Relational Practices and Pedagogies in an Age of Climate Change: Engaging Students in Understanding Indigenous Ways of Knowing

 Yavanna M. Brownlee

(Published November 10, 2020)

The variations of the Three Sisters story as they exist across North American Indigenous cultures are about more than the poetry of crops growing and their interdependence; they are also about physical human relationships with the land and the organisms that exist there, relationships constellated and connected. The relationship among corn, beans, squash, and humans allows us to understand how these plans are sown in relation to each other. The human participation in Three Sisters stories is significant, exemplified through portraying the sisters as human before they transformed. Joyce Rain Anderson, in “Remapping Settler Colonial Territories,” brings human bodies into a more explicit relationship between plants and land through establishing the size of the planting mount—the size of a pregnant woman’s belly—and when to plant beans—when corn is hand high—before discussing the relationship in terms of family, belief, and biology:

We tell the story of the three sisters whose mother prayed for them to help one another, so they became these plants. We tell how the crow brought corn to us, so we always plant five corn seeds—for the four directions and one for the crow. We talk about how these plants enact with one another: the corn takes nitrogen from the soil, but the strong stalks provide a climbing space for the beans, which put nitrogen back. The squash leaves, broad and prickly, protect the roots, keep the mounds moist, and keep small animals away. (167)

I participated in a similar telling by Anderson as she led a workshop session on making cornhusk dolls. I left the workshop invigorated, considering how to implement a Three Sisters practice, a relational practice, into my classrooms and life, and challenged to bring this practice fully into my teaching.

Demonstration of a relational practice that embodies respect, responsibility, and reciprocity is implicit in much of the conversation surrounding Indigenous rhetorics, decolonization, and our moral approaches to alternative rhetorics in rhetoric and composition. My relational pedagogical practice, though grounded in Western rhetorics because I was raised, educated, and exist within the American education system, is fed by a constellation of knowledges and relationships with marginalized, especially Indigenous, scholars and texts. My journey started with an attempt to respond to Scott Lyons’ call, in “Rhetorical Sovereignty,” to integrate Indigenous and marginalized histories and rhetorics into classroom practice. This journey progressed through engagement with concepts of rhetorical alliance (King; Powell), survivance (King, et al.; Powell, “Rhetorics”; Vizenor), decolonization (Mohanty; Smith; Tuck and Yang), feminist and queer theories (Alexander and Rhodes; Mohanty; Wallace), and relationship (Kimmerer; Watanabe). Though Anderson introduced me to relational practice through a Three Sisters approach, Robin Wall Kimmerer—along with King, et al.; King; and Smith—influences how I enact relational practice within the classroom.

I initially carried this constellated knowledge into a Writing about Environmental Sustainability course—one of three types of variably themed Junior Composition courses offered in English at a mid-sized university in the Eastern US with a predominantly middle-class White population. Within these sections of the course, the variation on the theme of environmental sustainability depends on the instructor. I chose to ground the course at the intersection of Indigenous rhetorics and environmental sustainability, especially in relation to the question of climate change. I saw this course as ideal for enacting a relational practice approach because of the possibility of focusing on building student connection between personal actions and the relational effects those actions have on local and global ecosystems and their inhabitants. Given that this institution offers three to five sections per semester and the current observable reality of climate change, there is a demonstrated need for a consistent offering of similarly themed courses at other institutions who wish to address the challenge of climate change with their students. In what follows, I describe my approach to this course.

Teaching this course was important for many reasons: 1) I self-identify as Native American (though am unregistered). My paternal great-grandmothers were Cherokee and Choctaw, and the family stories are similar to many other people of similar descent. My parents, who worked to build connections between my sister and me and the surrounding Indigenous peoples where we lived in western Colorado, including taking us to local events and hosting a Native American acquaintance at our home for a summer, are working on tracing our lineage back to the Dawes Rolls for the Cherokee and Choctaw nations; 2) the raging twelve-year-old environmental activist inside me; and 3) the theory and practice constellated in the Indigenous scholarship I engage with. During my doctoral studies, Lyons’ “Rhetorical Sovereignty” literally changed the direction of my studies and my intended career path as I worked to build agency and relationship between my varied interests in Indigenous rhetorics, environmental sustainability, and feminist and queer theories. 

I describe the course here as a jumping off point, one that demonstrates relationality through the texts, the projects, and the support. My relationships with this course over several years, its texts, and its students have taught me a lot about relational practice as a way of moving toward environmental activism and pedagogy and how to carry it forward.

As I engaged the project of Writing about Environmental Sustainability,^[1] the lessons of the Three Sisters, especially as a demonstration of the potential relationship that humans can have with the natural world, enabled a bridging of Indigenous rhetorics and environmental sustainability. When preparing this course to engage with concepts of relationship practice, I initially asked myself the following. How do/can I:

●      encourage students to care more about the environment?

●      start a ripple of positive change that works to reduce ecosystem impact and improve student consumer habits?

●      teach students to respect Indigenous peoples, practices, and relationships?

●      get students to recognize traditional Indigenous relationships with the planet as ones that we need to respectfully engage in?

In emphasizing the concept of relationship, I wanted students to recognize how capitalist/consumer systems play into our unhealthy relationship with Earth. To make an analogy, if Earth were human, Western capitalist systems of consumerism would be an inescapable and violent abuser. I also wanted students to recognize that we exist within the borders of a Western capitalist superpower and that we are complicit in the abuse of our planet. At the same time, we can enact and affect change.

As the course designer, I scaffolded relational practice into the curriculum, following a local to global pattern. I start the semester by having students focus on individual carbon footprints and local practice, with an emphasis on what they can individually change and the local activism they can become involved in—a thread throughout the course—before moving students through a range of ecological and relationship focused texts, discussions, and projects. Many of the course texts take an Indigenous rhetorics and decolonial approach to building and maintaining relationships with ecosystems while also examining the far-reaching consequences of consumer practices.^[2] Through these texts, students discuss global human population growth, the impact of fishing on the Bering Sea, oil exploration in the Arctic, and food sovereignty. These texts and conversations help students begin to understand the theory and practice of relationships featured in Indigenous frameworks, such as the one Linda Tuhiwai Smith so eloquently presents in Decolonizing Methodologies: “In indigenous frameworks, relationships matter. Respectful, reciprocal, genuine relationships lie at the heart of community life and community development” (125). I want students to understand that as outsiders, they need to develop relationships based in respect with Indigenous communities and that doing so means putting the communities’ concerns before their own. Without doing so, students will often follow in the colonizing footsteps of so many people, including academic researchers, before them.

To address the building of relationships within an Indigenous framework, I created course outcomes that foregrounded those values. Students will attempt to:

•        recognize the relationships between themselves and the far reaches of the global ecosystem and the affect they can have on all ecosystems they are part of.

•        recognize the traditional knowledge held by Indigenous peoples and how that knowledge can help to improve relationships with ecosystems.

•        negotiate how to request/receive this knowledge and how to share/put it into action in respectful, responsible, reciprocal ways that support rhetorical alliances with peoples/ecosystems.

•        respectfully gather information about Indigenous peoples, their environmentally sustainable practices, and the problems they face and be able to work within existing Indigenous practices and with Indigenous peoples to propose solutions in respectful, responsible, reciprocal ways.

Students achieve these outcomes through engaging in fairly typical Western classroom practices, such as engaging with course texts, discussions, and project research and composition.

These outcomes, however, are not without challenges. The first challenge was the location at a predominantly white institution with few Indigenous students and faculty. Second, the effects of global climate change have both drastically increased and become more visible with the UN’s 2018 Climate Change Report, more focused reporting, and an uptick in the effects and changes students are observing and experiencing. The changes leave some students overwhelmed with their potential ineffectiveness and the enormity of it all. Many feel helpless or despair in the face of climate change. My goal, though, was to help students feel more empowered through grounding them in Indigenous rhetorics and environmental sustainability discourses (and this remains the goal as I still teach the course, though it continues to evolve as all courses do). In doing so, students examine the world ecosystem we, as humans, exist in and how Indigenous practices and beliefs can move us forward in our relationships with ecosystems, build implicitly on a Three Sisters practice, and help students transition from consumers to caretakers.

The course syllabus introduces students to the concept of the world ecosystem and the idea that Indigenous and marginalized cultures have a lot to teach us about sustainable relationships and about respectfully engaging living, often thriving, Indigenous and marginalized populations and their traditional knowledges. Course texts such as Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas?, Subjankar Banerjee’s Arctic Voices, and Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass engage specific topics through multiple perspectives. For example, Banerjee includes at least four essays on caribou/reindeer in Arctic Voices. As a companion to these readings, I show the preview for Being Caribou and selected moments from BBC’s Frozen Planet. Demonstrating multiple perspectives on a topic, such as caribou or corn—Kimmerer’s “The Three Sisters,” Gary Nabhan’s “Harvest Time,” Winona LaDuke’s “Seeds of Our Ancestors, Seeds of Life,” and Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley’s “The Language of Corn'' from The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen—encourages students to build more than a single-story knowledge about a topic. I require Berners-Lee’s, Banerjee’s, and Kimmerer’s texts as the foundation for students’ class-built knowledge to demonstrate the global impact of unsustainable human practices and relationships and to provide realistic models for enacting relational practices with the natural ecosystems we exist within.

To initiate the relational practice goals set for the course and as an introduction unit focused on local human impact, I start the course with reading from Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas? and two articles about population, Martha Campbell’s “Why the Silence on Population?” and Jennifer Ludden’s “Should We be Having Children in the Face of Climate Change?” Along with these readings, students write a critical exploration of their personal carbon footprints while exploring Berners-Lee’s text, online carbon footprint calculators, and the potential changes they can make to their lifestyles. Part of the challenge of this project is that many students live on/near campus with roommates, which limits their control over resource and food consumption, but they start conversations within their living situations about recycling, carpooling, and electricity usage. Some students look at the carbon use numbers for their families’ homes, rather than their on/near-campus housing, and discuss the changes their families could make. The project goals include students examining their relationships within multiple ecosystems through assessing the carbon-equivalent cost of consumer practices and the potential changes they can affect through being smart consumers. Students are often surprised by their resource consumption and articulate plans to reduce use of water, fuel, and electricity and to shop at second-hand stores. When potential change is put into context of the reality of their own lives, students pursue conversations about easy changes, such as recycling, reusable bags, shorter showers, and picking up trash, as cumulative positive effects toward change. Following this unit, the class moves to engage Indigenous knowledges and discover how to work as allies to solve environmental sustainability problems.

Banerjee’s Arctic Voices and Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass help to ground students and provide examples of what Indigenous communities in North America do to maintain and protect their ecosystem relationships as they work to explore specific peoples and situations for their projects. Banerjee demonstrates the governmental and scientific struggle Arctic Indigenous peoples and Arctic scientists have engaged in to protect breeding grounds for much of the world’s bird populations and the caribou and animals these Indigenous Arctic communities are in spiritual relations with. Kimmerer demonstrates continental Indigenous North American spiritual and ecosystem relationships and exemplifies the relationship I hope students strive for when they think of their place within an ecosystem. Embedded in both of these texts are examples of beneficial relationships, in some cases even interdependence, between communities and ecosystems. These examples provide students with knowledge of the trauma Indigenous peoples face because of colonization paired with climate change and knowledge of how they are surviving and resisting (survivance), fighting to keep traditional ways of being while negotiating their current circumstances. The course texts exemplify how Indigenous peoples are engaging in the fight for environmental sustainability and model how alliances can be built and maintained.

While reading Banerjee and Kimmerer, students are asked to compose a connected two-part project: an informative multimodal composition paired with a solution paper. In the group-optional, multimodal project—i.e., a website, infographic, or art piece with accompanying artist statement—students work to inform their audiences about a specific Indigenous community or communities facing environmental sustainability issues. The accompanying individually composed solution paper argues for a solution to a problem the student/s came across during their research for their multimodal compositions. The topics for the solution papers occur at the same intersection of Indigenous peoples and environmental sustainability, and students propose and respectfully argue for one solution that allies can engage in to help mitigate the problem. For these projects, students have come up with the following problem/solution sets: deforestation in the Amazon paired with revising the Forest Code; hydro-electric dams in Brazil paired with more wind and solar power, which would be stored in Tesla batteries; food waste in the US paired with a mobile education team; water on Navajo lands contaminated with Uranium paired with water purification with the use of clay pellets; and coral bleaching in Hawaii paired with a program focused on pollution prevention, implementing traditional Hawaiian knowledge, and education. Similar to this last example, students are encouraged to create an organization or program to approach the problem when they discover that they have too many small solutions, such as a program that helps Indigenous peoples in the Amazon fight for legal rights to farmland or a program that allows Indigenous communities in Indonesia to retain mobility through a series of small permanent villages for temporary residence.

The biggest obstacle students have with finding solutions is being respectful to the communities they are working with. Specific challenges students have faced include whether the communities are engaged in global or regional economics, what their lifestyles are like, the amount of contact they have with other communities, and what the peoples believe their needs are. Students also have to consider if the solution will cause undesired assimilation on the part of the community and work to avoid continuing the trauma perpetuated on these communities. One student, for example, suggested in a draft that Indigenous Himalayans, who are suffering from water shortages because of melting glaciers, move towards assimilating by having money injected into their communities, setting up an economy and providing jobs so that they could purchase food they cannot grow because of water shortages. After some discussion about colonization and assimilation during the draft conference, this student moved to focus on a rainwater capture system that could help provide water to crops during a water shortage. Individual draft or revisions conferences can help students challenge their thinking and become aware that they are privileging Western systems of economics instead of being respectful in following the lead of the Indigenous peoples they are researching.

Relational practice is bigger than readings and human relationships with the planet. My personal challenge, one of many, is to connect with my students, to support them through the course, and to help them problem solve the predicament we are in with climate change. In this practice, I also aim to embody the relationships I want students to build. To do so, I meet with each student, check in with them, and examine their drafts. I work on recognizing their lives outside of my classroom: other courses, campus involvement, work, and social lives. I also work on being open with my own vulnerability through recognizing the climate change panic going on in my own head and the difficulty I have balancing ingrained consumerism with personal environmental impact, along with acknowledging my own complacency. By being honest about my own struggles and being willing to listen to theirs, I build and model the relationships I want them to have as people who have a right to be listened to and respected. I take responsibility for my part in their learning, from choosing topics to discussing how we move forward as a community. Together we reciprocate knowledge and understanding through joining personal and constellated knowledge. For instance, when discussing uses of various parts of the caribou carcass, we digressed into a conversation about trophy hunting, a very Western practice when compared to the care and compassion of the Alaska Native relationship with caribou. After one student mentioned knowing a taxidermist, I asked if she knew what happens with the meat when delivered for taxidermy. She followed up with her contact and later shared that information with the class. Such moments lead to the recognition of our involvement in an ecosystem.

The challenge for me as I lead students through this journey is helping them to connect the dots, to constellate the knowledge, to recognize the impact of Western capitalism and consumerism, and to recognize the fragile yet determined staying power of Indigenous ways of being. It becomes more than watching trees and flowers bud in the spring, more than recognizing the wildlife we cross paths with, more than reading the news and watching documentaries, and more than signing petitions or showing up for protests. Engagement in relational practice based in Indigenous rhetorics and environmental sustainability is a journey to recognizing positionality in all moments, from student interaction to grocery shopping, and recognizing what influences that positionality. It is a journey of choice after choice. I challenge myself to overcome and be better than the complacency that comes so easy in this American life. I challenge my students to do the same through small steps, including picking up trash, divesting from plastic use, and eating local seasonal produce. I also encourage them to work as allies with peoples they are culturally different from to begin solving the climate change problems that affect all of us. So many of these solutions depend on consumer awareness in the developed world. Students have called for the cessation of purchasing products containing palm oil so that forests in Indonesia are not cut down, destroying orangutan habitats; for listening to Indigenous voices speak out against the harm done to waterways by pipelines; and for stopping deforestation in Canada, the trees of which are used to make paper products, because this deforestation directly impacts the population of Canada’s caribou herds. While these students discover, learn, and negotiate alliances within the class setting, the biggest challenge they face is keeping up awareness and engagement when the class is over. There are always successes, students who go into food studies or who see how wasteful their workplaces are and try to enact change or who notice the impact of Native Americans in places they don’t expect. There are also those students who reciprocate gratitude for communication and support as they negotiated this moment in their lives.    

Through demonstrating a relational classroom practice—a Three Sisters practice—based in respect, responsibility, and reciprocity, I work to create an imperfect model of what striving to build relationships with communities and ecosystems can look like in an advanced composition course. My goal in demonstrating a relational practice here is not just to say that we need environmental sustainability focused courses at our institutions to address a need for literacies around climate change and consumption, even though we do, but that we also need to be humans who take responsibility for all of our actions inside and outside the classroom. As I do this work, I see other educators standing up in recognition and alliance with Indigenous peoples, recognizing their needs, and helping their students to do the same. Such endeavors should be structurally built into curricula to meet desire and demand in, perhaps, a sequence of sophomore or junior-level writing courses conjoined with environmental studies or Native American studies.

More institutions are becoming aware of their carbon footprints and actively working to divest from fossil fuels. Moreover, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced transit and economic activity, clear skies are proof of the daily damage humans do to the environment. Yet, this moment is also one where the EPA is losing its ability to keep waterways and lands clear of pollutants that will cause lasting impact on ecosystems and their inhabitants. If we cannot use our classrooms to educate students in lessons of environmental awareness and problem solving around climate change, then we will continue to perpetrate the Western colonial complacency carried in the privilege of imagining ourselves as separate from nature and progress as mainly being economic. We must recognize that in order to change and to affect change, this complacency is not the way forward. Standing with and encouraging our students toward relationality as they work towards change is a step forward.