Raven, Dog, Human: Inhuman Colonialism and Unsettling Cosmologies

Abstract

As capitalism's unintended, and often unacknowledged, fallout, humans have developed sophisticated technologies to squirrel away our discards: waste is buried, burned, gasified, thrown into the ocean, and otherwise kept out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Some inhuman animals seek out and uncover our wastes. These 'trash animals' choke on, eat, defecate, are contaminated with, play games with, have sex on, and otherwise live out their lives on and in our formal and informal dumpsites. In southern Canada's sanitary landfills, waste management typically adopts a 'zero tolerance' approach to trash animals. These culturally sanctioned (and publicly funded) facilities practice diverse methods of 'vermin control.' By contrast, within Inuit communities of the Eastern Canadian Arctic, ravens eat, play, and rest on open dumps by the thousands. In this article, we explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and 'trash animals' in particular. We argue that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes. Canada's North, we argue, is a site where differing cosmologies variously collide, intertwine, operate in parallel, or speak past each other in ways that often marginalize Inuit and other indigenous ways of knowing and being. Inheriting waste is more than just a relay of potentially indestructible waste materials from past to present to future: through waste, we bequeath a set of politically, historically, and materially constituted relations, structures, norms, and practices with which future generations must engage. 1 Waste studies scholars distinguish between terms such as waste, trash, discards, garbage and so on, and use them differently in different contexts. See, for example, Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste:

Earliest evidence for hunter-gatherer impacts on raven diet and ecology in the Gravettian of Southern Moravia

“…Recent work on raven behavior and ecology has demonstrated that sustained human neighborhoods often have decisive impacts on the demography and population packing of common raven [106][107][108][109] . In northern environments, raven movement, population density and seasonal ock size have been linked to the availability and concentration of anthropogenic food subsidies 110 , especially at land ll sites 111,112 , and this is also documented in Indigenous accounts, storytelling and mythology [113][114][115] . It has been noted that common raven prefer high-quality food items 89 but non-breeding ocks consistently monopolize food bonanzas related to human refuse 116 , which generally promote local avian biodiversity, notably among generalist feeders and adaptive scavengers 117 .…”

Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise

“…The failure of Indigenous societies to adhere to European ways of carving up the world for subordination, exploitation, and killing -for example, by not domesticating the proper animals for agriculture, or by hunting 'wild' animals for subsistence and not sport -was cited to justify the civilising mission using violence (Anderson 2004;Huggan and Tiffin 2010;Kim 2015). In this way, European settler colonialism in North America radically reconfigured the categorization of, and relationships between, the land's life-forms, dismantling and re-assembling human-nonhuman relationships within a matrix of Eurocentric-anthropocentric-androcentric power (Belcourt 2015;Zahara and Hird 2015).…”

Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the Global South

“…Ethnographic studies of everyday waste practices remind scholars and researchers that definitions of waste are often culturally specific and produced through specific regimes of meaning or knowledge. Zahara and Hird (2015), for instance, explore how western and Inuit cosmologies around waste and 'trash animals' diverge in ways that marginalize Inuit ways of knowing (see too Douny, 2007). These understandings of diverse practices of understanding and engaging with waste make clear that universal framings of waste need to take seriously specific contexts, dynamics, and histories (see Drackner, 2005;Furniss, 2017;Winegar, 2016;Machado-Borges, 2017).…”