The lay of the land

Lately, my mind keeps circling around land. It pops up everywhere, in everyday and academic, feminist and not so directly feminist contexts.

Land appeared when I was reading the book Here We Are: Notes on Living on Planet Earth to my 3-year old as his bedtime story, night after night for weeks until we both memorized it all. It is a book that explains that Earth is, basically, made up of two parts: land (rock and dirt) and sea (water). It is a book that taught my son his first adjectives to describe what land can be like: wet, dry, flat, pointy.

Land was inevitably central to many discussions in the summer school course that I co-organized in June this year on gender, justice, and environmental crises. The one that made me realize how, despite my efforts otherwise, I remain thoroughly entrenched in Western epistemologies. I was looking to invite indigenous feminist scholars working on environmental issues to teach in the course, only to be reminded by a dear friend I had asked for advice in an email that

Sámi ontologies do not really distinguish between the environment and social and cultural spheres – they are considered a relation. Thus, people working on self-determination, sovereignty, identity all, in a sense, work on the land issue (relation with other-than-human beings and human beings).

How used to compartmentalizing we are while what matters is the relation – land experienced as a relation to others. As she added, it is another issue altogether that ‘while there are people working more specifically on environmental issues, they are not necessarily feminist scholars’.