“Climate Change, Land, and Memory”

Please join us in the Johnson House Conference room on Tuesday April 23, 2024 at 1:15pm – 2:30pm for a presentation by Kenny Richards, a lecturer in the Department of Religion and Faculty in Environmental Studies.  His presentation is about Louisiana’s Pointe-au-Chien indigenous community which is confronting the tragedy of rising seas, oil extraction, and the loss of their ancestral lands. This lecture will explore how Pointe-au-Chien expressions of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) act to reclaim histories, resist climate change, and create tribal sovereignty within a legal framework that asks for the inclusion of TEK in environmental policy decisions.

In U.S. law, for traditional ecological knowledge to count as a justifiable discourse, as either authentic religious belief or as representative of actual material conditions (as in climate change observations), those involved in policy and courtroom decisions are often employed to interpret indigenous stories.  In doing so, they must make an uncanny leap between what is usually considered a matter of religious belief (and therefore not necessarily factual) and scientific or ecological observation.  Amidst rising sea levels and the sometimes good-faith efforts of government officials to incorporate TEK into US and state environmental policies, tribal memory, as TEK, emerges as a potent critique of colonial power and as a generative practice of indigenous sovereignty.