Regions of care : a political ecology of reciprocal materialities

Indigenous "country" or "land" is a region of reciprocities constituted through the relationships and obligations that preserve the continuity of life. It is a "region of care." In picking up and developing this phrase, this article opens a discussion about how regional political ecology can build from the materialist perspectives of contemporary scholarship and Indigenous politics. If, as some materialist scholars have argued, the political field in the Anthropocene is now more than ever an ecology of problems, how might regional political ecology use these perspectives to address the challenges of coexistence among humans, nonhumans, and other things? The article explores how praxis oriented around "regions of care" helps those involved in political-ecological work confront these challenges in an experimental politics that respects and works with nonhuman, material agencies through place-based relationships and networks. In this way, regional political ecology addresses the new environmental politics of the Anthropocene in a way that is attuned to the concerns of the many communities engaged in the challenges of coexistence.

Palabras clave: Antropoceno, Indígena, la materialidad, la ecología política, la región On the first day of my World Regional Geography class, shortly after reviewing the syllabus, I summon the trinity of formal, functional, and vernacular regions and parrot the well-worn line that regions are constructs we use to understand the world in spatial terms.I explain the region's darker side in its service of conquest, colonialism, and war, and talk about how that legacy remains alive today.Then I end my minilecture with a flourish, proclaiming that despite its troubled past, the concept of region helps us see all the global connections and diversity among people and places that make geography such a fun discipline and, by the way, a great major for all you undecided freshmen out there.
Even if I get no takers on the declaration of major, it's easy enough to define region in front of an auditorium full of restless undergraduates.It is much more difficult to define region for political ecology.Yet while the field's engagements with region are much more complex and contested, they too follow a relatively straightforward-albeit sometimes faint and intermittent-path, one that parallels broader theoretical trends in human geography (for a review, see Neumann 2010).Currently, there is an increasing engagement between political ecology and materialities scholarship (Bakker and Bridge 2006;Barua 2014;Bennett 2010;Latta 2014;Whiteside 2013).Drawn broadly, this work contends not only that environmental problems involve diverse human and nonhuman agencies and publics, but also that the problems themselves require ontologies which can uncover the more-than-human agency of dynamic materialities, what Bennett (2010) has called "thing-power", Braun and Whatmore (2010) "political matter", and Timothy Morton (2013), "hyperobjects."From this perspective, environmental politics becomes an "ecology of problems" in which strategies of experimentation are more appropriate than programs of control (e.g., Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010).The scale, complexity, and intractability of the problems that mark the Anthropocene call for a politics of experimentation which respects and works with the agency of matter and nonhuman beings.Region, at least conventionally understood, finds very little purchase in this kind of political ecology because it invokes a temporal and spatial boundedness (even if conceived as "constructed/in process/produced" or/and "networked/fuzzy/flexible"; cf.Amin 2004) as well as an anthropocentrism that cannot see the interstitial, vibrant worlds of energy-matter.The concept is inappropriate for the "scale" and approach of the newmaterialist political ecologies.On this point, region's etymology resonates.The Latin noun denotes "territory, boundary line, limit", and in its verbal form regō, means "to rule, guide, or steer", a word that in turn derives from proto Indo-European hȝreğ, "to straighten, to right oneself."In the Indo-European/Western tradition, regions reign.
But this is the Indo-European/Western tradition. 2There are myriad Indigenous ways of thinking that describe non-anthropocentric, outward-moving regions of openness, relationship, and care.Aboriginal country is a good example.As Deborah Bird Rose (1999: 177) has explained, "country" is the term that gained currency in Aboriginal English to denote the "matrix" of relationships based on mutual responsibility: Small enough to accommodate face-to-face groups of people, large enough to sustain their lives, politically autonomous in respect of other, structurally equivalent countries, and at the same time interdependent with other countries, each country is itself the focus and source of Indigenous law and life practice…one's country is a nourishing terrain, a place that gives and receives life.
Country is a region of reciprocities.It has no center or singular boundary, but is emergent instead through relationships of mutual care that preserve the continuity of life.These interdependencies orient the human being toward relationships of respect with nonhumans and the land.In this kind of region, personhood is "organized through a multiplicity of presences" and is therefore "multisited, multicentred cross-cutting and overlapping" (Rose 1999: 177).One's self is discovered in relationship with others and in the regions of country that emerge through the places and intervals of these life-sustaining relationships.
In Meeting place, Paul Carter (2013: 37) uses the example of the aherre-intenhe, the red poverty bush in the land of the Arrernte people in the Alice Springs area, to discern a kind of Aboriginal-Australian materialist thinking that understands regions as an "ambient field characterized by reciprocities."According to the Central Lands (Alice Springs) Council website,3 kangaroos find shelter underneath the poverty bush to get out of the wind and find warmth.Even when kangaroos are not there, it is possible to see where they have lain in the clearing underneath the bush.So the bush is named after the kangaroos and the shelter it provides them.In this "ecology of sense-catching forms", the kangaroo fits within the clearing underneath the bush, the outline of which matches that of the tree, which at the hottest part of the day casts a shadow silhouetted in the shape of the clearing.This overlay of bush, clearing, and shadow is animated by the visit of the kangaroo.The overlay of forms not only implies the animal's presence, but calls others into relationship with the kangaroo.Notably, poverty bushes are significant for people of the kangaroo totem, who see their own relationship with the kangaroo echoed in the animal's fit with the bush.But instead of binding people and kangaroo together-unifying them, as it were-the bush maintains their autonomies.It does so by provoking engagements through which obligations are carried out in the ongoing encounter with country and its "knotted paths" of responsibility.These obligations support the well-being of country and therefore the autonomies of all those who dwell there.
The red poverty bush, Carter (2013: 36) says, presides over a "region of care."He uses this phrase loosely and sporadically throughout his book as part of a broader effort to think through the contemporary challenges of coexistence.In so doing, he elaborates a material thinking about coexistence that, borrowing Nigel Thrift's (2007: 5) description, takes "the energy of sense-catching forms of things seriously-rather than see things as mere cladding."This way of thinking uses things to think.In picking up and developing Carter's phrase "regions of care," I hope to bring political ecology into a discussion of how new-materialist and Indigenous thinking together might addresses the challenges of coexistence within the "ecology of problems" of the Anthropocene.I interrogate the naturalization of region in a manner similar to Howitt's (1998) deconstruction of scale in order to understand the relational problems of coexistence, which Howitt (2006) has referred to as the "scales of coexistence."In other words: If the political field is now more than ever an ecology of problems, how might those involved in political-ecological work use region-a regional understanding-to respond to the challenges of coexistence among humans, nonhumans, and other things?
Before proceeding, though, I acknowledge that in the effort to deconstruct anthropocentrism, materialities literature makes it easy to ignore human agency, especially the agency of the disempowered.From an Indigenous perspective, materialities literature also overlooks the distinctively human responsibilities to the rest of Creation, including nonhumans.What materialities literature does help academics and practitioners see, though, are the agency-constituting relationships among the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, a perspective which, in turn, opens a much-needed (though often difficult) dialogue with Indigenous ontologies.Part of Carter's (2013) intention, in fact, is to expand the lexicon for the experimental politics of coexistence by using "Australian examples...as aids to epistemological reform."Importantly, the Indigenous examples he uses do take the sense-catching forms of things seriously.But they also suggest a space of coexistence that differs sharply from the traditional Western ideal of assembly-the agora, forum, ward, town meeting, or UN General Assembly.In the Aboriginal-Australian tradition, Carter writes, meeting is often convened to negotiate the conditions for not meeting in the future.Instead of the formal open space of assembly-spaces that presuppose and assert a uniform political subjectivity of (national, global, but always human) citizenship (Tully 1995)-Aboriginal meetings, Carter suggests, occur in the ambient places of encounter, like the poverty bush, where ongoing reciprocities support the interdependencies that sustain the well-being of country over the long term.In supporting life, these encounters create the scales of coexistence through which radically different kinds of political subjects-humans, animals, mythic beings, energies-have their own autonomy.But all these things are autonomous only through their interdependencies, and together they comprise a living, sentient matrix that Indigenous societies, when using English, refer to as "country", "land", or "earth." The phrase "region of care" describes these neighborhoods of entanglement within the acentric, perspectival spacetime-or better yet, topology-of country or land.Put more simply, regions of care emerge from myriad places of entanglement.Entanglement is well known in the physics of quantum mechanics, where it usually (though not always) occurs through the direct interactions of subatomic particles.To take one common method, a photon is split into a pair of entangled photons that have combined energies and spins equal to the momentum of the original photon.They behave similarly even when separated by great distance, creating what Einstein famously referred to as "spooky action at a distance."Some geographers (Panelli 2010;Somerville 2014), though, have used the term "entanglement" as a metaphor to describe an analogous geographic process evident when the action in (or of) one place-on a being, body, or thing-affects an "other" part with which it is connected.In this kind of relational space, it is care that entangles, and this happens through the places of encounter.When the human and more-than-human inhabitants of Aboriginal country come together, for instance, they are already in one sense entangled.They have mutual duties and obligations to perform.In the performance, they affirm not only their own entanglement, renewing the threads of reciprocity that will tie them together even after they depart, but also their mutual entanglement with the spacetime of country, that is, the entire matrix of relationships that sustains life."Care", then, is not something one chooses to grant or confer, but rather signifies the disposition for encounter, an attraction to interactions with the others with whom one is connected.In this way, for instance, the kangaroo and the people of the kangaroo totem have a disposition for encounter.As such, the red poverty bush presides over a neighborhood in their ongoing entanglement.It nourishes a region of care.
Regions of care point toward a political strategy of experimentation within the many "ecologies of problems" in the Anthropocene.This, at least, is how I have come to understand the political-ecological work the Cheslatta-Carrier Nation is doing in north-central British Columbia, a community I have worked with since the late 1990s.The Cheslatta were relocated from their traditional territory on Cheslatta Lake in the headwaters of the Nechako River in 1952 to make way for the Aluminum Company of Canada's (Alcan, now Rio Tinto-Alcan or RTA) Kemano hydroelectric project.The move devastated the community and to this day, generations down the line, the people are still feeling the effects.The band4 now lives on reserve and private lands about thirty miles north of their ancestral villages.For years the people suffered from unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and the dysfunctions of dependency.But the people have begun to recover.The band won a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement with the federal government and initiated a number of development projects that include a community forest, ecological protection corridor and currently, a proposal for a water release facility in the dam that would stabilize water levels in Cheslatta Lake, preserve salmon habitat in the Nechako River, and allow for small-scale hydroelectric power generation.Yet all the while the band has racked up successes, the land is still damaged.I do not mean the physical and cultural landscape, although the territory has been dramatically transformed by hydrological engineering, timber harvesting, mining, and of course the removal of the people.What I mean is that Cheslatta is damaged.The country is hurting.Colonial resettlement and industrialization uprooted, unstitched, and ripped out the entanglements that constituted the world the Cheslatta people once knew.

Journal of Political Ecology
Vol.23, 2016 163 To heal their community, the Cheslatta are stitching place-based relationships back together in new and sometimes unexpected ways.In doing this, they are reimagining and reinvigorating regions of care.This is difficult, often traumatic work.The village sites adjoin the spillway, which carries water from Alcan's reservoir through what used to be Cheslatta Creek and Lake, around the dam and deposits it back to the Nechako River several miles below the dam.The water level of the spillway fluctuates by ten feet, sometimes more, depending on how full the reservoir is and how much water is needed for the salmon in the Nechako River.The high water inundates the low-lying areas of the villages and also, tragically, the cemeteries where the Cheslatta ancestors are buried (these cemeteries were not relocated as part of the 1952 removal).Casket pieces, crosses, and even human remains are discovered; the band estimates the remains of some 60 individuals are buried in Cheslatta Lake.In the early 1990s, the band restored the two main cemeteries, locating the burials, placing spirit houses and over the graves (which must be moved to higher ground when the spillway water rises), and consecrating the cemeteries.In 1993, the Catholic priest consecrated Cheslatta Lake itself-the spillway-as a cemetery.Since that time, the people have regularly held a 'Return of the Spirits' ceremony at the village of Sdughachola in the summer, where the youth read the names of the deceased and the people, through remembrance and consecration, together return the spirits of the ancestors back to their rightful resting place, even if their physical remains have been carried off by the spillway.These encounters bring the people, place, and ancestors together into a region of care; the villages are one site in an emerging neighborhood of intensifying entanglement, what Carter (2013: 37) might refer to as an "ambient field characterized by reciprocities."In the "Return of the Spirits" ceremony, for instance, the entanglement involves a reciprocity between the people, who have returned the spirits of the ancestors to their rightful place, and the ancestors, who in coming home now watch over and help heal the land.
At the Cheslatta villages, the ambient materiality of sense-catching forms creates the disposition and the potential for encounters that entangle.Unlike the materiality of overlain forms in the red poverty bush, there is instead an ambience of absence-presence (Madrell 2013) in the village materiality.At each site, to the untrained eye there is very little physical evidence that a village had ever been there.You can see a few house foundations, remains of jackleg fence, and wagon ruts.Even for the elders who can still 'see' the houses, church building, and pasture fields, this absence-the lack of material form in what is an otherwise remote place uninhabited by humans-is signaled by the material presence of the (newly restored) cemeteries: the white-painted wooden spirit houses, wrought-iron crosses, memorials of flowers and wreaths.The dead mark the presence of absence on the landscape (Madrell 2013; cf.Wylie 2009), an ambience that, in turn, signals the trauma and tragedy of the 1952 relocation and the ongoing struggle to return and recover.The cemeteries gesture simultaneously to a world in which this place is still inhabited, and to a world where it now is vacant.(All the while, the spillway is alive, threatening to rise and when it does, washing over the village yet again.)This is a materiality of ghostly presence on the landscape.
The ambience of this materiality creates a charged atmosphere, a disposition, for entanglement.In the summer of 2013, a pair of local fishermen discovered two human leg bones that had been exposed by spillway water at the village of Belhk'achek.Familiar with the Cheslatta plight, they immediately contacted the band office.In response, the band office put together a consecration ceremony and archaeological exhumation attended by over thirty community members and other allies (NGO representatives, local residents) and filmed by the local CBC affiliate, CFTK-TV.I attended as well in the role of witness, scholar, and ally.The archaeologist was to identify the two bones-estimating the age, sex, and date of burial-and in covering the excavation, the media would help bring attention to the band's proposal for the water-release facility.But as the archaeologist proceeded with the dig, he uncovered first a skull, then a near-complete female skeleton accompanied by rare trade beads, copper ring, and a moosehide shroud.An ancestor assembled herself right there, in that very moment, for everyone to see.The bones became a presence, a body, a person.Although testing would have to be done at the lab, the archaeologist estimated that the ancestor had been in her 60s, was buried in the 1840s, and judging by her accoutrements, was probably a respected elder.At the end of the day, one of the Cheslatta youth, unprompted, gathered cobblestones from the beach and arranged them carefully over the archaeologist's infill in a kind of burial mound.He collected wild roses and placed them on top of the rocks, and set a lattice of driftwood on top of that.He stepped back, bowed his head, and said a few words that could not be heard.Then he helped the archaeologist carry the ancestor, whose remains were now packed securely in white boxes, away.
Word of the ancestor ricocheted through the community.Coverage of the event reached regional media outlets, and the band issued its own press release.Within days of the discovery, the ancestor had traveled far and wide-in news coverage, narratives and arguments, photographs, videos-doing political work in media, government, corporate, and other networks.She carried the band's political message that its proposal for a water release facility was the solution for Aboriginal and environmental justice to stop the desecration of the cemeteries and heal the watershed.The message was intended specifically for the British Columbia government to negotiate the electricity purchase agreement, and for Alcan/RTA to renegotiate the terms of their water license on the Cheslatta-Murray Lakes system.The message was part of the community's broader goals to advance their own sovereignty within a nation-to-nation framework while seeking redress for breaches by the Canadian government of its responsibility to Aboriginal peoples.Riding the publicity generated by the ancestor, the band filed for Alcan's water license in September of that year.This move generated more extensive media coverage, reaching the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Huffington Post.
The band got the attention it wanted by filing for the license, but it was the ancestor who set the sequence of events in motion.Later that fall, the community reinterred her remains at a final resting place in the old village, her burial site now one more stitch in this region of care in a charged village atmosphere, now set to trigger entanglement.In a way, the Cheslatta ancestor took a path or 'track' similar to an Aboriginal ancestor of Dreamtime-emerging from the earth, entangling places and beings on her journey, and then returning to the earth again.The purpose of this small example is to illustrate how the band and its allies are engaging the experimental politics of the Anthropocene within a region of care, a solicitous space of entanglement which, in stitching places and their cohabitants together, aims to decolonize the regional formations (cf.Peet and Watts 1996) that commodify, degrade, and marginalize their community and territory.The Cheslatta villages are places of encounter within an intensifying region of care that calls diverse publics of human (First Nations, industry, government, media, activists, local residents) and morethan-human (ancestors, salmon, water) communities into the entanglements of coexistence.This creates problems, but of a particular kind.These are problems, like the ancestor's sudden appearance, that are addressed by creating place-based relationships of reciprocity, obligation, and solicitude.
The red poverty bush of the Arrernte nourishes a region of care in a time-transcendent world of country.The encounters at the Cheslatta villages suggest how these regions are emerging as part of recovery, restoration, and healing.Regions of care point to a distinctively "Indigenous take on material thinking" (Carter 2013: 38) open to the more-than-human materialities of entanglement in the spacetime of country.This is a radically embodied praxis that does not take up the usual method of defining then tackling the 'whole problem' at once-nor does it exclude this method-but is oriented to encounters with the land and its cohabitants.It is therefore especially appropriate to the Anthropocene, an era we humans helped usher in by forgetting and ignoring our interdependencies with other forms and forces of life (Gibson, Rose, and Fincher 2015).This approach intersects with the new materialities of political ecology insofar as it engages a material thinking animated and moved by the energy of the sense-catching things of spacetime-poverty bushes, totems and kangaroos; villages, cemeteries, and ancestors.
Generally speaking, the materialities perspective lacks a sense of place that understands how humans, nonhuman persons, and more-than-human objects and forces are "rooted" (Rocheleau 2011) into regions of care on land and in country.This is an opening for regional political ecology.A region is more than a domain or articulation within a network.It is the rooting of networks through the land into a matrix of places that sustains (human and nonhuman) livelihoods, nourishes a sense of belonging (and motivates struggles over who and what belongs), and provides the material-semiotic terrain for working through the problems of environmental politics, management, and justice.Regions, in other words, provide an ontological bridging of place and network.This bridging makes for a distinctively regional political ecology that is able to grapple with the interrelated questions of ecological process, material production, social discourse, and environmental justice through the emplaced, "landfull" (Baker 2005) networks of environmental interaction (cf.Neumann 2010).
The ontological bridging-work region does can be found in many of the words and terms communities use to describe and negotiate their environmental engagements-country, land, and territory along with the rich Indigenous vocabularies for this phenomenology.The Cheslatta, for instance, do occasionally use the