In this interview, Indigenous and feminist science studies scholar Kim Tall-Bear explains that she was raised implicitly to understand that animals have “their own life trajectories” and social practices and that humans live “in relation” to nonhuman creatures. Expanding on the overlaps between Indigenous thinking and recent posthumanist and new materialist scholarship, TallBear suggests that Indigenous thinkers have always engaged a post-humanist understanding of self and other. These thinkers, she contends, are both deeply engaged in understanding the fluidity of relations among the many things that are “living things” and relatively uninterested in the concept of the human. We interviewed Kim TallBear by Skype on September 10, 2015.
SAMANTHA KING: Can you begin by talking about where and how you were raised?
KIM TALLBEAR: I was born in Pipestone, Minnesota, in 1968. My next book is on the Pipestone quarries. It’s where a lot of the stone is harvested for ceremonial pipes in the United States, and it’s a National Park Service site, so there’s a lot of history there. I grew up about fifteen miles from
Pipestone on the South Dakota reservation of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe. A lot of people in Pipestone are enrolled in Flandreau or from another Dakota reservation in Sisseton, South Dakota. So there’s a lot of back-and-forth between these three small towns, and a lot of people would call Pipestone a spiritual center because the quarries are there. But there was also a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school there that I think closed in the 1950s that makes Pipestone a place with diverse histories. My grandmother went to that Indian school. I was born in the public hospital in Pipestone, so I have a lot of contact with that space, but grew up just over the border in Flandreau and went back and forth between Sisseton and Flandreau where everyone is related. I lived there until I was about fourteen.
My maternal great-grandmother and my grandmother raised me, and then I went back to live with my mother in St. Paul, Minnesota, when I was in high school. But again, there is in general a lot of back-and-forth between the Dakota reservations in the southwestern part of Minnesota and the eastern part of South Dakota and the Twin Cities. The Twin Cities is a really interesting place: It’s basically Dakota and Anishinaabe people there, and they go back and forth between the cities and their reservations in the northern part of the state and in Canada. So two very vibrant, urban Native groups, but people who would not really see a divide between the urban and the reservation. So that’s how I grew up, migrating between the two, and seeing that more as a regular migratory route, versus the kind of divide that you hear a lot of reservation or urban people talk about in other parts of the country.
I was born to a mother who was always very political. My dad is white, but he was gone by the time I was three, so I was pretty much only raised with my Dakota family, although I did see my dad’s family maybe once a year at Christmas. They only lived about twenty miles away, but they were not very involved. So I was raised by my grandmothers and my mom, going back and forth, and the American Indian movement was raging at the time. I started first grade in 1974, and my mom by that time had left my dad and she was an undergraduate. She went back to university with four children under the age of five. We lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where there’s a Bureau of Indian Affairs office and a small college called Northern State College, which had a lot of Native students. My mom was pretty active with the American Indian student group there. Also, my brother’s father is Floyd Westerman. The three of us girls have the same dad, but my brother has a different dad. And Floyd was active as a musician and an activist during that time. There were a lot of people like that in and out of our house—artists, activists, student activists. So I was raised to be very politically conscious from the time before I could read. I talk about this in the Introduction to my book, Native American DNA, that I knew that phrase Custer Died for Your Sins, from Vine Deloria Jr.’s book before I could read and I didn’t understand what it meant. And so growing up like that, under the sort of political tutelage of my mom and then Vine Deloria Jr.—indirectly—really shaped my understanding that research and academic thought are political and were always part of the colonial project.
But my mom also emphasized that the only way out of poverty was through education for us. So we were also raised to think very pragmatically about education, that we had no choice but to graduate from high school. There was only a 50 percent chance back in South Dakota in those days that a Native person would graduate high school. But not only that, we were going to go to university. It was the only way that we could have a decent quality of life, and for us to give back.
SK: What was your route to academia?
KT: I never intended to become an academic, and I think most Native academics didn’t. I actually interviewed Native American biological scientists and we all ended up on a research track kind of by accident. Like a lot of Native people, I intended to go to university and do something very practical. I thought I’d go to law school. My mom was a planner, without a degree, but she has always characterized herself as a tribal planner, or an “Indigenous planner” in the language we use now. She helped build a lot of community institutions. She was a grant writer for urban Indian survival schools in St. Paul and Minneapolis. She helped start our tribal school on my reservation, started the St. Paul American Indian low-income housing board, and helped found our tribe’s drug and alcohol rehab center, which has a culturally based recovery curriculum. I grew up seeing her do research, so research for me was always about social change.
I never thought about being a professor. I had no role models for that in my life. I did an undergraduate degree in community planning at UMass-Boston and a master’s degree in environmental planning at MIT. Then I worked as a planner for about ten years for U.S. federal agencies, for tribal governments, and for national tribal organizations. And it was good work, but I wasn’t tremendously intellectually stimulated by it. I’m not a very good bureaucrat; I’m not a great grant writer. I see environmental policy as a really important thing and I’m glad I did it, but I didn’t want to spend my whole career doing that kind of stuff.
It was by accident that I fell into a PhD. I was working for an Indigenous environmental research organization in Denver, an NGO. We had done a lot of work on tribal involvement in the cleanup and management of the nuclear weapons complex, and of course that’s the Department of Energy’s problem. But then the DoE just happened to start funding human genome research and had this grant opportunity and my organization started holding workshops to look at the implications for Indigenous peoples of the mapping of the human genome. And when tribal representatives and community people came to our workshops they had a lot of questions about the relationship between blood quantum, identity, DNA, and histories of colonial violations within research, and I was fascinated by those conversations, but I had no background in genetics. I realized I needed to go back and do a PhD, so I could write a book about the problems around the mapping of the human genome and genetic research on Native American bodies. So I did that. I went in with my dissertation already formed in my head.
I don’t believe in doing a PhD because one wants to be an academic. I don’t think this is a lifestyle choice. I did a PhD because I needed to think through a problem, and the only way I could think through that problem was to have four, five, or six years away from doing policy work to study and read and learn how to think in a more critical, complex way. Because you’re not taught to think in those ways when you’re doing policy work. And I question everything. I was somebody who just questioned all of the fundamental assumptions flying around me in that policy work.
I got through the PhD in four years, and as a result, the kinds of students I recruit are students who are older, who are coming back because there is a particular problem they want to solve, and a PhD can help them do that. Because this is not a good time to just decide to be an academic, right? It’s a terrible job market; the university is being defunded by the public. It’s actually a really dangerous economic and social space for people to be in, so I think one needs to be very, very careful about coming into this. So I ended up here totally by chance. And I thought I would go back out and work for an NGO again, but I realized that I’m a better academic—surprisingly—than I am a bureaucrat. Because I do science and technology stuff mixed with culture—a field that is much in demand and yet too few people are trained to do this, I’m doing really well in the academy, despite the fact that it’s such a terrible place for a lot of people, which leaves me with no small measure of guilt. But it is what it is.
SK: Could you describe your relationship to the field of critical animal studies?
KT: It’s by accident, right? When I went into the History of Consciousness [HisCon] at UC Santa Cruz, I went to work with Jim Clifford, and I didn’t know anything about this world. I applied to two graduate programs. I applied to geography at the University of Edinburgh, because there was a woman there—Jan Penrose—who worked on questions of nationalism up in Nunavut. And I was very critical about the concept of Indigenous nationalism and I thought I could work that through with her, but I didn’t end up getting any money. I also was accepted into the History of Consciousness program, which I knew nothing about. But I had been coming across Jim’s work, The Predicament of Culture, in particular. I was always doing a lot of reading, even while I wasn’t an academic. And I thought, well, I’ll just apply where that guy is. And he and Donna Haraway accepted me as a co-advisee. When we opened my acceptance letter, which included an offer of full funding, my husband at the time, who’s a geographer, said, “Oh my god, you’re going to get to work with Jim Clifford and Donna Haraway!” I said, “Who is Donna Haraway?” And then I started reading her stuff and I thought, “I do not know what the hell this woman’s talking about!” Anyway, I ended up working very much with both of them, and luckily they’re very close colleagues and friends, and even though they work on really different projects, it was a very easy thing to be co-advised by them.
Because I was a student of Donna’s I ended up being in class with so many people who were thinking about human–animal relations—all of the other Donna students. I always felt like I am the only one who’s not a super nature person, and who doesn’t have dogs, that kind of thing. Her students are like that. So I was sort of the provincial one in her group of students who was working on humans. I guess my interests developed in response to things my non-Native, animal studies, fellow graduate students were thinking about. We all shared something working under Donna, and that was an aversion to hierarchies and a desire to dismantle human–nonhuman hierarchies. Although I did not initially understand her language, Donna’s ideas easily made sense to me. Everything that my fellow graduate students and Donna were talking about, in relationship to human–nonhuman relations, resonates with critiques that Indigenous people have made, even though I was raised in a family with no animals in the house, and it was kind of against our culture to, at least in my family, have them too close to you. They don’t sit on your lap, and they don’t sit on your furniture, and you don’t touch them and sleep with them; it’s kind of considered inappropriate. And you know how rez dogs are—they’re kind of feral and running around living their own lives on the reservation. Their lives are hard because there’s disease and they sometimes don’t have enough to eat and all that. But I realized in thinking through this with these other students that I was raised implicitly, not explicitly, to understand that nonhumans have their own life trajectories. And I felt very averse to the ways that humans mess with nonhuman life paths, and that includes breeding them and making them too dependent on us. And, of course, I learned that there are long histories of human–dog companionship and relationships like that, and there’s no disentangling their lives from our lives now. But there’s something about that that seems really unethical to me. So intellectually, this stuff is really interesting to me, but I myself have never sought out these personal, intimate relationships with nonhumans; it’s definitely been much more of an intellectual project.
Then I had a child—my daughter was born in 2002—and from the minute we sat her down on the floor in front of two big dogs she has been a complete dog person. I mean she sleeps with them, and kisses them; she’s like Donna. In fact, she was debating with Donna over Facebook about some dog stuff. I reminded her, “Carmen, be respectful!” “I know you don’t know who she is, but, you know, be nice. She’s your elder.” So I’ve got this child who brings all these animals into my life. I don’t know if you want to write this, but I feel like I’m kind of like a racist—or a speciesist—in the original definition of “race” toward dogs because I think they have a right to exist but I don’t want them in my intimate space. I don’t want to touch them and be with them intimately. But I have to because of my child, and she cannot be happy if she doesn’t have dogs in her life and her house. Part of my anti-speciesist education has been being surrounded by dog people.
SK: It’s interesting that given the environment in HisCon, your reading of the multispecies literature, and your daughter’s attachment to dogs, your relationship to companion animals seems not to have changed.
KT: No, I think they should have their own life. They have their own life ways, they have a social world, they have social practices, they transmit knowledge. They have their own intimate relationships among themselves and with some humans, and I think that’s fascinating and that they have a right to that, and it’s very sad how oppressive humans are in disrupting their social world. But I don’t crave intimacy with nonhumans at all. It is very much an intellectual and theoretical project for me. I think a lot more about filling in some of the gaps in the new materialisms and critical animal studies. I mean the whole idea of an animal, right? In our stories, in our languages we talk about all living things’ being in relationship to us, but living things aren’t limited to the things people in the West think are living, because spirits are in relation to us, rocks are in relation to us, things that people in the West think are dead are alive and they’re related.
So I prefer to think more in terms of who we’re related to, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that translates into some sort of intimate companion relationship for me; it’s more the way an ecologist might think about being related. That we’re interdependent, that we have intimate histories, that maybe we have moved apart as communities of beings. I don’t really see a lot of difference between evolutionary theory and the way that Native people think. I think we have a sense that there are long histories of relatedness and there have been close relationships that have gotten further apart over time, as different communities of beings drift apart.
SK: Moving now to the connections between your philosophy of relatedness and practices of eating, could you describe your approach to consuming meat or other animal products?
KT: For me there’s no good way to consume anything that we put in our body in the kind of society that we’re living in. I have this conversation a lot. I was actually dating a vegan until I left Austin for Edmonton. I don’t know if all vegans are like this, but I would call him a very typical vegan where he’s got this sense that he can stand in this morally pure place because he’s a vegan. Yet he shops at Whole Foods, and he buys fruits and vegetables that are being shipped using fossil fuels, and his soy is being produced in the Amazon and that’s displacing humans and nonhumans. The problem is our food system, but that doesn’t diminish the cruelty. There was a New York Times article that came out about an agricultural research station in Nebraska just a couple of months ago; it was just horrifying the way that these animal bodies are treated. It’s torture what they’re doing to them in the course of research and then production of meat. For me the question is our whole system of producing and consuming. All of the bodies that are used to prop up that system, whether they’re human or nonhuman, are being violated and exploited.
I teach a book called Hunters and Bureaucrats by Paul Nadasdy that’s about Yukon First Nations hunting people. If you can hunt, I think that’s an ethical way to consume meat. They have these sets of relations with their prey. There’s an acknowledgment that humans in their culture have also been prey. Most of us obviously don’t consume meat like that, but most of us don’t consume vegetables in a proper way, either.
SK: Has your thinking about food and the food system changed over the course of your academic career, or throughout your life?
KT: Growing up on the reservation, you ate what foods you could afford. And a lot of that was, we called it “commods”—commodities—U.S. agricultural surplus that they distributed on reservations and to other poor people. I’m trying to think when I first started thinking about meat consumption. It was probably when I moved to Boston to go to university in 1989, because I stopped eating meat for a while. I don’t remember why I did that, though. I don’t think it was an ethical thing. Maybe I had some vague sense that forgoing meat was healthy. I don’t know. But certainly, growing up, both in reservation and urban Native communities, nobody was a vegetarian, nobody talked about that, it would have been considered bourgeois and urban, or something white people did. But the other thing is, I grew up in a hunting family. My grandfather hunted, my uncle hunted. My grandfather, grandmother, and uncle fished. So we had a freezer in our basement that was always filled with river and lake fish, elk, and venison. We had dried venison as a snack a lot. A lot of our meat we caught ourselves, but not all of it. We’d get hamburger from the store if my grandma wanted to make spaghetti, but then my grandfather would leave the house and go to the café because he didn’t consider that real food. I would probably say at least half to three-quarters of our meat was caught ourselves.
That said, I wasn’t a big meat eater. I remember refusing to eat a piece of meat when I was a kid because it had veins in it. I thought that was really disgusting. So maybe I was always somebody who just thought eating flesh wasn’t really that appetizing. And the other thing about my grandfather and my uncle—my grandfather was a white guy, because that was my grandma’s fourth husband, while my uncle and my grandma were Native—they didn’t hang trophies on their walls, they didn’t believe in stuff life that. My uncle says that’s disrespectful to that body, and then he also stopped using guns and he went back to hunting with bows and arrows. But my uncle’s a national archery champion, so he would not advocate that just anybody do that because it would be cruel if you weren’t good at it, if you didn’t kill with one shot. So I did grow up in a family that kind of thought about these things, and there was no sport hunting, ever. We ate everything, or gave it to other people. So I suppose there was a foundation there for me to think about these things in more complex ways, because we had a closer relationship to our food—at least growing up. But then there was all the commod stuff too, that wasn’t close. And when I was a kid we still had gardens on the reservation. You don’t see that now, but my grandparents had gardens.
SK: Do you have a story you could share about a time when your dietary choices or food philosophy has been the subject of conflict, pleasure, or awkwardness?
KT: When I moved to Boston and I stopped eating meat for a while, I would come home and my uncle, the one who hunts, would tease me mercilessly, and he still does. Because I’ll eat tofu, I have some good tofu recipes, and because I have so many vegetarian friends, and I’ll get teased about it, because that’s how it is in small towns. I also got a wheat allergy diagnosis about four years ago when I was living in Berkeley. I remember being so annoyed with people in Berkeley. Nobody could eat anything. Everybody had all kinds of food rules there, and they judge you, they really judge you in Berkeley about what you eat; it’s kind of oppressive. It’s a Michael Pollan world there. So I would be busy making fun of these Berkeley types, and here I get a wheat allergy. My hair was falling out. I was getting terrible rashes on very specific parts of my body, and I went to the allergist and she told me what I had. My hair had been thinning for years, so clearly I’d had a problem for some time; I ate too much wheat. So I had to go on the wagon with gluten, and it’s like you’re a pain in the ass to people. I’m embarrassed to say I have this allergy. But I was really strict for three years and now that it’s really out of my system I find that I can cheat sometimes, and I’m relieved about that.
SK: Given the systemic problems with the food system that you’ve identified and the political limitations of responding to these problems in an individualist, consumerist way, I’m wondering how you approach shopping or otherwise procuring food.
KT: Being an academic with a middle-class income, I can buy organic. But that’s about my own health, knowing that I don’t want to consume pesticides and I don’t want to increase my own risk of cancer. I don’t know that it’s really a social justice thing. I try not to shop at stores that I know have really bad labor practices. I can afford to buy what is labeled as free-range meat and things like that, although my vegan friend in Texas would always post to Facebook these articles saying, “That’s not true, they call it free-range but it’s a still really violent part of the food system.” Maybe that’s true. These labels facilitate people’s shopping choices. Do they facilitate a real change in agricultural practices? I do try to consume less meat and fewer things where I don’t know anything about the history. But you’re reduced to looking at labels. Is it free-range? Is it free trade? And even though I’m this middle-class, conscious person now, I’m sure I ate in a much more sustainable, humane way when I was a kid, because we procured so much of our food from our own labor. We kids even “hunted” nightcrawlers on nights after a rain. Our grandparents used them for fishing. And there was no moral project there, it was what my grandparents could afford, it was the traditions of people—it wasn’t just Native people—the white people where we lived, too, they all hunt, the boys all get a BB gun when they’re thirteen, people all had gardens. It wasn’t any big social justice project; it was just what people could afford and how they lived.
SK: This project was inspired in part by an interview with Donna Haraway in which she said she thinks there should be a place in the world for agricultural animals, but that when she’s confronted by the convictions of her vegan friends, she doesn’t feel like she has adequate answers. I’m wondering how you would respond to her response.
KT: Because I’ve been around Donna so much, I actually do feel like her response to ethical veganism is a really good response. The thing I noticed about vegan friends of mine—they’re still basically operating under the same hierarchy in which humans are above nonhumans. And instead of being able to exploit those nonhumans at will, we should steward them and take care of them. That is just not the worldview that I operate under. It’s easier for them to care about a nonhuman that they have judged to be closer to a human, in terms of brain size or transmission of culture, or whatever. They’re not thinking about relations as much as they’re thinking about the ethical job of superior humans to steward the lives of those that are less than they are. I feel like Donna gets this, and I’ve seen her take to task vegan scholars at conferences. Actually, we were at a meeting in May 2013 at Berkeley that my friend Harlan Weaver organized. Harlan’s just fantastic. So Harlan organized this meeting at Berkeley and Donna was there. And there was this vegan guy from somewhere in southern California. Just a totally urban guy living in L.A., probably does all his shopping at Whole Foods, giving a talk on veganism and being so judgmental. And I’m sitting there as an Indigenous scholar thinking, “What the hell! You can go to Whole Foods and live your vegan lifestyle, but you’re going to tell this to hunting people in the North? Just no cognizance that not everybody can make those kinds of choices and live like that.” But I wasn’t going to say anything because I was feeling really angry and that’s not productive, but Donna intervened and she made a comment, “So what are we going to do if we end the agricultural food system? You know what that’s going to result in? It’s going to result in the extinction of all these animals bred for human consumption.” And this person was like, “Yeah,” and he admitted that he thought their extinction was acceptable. It was really interesting, the lack of thought about that. And I haven’t really probed her on her thinking about the role of those kinds of beings in the world, but there are these discourses of purity that are underlying these kinds of ethical approaches to food, and I just don’t think there’s room for that kind of purity in this world. It seems very Christian to me in some ways.
SK: It’s interesting that you should say this, because two of our other interviewees have described their conversion to veganism as a spiritual experience of sorts, something that just came to them, that they had no choice but to undertake.
KT: So I met Chloe Taylor at a party here in Edmonton when I first arrived and she’s a vegan, and I told her, because I had been cooking for this vegan boyfriend of mine, “I have an amazing vegan sauce recipe, it’s really good, it tastes like meat.” And so we got to talking and I said that I see us in relation to our prey and I come from a culture in which not too long ago, we were prey, and hunting people still can be if they’re out on the land. A lot of human beings in this society haven’t experienced what that’s like. But I grew up in a way in which nature was dangerous. That’s why I don’t hike and do all of this nature girl stuff. To me it was life and death: Blizzards can kill you, tornadoes can kill you, floods can kill you. That’s the kind of landscape I grew up in. It’s beautiful and violent and dangerous. And so we are not superior to nonhumans, we are at their mercy to some degree, and this is why we had guns and we had other things to protect us when we were out there. But I also told Chloe, because I view myself as being in relation, when I take that to the ultimate edge of thinking, I actually come to see now how certain peoples practice cannibalism. Because if we live in relation to nonhumans, it also makes sense that we should be able to eat our own if there was nothing so elevated and special about us. I get to that point in some of my classes sometimes and my students are horrified, but why is that such a horrible thing? I’m not saying you should go out and kill people for food, although then one could say you shouldn’t go out and kill nonhumans for food either. But if we are capable of being the prey of nonhumans, I think ultimately, morally, we’re capable of being eaten by each other. Chloe Taylor said she agreed. She said, “And I don’t want to eat humans either!” And we laughed. But for me, if I’m going to eat meat, I can imagine a circumstance in which if somebody offered me some human meat and it was willfully given, it would be disrespectful to turn it down. So it was a very interesting conversation we had.
But it sounds kind of crazy to most people because there’s such a deep core assumption in our society that humans are so special and that somehow cannibalism is just an incredible, terrible sin.
SK: Are you working on a specific project in animal studies at present?
KT: No. My next book is called Pipestone Relations, and it’s about the Pipestone quarries. A lot of what I’m doing is looking at the absence of Indigenous thought in the new materialisms literature and in critical animal studies. There is a lack of understanding that Indigenous people have thought about questions that are central to these fields. Indigenous thought is largely missing from these academic conversations, and I think that Indigenous people should be much more a part of these conversations and should be at the forefront of theorizing these things. Our language in “academese” and in English for talking about these issues is inadequate. First of all, there’s not an animal–human divide for many Indigenous people. And that is not to say there is some utopian idea like “We’re all equal,” but it’s just a recognition that, why would you have the word animal when we’re all related? The word animal— everybody in animal studies knows this—it’s used to denigrate, to de-animate, to make some beings less than others and controllable by us and exploitable by us. And that word gets applied to both nonhumans and to humans. And it’s really anti-relational; it’s a horrible word. And even if you don’t care about nonhumans, people should care about the question of the use of the category of animal because it’s used to enslave and incarcerate and kill a lot of human beings. And even if that’s all you care about, that’s enough, right?
SK: I have two questions related to this point: Do you see yourself in conversation with posthumanism? Do you have thoughts about posthumanism as a category of analysis, or as a way of thinking about the human?
KT: To speak broadly, a lot of Indigenous thinkers already talk more about “persons.” Humans and nonhumans can be persons, and so can “spirits,” for lack of a better word. And we think about collectivities, which you might translate roughly into English as peoples, or nations, but those are bad translations. This is part of the work of getting Indigenous thought into other academic conversations; there are much more complex ideas within Indigenous languages that really get lost in the translation to English. When you dig into those languages, it just floors you, to find the deep and very different philosophical assumptions. There are very different worldviews and categories embedded in those languages that give us a whole new way of talking about these sets of relations. And I think that’s some of the work that needs to happen. We need to be working with those who are revitalizing Indigenous languages and thinking out of those languages. So, I don’t think Indigenous thinkers would spend a whole lot of time trying to critique or save the concept of the human. I think that there are other terms, if we were to get deeply into this conversation, that we could use.
SK: Is there a key concept or theoretical perspective that guides your thinking about human and nonhuman animals or other life forms?
KT: Yes—“being in relation.” I was watching a film for my Pipestone project where Albert White Hat, who was Sicangu Lakota, and he’s a language speaker, was talking about Pipestone and our relationship to the stone and the pipe. A lot of people talk about that site as sacred, and the stone as sacred, and there’s an origin story that lends credence to this notion of the “sacred,” but White Hat didn’t use that word. And the word that we tend to talk about as being sacred that people translate from Lakota or Dakota into English as sacred, he didn’t describe it that way. He translated that word as relations. He didn’t say relationality, but that’s what he was getting at. I thought, “Holy, Albert just said this word that we use as sacred really means in relation.” We have inherited so much from Christianity that it has completely perverted our ways of thinking about how we should relate to these things. And that’s what my book is about—taking the concept of relations and getting away from the concept of the sacred, which is going to be controversial. There’s another Native studies thinker who is doing a lot of work along this front, David Shorter at UCLA. Because, again, you can’t have the sacred without having the profane, but we don’t have anything profane in that land. There are some things that are more revered than others, like your elders are more revered than a younger person, or some mountain might be more revered, but it doesn’t mean that the other stuff is profane. Again, these kinds of binaries that exist in English and in histories of Christianity are really counterproductive.
And so that book is going to talk about the relations between humans and rock, between the U.S. Park Service, federally recognized tribes, and another organization called the Indian Shrine Association. It’s going to think about the relationships between quarries and carvers, between climate scientists and ecologists, and between the Park Service and the tribes. So there are all these aspects of the Pipestone quarries that you could consider “religion,” you could consider them science, you could consider them policy, and I want to show how each of those categories is problematic and instead think about the relations between the humans, the institutions, and the nonhumans, including the stones. So—relations— that’s my term right now. It’s very much in conversation what’s happening in the academy, which is why I think this is an ideal time to be doing this work. The academy is getting to the place where we can actually have a conversation in a way that probably wasn’t possible twenty years ago.