Brainstorm Week 9 - Angie Lai

In the chapter, "Indigenous Matters", Million says in Indigenous thought, "Indigenous place is… in every sense holistic, in which the relations of all entities are bound in relations that interactively form societies and place" (98). The relationality and holistic nature of indigenous thought regarding place described in this quote reflects Walsh's concepts of relationality, correspondence, complementarity, and reciprocity that are central to buen vivir. Million also reinforces the Ecuadorian idea of mother earth, saying that in Anishinaabe thought, "the earth is female" (98). Indigenous sense of place and beliefs regarding different life forms/matter bridge buen vivir and mother earth. In the chapter, "Introduction: Defining Mexican American Goodlife Writing", Ybarra mentions the concept of buen vivir explicitly, saying that the goodlife writing “embraces similar values [to buen vivir]" (8). Ybarra explores and outlines the history of Mexican American environmental thought, noting that Chicana/os "never became environmentalists in the first place" because "Chicana/o culture enacts values and practices that include nature all along" (7). This relationality between humans and nature that has always been present is at the core of buen vivir. Also, on a separate note, as an Environmental Studies major, it was fascinating to read about the history of the book The Good Life and its parallel timeline to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, because everyone who has taken an environmental studies/science class knows about Leopold’s idea of the “land ethic”, which is very similar to the core values in goodlife writing. I really liked Ybarra’s claim that "It is time to stop pretending that ideas for healing the relationship between humans and the natural environment need to be new or originate in Anglo-American writings when they can be found in” Chicana/o writing (10).