Brainstorm Week 9 - Paul Druta

Million's understanding of place-thought is highly connected with the ideas of buen vivir and la pachamama that we learned about last week. These concepts both center around the protection and celebration of nature and living in sustainable ways so that future generations are able to enjoy and learn from la pachamama. Million's piece talks a lot about the idea of place-thought, a central part of Indigenous knowledge systems, which contrasts from Cartesian duality (the separation of mind from matter). In place-thought, everything is sentient and knowledge is not global, but is specific to locations. Million includes the following quote to showcase the essence of place-thought: "'In a literal sense, indigenous means "to be born of a place," but it also means "to live in relationship with the place where one is born" as in the sense of an "indigenous homeland"'" (Million 97). In this way, we can see the reason why the preservation of nature is so important to Indigenous populations. In this worldview, la Pachamama is a sentient being that humans engage in important relationships with for their benefit. Without nature, humans would not be able to survive. And equally importantly, since Indigenous populations derive knowledge from their location, it is important to preserve the natural environment because it is the source of cultural knowledge and understanding. Ybarra's article continues this vein of thinking by explaining that modern Latino/a concern with nature is not a recent development, but rather a cultural determination with living cohesively with nature rather than seeing humans as being separate from it: "While the American project of environmentalism denotes an explicit quest to find alternatives to exploitative approaches to nature, goodlife writing shows how the Mexican American and Chicana /o culture enacts values and practices that include nature all along." (Ybarra 7).