Brainstorm Week 9 - Sarah Yang

Dian Million discusses the relationship between Indigenous people and the earth, before and after capitalism and colonialism in “Indigenous Matters”. When analyzing the term indigenous, it must be known that “indigenous means ‘to be born of a place’, but it also means ‘to live in relationship with the place where one is born’” (Million, 97). This intense connection is similar in spirit to the respect that Ecuadorians gave their land, by giving it written rights in their constitution. The sense of community and respect for mother earth, Pachamama, is an essential part in the Indigenous culture, as “Indigenous knowledge of matter is inextricable from people’s holistic, lived experience in specific places, in relation with both the human and nonhuman” (Mission, 107). However, Million also discusses how colonialism and capitalism are practically synonyms when looking at their effects on the Indigenous land and communities, as “the growth and expansion of capitalism since the 1500s has underlain colonial expansion across the globe” (101). The Indigenous people and their land have been under attack from both colonialism and capitalism. In “Writing the Goodlife”, Priscilla Ybarra discusses how goodlife is “decolonial because it embodies two core values of decoloniality: (1) a consistent rejection of the modern ideology of universal humanism and linear progress, and (2) a deviation from chronological and single-dimensional approaches to time and place” (25-26). Goodlife writing not only deconstructs colonialism, but also betters environmental practices and “rectifies some destructive ecocritical practices, challenging the field to once and for all abandon its tacit approval of settler colonialism implicit in its first wave enthusiasm for the pastoral and the biocentric” (Ybarra, 10). Goodlife writing is inclusive and holistic, not including discriminatory and colonial views that many other writings include.