I am in the midst of preparing my lecture for the Introduction to Natural History course that I am teaching this term. For this course, I have created a very interdisciplinary approach: field observations and patterns in nature are combined with the history of collecting and then we connect this with Natural History museums, and their colonial legacy. The focus is on observing, interpreting, naming, collecting and displaying.

When I began working on this course I returned to all of the courses that I did in both my Biology and Anthropology degrees. The work I did in Biology certainly has helped me with developing the sections on fieldwork and nature observation. I am in the process of returning to many of the field notebooks I have from my field biology courses (Old Growth Forests in Temegami, Ontario and Alpine Biology in Kananaskis Alberta) and the Ornithological research I worked on in Oregon and Alaska.

Surprisingly, what has been so helpful during my preparation for this class is the work I did in Anthropology. I know it sounds strange – but it was during my degree in Cultural Anthropology at McMaster University where I first took a course with Dr. Harvey Feit on Environmental Anthropology. Now, I had taken many courses with Dr. Feit (and also Dr. Wayne Warry) on Applied Anthropology that focused on decolonizing and social justice work with the James Bay Cree, and in particular Aboriginal Sovereign Rights to land. The Environmental Anthropology course and so many of my courses that focused on Aboriginal Sovereign Rights, helped me to understand the horrific colonial legacy and logic of silencing, collecting and displaying the Other. The discussions in these courses also introduced me to the idea of doing research with communities and the concept of decolonization. Until my work in Dr. Feit’s courses, I had never thought about the importance of documentation for a community, and the power that it could hold when used by the community to fight for land rights (based on his work with the Cree, Dr. Feit’s testimony in 1973 helped to secure Cree land rights in face of the Quebec Hydro Dam, see: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19730510&id=WJouAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oKEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=847,3078175).

Not only has my work in Anthropology helped me make links to how rights to land and identity are connected, it mapped race onto space, and linked social and environmental justice. I don’t think I had ever directly connected my work in Anthropology to my understanding of environmental justice and the role of researchers working as allies with communities. Those important courses helped me to understand the political struggles over Aboriginal Sovereign Rights, and I don’t think I could have come to understand the importance of stories for understanding and linking people to place without such a politically important connection that was happening in Ontario.

I also just came across the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute’s blog that mentions how Dr. Feit has donated the field notes that he complied with Cree trappers and hunters over the last 40 years. (See the following link: http://aanischaaukamikw.blogspot.ca/2014/09/dr-harvey-feit-donates-hunters-diaries.html). This is a great example of research with a community, both for how this work established Aboriginal Sovereign Rights, but also because it demonstrates what returning research to a community looks like in practice, and how actions and commitments can return research stories to a community. This is something I am going to be using with my class when we examine being an ally in decolonizing research and the process of reconciliation.

Pariss Garramone