Melissa K. Nelson: Living in storied and moral landscapes

“It’s very important that we translate how different knowledge systems have been privileged and others have been marginalized and repressed and erased. To have true knowledge symbiosis, where there is harmony and balance and inter-relationality and each contributing respectfully with care, thoughtfulness, humility, that is a process and it’s a messy and tangled process.” In this episode, we welcome Melissa K. Nelson, an Indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker and scholar-activist. Expanding on her years of community based work as well as mixed background and heritage, Melissa reflects on climate change as a symptom, rather than a cause, of disharmonious imbalance with the earth. She invites us to ask: how might acts of ‘balance’ be more dynamic than we may perceive? And how might we re-examine, re-situate, and even re-claim the word “sustainability” to invoke more than maintaining stasis, or keeping a status quo? In staying with these questions, Melissa reminds us of the importance of death, decay and composting; concepts so often eschewed under the house that modernity built. In composting that which needs to change, Melissa gestures towards practices of embodied story-ing that is relational, place-based, and ancestral. Ultimately, Melissa asks of herself and us: what does it mean to become, or be in the process of becoming, a good ancestor?

(The musical offering featured in this episode Carolina by Mother Juniper. The episode-inspired artwork is by Lauren Rosenfelt.)

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