‘Folks need to realize that not all knowledge is for their consumption. Knowledge is produced through relationships – relationships to space, time, people, other beings. And those relationships create responsibilities. […] I have no business extracting those stories. […] When someone tells me that a piece of knowledge isn’t for sharing, I respect that as an act of self-determination.’
In August 2016, Caroline Picard interviewed Metis scholar Zoe Todd (who writes often about environmental imagination, community-building, the ongoing effects of Empire/colonialism on human-environment relationships, and academia’s appropriation of Indigenous knowledge):
‘In a recent talk at the University of Toronto, you describe eating a summer trout when your host explains that every bone of a fish has a different story. She tells you that the stories, however, are not for you as an anthropologist, which I take to mean they aren’t to be shared in academic settings, and then systematized by the public context of, the colonial academy. Your anecdote struck me as especially significant, in that the regime of global capital seems flatten different types of knowledge; the privilege of accessibility is fostered through systems of education and expense, rather than privileging intimacy.’
From a separate article by Todd, here is the anecdote being referenced:
‘The ways that humans are decentered in understandings of how to live with care in Paulatuuq are instructive for enacting robust survivance. Furthermore, during my time working Paulatuuq [”Northwest Territories, Canadian Arctic”], these complex relationships were expressed in terms of responsibilities and fish pluralities, which are shared and re-examined through dynamic stories. A crucial moment for me in understanding implicit human responsibilities to fish and fish pluralities was one day at lunch in 2012, when Millie and I were eating in her kitchen. We were eating a lake trout that she had cooked, while her grandkids finished up their lunch, and she held up a fish bone and said “did you know that Inuvialuit have a story for every bone in the fish?” She gently explained that these stories are not ones for me to learn, but this moment deeply shifted my understanding of fish as more-than-food. Fish carry stories in their bones and her sharing of this reality, this truth, nudged me to think about the ways that fish in my own home territory carry stories within their bones as well. Not the same stories – not by any means. I do not seek here to appropriate Inuvialuit praxis, but rather to reflect on the ways that fish exist simultaneously as many different things and beings and agents in Métis legal orders as well. […] So, […] human-fish relations are a micro-site across which Inuvialuit assert and negotiate a complex and paradoxical ‘sameness and difference’ in attending to and contending with the imposition of State and Church and Commercial understandings of how to conceive of, move through and relate to the lands, waters and atmospheres, human and more-than-human inhabitants and presences in the region.’ [From: Zoe Todd. “Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous Legal Orders and Colonialism in North/Western Canada.” September 2018.]
Here’s what Picard asked of Todd, referencing the anecdote:
‘Going to back to your point about new, local systems of knowledge, I wondered if this was an example of an alternative strategy for learning?’
‘I think folks need to realize that not all knowledge is for their consumption. Knowledge is produced through relationships – relationships to space, time, people, other beings. And those relationships create responsibilities. It’s not my place to learn something if I do not have robust and ongoing relationships to a specific place or person or history. And if I cannot tend to place, people or history in the ways that those who hold the knowledge deem to be necessary/adequate/robust, I have no business extracting that story. In that sense, knowledge is also deeply shaped by a kinship of sorts – and it requires labor to continue to tend to those relationships between ourselves and the stories we are gifted or granted through our connections to others. This is something my colleague Damien Lee and I have been discussing over the last little while – the labor and renewal of relationships really matters. Kinship isn’t just about blood relations, it is about a constant tending-to, and a tenderness towards, those who give us life through stories and relationships through time and space. Being given a story, or co-creating a story involves concomitant responsibilities to that story and the relationships it encapsulates and also creates through the telling and re-telling of it. And for this reason, when someone tells me that a piece of knowledge isn’t for sharing, I respect that as an act of self-determination.’
The interview: Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.
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