IT WAS NEVER "AGAINST NATURE":
Many critical aspects of nature have been downplayed, ignored or rendered invisible by mainstream science in order to maintain the status quo. A goal of queer ecology is to critique biased science created within dominant Western paradigms.
Queer ecologists argue that the sexual diversity of animals matters. Modern theory often assumes a radical separation of nature and culture and thus minimizes the significance of animal sexuality and ‘queer animals’. But, as with other ‘keys [to the] Human Kingdom’ such as language and tool use, sex disconnected from reproduction has been similarly accomplished across a range of species (Alaimo, 2010).
This is important because it makes us reconsider our anthropocentric viewpoint of ‘natural’ sexuality as being inherently tied to reproduction (heteronormativity). The sexual diversity of the relatives that share the planet with us is meaningful because, “animals help us tell stories about ourselves, especially when it comes to matters of sexuality” (Terry 151, quoted in Alaimo). Moreover, “an understanding of animal cultures critiques the ideology of nature as resource, blank slate for cultural inscription, or brute, mechanistic force”(Alaimo 60, 2010). The more we understand animal naturecultures, the better able we are to protect them and help them thrive.
On The Origins of Species
The scientific term species was invented in the late eighteenth century (Coined by naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon), “but the term has never been free of controversy” (McWhorter). During the Nineteenth century, it was used in debates over whether “Negros and Indians” were Homo Sapiens or not and was again destabilized when Charles Darwin released his work, On the Origin of Species. “Politically charged from its scientific conception, the concept of species has often brought great harm to both racial and sexual minorities over the past two hundred years” (McWhorter).
According to Foucault, “concepts […] are for cutting. They are never merely benign representations of a natural arrangement” (1969). Essentially, the concept of “Species could be made to function oppressively to separate white from blacks because […] it was already a tool for marking separations in natures heterogenous continuities in the interest of prevailing human practices” (McWhorter).
Animals within the western paradigm are animals because they are considered a different species from humans. According to Darwin, however, the concept of rigid species boundaries is practically meaningless, given the inevitability of evolution (The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin never answered the question on the origin of species, except to say that, “there are no eternally fixed types, nor are there eternally distinct lines of descent. All life on earth, no matter how morphologically or functionally distinct at present, conceivably could be traced back to a single germ line” (McWhorter , 81).
Morton suggests that queer ecology might abandon using 'animal' and adopt a term like 'strange stranger'. Indigenous paradigms, like mitakuye oyasin, would consider ‘animals’ to be ‘relatives’ or ‘relations’.
According to Albert White Hat, Lakota elder, the wisdom in Indigenous paradigms aren’t “merely a collection of historical ideas or words” but “ a system of powerful knowledge applicable to the lives and struggles of people right now” (2020). Vine Deloria refers to mitákuye oyásįn as the ‘Indian principle of interpretation/observation,’ calling it “a practical methodological tool for investigating the natural world and drawing conclusions about it that can serve as guides for understanding nature and living comfortably within it. . . . We observe the natural world by looking for relationships between various things in it. . . . This concept is simply the relativity concept as applied to a universe that people experience as alive and not as dead or inert” (1999, 34) (Posthumus 2022 p219 f). According to the Tapestry Institute, “The Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ describes Reality by addressing it as ‘All our Relations.’ All humans, all animals, all plants, all the waters, the soil, the stones, the mountains, the grasslands, the winds, the clouds and storms, the sun and moon, stars and planets are our relations and are relations to one another. We are connected to each other in multiple and vital ways. When one is in pain, all are harmed. When there is justice for one, there is more justice for all” (2020).
Mitakuye oyasin is about relationships and the decentering of humanity as ‘master’ of the land. In fact, in almost direct opposition, “the normative cultural values encompassed by mitákuye oyásʾį are the very foundation of kinship, relational ontology, and the overarching interspecies collective, of which humans are only one hoop, one oyáte ‘people, nation, tribe’, in the company of many others. The key constituents of this animist ontology and worldview, of mitákuye oyásʾį, are persons, a category that extends beyond human beings to nonhuman or other- than- human persons. [...] Importantly, the Lakota worldview sees humans as the least knowledgeable and powerful beings, requiring the most aid and pity (see V. Deloria 1999, 50; 2009, 99– 100). MItakuye oyasin as a paradigm has great potential to work in symbiopoesis with queer ecology.
Queer ecology is a critical response to biased Western science, especially about our animal relatives' naturecultures. However, by centering discourse around EuroAmerican culture, even if in critical consideration, we run the risk of reinforcing concepts such as ‘species’ which has been used by the colonial project to reinforce oppressive structures and separate us from nature. Mitakuye oyasin, is one example of an indigenous paradigm that might be an ancient answer to queer ecology’s goal of disrupting current colonial ideology. Moreover, both queer ecology and mitakuye oyasin, when they are used symbiopoetically, can provide us with the necessary imaginatory and observatory skills to contend with our current environmental issues.
