TEST
ON "THE HOOP"
From 2014-2017 I visited, traveled with, and interviewed nomadic non-Indigenous "rewilders" in Oregon and California, people living on "the Hoop," sometimes called wildtending.​
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Published work:
Seraphin, Bruno. "Wildtending, settler colonialism, and ecocultural identities in environmental futures." In Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, pp. 403-415. Routledge, 2020.
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This chapter centers on an inchoate nomadic movement bound by shared environmental practices, here called wildtending, and speculates about ways Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the United States Northwest imagine an array of contradictory environmental futures. The chapter situates wildtenders’ ecocultural identity formation within the ongoing structural conditions of U.S. settler colonialism. I contend that such radical environmentalisms could more fully realize their liberatory potential by entering into relationships of direct accountability with contemporary Indigenous efforts toward land repatriation, resurgence, and self-determination. Drawing attention to diverse and sometimes competing visions for the movement’s possible trajectories, I make the theoretical argument that ecocultural identities emerge not only within networks of human and nonhuman relations, but moreover in the ways those relations are imagined into the future. I complicate some wildtenders’ settler futurities by centering scholarship on North American Indigenous resurgence, futurisms, and science fiction, as well as Black feminist Afro-futurism. I propose that such a focus combined with a conception of community organizing as a form of practical science fiction opens space for a hopeful orientation toward viable ecocultural futures, disrupting the predominantly apocalyptic tone of 21st century global warming discourse.
Published in the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity:
Drawing on a diverse range of contributors who utilise an array of multi-disciplinary lenses, this Handbook provides a much-needed reference on the many ways in which individual and collective ecocultural identities are being produced and performed on individual, local, and global scales. Each section includes authoritative grounded theoretical essays and an international range of case studies. Providing a transdisciplinary overview of this cutting-edge subject, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars of environmental communication, environmental sociology, human geography, and environmental studies more broadly.
"PAIUTES AND SHOSHONE WOULD BE KILLED FOR THIS":
WHITENESS, REWILDING, AND THE MALHEUR OCCUPATION
Seraphin, Bruno. “‘Paiutes and Shoshone Would Be Killed For This’: Whiteness, Rewilding, and the Malheur Occupation.” Western Folklore 76, no. 4 (2017): 447–78.
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"Wildtending" is a grassroots movement of mostly white and non-Native nomadic "rewilders" in the northwest United States who appropriate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, gathering and replanting wild foods in a seasonal round. Evaluating wildtending's potentialities for settler-Indigenous solidarity, this article discusses the network's rhetorical shifts within the context of the 2016 armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.
Note: The term “High Desert Wildtending Network” in this article is meant to pertain to the broader wildtending movement in general and neither specifically nor solely to the non-profit organization called "High Desert Wildtending Network."
REWILDING, "THE HOOP," AND SETTLER APOCALYPSE
Seraphin, Bruno. "Rewilding," the Hoop," and Settler Apocalypse." The Trumpeter 32, no. 2 (2016): 126-146.
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This paper presents an ethnographic account of the grassroots "wildtending" movement. Comprising mostly white and non-Native nomads who travel in the northwest United States’ Great Basin and Columbia Plateau regions and live mostly on National Forest land, this movement of “rewilders” appropriates local Indigenous peoples’ traditional ecological knowledge in efforts to gather and replant wild foods in a seasonal round that they refer to as the “Sacred Hoop.” I discuss the Wildtending (or "Hoop") community in order to explore the environmental ethics of a group that is at once strikingly unique and also an embodiment of the problems of settler colonialism within the broader environmentalist movement. I begin by introducing the group's ecologies and ethics, which emphasize human-nonhuman reciprocity and mutual care, and subsequently move into an examination of the multiple and sometimes-contradictory lines of apocalyptic narrative logic at work in Wildtending discourse. I propose that the "Hoopsters’" conflicting accounts of the Anthropocene, and the temporality of its disasters, are a manifestation of their ongoing work grappling with their own racial positionality. Despite the "Hoopsters’" uncompromising critiques of capitalism, and environmental exploitation, the network struggles to come to terms with its role in ongoing colonialism. In this way, Wildtending echoes the troubled narratives at work in broader North American environmental thought, which consistently reveres the idea of Indigenous cultures while struggling to enter into solidarity relationships with Indigenous communities and their efforts toward decolonization and resurgence.
Note: The terms in footnote #2 refer specifically to the names of Facebook groups, and do not necessarily represent the movement as a whole.