Zoe Todd: Embodied listening for freshwater fish futures (ep410)

Written By kamea chayne
“My life goal is to get our governments to understand that Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures are completely linked.”
— Zoe Todd

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Zoe Todd, who invites us to think alongside a critical lens of Indigenous fish philosophy and examine relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and fish well-being in Canada. By asking how we can learn with fish as they “listen with their whole being,” Zoe prompts discussions on compassionate listening, the fundamental link between the future of fish wellbeing and Indigenous sovereignty worldwide, and their relationship with art as research practice.

Tune in as we swim in waters of critical attunement to our wider ecological entanglements, as inspired by Zoe’s devotion to fish as companions of care.

 

About our guest:

Dr. Zoe Todd, is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Governance and Freshwater Fish Futures at Simon Fraser University. They are Red River Métis and a practice-led artist-researcher from Alberta (with family connections to the historic St Paul des Métis Settlement) who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative Indigenous-led initiative that is ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’ across plural watersheds. They are a member of the class of 2020 of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada.

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transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Zoe Todd: I just turned 40 this year, but I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, which is in what we call Western Canada. And I grew up in a family, a really, very large extended family on both sides of my family. My mom is a white settler with ancestors from England and Norway who came to Canada through the 1880s to the early 1900s. And on my dad's side, he comes from a very big red river Métis family that has roots that extends through what we would presently call Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. His mom was a white settler but his dad was Métis and through my grandfather's side I'm connected to many big Métis families.

So I grew up in a pretty dynamic environment. And another person that was really significant to shaping my interest in fish alongside my mom and dad is my late stepfather Wayne Emerson Roberts who grew up in central Alberta came from a family of folks who were really interested in fish. His uncle was a very prominent fisheries biologist here in British Columbia and Wayne went on to become a biologist and a curator at the University of Alberta. And so between my dad's artistic talents and interest in the land as a Métis person, my mom as an environmental broadcast journalist who first started out with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and then went into doing freelance work, and then Wayne as a fish biologist and naturalist and then actually my late stepmom, Adair Patterson, was an artist and fashion designer. So I was surrounded by a lot of really interesting people who've all shaped me, and then growing up in Alberta along the North Saskatchewan River and spending time in those Alberta waterways really shaped my interest in environmental matters and the specific issues that freshwater fish in Alberta and its related watersheds experience.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for this introduction. So fish have been present and developing and evolving as a part of the planet for over 500 million years, which is amazing. And you often quote Dr. Leroy Little Bear, who shares, “Western science is largely aimed at exploration. Native science is aimed at sustainability. Fish have been around way before dinosaurs, way before the Neanderthals, way before our time. The fish are still around. I wonder what scientific formula the fish have discovered, we should ask the fish." With this, I wonder if you can share more about what dominant modes of quote listening or validating knowledge through certain tools or metrics of credibility that a lot of us might need to rethink or question and how you thought through this question of what embodied listening to fish means?

Zoe Todd: That's a wonderful question. And this is work that I do with my very dear friend and co-thinker, Dr. Amer Kanngieser, who is a German-Australian sound artist and geographer who works closely with water protectors and land offenders in different parts of the Pacific. Dr. Leroy Little Bear's provocation has deeply shaped my career. I first came across his thoughts on this when he delivered a lecture that was recorded for the 2016 Congress of Humanities in Calgary. And that question of ‘what scientific formula have the fish discovered’ has basically sat with me ever since and I already was exposed to quite a bit of fisheries research through my late stepdad, through my training in biology in my undergrad, and then I followed that work with graduate work looking at different ways that communities in northern Canada, specifically the Inuvialuit Settlement region and the community of Paulatuk, where I was so lucky to work with amazing thinkers and philosophers and land protectors within that community.

The concept of listening to fish has been very central to a lot of the work that many different people I've been mentored by do.

And listening to fish, a lot of people say, oh well, how did the fish talk to you? It's sort of like a gotcha question, like, oh well, are you saying the fish talk to you in the way that we would understand humans to talk? And that's kind of like, it's funny when they ask it can engender some interesting conversations. But when we say listening to fish, like when Dr. Kanngieser and I talk about listening to fish, we're thinking with all of these mentors and philosophers like Dr. Leroy Little Bear, like my late stepdad, like the land and water protectors that [Dr. Kanngieser] works with, who have dedicated their lifetimes to sitting with places and tending to them and learning the nuances of them and feeling them and understanding when those places have urgent things to tell us.

They might tell us in a variety of ways. It might be through an urgent and different smell, it might be through sounds that sound off or different, it might be through dreams, it might be through hauntings. I've experienced a lot of hauntings in my life where things beyond this realm have tried very hard to communicate things to me, sometimes very urgent things and so that kind of embodied listening to fish, it goes beyond kind of there's a current deep interest in Western scientific spaces and listening to fish through sort of the mechanical listening to fish through hydrophones and recording. But when Amer and I are talking about that, we mean it more in the register that Dr. Little Bear is coming at it from, which is listening with your whole being. A kind of, Amer calls it a sort of noticing, sensing and attuning to place and to beings and kind of displacing our centrality as humans from that as well and realizing that we're just another sensor and environment. Full of sensors. I don't know if that makes sense but that would be my answer. Yeah.

Kamea Chayne: I love that. Yeah, I mean, I think what this really speaks to is that there's no way to kind of universalize this knowledge because it is so place-based and dynamic. And whatever is present to be listened to today might be very different to what it might have been 10 years, 20 years, centuries ago. So it definitely requires like you said, a very present noticing of place and all the relationalities and complexities and dynamics of the land and water and our larger, more-than-human communities.

A lot of our past conversations have explored things like the sentience or intelligence or culture and languages of the more than human world, like how plants are able to listen in their own ways. And part of the criticism I am aware of for people who even talk about these subjects is that these comparisons and applying certain human concepts to the more than human world would be kind of anthropomorphizing. But I've always kind of pushed back against that because I would argue that labeling these extensions of concepts as anthropomorphizing itself comes from a sort of subjective interpretation because another way to look at it would be to expand what people understand to be perceiving, hearing, seeing, so that they de-center the human experience.

And in this case, maybe exploring how fish listens isn't making fish more human, but it's making our lenses on our understanding of sensorial intelligence less limited by human and certain cultural ways of knowing. So, yeah, I’d just be curious what else you might add to this and what you can tell us about the ways that fish listen with their whole bodies and what lessons we might learn from that.

Zoe Todd: Yeah, I mean, you've pretty much encapsulated it, but all I can add as a person who's very passionate about fish is, as I'm learning by delving into the scientific literature to try and I'm teaching a course this term called Introduction to Critical Indigenous Fish Philosophy, and it's a bit experimental because I've never offered it before, but the students are amazing. In teaching this, I'm delving into the scientific literature to sort of see what scientists have to say about fish, sensory systems and their nervous system and their sensory organs, and to sort of, I'm having the students read those scientific pieces alongside stories and reflections and philosophical works by Indigenous knowledge keepers and educators and philosophers who talk about fish and what fish know. And so what I'm learning alongside my students in reading this scientific literature is that, yeah, fish do sense with their entire bodies and what's so fascinating about it is that air is very different from water in terms of density, in terms of like the dissolution of chemicals and molecules within it, and so how a fish senses the world is they have some things that are very similar to us because we do descend from fish like Tiktaalik, the first fish that they think left water and became the tetrapods that you know eventually led to us. There’s things that fish have that we also have, essentially because they figured it out first, as Dr. Little Bear's pointing out to us. They figured out that scientific formula millions of years before we did. But what's so cool about fish is that they had to adapt to a particular environment that we haven't. They have figured out a different medium than us. And so that means that the way that they see is adapted to water.

The way that [fish] listen is also how they feel—they listen with ears that are not necessarily so different from ours but they're adapted to those specificities of water.

So some fish have a set of bones that are ossicles that are sort of in connection with their swim bladder. And so when their swim bladder vibrates, it then causes these bones to vibrate and that communicates certain things to them. And then what also is cool is that they have something called the lateral line. And so that is basically a system of these cells, these hair cells that we have, similar ones in our ears, but they extend down their body. And so they're able to sense changes in pressure and all sorts of really interesting information we got rid of when we went to land and didn't have to measure that information in the same way. So I think they're just endlessly fascinating. And then they also have chemoreceptors throughout their bodies. So whereas we like taste and smell with our mouths and our noses respectively, they can have chemoreceptors on almost any part of their body. And so they're taking in information and sort of like dissolved compounds from the water and sensing that and understanding that. And then some fish also have, as I'm learning, a capacity to sense electrical currents in the water and that gives them other information. And for example fish in deep water might have actually more acute hearing than fish that live in sort of the upper regions of the water column. So that raises questions about things like deep sea mining.

If we're going to, as humans, go into these environments in the deep sea, you can imagine how loud that will be for these beings that have adapted to an environment that is very different from ours.

So all of that is kind of in my mind as I'm thinking about what it means to listen like a fish or I guess I think of it as like kind of a compassion. Like many different spiritual traditions throughout the globe talk about compassion as a really important quality and I want to use that a bit differently than empathy and there's really brilliant people who are making that point about it. There's a book coming out whose name and author I completely forget at the moment, but it's making that point that empathy actually has led us in some problematic directions and maybe we can add this back in after because I want to give that person deep credit. But yeah, I think of it as a kind of compassionate listening, which is trying to really understand someone's total being on their own terms and not needing to resolve it to mine or even compare it to mine necessarily, but just understand that it exists as it does and that it's powerful and fascinating in its own right.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing that. We'll definitely look it up and highlight it in our show notes and I can share it in my voiceover as well.

And it's kind of impossible to fully know and that's kind of the humbling beauty of it, but as a sort of interpretive invitation, what have you thought through in terms of how fish may have perceived or listened to or experienced the changes brought about through processes of colonial extraction that of course devastated also their habitats and communities. Yeah, like as people we might come to experience or learn of these stories in very particular human centered or human sensorial ways, but I'd be curious: Have you thought about what it might be like for fish to have experienced these histories through their bodies and sensory receptors? So it's kind of like the reverse of deep listening as humans trying to better know our place, but like deep listening on the side of fish to their own environmental changes and historic changes.

Zoe Todd: Yeah, I was part of a team that called ourselves Fluid Boundaries and we put together a proposal that was shortlisted to represent Canada at the Venice Architectural Biennale and we were shortlisted in 2018. We weren't chosen unfortunately, but the premise of our proposal was basically to look at Canada through a fishy perspective and to think about Canada in terms of its waterways and how its viewed in terms of its experiences of fish. That was prompting us to think about how would the fish understand the kind of infrastructures that have been built like bridges and dams and mining tailing ponds and other things that have impacted their environment and to really try to get Canadians as a general public to think about our country not just in a terrestrial or you know air oriented way but also in terms of what it’s like underneath the water. So that was one space where we did put a bit of thought into this and continues to inform the work I'm doing collectively with my friends and colleagues.

So many things have happened in terms of changes in the chemistry of water. So acidification or pollution has had particular impacts on fish in so many different ways. I'm not trained in those ways to be able to explain them in detail. But understanding that different compounds have really direct and often devastating impacts on different systems within a fish's body, impacts on the ability of fish to reproduce. Sturgeon, Lake Sturgeon, were one of the species hit really hard and historical geographer Frank Tuff wrote about this very early in his career, looking at sort of the impacts that the fur trade and kind of commercial fishing had on sturgeon within the provinces we know called the Prairie provinces. Just the kind of pressures that they faced from a different kind of fishing.

Indigenous fisheries within that space and time, were particularly attuned to the life cycles of sturgeon. But sturgeon reached sexual maturity quite late relative to other fish and they don't reproduce as quickly as some other kinds of fish. So as soon as there was a commercial interest in them, they were very quickly depleted and it's taken a lot of work to try and bring Lake sturgeon populations back up on the prairies. And in Edmonton where I grew up, one of the things that was impacting them was that the city of Edmonton in the 1950s, for example, allowed raw sewage to be discharged right into the river. So you imagine having this incredible glacier-fed river that was winding its way down from glaciers in the Rocky Mountains through the foothills into Edmonton and then raw sewage was being put into it. And so that just literally surrounds them in our waste and effluence and our garbage. So I don't know if I'm answering your question directly, but I think that heat, chemicals, waste changes in waterways, so the building of viaducts and canals and different things that redirected their waterways. The changes in sediments, one of the big challenges in Alberta where a lot of us are working to try and understand the social and lived experiences of fish and the people that love or rely on them. We're working on bull trout, there's other Indigenous trout that are impacted by changes in Alberta and Lauren Fitch, who's a retired fish biologist who works in the province, has talked about how changes in sediment can have these massive impacts on Indigenous trout and other species because it changes how they can spawn, whether they can build their reds or other ways that they try to reproduce. And so yeah, there's just this totality to it.

And I'm forgetting her name again. So this will be another fight to bring in another thinker but there's a scholar who writes about this in the context of sort of experiences in South America and she talks about a fish-eye episteme. And in my work I talk about fishy refraction which is sort of how do fish understand those experiences between air and water and human and more than human kind of domains. And yeah, I think a lot of us are trying to get at that understanding of how do they experience these really massive changes. And going back to Dr. Little Bear's work, he talks about how fish have survived all these mass extinctions and what I find kind of the bleakest but also like it's one of the points that really spurs me to action is that they survived multiple mass extinctions on the planet. They were able to adapt and change to all of these catastrophic things that happened in the past, but they're really struggling—

many populations of fish around the globe are struggling to adapt to colonialism, white supremacy, and extractive capitalism.

Those three forces together, we can think of almost on the scale of a catastrophic, cosmological disaster like an asteroid hitting the planet.

Kamea Chayne: Hmm, wow. Yeah, I mean, as the chemistry and dynamics of water has changed, I do also wonder about how the permeable skin of fish and other underwater creatures may be reacting to those changes to like, how our skin might react with rashes to certain irritants or allergens and so forth, to kind of inform us something about our environments, but yeah, like who's going to pay for the research for us to get to know these things? Because there's probably not going to be a profitable outcome that can come about from that sort of research. So, I mean, in the scientific world, there's also disproportionately less funding going into a lot of these questions that could teach us a lot about us and our planet and how to have healthier relationships with our more- than- human- world. So there's so much more to think through on this. Here I would like to bring in your piece titled Respect for Autonomy and Sovereignty of Indigenous and Local Peoples, not arbitrary protection targets are key to protecting global biodiversity, whereas the title suggests you critiqued. Various United Nations climate and biodiversity agendas centered on hitting particular targets of conservation, like the 30 by 30 plan which seeks to protect 30% of earth's land and waters by 2030.

So what do you think is important for people to keep in mind in regards to these sorts of protection targets? Because at the surface level, they might seem like steps in the right direction. But what do dominant conservation goals focused on particular metrics and numbers miss out on? And also, how do we make sense of this paradox that there might be increasing funding going towards even Indigenous-led land protection initiatives? But at the same time, there are still disproportionately way more funding going into extractive industries that are undermining Indigenous lands and sovereignty.

Zoe Todd: Yeah, so I wrote that at the same time that the Commission on Biodiversity was meeting in unpreceded Haudenosaunee Mohawk territory in Montreal or Chiachague and It's informed by critiques coming from thinkers and activists and scholars working primarily in Africa, like Aby Sène, who's just written so many brilliant pieces about the conservation industry in her work.

It's very complicated because we're at this moment where Indigenous rights are being affirmed differently than in the past and I don't want to discount or dismiss the amount of labour that Indigenous peoples put into that work globally. At the same time, I'm really reminded of the critiques of class and capital and power that really important people like Franz Fanon kind of advanced about how power can circulate within a decolonizing space.

I think a lot about his points about the colonizer bourgeoisie and the colonized bourgeoisie…

it's hard because of the translation from French to English, but some people translate that as the settler bourgeoisie and the native but all of which is to say, he was thinking about what happens when... decolonization is undertaken, but the structures that the colonizer implemented are not themselves dismantled. And I really see that very, very deeply exemplified in so-called Canada when we're dealing with conservation issues, precisely because Canada still has not resolved the question of how it came to claim its sovereignty over Indigenous lands. And the courts are inching towards it.

There was a case last year in British Columbia where one of the judges sort of said, maybe the way Canada came to, or the Crown came to claim its sovereignty isn't quite on the up and up. I'm paraphrasing him obviously, he was using much more erudite language, but you know, there's just this like really deep tension in Canada around Indigenous sovereignty and how did Canada come to acquire all this land without recognizing Indigenous sovereignty and it still doesn't recognize Indigenous sovereignty. It still thinks of Indigenous people as the language that they borrowed from U.S. jurisprudence, as dependent, domestic dependent nations from the Marshall trilogy decisions in the 1800s. And that was their way of getting around the fact that if you recognize Indigenous peoples as sovereign peoples, then you have to recognize them as international peoples. And then if you recognize them as international peoples, then you better have treaties and things that show that actually got the land in an ethical way. It actually has been ceded and in Canada that isn't really the case. Like land was acquired through all sorts of unethical and actually internationally illegal means. And people like Joan Barker and so many other brilliant people have written about this and have really important things to say about it.

So when I applied that to the lens of looking at conservation issues in Canada, there's been a real push called Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, which on the surface are amazing. They're definitely better than past command and control approaches that different federal, provincial and territorial bodies were using. But there's a spectrum of how those are applied and they can be everywhere from. Basically just a superficial agreement between an Indigenous group and a settler body that agreed to sort of like some aspects of how land is used, all the way to fully affirming and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty. When you go through the paperwork that the federal body that oversees this concept has created, they don't use the word sovereignty. My guess is that someone in the Justice told them you can't use that word because this can be used to justify Indigenous nations getting their land back and we're not in the business of giving land back that we've stolen.

My main critique of the current sort of co-management approach is that it flies in the face of true land back.

It flies in the face of full recognition of land sovereignty. It still means that in Canada the funding flows through federal bodies that maintain illegal control over lands and resources that are not theirs to control and it flies in the face of actual legal decisions that have come through their own courts. And so in 2014 there was the Chilcotin decision that recognized that Aboriginal title is real and that the Chilcotin nation actually had title to their lands. And yet that's 2014. We see three, four years later these IPCA approaches coming out that don't center that full title recognition within them. And I think it's because people within those systems, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, were always expected to make compromises. And rather than ask for the whole piece, we say like, well if we just ask for four percent because we make up four to five percent of the population, that's probably all we’re going to get anyways. So I’m not blaming all the people that are making these negotiations, and I think a lot of communities are using them in strategic ways where an IPCA doesn't preclude making a further title claim so it's a bit more complicated than that but I think that when you look at the federal side of things that's where it starts to fall apart because people on the federal side think this is amazing and this is radical and this is as far as they need to go and it's kind of hard to point out to them like no actually this is like the beginning and the full end game for a lot of nations which they're not hiding their intention they're stating it in court cases they're stating it publicly in many different public venues.

The full goal for many Indigenous nations in Canada is to gain back for lands that were taken by the state. But to couple that to the global question, it's a little bit troubling the 30 by 30 plan which Canada has fully embraced. It's informed as many other much more brilliant people than me have pointed out, it comes from people like EO Wilson who argued for the half earth proposal which is this idea to set aside half of the earth's lands for conservation. And the problem with that is EO Wilson is a white cis-het biologist who has unilaterally decided that half of the earth needs to be set aside for conservation under his terms. And I know he's passed away and you know some people who have critiqued him were deeply attacked for doing so when he passed away, but conservation remains a very problematic basis upon which to determine environmental justice because it's based on this idea that humans uniformly destroy lands. And it doesn't uncouple the question of land protection from white supremacy, colonial capitalism, and extractive approaches.

And so Aby Sène and others working in Africa have pointed out that these targets, these 30 by 30 targets, which are informed by this kind of problematic half Earth proposal, what's happening on the ground is that they're being translated via these massive big environmental NGOs and other organizations that are made up of extractive industry proponents who are greenwashing their work through these environmental approaches and things like carbon capture and other kind of dubious capitalist conservation approaches. And on the ground, what is happening is you see the most persecuted and oppressed land protectors being displaced, lands being bought up or set up by state governments and Indigenous and local peoples being displaced from their lands in the names of meeting these 30 by 30 targets.

So while in Canada it's not quite that bad a lot of that work of meeting the 30 by 30 targets so setting aside 30 percent of lands for protection by 2030. Canada's relying almost entirely on Indigenous people to meet that target. In the global South, those targets rely pretty much exclusively on local and Indigenous peoples who are already under so many pressures and threats from different things that are going on that dispossess them already. And so its just not the answer. I've been in this sphere. I grew up around biologists. I grew up around naturalists and people who are fighting for land protections in Alberta, which is a resource extractive economy. And so, you know, I've been watching these spaces closely for most of my life. And it all sounds so good on the surface.

You have the David Suzuki Society, you have the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, all of these organizations sound so good and genuine on the surface, but at the end of the day they're not ceding control and autonomy to the people on the ground who have lived there for, in many cases, tens of thousands of years, who have the laws that govern how to live there ethically and reciprocally and effectively in ways that do not destroy those places. It's just another means through which for capital to steal more land. And so those opposing the 30 by 30 plan and the way that the Convention on Biological Diversity centered on that approach, you know, they're talking, they're calling this one of the biggest land grabs in our current era. You know, and that's pretty powerful language to use. That, you know, it sounds good because some Indigenous people have been involved, but it's still not focused on sovereignty and redress and true justice, in my opinion.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, there's definitely been a lot of incrementalist changes that are worthy of acknowledging and celebrating. And at the same time, there are limits to working within these same systems and diversifying the faces representing the system. So that bigger picture critique, of course, is always really important.

And something that has really stood out to me is the ways in which certain conceptualized metrics such as GDP for economic health, quote unquote, or carbon levels for climate change, or land area marked off as protected for wildlife conservation, these metrics often get used in ways that further the overarching trends of growing power disparity, which you just spoke to, which to me is really at the heart of a lot of these issues. So for example, there are ways to sequester carbon, that don't empower communities. There are ways to decarbonize that actually intoxicate more mining communities and indigenous territories. There are ways to conserve more land while displacing more people. There are many ways to increase GDP while worsening people's senses of security and quality of life. And I think, each of these examples are different, but part of it is that some of these metrics are over generalizations that do not show the embedded injustices within them and part of it is also just that some of these metrics represent kind of like the symptoms rather than the heart of the issues. So they can be co-opted for other purposes.

And your work speaks really eloquently to this as well. When you look at the relationship between indigenous communities who are honored for their autonomy and the health of their watersheds and fish communities, that aspect of power and local and indigenous knowledge being centered are critical to this picture. So I would just like to deepen everything we've been talking about here a little more and invite you to take these prompts forward to share anything else on your mind in regards to focusing on certain isolated or abstracted metrics in comparison to really centering the story of power relations and law and sovereignty.

Zoe Todd:

The concept of indigeneity is very fraught. It's a concept that really grows out of the encounter between the colonizer and the people that they were colonizing. And it's a category that has been used at times to include and exclude different groups of people who've been oppressed.

Explicitly, there are really important critiques of it in how the concept of indigeneity has tended on a global sort of scale to focus the Americas and Australia and the Pacific to the exclusion of indigenous peoples or local peoples or people with very specific relationships to place in Africa and in Southeast Asia and other parts of the planet. So when I use the word “Indigenous”, I'm always also thinking about the power relations inherent in how that gets described, how that category is mobilized.

But what I’ve learned in so-called Alberta and spending time with really brilliant land and water protectors in the communities that I've worked in including in Paulatuk in the Northwest Territories in Canada is that

The more control that local people have over their lands and waters and the relationships that they have with all of the beings that live in those places, the better outcomes there are for fish.

When Indigenous sovereignty in so-called Canada is centered on land, water, and aquatic species questions, fish have much better outcomes. And I know this because I spent time in Palatuk in a community that settled their land claim in the 1980s and through that process we're able to assert a very particular kind of governance structure over fish and other wildlife and in the time that their land claim has existed the community of Palatuk has gone from there being some concerns about Salvinas alpinus or Arctic char within a particular river in their in their homelands. And they've been able to completely change the outcome of the trajectory for that fish population and those fish are now in a very healthy position. The community has worked really closely with all levels of government on this but they have continuously asserted their laws and stories. The community is so powerful at conservation issues and it's because they're asserting their laws that incorporate humans and fish and water and all of the other beings that are important to their lives within that space.

But when you look at Alberta, where I'm from, you see that there's a different structure that the provincial government adheres to with respect to Indigenous peoples, and they have a very different relationship through the way their land negotiations happen. And First Nations and Metis in Alberta don't have that same level of direct control over what happens in our lands and waters. And so when we look at what happened to bull trout, which are actually related to our char, they're a salvo lineis confluentus, so they're within the same genus as Arctic char, but in Alberta bull trout are now listed as a threatened species under the Species at Risk Act and are in a precipitous decline and any effort that Indigenous peoples make to continue to protect them and other at-risk species in the province are stymied by the fact that the province sees itself as having complete control, which it was granted by the federal government in 1930 under the Natural Resource Transfer Act. The legal structure that's in place impacts what happens to fish.

My life goal is to get our governments to understand that Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures are completely linked.

It has been a lot of work that's shown that indigenous managed lands increase vertebrate biodiversity. There's a paper that came out in, I think it's 2018, that looked at this question and came to that in about 2018 that looked at this question and came to that conclusion (Schuster et al.) came to that conclusion that Indigenous managed lands were as effective or in some cases even more effective than the national park system. It's not enough to partner a federal or provincial body with Indigenous peoples. We have to be able to move beyond that to understand that the laws, science, philosophy and relationships and all of those pieces together in gender are better for fish. If you have known fish for 12,000 years I feel like you're going to have better outcomes and how you govern fish than a group of people who showed up 150 years ago and were like, wow there's so much fish here we should fish it out, you know? It's really hard to get that message through.

A lot of the discourse has focused, unfortunately, on picking apart what's different between Indigenous science and knowledge and Western science. That's almost a distraction.

I was thinking about Toni Morrison's point about racism as a distraction the other day. And I wanted to make that point to my students. They get us debating, what are the differences between Indigenous knowledge and Western science so that we aren't talking about, actually, what's similar enough. What are the legal and governance questions that actually would help us get to these questions.

The question of knowledge is always wrapped up in power, and we know this from Foucault and all sorts of people who've thought about that. I started my undergrad in 2001, and we're still asking some of the same questions about traditional ecological knowledge and Western science that we were asking when I started. And those questions themselves were still coming from the 1970s. It feels like every few years scientists are like, oh we've discovered traditional ecological knowledge and it's like, no we've been we've been down this road. The question is how are you behaving as a person with a set of relations and responsibilities in a particular place and I even take that to heart as a Red River Métis person living in Coast Salish territories today. Just you know me being Indigenous is not enough you know for me to be able to answer searching and urgent and important questions these places the way I know my homelands.

But I can humble myself to listen and try and enact good relations within the governance structures that the nations here operate within. And that's actually pretty easy work because their laws are very clear. Respect fish, respect water, be a good relation. And I don't mean that in a way that flattens their laws. Western settler sort of systems make it sound like it's really hard to not destroy the planet. And it's actually very easy to not destroy the planet. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to get out of my work is that if we can come to kind of a space of real care and attunement for people and place, all over the planet, and like a curiosity about what people's stories are and like how those stories inform how people govern one another, those are sort of the questions that I'm really interested in.

Science and indigenous knowledge: of course they have differences, but what are those questions that bring us together? Like we all wanna survive, we all wanna live well. Fish are tasty, so we wanna be able to continue eating them in a respectful way, but we don't wanna fish them out to the point that they disappear off the planet. Those are the kinds of things that I try to bring into my courses, because I want us to move beyond some of the binaries or dichotomies that the Western Academy has set up for us to keep us in an endless loop of trying to defend ourselves as Indigenous people in ways that don't actually ever get us to the point of asserting our sovereignty in the ways that we need to.

Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. There's so much in this response that you just shared. I'll have to sit with everything you offered here and just thank you so much for all of this.

We are nearing the end of our time, but I know that art has been a really central part of your work, so I definitely wanted to weave that in here. Can you share more about how your relationship to art has evolved from you initially feeling discouraged by the field to engaging it now as a core part of your work on fish philosophy? And briefly, as well, I guess, what comparisons have you drawn between the art world and the scientific research world?

Zoe Todd: Yeah, so my dad's an artist and he upgraded his high school when I was a little girl and he went to university when I was very little. So I got to go with him to the University of Alberta to the Fine Arts building as a very small child and got immersed in the world of fine art. And he had all of these amazing Indigenous classmates so that he was in a cohort of really brilliant Indigenous artists, which was really cool. And this is in the 1980s.

So I was always around art and artists, but I didn't always feel that was a space for me, because I wasn't just sort of innately talented in the way that a lot of folks are. I did go to a fine arts high school, but again, there were just so many much more talented people than me and I didn't feel like that it really was a space for me. So I had a lot of doubt around that. But it continued to be something I was really passionate about and I continued to kind of find ways to bring art into my stuff, my work and life unofficially.

But it was really at the end of my PhD when I was looking for ways to sort of illustrate the amazing stories and knowledge that elders had shared with me in my PhD and I really wanted to sort of honor the beauty of the stories that they had shared with me and also honor some of the fish that we had caught during my PhD. So I incorporated some drawings of an Arctic char, a white fish, and a lake trout in my doctoral thesis and when I shared them with folks both within the community but also like my supervisors everyone was like you drew these like these are beautiful or these are great! And I realized that art was a really powerful way to bridge a lot of different contexts and so then I began just drawing all kinds of fish and I had on back when Twitter was really thriving, I for a while had like a fish Friday series where I would just draw different and post it and people were so enthusiastic that I actually kind of got over any kind of doubt I had that I could do this and it has kind of just continued from there and now is a very central part of my work because in Alberta we're working on a project—-the shorthand we have for it is restoring bull trout—-and art is a really big part of how we're communicating the stories that people from different parts of Alberta have shared with us about their knowledge.

I also just find it quite joyful and it has expanded for me in lots of different ways.

Art, now, for me goes hand in hand with science and philosophy and governance questions, because it enables me to play, it enables me to think with fish in a hopefully non-intrusive way.

If I had continued in biology, I would probably have done a lot of fish dissections and very invasive things with fish that are expected of a scientist. The field. But this allows me to study sort of their anatomy and the way they move in a very different way just through play with lines and layering of different things either digitally or physically. Like I use a lot of watercolors now.

And shout out to Beam Paints from Manitoulin Island. They're one of the exclusive, the only kind of paint that I use because they also have deeply ethical Anong Beam, who's the person who founded that company. Her parents were artists as well. And anyway, she's created this company that's very founded in Anishinaabeg laws and protocols. And so using her paints to paint fish for me is a joyful experience because I also know that the materials I'm using have come from a really ethical sort of context.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, that's so lovely. I actually use beam paints too, so I feel more connected to you in this conversation. Yeah, they're awesome. Definitely recommend fellow artists, check them out. And as we come to a close for our main conversation, I just want to hold space for you to share anything else on your mind that you feel called to share and your cause to action or deeper inquiry for our listeners.

Zoe Todd: I think we're living through really hard times and a lot of our ancestors lived through hard times as well. And at times it can feel isolating, but I think that their stories course through us and that I think in a lot of cases for quite a few of us, they're with us. And so I think what I've learned through this work with fish and working with Amer and working with all of the people who have taught me, Wayne and Annie Millie Thrasher who were mentors that taught me in Palatuk and the many, many different people who've taught me over the years. I think that something that's very clear is we're not alone. We do have each other. We are at a very point in the existence of this planet as humans, but also

I really do believe we have the capacity to come together and re-imagine in more expansive and uplifting ways. For whatever reason, I think the fish are part of that.

I think that they have a lot to teach us, as Dr. Little Bear points out, their scientific formula. They've figured out how to adapt to some very, very significant world-ending changes in their time on the planet. And I guess we just have to try and be fearless. But in a way that is very aware of how interconnected we are.

// musical intermission //

Kamea Chayne: What's been one of your most, what's been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

Zoe Todd: I'm currently reading Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. It just it resonates so much with indigenous, like sort of broad indigenous perspectives across lots of different societies that I've had the opportunity to spend time with or learn from. So yeah, I'm very grateful for their work and I hope that folks continue to pay attention to it and think with it through lots of other approaches so that it's held in that kind of accountable space across paradigms.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Zoe Todd: Oh, ego death. I've just been trying to embrace the ego death and know that I'm just one among many. Yeah.

Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Zoe Todd: Well, my family. I am really grateful I'm home now after a long time away and I'm super grateful for my family.

Kamea Chayne: I'm glad you get to be home. Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but to learn more and stay updated on Zoe's work, you can head to fishphilosophy.org. And Zoe, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been an honor to have you here. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Zoe Todd: Be fearless.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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