Staying Down: Comportment and the Ecological Field

Abstract

This article underscores sites of Black and Indigenous ecological failure to draw attention to the limits of figuring ideal subjects on the “ecological field” as stewards of, laborers on, and ultimately masters of, the earth. I consider depictions of errant ecological comportment to render other kinds of orientations—boredom, distraction, orgasmic submission, grief—plausible and necessary for developing and honing an ecological ethic. What is often rendered implausible or undesirable might also contain the potential to stave off the impulse to reproduce humanisms that require mastery over the earth. To better pursue failure or an inability to achieve appropriate attunement with the ecological, I focus on a Black fat femme falling from a tree and an Anishinaabeg youth lying on the ground and looking up at a tree. These errant bodies function as sites of friction that trouble old and new materialisms that continue to shape ecological thought and subjectivity.

1. Introduction

My own experience here is one of long shards of time. Because I cannot kill it, I traverse my boredom. The road keeps extending. I park the car and walk for miles.

I begin to think of boredom as a glacier, a cactus flower that blossoms from your mind, inside of which you can look at the world, a lighthouse, a vantage point, a zone of safety (p. 25).

My boredom feels like an aesthetic challenge (p. 108).

Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis: An Essay: (Sloan 2021)

In the woods, in a box of books, I found Borealis. My ex used to (and perhaps still does) receive a shipment of “books of the month” from the local independent bookstore. Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s book was among them. The editors of Coffee House Press’s spatial species series invited Sabatini Sloan to follow the prompt offered by Georges Perec, who attempted to capture the unnoticed, ordinary, and unspectacular activity at Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris in the mid-1970s. Perec’s (2010) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris became Sabatini Sloan’s prod for her trip to Homer, Alaska. Accustomed to being the lone Black person on the landscape and in social spaces, Sabatini Sloan contended with both terror and boredom in a land of glaciers and sublime beauty.

I instantly appreciated Sabatini Sloane’s meditation on boredom and her refusal to push it aside. Sabatini Sloan in Homer, Alaska, reminded me of the errant comportments of my Monacan colleague who does not like to camp like her relatives do, my Black–Saginaw Chippewa colleague who would not sit and eat his lunch on a blanket on the grass in the park, and even the strange or perhaps frightening magpie-like birds who fight in parking lots over the flesh remaining on a discarded fried chicken wing. They are all figures who are just a little off on the ecological field. Native folks, Black–Native folks, Black folks, and birds—even scavengers—are supposed to act a certain way in the realm marked off as the ecological.

In Borealis, Sabatini Sloane intermittently attempts to discipline her boredom into an appreciation for the ice-white and sometimes-unsettling landscape but, ultimately, she fails to attune herself to the glacial ecology of Homer. Coming just shy of alignment with the environment, like Sabatini Sloane, enables an interrogation of some of the demands and disciplinary constraints asserted by certain genres of writing and academic fields like environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and feminist new materialisms. Concomitant with the ecological (re)turn across fields in the humanities and social sciences, writers and scholars began to hone modes of attention and privilege certain forms of embodiment and orientations toward “nature.” Additionally, disciplinary formations normalized preferred cognitive orientations to the ecological, like curiosity, openness, wonder, and porousness. These specific modes of attention evidence a certain kind of fitness, able-bodiedness, settler status, and whiteness (which seeks to absorb Indigeneity). . Authorial subjects, or subjects who can know non-human environs, are marked by affective and cognitive orientations that index mastery in the ecological field.

For the purposes of this article, I refer to the “ecological field” as the discursive terrain that attempts to describe and represent the dense and entangled realm that comprises what is commonly understood as the environment/nature, ecology, and the various life forms that co-exist there.1 More importantly, the “ecological field” is a space of productive power and a regime of representation that has the potential to surface some forms of life and make others recede into its background or disappear altogether. Wilderness, the shore, the clearing, the frontier, the desert, the reserve, and the plantation (particularly the pastoral) all function as regimes of representation or ecological “fields.” Ecological fields have their own norms, codes, orders, and ideal forms of embodiment and orientations.

Of particular interest in this essay is naming and challenging the forms of ecological uprightness that produce subjects and make them legible across the fields of environmental humanities, ecocriticism, feminist new materialisms, post humanisms, and some tendencies within academic iterations of Black studies and Indigenous studies. Black and Indigenous studies also produce their own “ecological fields” that valorize certain kinds of beings, lifeforms, spaces, activities, scholarly preoccupation, and politics. Often, the appropriate, responsible, and reflexive orientation toward “the ecological” or “the environment” across fields of study during the epoch currently known as the Anthropocene is one of ecological stewardship or care. Rightly so, a primary concern and preoccupation with the devastation that Homo Sapiens have wrought has directed attention to how humanity might slow or reverse the climate crisis. An almost unified liberal–progressive response, across fields including Black and Indigenous studies, has been to comport oneself as a steward, caretaker, and often unwittingly (or deliberately), a master of the earth.

Many Black and Indigenous scholars (see Karera 2019; Ramírez-D’Oleo 2023; Todd 2016; Watts 2020) have problematized the universalizing gesture performed in invoking and proclaiming a “we” that is equally culpable of the human’s ecocidal sins. Black diasporan scholars Karera (2019) and Ramírez-D’Oleo (2023) have drawn attention to a “hyper-ethics” of “relationality” that, left unchecked, reproduces various forms of ecological and anti-Black violence.2 Further, a certain kind of descent into a hallow respectability and overexuberance about “relationality” that seeks a frictionless and easy slippage into “oneness” with nature elides Indigenous conceptions and practices of relationality and debases (or turns Blackness to compost in Ramirez’s and Cooper’s accounts) Blackness (Ramírez-D’Oleo 2023; Cooper 2022). More importantly, uncritical moves to be in relation often paper over real constraints and material limits that shed light on where humans and the earth do not and perhaps cannot align. This reflexive move toward relation can reproduce the violence of “the pastoral” that renders relationships organized by violence as organic and natural. Ramírez-D’Oleo annunciates this point in her investigation of how various forms ecocriticism, new materialisms, and post humanisms often impose a “forced or coerced relationality” that disavows friction, impasse, and colonial violence (Ramírez-D’Oleo 2023, p. 8). Reflexively reaching for harmony, oneness, and integrity often elides what cannot be reconciled, healed, mitigated, or avoided any longer. Attending to where we are not aligned, are not in sync, are not organically merged with the earth, and what we cannot fix also tells us what we must live and or perhaps die with and must develop some ethics for enduring.

From here on, I pursue sites of Black and Indigenous ecological failure or ecological alignment to contour the limits/edges of the figurations of ideal subjects on the ecological field as contenders with, stewards of, laborers on, and ultimately masters of the earth. I consider depictions of errant ecological comportment to render other kinds of orientations—boredom, distraction, orgasmic submission—plausible and necessary on the ecological field. What is often rendered implausible might also contain the potential to stave off the impulse to reproduce a humanism that requires mastery over the earth. To better pursue failure or an inability to achieve appropriate attunement with the ecological, I focus on a Black fat femme falling from a tree and an Anishinaabeg youth laying on the ground and looking up at a tree. These downed bodies function as sites of friction that trouble old and new materialisms that continue to shape ecological thought and subjectivity.

Theoretically, I move with the friction that three errant bodies create for Deleuzo–Guattarian posthumanism, new materialism, and Marx’s radical humanism and materialism. The friction that I attend to and hone as a reading practice at times moves along the register of the erotic, specifically the orgasmic. The friction in this article animates and mobilizes a Lordean erotic that functions as a resource and produces its own materialist analysis from suspect embodiment. A Black feminist ecological and erotic sensorium wrought by friction has the capacity to register failure, difference in relation, peculiar human and non-human appetites, uncertainty, and makes room for the “unfit.”

My Black feminist inquiries into the erotic and ecological are animated by a friction that emerges from a particular methodological location. As a scholar of Black and Indigenous life on Turtle Island (North America), and now a co-director of the Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute, I have grown into a Black feminist praxis that remains open to, in conversation with, sometimes in agreement with, sometimes at an impasse with, but ultimately shaped by the ways that Native and Indigenous feminisms rub up against Black feminist concerns. Thinking from within this generative Black and Indigenous feminist space of friction encourages my ecological and erotic inquires to remain supple, shifting, and suspicious of easy and smooth resolutions. My reading practice attends to the chafing produced by a Black and Indigenous feminist materialism that troubles what critical Black studies scholar Axelle Karera identifies as a “hyper ethics of relationality” in Anthropocene thinking, apocalyptic imaginaries, the posthumanist turn, and even an aestheticized version of Black and Indigenous land stewardship.3 Black and Indigenous erotics that are animated or turned on by this chafing can challenge notions of relationality, or an aspiration to oneness, that absorb and disappear Indigenous people and epistemologies while rendering Blackness a site of failed ecological subjectivity.

2. Just Shy of the Summit

What do we do with the body that fails to reach the top of the mountain? Only years after my first climb up Stone Mountain, outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and many climbs later, did I consider how my own desire for the summit might have failed me. To be honest, on the days that I trekked to and up the infamous mountain, I often only felt relief that I had made it to the top. And through my fatigue, I could only barely muster the awe that I was told the mountaintop sublime should inspire. In this section, I displace the human body at the apex of the ecological field—the summit—with bodies that cannot finish the climb or fall from treetops and remain on the ground. I begin with thwarted attempts to reach the promised transcendence—oneness with grace—offered by the mountain top.

In 2021, most of the days that I headed to Stone Mountain, I was there practicing a form of attunement in hopes of doing some writing that would develop into a land-based pedagogy. I had accepted the prevailing wisdom that climbing a mountain, or immersing the body in nature, was a necessary methodology that ecofeminists and ecological writers needed to hone. In “Bodies of Nature”, Alison Kafer critiques ecofeminist epistemologies that axiomatically link activities like “hiking” and “walking” to an ability to know or understand nature. Feminist ecocritics like Linda Vance had embraced, uncritically, the able-bodied notion that walking or hiking allows the able body of the hiker to bridge or “transcend the essential separation between humans and nature” (Kafer and Terry 2017, p. 211).

While my hikes up Stone Mountain taught me quite a bit, it was my aging body that let me know hiking’s limits and led me to a more deliberate engagement with embodied methods that emerge from disability studies. My body and its resistance—measured by the cajoling and encouragement it needs for each encounter with the mountain—made me lean into an ambivalence embedded in queer and crip ecologies (Kafer and Terry 2017, p. 223). My more recent engagement with queer, trans, and crip ecologies, and the performance methodologies of writers and thinkers like Alison Kafer (settler), Syrus Ware (Black diasporan), Eli Clare (settler), and Hershini Young (Black diasporan), who have written about their and others’ encounters with mountains, challenged me to reconsider ecological desire and the successful embodied performances of normative ecological subjectivity.4 Kafer argues that “what is needed in ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and environmentalism, in general are the narratives of people whose bodies and minds cause them to interact with nature in nonnormative ways” (Kafer and Terry 2017, p. 212). Crip ecologies include disabled narratives to disrupt the assumed performance of supreme ecological achievement, staged at top of the mountain, and its allegory of transcendence and supercripdom. At the end of the section, I argue that Black and Indigenous feminist disability studies deepen critiques of normative embodiment as well as liberal and disability justice’s notions of access. A Black femme’s fall from a tree serves as a counterpoint to Eli Clare’s quest to climb mountains by interrogating crip ecological desire and, more importantly, short-circuiting the very desire to summit.

Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (2015) is often cited as a text that challenges the performance and desire for ecological fitness. In the book, Clare tells us of their love of climbing mountains and this desire’s relationship to the internalization of disability oppression that makes some disabled people prone to performing aspects of supercripdom. Talking about their attempt to summit Mount Adams, they recount the following: “I climbed Mount Adams for an hour and a half scared, not sure I would ever be able to climb down, knowing that on the next rock my balance could give out, and yet I climbed. Climbed surely because I wanted the summit, because of the love rumbling in my bones. But climbed also because I wanted to say, “Yes, I have CP but see. See, watch me. I can climb mountains too. I wanted to prove myself once again. I wanted to overcome my CP” (Clare 2015, p. 9).

Clare explains why “Overcoming has [such] a powerful grip” (Clare 2015, p. 9) and is so fraught and complex. Clare writes, “And here supercrip turns complicated. On the other side of supercripdom lies pity, tragedy, and the nursing home. Disabled people know this, and in our process of knowing, some of us internalize the crap. We make supercrip our own, particularly the type that pushes into the extraordinary, cracks into our physical limitations. We use supercripdom as a shield, a protection, as if this individual internalization could defend us against disability oppression” (ibid., p. 9). While it is clear what kind of violence motivates the performance of supercripdom, I pick up on a surplus of desire at play.

Even with a knowledge of the inability to access certain summits or eradicate disability oppression from the performance of supercripdom, the desire to summit remains. Clare is resigned and writes that “The mountain will never be home, and still, I have to remember it grips me” (ibid., p. 13). In the following passages, Clare imagines a post-revolutionary future where the metaphoric mountain disappears. “I hang onto a vision. Someday after the revolution, disabled people will live ordinary lives, neither heroic nor tragic. Crip, queer, freak, redneck will be mere words describing human difference. Supercrip will be dead; the nursing home, burnt down; the metaphoric mountain, collapsed in a volcanic splendor. Post revolution I expect there will still be literal mountains I want to climb and can’t, but I’ll be able to say without doubt, without hesitation, “Let’s turn around here. This one is too steep, too slippery for my feet.” (Ibid).

While Clare might decide to turn around, the desire to climb the mountain remains. Another trail or summit might be conquered in the future if it suits Clare’s bodily difference (not too steep). While a deferral of a desire is discernable, I want to note here that nothing replaces the desire to climb. A desire to summit still shapes and molds Clare’s queer, disabled, working class, and exiled life. I turn to another scene of a desire to reach a summit, the top of a tree, that remained unrealized. However, the unrealized desire was redirected and transformed into a different kind of desire.

3. Falling for and from the Tree

On 22 June 2022, “Snowflake Mountain” aired on the streaming platform Netflix.5 Jo Harcourt-Smith and Cal Turner are the executive producers who orchestrated the hoax that led thirteen spoiled “snowflakes” in their twenties to the mountains in the Lake District National Park located in Northwest England. Over the course of the series, the hosts Joel Graves and Matt Tate, who are US veterans and survivalists, test and occasionally berate the survival skills (and lack thereof) of contestants. Fifty-thousand dollars is on the line during the experiment-cum-competition that declares a winner at the finale. While the challenges that test the competitor’s endurance, strength, temperament, and campsite etiquette, and the conventional plot twist of crowning the underdog are quite predictable, the winner is almost too unruly for the wilderness competition’s frame.

The Haitian American New Yorker Deandra, who is cast as the least likely to succeed, secures the crown and wins the fifty-thousand-dollar prize due to her dramatic transformation. What is more interesting to me than her crowning is the way that she fails at ecological fitness in episode five. During the fifth episode, the cohort of snowflakes are tasked with climbing a tree on this day of challenges, adventures, and mishaps. Expectations are low for the whole lot of urbane, spoiled, and lazy rich snowflakes. But expectations are particularly low for Deandra, who is hilarious, femme, fat, medium brown skinned, impeccably beat, and embodies many beautiful looks and personas.6 People do not expect her to be able to scale the tree. In fact, the producers and editors, for dramatic, anti-fat, misogynoir effect for the viewers, make her the final challenger to attempt climbing the tree. While she makes it most of the way up the tree, she fails to make it to the height where the bell is placed around its trunk. Scalers must reach the bell and ring it to complete the wilderness adventure task.

On the way up the tree, Deandra is distracted and rendered unable to climb. Mid climb, she is overcome by a sensation. She is stunned, confused, and finds herself aroused. She stops her upward movement on the tree and announces to everyone below:

“This is actually like playing with my clit.”

“It felt nice. it did. I did not want to give up.”

“It’s fucking with my head.”

“I don’t know how to feel.”

“I got a nice vibration on my vagina, so that motivated me slightly.”7

Her cohort below is roaring with laughter as she pats her face with a beauty blender while still harnessed and hanging in the air.

Deandra’s rerouted desire is what I find most interesting. The who or what that is playing with her clitoris is unclear. The camera’s shots and the editing do not make it apparent whether it is one of the straps of the harness that holds her suspended in air or the tree itself that plays with her clitoris. Within the frame available, the tree, the strap, or both could be playing with and rubbing her clitoris. The feeling, the pleasure, “fucked with” her head. Normative cognition and sensation were interrupted. She did not know how to feel. She had to reorient herself to the tree and task of climbing. She could not continue with her challenge to scale the tree.8 How can unexpected pleasure, and perhaps an orgasm, at an inopportune time reorient an understanding of respectable or appropriate embodiment and comportment on the ecological field? Deandra’s difference from the tree produced a sensual space of Black pleasure that upended a normative arc that typically bends toward a story of Black fitness, achievement, and an orientation toward patriarchal ecological stewardship.

An important place to pause is with the friction, pleasure, and heightened awareness of difference from the tree that the scene brought to the fore. I want to note that Deandra’s embodied and material experience with the tree is not a “becoming-tree” scenario. Deandra does not reproduce a Deleuzian “molecular becoming” or a total immersion scenario that aligns with “deep ecology’s” eco-philosophical maneuver to posit the ecological self as merged with nature.9 A different ecological encounter is in play, that refuses mastery while not positing oneness as self-evident, natural, or the ideal destination.

I note this difference for several reasons. An important reason to mark this divergence is because it announces the conceptual, theoretical, and ontological nuances and tensions that exist between fields like feminist new materialisms and the critical itineraries of Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous science studies, Black feminist ecologies, and critical Black studies. Metis feminist science studies scholar, Zoe Todd, argues that there is often an appropriation of and then misreading of Indigenous epistemologies and notions of “relations” that transforms them into a Western conception of relatedness by virtue of bestowing all matter with animacy or life (Todd 2016). Western notions of relationality often displace concepts of Indigenous kinship and the specific epistemologies, political concerns, and responsibilities that are distinct to Indigenous practices of kinship. Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts elaborates upon the stakes of the distinction between Indigenous epistemologies and post-humanist, new materialist turns in her article “Growling Ontologies.” Watts describes how the specific kinship relations of her Bear clan to actual bears exposes the failure of Deuleuze’s and Guattari’s theorization of molecular becoming to explain the particularity of Anishinaabeg bear relationalities.

Watts writes that, “While the common adage of many Indigenous people, “all my relations, would extend to all beings, I argue that one’s clan is something more intimate that extends beyond an acknowledgement to “all relations.” That is, while humans are not separated from nature, the relationship to one’s clan is of specificity in terms of responsibility, accountability, and characteristics, as well as gifts” (Watts 2020, p. 117). Further, Watts argues that the Deuleuzian concept of desire and access sidesteps issues of responsibility, permission, and consent, particularly in its configuration of becoming. Watts continues, “The universal form of access of Deleuze’s meta desire cannot account for how permission is granted with respect to becoming. Rather, “becoming-animal” translates to me as becoming anything if I am committed enough, even just for a moment. A uni-accessibility is then only limited by the being’s ability to become in a particular event” (Watts 2020, p. 118). Watts emphasizes the point that Deleuze’s “poststructuralist view of the individual subject desiring to transform (transcend the human-nature divide) by becoming animal makes the animal a “body of accessibility without permission”” (ibid., p. 119).

Deandra’s erotic scene of Black femme failure allows me to linger on the ways that she falls short of achieving the “uni-accessibility” that would allow her to summit, transcend her human limitations, and meet (or merge with) the tree as master. Further, Deandra is overcome by the erotic friction of difference and the pleasure that it produces. Deandra’s experience with the tree is mediated by her limitations, what the tree will permit, and her own ecstasy. Scholar Sarah Jaquette Ray draws attention to how certain canonical texts like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness and Paul Adams’s book chapter, “Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place”, argue for an unmediated and sensual experience with the wilderness (Abbey 1968; Adams 2001). Jaquette Ray picks up on the erotic undertones of Paul Adam’s pursuit of a sensual experience with nature in Adams’s assertion that a harmony and “heightened sensitivity to the earth” can be achieved by the human being through what Edward Abbey insists must be an “upright” and “fully erect” position of walking.10 This masculinist and ableist aspiration for a fully erect perpendicular or right angle to the earth produces a sexually charged experience of knowing the earth and becoming a proper ecological subject or ecological-Man (Adams 2001, p. 51). For Adams, a direct “imprinting of place on self” as a merging with the earth is needed to reach the apex and therefore climax that consummates human–nature reconnection.

While Deandra also has an erotic experience, she fails to achieve total immersion through a masculinist scaling of the tree. In fact, she stops attempting to scale the tree and submits to the tree’s capacity to produce pleasure through the friction of their difference. Clitoral sensation supersedes the desires for and sensations of upright, erect, penetrative “imprinting” that leads to a dissolution of self that generally accompanies heteronormative erotics and their deep ecological drive toward total immersion. Deandra’s inability to scale the tree and the rerouting of her desire also raise questions about access. Unlike Clare’s persistent desire for the mountain top, Deandra’s desire to scale was supplanted by pleasure and surrender to a fall. While Clare’s Exile and Pride makes crip interventions into ecocriticism and argues for making nature accessible to disabled people, Clare’s crip eco-politics do not undo the Lockean terms of access and it is “founding epistemologies” (Meissner and Reynolds 2024).

In Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner’s and Joel Michael Reynolds’ 2024 article “Roots of Access: Un-Lock(e)ing Coalitions for Indigenous Futures and Disability Justice”, the authors draw attention to the limits of disability studies and even disability justice frameworks that do not contend with settler-colonialism, decolonization, and Indigenous sovereignty. Meissner and Reynolds cite the work of Jaffee and John who bluntly state, “Put simply, ‘disability justice’ requires that settlers not be included in all spaces, which runs counter to mainstream disability advocacy (Jaffee and John 2018, p. 1418).11 Indigenous struggles for national sovereignty challenge the uncritically assumed desirability of access/inclusion and suggest that decolonial disability justice necessitates that Indigenous peoples’ land ought to be inaccessible to or non-inclusive of (disabled and non-disabled) settlers” (Meissner and Reynolds 2024, p. 16). Further, disability studies and disability justice uninformed by decolonization does not contend with the way that accessibility emerges from “Lockean understandings of property relations” that remain “baked even into discourses and movements that take themselves to be radical” (Meissner and Reynolds 2024, p. 16). Meissner’s and Reynolds’s critiques of Lockean notions of property relations and humanist-settler conceptions of labor and the creation of value also challenge normative comportments to the earth. Critiques of property and the attendant exclusionary notions of who can and does labor potentially opens paths to post-work and anti-mastery orientations to bodies and land.

Deandra’s pleasure and erotic distraction become even more meaningful in carving out a space for non-climbing, non-laboring, non-summiting bodies. Deandra’s fall creates the possibility for a different kind of yearning and appetite. Deandra’s quest is derailed by the tree’s desires and prowess. From the grounded, laughing, folded bodies at the base of trees, it might be possible to rethink materialisms that privilege the onto-epistemologies of Lockean and Marxian humanist configurations of labor and human uprightness for understanding body–land relations. Further, Black and Indigenous failed and or erotic relations to trees, land, and dirt might provide alternative feminist materialisms that figure bodies and orientations to land outside of mastery.

4. Looking up as I “Nibble and Suck”

In the book As We Have Always Done (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson retells a Nishnaabeg story. Simpson retells the story of Binoojinh, making a discovery which she has told many times, and almost each time that she retells it, it changes. The changing nature of it reflects the dynamic aesthetic capacity of Nishnaabeg story-telling, as well as the ethics of making room for transformation as a story is retold. Simpson talks about the function of repetition as an element of the aesthetic and world-making practices of Nishnaabeg and many Indigenous nations. Repetition makes a story flexible, revisable, and more open to including marginalized voices over time. In the 2017 retelling, in As We Have Always Done, Binoojinh has shifted from he, to she, to they. Simpson explains this as the queer (and trans) indigenous potential of Nishnaabeg story-telling. Simpson acknowledges that this story travels (settler-capitalists have retold it to commodify maple syrup), but what is crucial is the reason and mode of retelling. I asked Simpson for permission to retell this story in 2021. I have desired to think about it and retell it in conversation with queer, trans, and Indigenous and Black feminist fleshy materialisms.

While our purposes differ somewhat, what remains constant, however, in Simpson’s and my own retellings is that Binoojinh is out collecting firewood on this particularly lovely day. Nowhere in the story is this activity, or this doing, described as work or labor. While I am not arguing, nor is Simpson, that Nishnaabeg people do not labor, for they are certainly exploited laborers under settler-colonial capitalism, there is no assignation of labor as an activity that is uniquely human or species-producing in the story. In 2020, during her Kreisel Lecture, Simpson referred to the Nishnaabeg as “makers”.12 I want to attend to this distinction over time because I think that it is critical to the ways that we adapt older materialisms. The Anishinaabeg story “Binoojinh Makes a Lovely Discovery” illustrates a difference between collaborative and relational creativity with the earth and Marxian labor (even in its ideal register) as a process that consolidates/sediments the laboring human as a distinct being who orders nature and the world (animal, stones).

In 1844, Marx tells a story of laboring man in his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscript.” In the story, laboring man in the ideal sense is engaged in conscious, active, voluntary, and productive activity which designates him as a species-being.13

In this particular origin story of man, labor in its most ideal form re-instantiates humanist and ontological hierarchies. My assertion is not a provocative statement as Erich Fromm, John Bellamy Foster, Judith Grant, Michael Ekers, and Alex Loftus have all previously argued that Marx is in his most humanist mode in the Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844 (Fromm 2013; Foster 2000; Grant 2005; Ekers and Loftus 2020). In Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), Foster methodically traces the materialist genealogy from which Marx’s radical materialism emerges. Foster carefully contours Marx’s influences, motivations, and the conditions of possibility for his writing the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscript. Foster argues that, by the time Marx was writing the 1844 manuscript, that Marx “was trying to lay out a consistent naturalism, humanism, and materialism.”14 In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx articulates an appreciation of the fact that “man is a part of nature” (Marx 1844, p. 32). For Marx, this was a commonsense acknowledgement that man needed nature to survive. Marx articulated his understanding of the interconnectedness of man and nature as such: “Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (Marx 1844, p. 32). Critical Marxists, eco-socialists, and feminist new materialists have paid close attention to and even praised Marx for this understanding of man’s interdependency with nature in the 1844 manuscript. I too think it is important to attend to Marx’s regard for nature and his view that man should not be separated from it.

However, I pay attention to Marx’s regard for and regard of nature in the last section of the first manuscript, entitled “estranged labor”, to draw out some of its ontological underpinnings. In the last paragraphs, Marx hedges on some of his own understandings of man as a part of nature. Marx makes statements about work as spontaneous, productive, and conscious activity that satisfies needs. In this section of the manuscript, Marx also enchants man with the capacity to create the world. This same world-making capacity is not granted to animals, for it is the sole and unique capacity of man. According to Marx, man makes the world and his reality through his “work on” inorganic nature (plants, animals, stones, air, light) (Marx 1844, p. 32). As a conscious species-being, man produces freely and “universally” (ibid.). Man is creative and productive in a way that has world-making capacity (aesthetic, productive, etc.). Man has the capacity to order time, space, and what is sensible and beautiful.

Passages from the last paragraphs of Marx’s section on estranged labor read almost like an origin story for Laboring Man. In the passage below, we observe Marx telling a story about man self-actualizing through his creative work. During this process of self-actualization, man re-establishes himself as the creator (and possessor) of nature and thus the world and reality. Marx proclaims the following through this story:

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”

(ibid.)

One can read Marx’s need to create a distinction or an advantage over animals in a few ways. Marx inherited humanist materialist traditions and their boundary-producing projects from Darwin, Locke, and Feuerbach (Foster 2000). Marx’s revolutionary theory and tradition reproduce a human centered ontological grid that ranks humans and animals. The Afro–Brazilian feminist scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva might name this architecture and its scaffolding as form of “separability.” For Ferreira da Silva, “separability” as well as “determinacy” and “sequentially” are pillars and organizing principals of Western reason and its violence, specifically racial violence (Ferreira da Silva 2020). Further, Caribbean studies scholar Shona Jackson, who critiques the onto-epistemology of labor in her book Creole Indigeneity, argues that Marxist discourses of labor only offer affirmation of certain subjects (Jackson 2012).

I am not engaging in a criticism of Marx to undermine his essential work for our contemporary times. Without question, Marx’s body of work is an example of the kind of liberatory European continental thought that has inspired revolutionary movements across the globe. However, I call attention to the production of an ontological grid in Marx’s early work to disrupt a contemporary pattern. It is in these brief statements where Marx acknowledges an “interchange with” and a “link” to nature that Marxists and eco-socialists find their alibi to turn to Marx time and time again and ignore Indigenous and Black anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ecological thinking and knowledge production. This chauvinism, specifically anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, in North American settler-colonial contexts is particularly rampant. Settler socialists and settler communists have used Marx’s “ecological thinking” to bypass Indigenous and Black ecological and anti-colonial struggles and intellectual production in the settler-imperial core. To endlessly and uncritically return to Marx to make him an (or the) ecological thinker is to endlessly return to a form of humanist materialisms that reproduces Lockean hierarchies; that degrade non-human animals as well as Black and Indigenous people who are not ideal representatives of laboring man.

I argue that Marx’s acknowledgement of man’s “interchange” with and “link” to nature is invested primarily in man’s survival. Man, or the human, is the center of the universe who must tread lightly and in balance with the nature that he, to quote Marx, “lives on” (Marx 1844, p. 32), i.e., on top of. Marx’s configuration of man’s relationship to nature in his articulations of ideal labor reproduce an ontology of a settler subject. Man is a steward of the land who needs the land as a substratum/substrate or “resource”, in Max Liboiron’s terms, primarily for his own survival and harmonious, unalienated dominion over the land. Dixa Ramirez’s formulation of “coerced and forced relationality” comes to mind here in this Marxian struggle against alienation from nature.15 The labor’s ideal relationship to nature is one of objectification. Rather than return to Marx’s form of humanist ecological thinking to do things that it could not have done and cannot do for anti-colonial struggles against ecocide in settler-colonial states, I argue for an earnest turn to Indigenous feminist and Black feminist ecological thinking that emerges from anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. Indigenous and Black anti-colonial insurgents and scholars have long studied and adapted Marx’s work for their own struggles and the development of their revolutionary compasses. Settler socialists and settler communists have not studied Indigenous and Black ecological thought emerging from anti-colonial struggles with the same commitment, rigor, and gusto.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Binoojinh Makes a Lovely Discovery” is a story and form of theorizing from this hemisphere which I argue frees us from some of the ontological grids that violently rank life. I return to the day that Binoojinh makes their discovery. After Binoojinh collects firewood, which Marx would have championed as their right, they rest under a tree.16 As Binoojinh rests under the tree (Ninaatigoog), they proclaim that they are feeling “happy” today (Simpson 2017, p 146). In their supine or prone position, as opposed to the Marxian worker, positioned over or upon nature, Binoojinh is below and looking up at Ninaatigoog (tree). This supine position subverts or undoes what Black queer studies scholar Kemi Adeyemi names as the ideal human’s angularity of ninety degrees (90) that registers domination and uprightness over the earth (Adeyemi 2019). Binoojinh’s position of rest, of openness, reception, and intimacy with the earth, is a position of knowledge reception and production.

Because Binoojinh is lying on their back and looking up, they can notice and acknowledge their relation from a position of openness rather than domination. They must look up, defer to, and submit (not to force) but their willingness to be open. It is also an erotic position of trust, comfort, and consent.

And while that Binoojinh

Is lying down, and looking up

They see Ajidamoo up in the tree

“Bozhoo Ajidamoo! I hope you had a good winter.”

“I hope you had enough food cached.”

But Ajidamoo does not look up because she’s already busy.

(Simpson 2017, p.146)

In Binoojinh’s positions under the tree and the squirrel (Ajidamoo), they observe the squirrel engaged in activity. She, the squirrel, is engaged in an activity that is related to time. Binoojinh is aware of Ajidamoo’s shared awareness of winter. Binoojinh knows the challenges of winter for all their relations—they share a time-space together—and hope that their relative has fared well. They hope specifically that Ajidamoo has had enough food.

Ajidamoo is busy as Binoojinh sends these well wishes. I dwell in the time, pace, and activity of Ajidamoo in the story because it reveals a world-making capacity that is denied of the animal and nature in Marx’s 1844 configuration of laboring man as the center of the world. Binoojinh is not the center of the world nor of time, nor does Binoojinh possess Adijamoo or the world that Ajidamoo creates. They are worlds that co-exist. In Ajidamoo’s world and time,

She’s not collecting nuts

Gawiin

She’s not building her nest

Gawiin, not yet.

She’s not looking after any young.

Gawiin, too early.

She’s just nibbling on the bark, and then doing some

Sucking.

(Simpson 2017, p. 146)

Ajidamoo the squirrel has their own rhythm and time capacity. “Gawiin” it is “too early” for some things and not time for others. Nuts, home, children, and young are not the relations they attend to in this moment. They are nibbling bark, and sucking at this moment. Unlike Marx’s story of the unnamed animal, Ajidamoo is not bound to “life activity” in any deterministic or overdetermined way. They are not merged with or at one with their activity. There are a range of activities, seasons, times, attentions, and decisions available to the squirrel. It is not the time for collecting nuts, or building a nest, or looking after young, which all have a specific temporality. It is too early for that. What Ajidamoo is doing is the following:

Nibble, nibble suck.

Nibble, nibble suck.

Nibble, nibble suck.

Nibble, nibble suck.

(Simpson 2017, p. 146)

The nibbling and sucking that Ajidamoo is doing is a repetitive act that aligns with the repetition of the story and the aesthetic force and capacity of repetition itself. The nibble, nibble suck is an action or doing that grabs Binoojinh’s attention. It moves and brings Binoojinh’s attention to the deliberateness, the rhythm, and the dense world-making of Ajidamoo. They are compelled and moved beyond their scope of knowing into another.

Binoojinh is feeling a little curious

So, they do that too, on one of the low branches.

Nibble, nibble suck.

(ibid.)

Binoojinh repeats the actions and doings of Ajidamoo. Binnojinh is doing more than merely mimicking Ajidamoo. In this moment of repeating Ajidamoo’s actions they also subvert the human sensorium and its hierarchy of senses: sight over taste/smell. They taste using their tongue, salvia, and olfactory system to navigate and understand something new.

Sight does not become the privileged epistemology for knowing, nor does speech or language become the medium of exchange for understanding.17 Binoojinh must insert a branch into their mouth and rely on what the West deems as baser or animal senses (taste and smell) to learn that there is sweet sustenance in the form of sweet water or syrup in the tree. Indigenous and decolonial imaginaries, theories, and analytics are capacious enough to register Binoojinh’s coming into knowledge through chewing–tasting–smelling as a form of embodied cognition and co-creation.

MMMMMMMMmmmmmm.

This stuff tastes good.

It is real, sweet water

MMMMmmmmmmmmmm.

(Simpson 2017, p. 147)

Binoojinh must take Ajidamoo’s, the animal’s, knowledge, time, and world seriously, and be humble enough to learn from them.

This scene of collecting firewood could so easily be transmogrified and mistranslated into solely a scene of human labor if one were not careful. The humanist impulse to position oneself as outside, above, and in control of or the author of nature (squirrel, tree, world) as an object does not appear in this particular story. Even the wood, prior to being turned into a different form of life-giving substance as firewood, has veins that flow with sweet water. Another site of the erotic.

Binoojinh’s story is not a revision to Marx’s notion of labor. What I mean is that it cannot be incorporated into Marxian notions of labor, leaving them, even as a conscious life activity, intact. It is also not a post-humanist tale. It is a Nishnaabeg story of other kinds of worlds not figured into settler-colonial materialisms, old or new. The story of Binoojinh, who is compelled to nibble and suck on a branch, aligns with some more recent work of African diasporan feminist and queer theorizing of erotic ecologies.

In A Dirty South Manifesto, LH Stallings argues that diasporic practices of eating of dirt and the “nibbling and sucking of” of tree branches by Black, Indigenous, and poor queer white peoples is pathologized by western medicine. It is called geophagia. Of dirt eating, and geophagia, which Stallings renames geophukit, Stallings says the following:

Eating dirt is an embodied practice that existed before medical boards and cartography, and the treatments and treaties constructed out of them. Yet, compelled by the land’s refusal to be metaphysically alienated from flesh, these dirt eaters pass on knowledge and minerals about an older system so that their descendants may know something more about the world than what dated treaties, proclamations, and certified disorders can tell them. Though economically empowered white communities arduously invent religions or national identities out of opposing dirt, as well as create industry out of possessing it, when Black and Indigenous people, or poor queer whites, insist with effortless sensorial action upon the value, worth, and natural connection of dirt to living beings, it becomes geophagia, an illness or crisis to be healed or overcome. Nevertheless, what dirt tastes like or the sensation that it evokes, gustatory perception and pleasure is not what settler colonialism has alluded to in its articulation of geophagia as a mental disorder.”

(Stallings 2019, p. 42)

I have deep appreciation for Stallings’ attention to the ways that dirt eating moves outside of mandates to cultivate, transform, steward, or discipline dirt through labor and industry. Throughout Stallings’s oeuvre in Black queer studies, they have sustained a career-long commitment to pausing for and seriously considering the most minute, and at times almost imperceptible, forms of Black errancy as occasion for working on and against normative forms of sexual, economic, and ecological self-fashioning. Stallings moves with Black cravings, non-productive and less conspicuous quotidian life activities and systems of value that momentarily slip the noose of capital’s capture and the human impulse toward mastery. On a personal level, I have come to appreciate these micro-orientations because I have adopted a more sober perspective on what a Black ecological return means for Black queer, and specifically Black femme, survival. Over the past two years, I have lost two beloved Black land-stewarding friends. My longtime friend transformed their backyard in Cobb County, Georgia, into a community garden to support Black queer folks and community as we approached Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic date of 20 July 2024. My dear friend was three years shy of fifty. They left this world intent on experiencing other horizons not available in this realm. Another friend, whom I had only known for three years, stewarded a Black-, Native-, and People of Color-led land project on the side of mountain in Eastern Cherokee and Yuchi lands. They succumbed to cancer in 2024. Surrounded with love, they departed at fifty.

Just days after my dear longtime friend died, I went to a “dirt therapy” session at a Black-led agroforestry project in my city to tend to my grief and contribute my part to the collective work. Our duties for the day were to weed one of plots and lay hay mulch down. At the end of the two-hour session, I realized that I had picked my patch bald. I “overweeded”, and I was still consumed with grief and not fully in my body by the session’s end. The repetition and boredom I often experience while weeding and gardening did numb some of my grief-induced body ache, but the pain of loss remained. My back and legs were already cramping from bending, squatting, sitting, and sometimes partially lying on the ground as I pulled weeds. Over the last few years, since the resurgence of Black land projects, I have tried to work myself into a state of excitement about growing. I try to feel the transformative power of touching the earth. Yet, when I am honest with myself, I realize that I must often will myself to the orchard and my own backyard box gardens. I am often bored and drawn to growing out of a sense of obligation to myself, my neighborhood, and community. I am necessarily locked into the mundane and quotidian rhythms of urban farming as we try to survive authoritarian terror at the scales of bombs, abductions on the street, and empty stomachs. While Sabatini Slone comes to understand boredom as “an aesthetic challenge”, I recognize boredom as an affective state of survival that I must accept as a necessary part of the ecological field (Sloan 2021, p. 108). Routine, repetition, and boredom, much like Ajidamoo’s nibble, nibble, suck, is a persistent and, at times, discomfiting temperament amid depictions of Black and Brown jouissance on the land.

I am not sure that “I got what I needed” from the dirt that day, but dirt is a not a reservoir from which I can extract Black joy or healing. Earth is not easily domesticated or rendered mother, provider, carer, and relative. When earth in her pastoralized trope as mother does not tend to us as we wish, we must reach for something different, unfamiliar, and perhaps always unfolding in ways that we cannot predict. Dirt is not the magical balm that it is often depicted as in the latest promos, documentaries, and Instagram posts that help curate the digitized, aestheticized, and joyful Black and Brown ecological field of the contemporary (and often philanthropically funded) back-to-the-land projects that have begun to proliferate. Sometimes, and more often than we like to admit, dirt relations are made up of the slow tearful grind of the disabled and sick people that we love, and the “barely holding on by a string” projects we love but which do not last more than a few brief years.

We weed, and overweed, as sick, grieving, disabled, unfit people marked for death who nonetheless try our best to be in the earth’s rhythm for as long as we can. Ecological and environmental struggles are replete with our failure, boredom, sadness, suicidal ideations, illness, and the desires these dispositions engender.