RHIZOMEMIND

This project is grounded in London, Ontario, and run out of Western University, through the Western Sustainable Impact Fund, and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. These institutions and we, the team behind this project, are situated on the lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton Nations, which are lands connected to the London Township and Sombra Treaties of 1796 and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum (Sherwood, 2021) [1].

​

How do digital environmentalisms ultimately avoid re-entrenching appropriative, extractive knowledge economies and address, if not redress, the environmental impact of these technologies? This is a matter at least as much to do with how we approach the solution as it is with the solution itself—it is a matter of methodology and our commitment to it. The solution must be directed from and alongside Indigenous thinkers, artists, activists, and communities. From the perspective of settler and non-Indigenous action, we can encourage what Bartlett, Marshall, and Marshall (2011) identify as two-eyed seeing. As Martin (2012) explains, writing as a settler, “all things are related and share similar issues and concerns, even human beings whose differences may appear vast.” This is not license to extract knowledge (or other resources) from Indigenous communities for settler gain, but a call to open up emerging technologies to use-cases that meet the needs of local communities first and foremost. [2]

​

Even though AI and digital technologies may seem to lack material heft or geographic locality, they are in fact anchored in time and space, and indeed anchor us users temporally and spatially.  Seen this way, the nature of these technologies does not predetermine that we are bound to reproduce settle-colonial violence in how we theorize or apply them.  These technologies can rather foster human engagement with cross-cultural environmental realities through the arts, sciences, and cultural practice. Nevertheless, this still means that we are bound to consider the social, historical, and material realities of these technologies as we pursue this engagement. Any discussion of these technologies must collaborate with the peoples, non-human others, and the land who are part of the place where this work is pursued.  

​

To responsibly ask how digital and AI technologies can support plural environmentalisms, we must also attend to how we approach the question in the first place. As Kyle Powys Whyte has argued, “[d]iverse persons [...] have described settler-colonial domination as violence that disrupts relationships with the environment” (125). The gargantuan water, power, and land requirements of AI and internet infrastructure—whole server-scapes—is one obvious example. But another is how research about land, ecology, and human technologies tend to be undertaken without the guidance or input of Indigenous peoples, and often without them seeing the benefits of this research. Similarly, Linda Tuhiwai Smith has made it clear that eurocentric theories of the impacts and potential ‘solutions’ to settler-colonialism and imperialism tend to covertly buy into and reiterate their logics of oppression (1999).

 

Indigenous scholars and thinkers from around the world have long thought about how to best adapt to and adopt the capacities and responsibilities of a world that includes AI and other new media technologies, just as they have always done with respect settler-colonial ‘innovations’  (Lewis et. al., 2018; Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group, 2020). A common theme in some of this work includes how to think of AI as something other than a mere tool for human use, and one inherently separate from the ‘natural’ world. For example, Lewis, Arista, Pechawis, and Kite (2018) theorize how to “make kin” with the machinic and digital tech-scapes that exist within and alongside our “terrestrial” life. Instead of simply opening up the world to further exploitation as a catalog of resources, making kin with machines concerns acknowledging and acting on an enlarging circle of mutual responsibilities or relations.  

​

Approaching our work through a two-eyed seeing of making kin means being continually open to the non-fixed responsibilities of these ongoing relations. 

 

[1] As Tuck and Yang have argued (2012), “[d]ecolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life,” and such gestures as the land acknowledgement above, by contrast, risk doing harm to Indigenous ways of life and Indigenous-settler relations. This is because the acknowledgements are inherently a matter of identifying or naming, and not going beyond to redress past and ongoing injustice. For Tuck and Yang, such acknowledgments of settler-colonialism and calls for decolonization are metaphors, and should more properly lead to the ceding of land back to Indigenous peoples and ways of life as they live and express it. Decolonization articulated in this way is therefore not achievable within the scope of this project. At the same time, this understanding of decolonization should not simply be bracketed: it should inform our work in other ways.  

​

[2] This acknowledgement of two-eyed seeing is ultimately insufficient if it does not lead to real collaboration. The authors encourage readers to check in on the site from time to time to see the latest updates on local collaborative efforts.