Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept

This paper asks how Indigenous ways of being and knowing can become legitimized within western theorizations of ontology, given the ongoing (neo)colonial relations that shape geographic knowledge production. My analysis emerges within my narrative accounts of being a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar in two spaces of knowledge production: a geography conference and a potlatch. Through these stories, I engage with the individual embodied scales at which we reproduce geography as a discipline and reproduce ourselves as geographers. I argue that making ontological shifts in the types of geographic knowledge that is legible within the discipline requires destabilizing how we come to know Indigeneity and what representational strategies are used in engaging with Indigenous ontologies, as differentiated from western ontologies of Indigeneity.