Being Known by a Birch Tree: Animist Refigurings of Western Epistemology

[JSRNC 4.3 (2010) 182-205] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1363-7320 doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v4i3.182 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1743-1689

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Priscilla Stuckey

Prescott College, 220 Grove Ave., Prescott, AZ 86301, USA pstuckey@prescott.edu

Abstract

New animism, as derived from Ojibwe philosophy and articulated by anthropologists of religion, begins in a relational worldview and implies ways of knowing that challenge Cartesian dualism. Opening with a story of my relationship with a weeping birch tree in Ohio, I use the relational epistemology of animism and of feminist theorist Lorraine Code to examine four ways in which my experience with the birch tree, interpreted within an animist-feminist relational worldview, challenges Cartesian dualism. To elaborate animist ways of knowing, I draw on Indigenous philosophers such as Carol Lee Sanchez (Laguna Pueblo), Vine Deloria (Standing Rock), Donald Fixico (Creek and Seminole), and Makere Stewart-Harawira (Maori). But to illustrate border crossings between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, I draw also on non-Indigenous scholars such as Tim Ingold and his ‘relational constitution of being’; Karen Barad and ‘intra-acting’; Val Plumwood’s ‘spirituality of place’; and David Abram’s concept of ‘the flesh of language’. My goal is to situate humans as but one extension of Earth’s ability to know and to explore how we might take our places in a community of knowers, only some of whom are human.

I grew up in a little white house at the very edge of a small town in northwest Ohio. Beside our house my parents had planted a few years before my birth a cut-leaf weeping birch tree, Betula pendula laciniata, a transplant from Europe, as my ancestors had been. The laciniata refers to its small, many-pointed, lacy leaves. As a child I loved to stand under the weeping threads of its branches, next to the slim white trunk. Its young bark was thin and crinkly as tissue paper and revealed to my toddler fingers the joys of peeling things. In junior high, sent to rake the birch tree’s generous fall of yellow

Stuckey Being Known by a Birch Tree 183

leaves, I would rake and daydream, sometimes arranging the leaves in the rectangles and squares of a floor plan, with windows and doorways laid out as in blueprints. Later, in high school, I sat beneath the now thirty-foot-tall tree on summer afternoons, immersed in books, reading everything from romance novels to C.S. Lewis. I cannot say I shared secrets with the tree, but I did feel different—calmer, a little more confident or clear—after being veiled for a few hours under its leafy fall. Fifteen years out of high school, when I was in my early thirties and living in Oakland, California, the birch tree became a friend in a new way. One evening I was startled by something I had never before experi-enced. I was having to get used to a lot of changes; about six months earlier I had fallen ill with a flu that had left me feeling as if twenty-pound weights were strapped to each limb. Every step took considerable effort. I could feel, but not see, that our hillside flat flowed ever so slightly downward because walking across the living room floor was easier in one direction than the other.1 One evening as I headed downhill on the floor after dinner, an image jumped to mind. It was the birch tree, and in the space of a moment the tree was as present inside my head as the sofa was present before my body. I sank down and closed my eyes. What was happening? I had not thought of the birch tree for years and had no reason to be thinking of it now. There was no announcement, there were no words. The tree simply rose in my awareness, its tall, graceful image strong in my mind—stronger somehow than a memory. The presence remained vivid for a few moments and then gradually faded. A feeling of quiet gravity, almost sadness, accompanied it. A few weeks later I received a call from my brother, who still lived in our hometown in Ohio. We talked a few minutes before he said slowly, ‘Well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut down the birch tree. It’s got a disease or something’. I hung up the phone, full of wonder. So the birch tree had come to say good-bye. I knew the birch tree very well from my years of living with it; what I had not realized until then was that the birch tree also knew me.2

1. I was ill for a total of four years before recovering completely. 2. I use the pronoun it throughout to refer to the birch tree, in spite of the fact that this pronoun usually refers to objects rather than persons. I agree with Buber that all third-person pronouns are inadequate; in his words, the ‘twofold’ experience if the ‘I-It’ world ‘is not changed when He or She takes the place of It’, and only using the relational ‘You’ can overcome this divide (Buber 2008 [1970]: 53). By using it to refer to a tree I experienced as a friend, mentor, and partner, I animate English speakers’ notions of objects. I also avoid the gendered images associated with he and she, which

184 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Worldviews and Criticism

That I experienced the birch tree as communicating with me both is and is not the issue. Yes, it constitutes the central problematic in what follows here—an image of cross-species connection that provokes reflection on and critical thinking about relations between humans and other beings in the world. But my purpose here is not to explain or justify my inter-pretation of the event, much less to convince others of the possibility of human–tree communication. Although I discuss such communication, I do not construct an apologetic for it. With Ninian Smart, I hold that worldviews are ‘not…straightforwardly verifiable or falsifiable’, which means that attempts at convincing others of their believability are mis-placed at best (Smart 1995: 19). Yet the issue is indeed one of worldviews. That I experienced the birch tree as communicating with me indicates that I had crossed a border separating a modern Western worldview from the alternatives. Modern and Western here both refer to a worldview dependent on the body–spirit, human–nature, and subject–object dualisms characterizing the scientific revolution and Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as well as the discourses and practices, such as those of the industrialized West and North, derived from that history (Plum-wood 1993, 2002). In the words of anthropologist of science Bruno Latour, the modern worldview is characterized by the ‘double separa-tion…between humans and nonhumans on the one hand, and between what happens “above” and what happens “below” on the other’ (Latour 1993: 13). If, as Latour suggests, ‘we have never been modern’, then my experience of receiving communication from a tree stands as an example of the failure of the modernizing enterprise and the persistence of pre-modern, antimodern, or nonmodern worldviews within and alongside modernity (Latour 1993). That I never spoke about this experience—and many similar experi-ences—in an academic context reveals the extent of the Western intellec-tual taboo on ways of knowing that do not conform to Cartesian contours of doubt. As a person educated in the modern worldview, I had available to me certain lenses of interpretation but not others. I could view my experience with the birch tree, for example, as a coincidence, as my imaginative reconstruction of the tree, as a product of unresolved

are inappropriate especially for a monoecious species like this birch. On a related note, see Harvey (2006: 46-48) for discussion of the Ojibwe language’s use of two genders, ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, and the fact that these take priority over male and female genders.

emotions from the past, or as a projection of my own wishes and fanta-sies. Each of these interpretations, I notice, rests on and reinforces the epistemological dualism of Descartes, in which I am the knower and the birch tree is the object of my knowing. Each interpretation focuses on my construction of the birch tree; each is anthropocentric, with the human knower standing firmly at the center as the only active agent of knowing in a passive, known world. Within the confines of the modern, I was forbidden from interpreting the event in certain other ways, for instance, as communication initiated by the tree in acknowledgment of a lifelong relationship between us. The modern worldview sanctioned the tools by which I might know the tree; it proscribed tools for recognizing how the tree might know me. In a similar vein, the writer Scott Russell Sanders reports on an experi-ence he had during the time he was grieving his father. Walking on the Ohio land they had shared, he was weeping as he recalled his father when he was suddenly interrupted by the scream of a red-tailed hawk overhead.

It was a red-tailed hawk for sure; and it was also my father. Not a symbol of my father, not a reminder, not a ghost, but the man himself, right there, circling in the air above me. I knew this as clearly as I knew the sun burned in the sky. A calm poured through me. My chest quit heaving. My eyes dried (Sanders 1995: 7).

Sanders chose to interpret his experience according to a worldview that departed from the Cartesian ‘hyperseparation’ of the self and more-than-human others (Plumwood 1993: 176-77). He arrived at this worldview only after years of soul searching because the experience ‘was so categorically different’ from all he had been taught (Sanders 2002):

The voice of my education told me then and tells me now that I did not meet my father, that I merely projected my longing onto a bird. My education may well be right; yet nothing I heard in school, nothing I’ve read, no lesson reached by logic has ever convinced me as utterly or stirred me as deeply as did that red-tailed hawk (Sanders 1995: 8).

The very first time Sanders read this essay in public, he reported later, a member of the audience who identified himself as Shawnee approached him afterward and said that at the moment in the essay when Sanders experienced the hawk as his father, ‘I leaned over to my [Shawnee] friend and said, “He’s Indian; he just doesn’t know it”’. Sanders hastened to add that he is not Indian and is not pretending to be Indian. Rather, in seeing the hawk as his father—in connecting and even identifying hawk and human, material and immaterial (the human and nonhuman, ‘above’ and ‘below’ of Latour’s definition)—he was inhabiting a

worldview familiar to the Shawnee man but foreign to Westerners (Sanders 2002). Because, as the Shawnee listener suggested, crossing the border out of the modern worldview and its ontological dualisms means approaching the worldviews of Indigenous peoples, I find it useful to employ catego-ries of ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’ in what follows. My intention is not to essentialize groups of people but to recognize political histories, espe-cially colonial ones. For to leave behind modern Enlightenment rational-ity, as Sanders did in experiencing the hawk as his father, and as I do in asserting that the tree communicated with me, is to find commonality with worldviews that were suppressed in the—ultimately unsuccess-ful—attempts to impose modernity. It is to revalue ‘subjugated knowl-edges’ long held and taught especially in Indigenous traditions yet denigrated as primitive in the Western academy (Foucault 1994: 203). By counterposing ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’, I acknowledge an intellectual and historical debt to Indigenous peoples for offering ontological alternatives to modernity even though my crossing of this particular boundary took place prior to direct contact with Indigenous people. Again, my use of such intentionally broad categories is not to be construed in essentialist terms, as if all people of Indigenous heritage embrace a non-Cartesian worldview or all Western people conform to the modern one. Still less do I mean to suggest that all the varied Indigenous traditions differ from modernism in precisely the same ways. Rather, I use the categories ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’ to highlight the intellectual (as well as cultural and political) border that modern Western people erected beginning with the scientific revolution and then employed to separate themselves from those they labeled as premodern others. A border between worldviews continues to exist, demarcating the Western worldview with its subject–object and related dualisms from worldviews, found most commonly among Indigenous peoples, that do not share those assumptions. Yet border crossings in both directions take place on a regular basis, and my experience is but a single example. Each of the scholars, Indigenous and Western, whose work I discuss here blurs a worldview boundary in certain important ways. But even though boundaries may not rigidly hold, specifying differences remains important. Precisely because ‘no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining’, as postcolonial critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty asserts, elaborating differences helps us to see points of connection and commonality. ‘The challenge’, she suggests, ‘is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately, how

specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully’ (Mohanty 2003: 505). The ‘universal concern’ that must capture our attention at this time is the ecological crisis, widely understood to be the product, in part, of the modern Enlightenment rationality and its epistemological dualisms (Plumwood 1993, 2002). If, as Foucault suggested, ‘it is through the re-appearance of…these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work’ (Foucault 1994: 203), then I suggest that closer critical attention to experiences such as the one I relate with the birch tree might help individuals immersed in Western culture, and the culture itself, to begin to move beyond the subject–object, nature–human dualism that is our intellectual heritage. To consider seriously the possibility of being known by a birch tree is to begin to step down from the lonely pedestal of knowing, which keeps (modern) humans at the center of every story, always superior to and removed from all other beings. It is to open ourselves to ‘a different kind of democracy…a democracy extended to things themselves’ (Latour 1993: 142). What I examine here, therefore, is not my experience with the birch tree but rather the modern worldview, which would regard my experi-ence as an exceptional one to be evaluated according to rational, materialist criteria. Instead of asking how it is possible for a birch tree to communicate, I ask how my experience of receiving communication from a birch tree challenges modern ways of knowing. I begin, in other words, from a worldview informed by animist and feminist critiques of modernity, a worldview rooted in relationship and reciprocity rather than in subject–object, matter–spirit dualism. My aim is not to convince skeptics of the veracity of my experience. My aim is rather to identify a few particular ways that a relational epistemology, as evidenced in my experience with the birch tree, provides an ecologically salutary alternative to a modern epistemology. My aim is also to suggest that such a shift in epistemology is a prerequisite for reharmonizing humans with the rest of the natural world. To begin, I ask a simple question: What might it mean to be known by a tree? The implications of a simple question, however, may be far-reaching. In examining how relationship with a tree shapes awareness and knowledge, we might find ourselves reassessing what it means to know, what counts as knowledge, and who can be recognized as a knower. We might entertain a view of Earth and of epistemology in which humans are but one extension of Earth’s many-faceted ability to know.

Epistemological Starting Point: New Animism and Feminist Theory

My first interpretive lens, new animism, is found in the work of anthro-pologists of religion such as Graham Harvey and Nurit Bird-David. Departing from Edward Tylor’s definition of animism as a belief in souls or spirits, new animism instead uses the prism of relationship for under-standing interconnections with beings of all sorts, including human and other than human. In Harvey’s words, ‘Animists are people who recog-nise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’ (Harvey 2006: xi). A redefining of Tylor’s animism became necessary when anthropolo-gists, beginning with A. Irving Hallowell in the early to mid-twentieth century, found that Tylor’s definition simply did not fit the people they were working to know. Tylor’s definition reproduced dualisms, such as between body and spirit or natural and supernatural, that were endemic to a Western worldview but foreign to the worldviews of many Indige-nous peoples, and especially the peoples of North America.3 By defining animism as focused on the immaterial side of a material–immaterial split, Tylor had firmly locked a Western epistemological frame onto perceptions of others’ traditions. Using Tylor’s definition to understand Indigenous cultures meant imposing that Western framework onto worldviews that did not depend, as does the Cartesian/Platonic one, on that fundamental split (Morrison 1992a, 1992b, 2000; Bird-David 1999: S68). Hallowell, working among the Northern Ojibwe of south-central Canada, suggested that among animists such as the Ojibwe, the defining category seems to be, not body or spirit, materiality or immateriality, but rather person (Hallowell 2002 [1960]; Harvey 2006: 17-20). An animist worldview rests less on some natural–supernatural divide than on inter-acting with other persons, some of whom may be human but many of whom are not, such as animal, mineral, plant, cloud, dream, or spirit persons. Persons may wear many kinds of bodies, including more-physical or less-physical bodies, but the presence or lack of a physical body is not the defining feature of animism, as Tylor had thought; what matters, rather, is other persons’ ability to interact or engage in relationship (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Harvey 2006: 33-49).4 Hallowell 3. That is, Indigenous worldviews might include elements of both (what in a Western taxonomy are called) ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, but the distinction may not function as a principal category of analysis, as it does in modernity, and therefore does not constitute an ontological dualism. 4. In a similar way, the natural–supernatural divide is less prominent among animist Amazonian people (Viveiros de Castro 1998) and among animist South

coined the term other-than-human persons to suggest the broad variety of personhood that is both possible and present in the worlds of animists. Anthropologist Nurit Bird-David contends that for animists, relation-ship precedes perception: other beings are chosen as relational partners, but not because they are seen as having a certain kind of consciousness or mind (although this tends to be assumed); rather, an animist responds, as a friend or relative would, to other beings and then perceives them as persons (Bird-David 1999: S89). Harvey highlights Hallowell’s story about an old Ojibwe man and his observations of rocks. Hallowell, aware that stones in Ojibwe language are grammatically animate, asked this man, ‘Are all the stones we see about us here alive?’ The old man looked around, considered a long moment, then said, ‘No! But some are’ (Hallowell 2002 [1960]: 24; Harvey 2006: 33). Stones could be related to as persons, not because all stones have a soul or spirit or are categorically alive, but rather because some stones act like persons: they move; they relate to and communicate with others. By this logic, some stones make themselves available as persons; they are more ‘personable’ than others. An ability to communicate presumes a level of consciousness and self-consciousness; however, the type of consciousness possessed by the other tends to be less important to animists than the fact and quality of communicating. ‘The ability to relate is definitive’ rather than, as in most Western modern discourses, some ontological state of being or of con-sciousness (Harvey 2006: 187, 48). In this way animism departs from Western panpsychism, with its claim that matter is permeated by mind. While the effects may be similar, in that both panpsychists and animists form relationships with beings considered alive who may not be considered alive by others, animism does not depend on an ontological claim that all of the world is alive. Animists may consider some rocks animate and others inanimate, some trees but not others conversation partners.5

Indians (Bird-David 1999). In an issue of Religion devoted to the categories of natural and supernatural (vol. 22, July 1992), Morrison and others drew attention to the inadequacy of the Western concept of the supernatural when it comes to analyzing Indigenous, and especially Native American, traditions (Morrison 1992a and 1992b). The discussion began with Hultkrantz (1983), who claimed that the study of religion required a concept of the supernatural. Saler (1977) reviewed the use of the category supernatural in Western philosophy and theology and suggested guidelines for limit-ing its use in relation to Indigenous cultures. 5. The difference can also be described as the difference between a philosophical and an anthropological interpretive lens, with panpsychism informed by Western philosophy and new animism by Indigenous worldviews. For a defense of panpsych-ism from the perspective of a deep ecologist, see Mathews 2003. For a comprehensive

If person is the central category of new animism, what are persons, and how might one recognize them? In Harvey’s words, ‘Persons are voli-tional, relational, cultural and social beings. They demonstrate intention-ality and agency with varying degrees of autonomy and freedom’. Persons are those who relate, and especially those who communicate: ‘Persons may be spoken with. Objects, by contrast, are usually spoken about’ (Harvey 2006: xvii). By this definition, both the birch tree and I are persons. In an animist framework, the birch tree, by initiating communication with me, revealed its personhood. In speaking with me through image and affect, the tree acknowledged the history we shared and renewed our decades-long connection. Moreover, it did what friends and relatives do: it let me know when it was dying and reached out to make one last connection, in effect, saying good-bye. Persons as the central category calls for an epistemology based in personal knowing, which is a model suggested by feminist philosopher Lorraine Code. Noting that Western epistemology takes as foundational the knowledge of objects independent of the knower, Code proposes an alternative: ‘When one considers how basic and crucial the necessity of knowing other people is…knowing other people [becomes] at least as worthy a contender for paradigmatic status as knowledge of…objects’ (Code 1991: 37). Precisely because persons cannot be known completely, learning to know them is an ongoing, never-finished practice. ‘The process of knowing other people requires constant learning: how to be with them, respond to them, act toward them’ (1991: 39). The process of knowing, when directed toward persons, means leaving behind easy assumptions about who they are because as living, evolving beings, they are continually changing. Moreover, knowledge of persons includes both objective and subjec-tive elements. Some facts about another are objective, such as date of birth or place of residence. ‘Only certain stories can be accurately told about a person; others simply cannot’ (Code 1991: 39). But subjective elements of knowing are always present when knowing a person: how I feel about the other or how I experience our connection. Central to the knowing of persons is acknowledging the subjectivity of the other. Knowing when directed toward persons always implies the possibility of being known as well, for a person, unlike an object, gives as well as receives attention. The knower can never be insulated from scrutiny, as in the practice of knowing an object, for the other is always a

review of panpsychism in Western philosophy, see Skrbina 2005, and for readings in panpsychism from Western sources, see Clarke 2004.

partner in relationship. Further, both partners may sometimes act as the knower, sometimes the known. ‘Claims to know a person are open to negotiation between knower and “known”, where the “subject” and “object” positions are always, in principle, exchangeable’ (Code 1991: 38). Code’s model of knowing other persons is a fitting one to be extended to knowledge of other-than-human persons and, in particular, my relationship with the birch tree. From an animist perspective, the tree announced its presence in my awareness through an image of itself. When it did so, I had to acknowledge the subjectivity, agency, and intentions of this tree. By contacting me, the tree assumed the stance of the knower, an exchange of subject–object positions that I had never before experienced with a tree. The implications of such an experience are far-reaching. ‘If every “thing” we humans encounter’, writes Harvey, ‘might in fact be a living person, the implications and ramifications are immense’ (Harvey 2006: xiv). In particular, being known by an other-than-human person opens new avenues of epistemology. Several elements of an epistemology based in personal knowing deserve a closer look. For each of these elements, I present representative voices, often those of Indigenous scholars, because animism is both historically associated with Indigenous traditions and at the present time in the academy is defended most robustly by Indige-nous thinkers. However, to acknowledge that borders are not rigid and border crossings between worldviews take place regularly, I present animist-compatible voices from Western scholars as well, often from feminist perspectives. Feminist theory is the intellectual framework that shaped me most deeply prior to encountering new animism, and its critique-from-within of Western dualism provides a fitting parallel to the external critique provided by Indigenous thinkers.

Elements of an Animist Epistemology To construct an epistemological account that takes seriously an experi-ence such as the one I had with the birch tree, Western ways of knowing will need to incorporate several elements of an animist, relational episte-mology. I highlight four elements here: (1) Knowledge as relational rather than objective (and this quality affects all the others); (2) knowledge as contextual, not abstract; (3) knowledge as built through inner or intuitive attention as well as outer, empirical methods; (4) knowledge as commu-nicated through story rather than abstract theory or principles.

1. Knowledge as Relational: Built through Engaging with Rather than Standing Apart From Animism’s emphasis on a world inhabited by persons means that knowing is through and through a relational activity. It grows through engaging with and speaking with others, many of whom are not human. As Code (1991) points out, a relational model of knowing challenges the model of objectivity that has been paradigmatic in Western science for several hundred years. Unlike knowledge of, say, a red ball, which can be relatively complete (‘relatively’ because recent physics casts doubt on how much can be known even about a ball), knowledge in a world made up of persons, only some of whom are human, means navigating an endlessly shifting sea of perspectives. If all ‘things’ are potentially persons, then there is no objective standpoint; there are only multiple perspectives. In a real sense, everything else to be said about animist epistemology follows from this central challenge to a modern, Western model of knowing. In a person-centered world, ideas of causality necessarily shift. For an animist, to ask what causes an event makes less sense than to ask who causes it (Morrison 2000: 31). An animist confers respect on other-than-human persons by noticing their actions and communicating with them. Carol Lee Sanchez (Laguna Pueblo) writes, ‘There are trees and grasses and flowers and birds and ants and bees waiting for you…to say hello to them—to call them sister, brother, cousin, or friend. They are your rela-tives; they hear your thoughts as you travel around your town or city’ (Sanchez 1993: 225). From this perspective, the birch tree was listening to me and watching me (at least as much as I was noticing it) for the eighteen years that we shared the same plot of ground. When, years later, an imagistic vision of the birch tree took shape in my awareness, an animist interpretation ascribes the experience to the actions of the tree rather than just to processes of my brain or consciousness. Furthermore, in an animist world made up of persons, the world itself is continually coming into being because to say that knowledge is con-structed through relationship is tantamount to saying that the self as well comes into being through relationship. In other words, there is no prerelational self. An ontological claim is implied: the world is not like a billiard table upon which selves, like balls, are placed and set in motion. If knowledge is relational, there are no premanufactured billiard balls; there is no preexisting table; there are only entities creating one another as they interact. As they create one another, they also create the world.6

6. One reviewer of this manuscript for this journal suggested that here I am overstating the role of relationships, given the centrality of DNA in shaping the

Social anthropologist Tim Ingold says that this ability to cocreate defines an animist world. ‘Animacy’, he says, is the ‘condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and respon-siveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next… Beings of all kinds…continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (Ingold 2006: 10). One catches from his words a sense of the dynamic interplay that is creating the world—and each being within it—afresh in every moment. Each being, by contributing its own characteristic move-ment and creativity, shapes all the other beings in its vicinity and so shapes the world. To illustrate this ‘relational constitution of being’, which Ingold bases on Indigenous animisms, he contrasts the bounded self of the Cartesian framework, pictured as a circle, with the self drawn as a wavy line moving forward, like the track of an animal through the underbrush. The circle is static, with an inside and an outside, a ‘me’ and ‘not-me’. The wavy line has no such boundary but instead indicates direction, movement, change. The drawings translate into differing conceptions of a being. Instead of a fox categorized as an animal with four legs and orange fur, in the words of the Koyukon of Alaska, a fox is: ‘Streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth’ (Ingold 2006: 13-14). Like-wise, the birch tree might become not a thirty-foot-tall tree with white bark and lacy leaves, as I described it at the beginning, but rather: ‘Standing tall, emitting soft rustles through weeping threads’. One recog-nizes another being not by its static attributes but by its unique way of moving in the world. Each movement, each track or trail, implies an interconnection with the tracks of others. ‘Every such trail traces a relation’. Each being—each track—intersects with other tracks, continually creating ‘a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the lifeworld…not a network but a meshwork’ (Ingold 2006: 13). Such a depiction of personhood as a trail moving through life stretches the limits of a noun-based language such as English, and it is no accident that the languages of many animist cultures, including those of Indige-nous North America, are verb based.7 A verb-based language mutes the distinction between subject and object, first and foremost in the construc-tion of the sentence, where those two positions do not exist. All beings person. The comment reveals a modern dualism between nature and nurture, or DNA and relationships, which is increasingly being eroded in science itself as biologists study the effect of environment on genes (Robinson 2004). 7. This is a common assertion in American Indian and First Nations sources, for example, Pintarics and Sveinunggaard 2005: 71.

are implicitly actors, subsumed in the activity of the verb. The message that everything is evolving and in movement is communicated through each sentence, in contrast with languages such as Greek and English, which train the attention to perceive discrete objects and their static attributes.8 When movement is primary, it becomes easy to view each ‘thing’ as an actor, to see the ways in which rocks and trees, with humans, cocreate the world. And so Indigenous scholars from many corners of the globe speak of the process of creating that is taking place continually. Makere Stewart-Harawira (Maori) calls attention to the ‘profound intercon-nectedness of all existence’, which ‘binds all together in a continuous web of creation’ (Stewart-Harawira 2005a: 155). All beings—four-legged, webbed, leaved, finned—participate in the making of this world. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) says, ‘Stasis is not characteristic of the American Indians’ view of things… All of life is living—that is, dynamic and aware, partaking as it does in the life of the All Spirit and contribut-ing as it does to the continuing life of that same Great Mystery’ (Allen 1992: 56). Deborah McGregor (Anishinaabe) emphasizes that this way of knowing the world ‘is not just…knowledge about relationships with Creation or the natural world; it is the relationship itself. It is about being in the relationships with Creation’ (McGregor 2004: 391, emphasis added). McGregor tints the noun of relationship with action to emphasize the process of relating, the crisscrossing trails that weave the living mesh of creation. Clearly, the cocreating takes place continually through a process of relating, through relationship imagined as a verb, an act of ‘being mutually responsive’ with another (Bird-David 1999: S88), which creates each participant and thus creates the world. Such an account of ongoing mutual creating is a fitting lens through which to view my decades-long experience of the birch tree. For eighteen years we lived side by side, witnessing one another in all sorts of weather. If at the time I thought I was the only one doing the witnessing, it is just as true that I was being shaped—and recognized myself at the time as shaped—by the presence of the tree. There were certainly other trees on the property, but the birch was the one that captured my attention and for which I felt a distinct fondness. It was the one whose company I sought when I wanted to relax or read or slip into a shaded niche. My experience of the world was molded by the presence of that tree—not just my view of the landscape, which was dominated by it, but also my view of the seasons, which were measured by this tree’s green

8. If Aristotle had spoken a verb-based language, would Western philosophy and then Western science have begun with the problem of how to explain motion?

leaves in spring and summer, its golden leaf-fall in autumn, and its thready, frost-covered branches in winter. Certainly our crisscrossing paths helped to weave the mesh of my world. Animism’s emphasis on cocreating relationships parallels feminism’s long-held conviction that relationship rather than separateness stands at the center of self-building (Meyers 1997). In a recent rethinking of relationship, feminist physicist Karen Barad looks at quantum physics and its strange discoveries, which challenge the Newtonian subject–object model of knowing. Building on Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, she grapples with what his theory suggests about the radical entanglement of human observers in the very processes measured in the laboratory. In Barad’s view, the Copenhagen, or ortho-dox, interpretation of quantum mechanics blends Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s sometimes incompatible positions. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle (of energy or matter) because measuring the process influ-ences the result. The uncertainty principle fits comfortably within Newtonian physics with its assumption that particles move along inde-pendent of human observation and that measuring the particle might well interfere with that motion. Bohr, by contrast, suggested that it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle not because these properties are disturbed by observation but because the particle does not have those properties until observed. In the case of comple-mentary properties, for example, such as acting like waves or like particles, both properties cannot be measured at once because the values are indeterminate—they do not belong to the particle—until measure-ment takes place (Barad 2007). Bohr’s ‘principle of indeterminacy’ goes farther than Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; whereas Heisenberg questioned what humans can know (an ‘epistemic’ issue), Bohr ques-tioned the nature of reality itself (an ‘ontic’ issue) (Barad 2007: Chapter 7). The epistemological consequences are profound, and from Barad’s account they show certain parallels with an animist account of knowing informed by Indigenous thought. Barad focuses on the mutual creating of humans and particles—or of matter in all its forms. She coins a new word, intra-acting, to refer to this mutual construction, mutual creating, of one another. ‘In contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (2007: 33). That is, even down to the subatomic level, no action by an isolated agent is possible because there is no such thing. Agents are produced by acting rather than the other way around. ‘Matter is…not a thing but a doing, a

congealing of agency’ (2007: 183-84). In contrast with a modern world-view, which would give human language and mental constructs priority over the physical world—where ‘I think’ means ‘I am’—in the quantum world of Bohr, matter itself is recognized as acting. In this way, argues Barad, ‘matter comes to matter’ (Barad 2003: 801). Attributing agency to all matter parallels new animism’s recognition of intentionally acting persons found throughout nature. Barad speaks of ‘the world’s radical aliveness’ when the notion of agency is ‘cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit’ and broadened to include all things (Barad 2007: 33, 177).9 In a radically alive world where cocreative agency is shared through-out, knowing becomes a mutually constructing activity. Here, Barad again emphasizes the entanglement of humans with the rest of nature: ‘We are not outside observers of the world. Neither are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity… We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world’, participating in its cocreative processes (Barad 2007: 184, 185, emphasis in original). 2. Knowledge as Contextual, Not Abstract In an animist world, where a birch tree may speak or rocks provide friendship, knowing is dependent on context; it is rooted in a particular time and place. Knowledge, in other words, is bioregional.10 To know anything properly, one must know where it arises and in relationship to whom. For example, in a Maori knowledge system, ‘The location of [something’s] origin within time and space provides the map for understanding the true nature of anything that is’ (Stewart-Harawira 2005b: 41). Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock) said that in the Indian world the particular is ‘the ultimate reference point’ for knowing (Deloria 2001: 22). American Indian religion itself, he said, is modeled directly on the natural world and on humans’ relationships with other beings. ‘Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality’ (Deloria 1994: 66-67). Deloria (2001: 23) argued that bioregional knowing implies a certain ethics. ‘All relationships have a moral content’, he said, and he was sharply critical of the split between fact and value in Western scientific 9. Barad’s ontological position is actually closer to panpsychism than to animism, but her view of intra-action closely resembles animist accounts of cocreation. 10. Bioregional here refers to relationships not just among the native flora and fauna, but with all the creatures with whom we share a dwelling place, no matter their historical origin. My bioregional knowing when I was a child included the non-native weeping birch.

knowing. He claimed that such a split has no place in a world made up of relationships—and that, in fact, is its main trouble: it has no place. A thing without a place cannot be related to, cannot give advice or be held accountable. To be alive, to know and be known, a thing needs a place. Animist knowing shares this insistence on context with feminist theorists, who speak of ‘situated knowledges’. Donna Haraway, in her famous essay of this title in 1988, argued that knowledge without a place is irresponsible because it tries to be disembodied; it tries to perform the ‘god trick’ of claiming to be everywhere at once while in fact residing nowhere. ‘It is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives’, she said, that a more adequate understanding of knowing can be found (Haraway 1988: 584). More recently, environmental philosopher Val Plumwood recom-mended a ‘materialist spirituality of place’ as a way to overcome the dualisms of Western culture between body and mind, reason and emotion, male and female, human and nature. She advocated cultivating a sense of belonging to the land rather than the land belonging to humans—attuning one’s ears to the sounds of its insects and birds and in effect opening to the ‘language of the land’ (Plumwood 2002: 231). Doing so requires becoming deeply acquainted with a place or a group of places. It means finding a sense of meaning in immanent rather than transcendent realms, becoming immersed in the material surroundings so that a sense of the sacred arises from relating to the Earth. It also means working to develop sensitivity to place, not just among individu-als, but throughout the culture in order to counter the extreme denial of place that characterizes Western-based global society. Cultivating a spirituality of place is difficult to do, she said, for modern people:

A spirituality of place is challenging because it is at odds with the western system of dualisms that has made the particular and immediate, the bodily, the sensory, the experiential and the emotional the inferior ‘others’ to the abstract, the mental and the rational-dispassionate. A spirituality of place is not then something that will just fall into the laps of people with these kinds of traditions behind them. Because its dominant traditions have been hostile to or remote from nature and place, locating the sacred in a transcendent higher world beyond the fallen earth, the development of a non-superficial spirituality of place that locates the sacred as immanent in particular places is highly problematic for western culture, and requires major rethinking and re-imagining (Plumwood 2002: 231).

Significantly, Plumwood cited in her ecofeminist vision for a place-based spirituality the Laguna Pueblo thinker Carol Lee Sanchez, with her dialogical model of relating to nature beings as friends and kin (Plumwood 2002: 223-24).

3. Knowledge as Intuitive: Gained through Inner-Focused in Addition to Outer-Focused, Empirical Methods Intuitive knowing is inner-directed or meditative knowing that arises through the practice of taking time to be quiet and look inward. When the birch tree visited me to say good-bye, I already had some years’ experience practicing contemplative awareness. However, those years of practicing contemplative ways of knowing were considered irrelevant to the knowledge I was gaining in my doctoral program at the same time. Animist traditions, by contrast, teach that knowing cannot arise through outer-focused empirical and rational methods alone. Canadian educator Marie Battiste (Mi’kmaq) says there must be a place for ‘knowledge that comes from introspection, reflection, meditation, prayer, and other types of self-directed learning’ (Battiste 2002: 16). Inner-focused knowing is as relevant to knowledge as sense-based knowing because in an animist framework the worlds of matter and spirit are inseparable. All methods of knowing are necessary to parse the mysteries of this single reality. According to Willie Ermine (Sturgeon Lake First Nation),

Aboriginal people found a wholeness that permeated inwardness and that also extended into the outer space. Their fundamental insight was that all existence was connected and that the whole enmeshed the being in its inclusiveness. In the Aboriginal mind, therefore, an immanence is present that gives meaning to existence and forms the starting point for Aboriginal epistemology (Ermine 1995: 103).

Because reality is a whole, knowledge gained of it must reflect that wholeness by arising through both inner- and outer-directed means. This is not to suggest that among Indigenous animists inner or contemplative means of knowing take precedence over sensory knowing and relating. I think of what a Yurok man living near the California–Oregon border said to an anthropologist: ‘When you see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree; when you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree; when you can see the spirit of the tree you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something’ (Buckley 1992: 43). Seeing ‘each leaf as a separate thing’ takes many hours of close observation; months could be devoted to cultivating this level of familiarity with another being. It also requires focusing on the individual who is in front of you, immediately present to the senses, instead of bringing precon-ceived ideas of ‘tree’ to the encounter. Only after such detailed sense-based knowing do more subtle means of knowing become possible. In my case the intuitive communication that revealed the birch tree’s personableness was built on a history of our interacting with each other. From living next to the tree, I recognized its seed-rich catkins and the

precise shade of green that sprouted in its leaves each spring. Over years I watched its paper-thin bark thicken and develop fissures that black-ened with age. This knowing resided in me, not as some romantic image of a tree that might exist in a faraway world, but rather as memory—specific memories of this tree, who lived on this piece of earth and whose daily presence graced these particular years of my life. The particularity of face-to-face relating preceded any imagistic communication.11 Com-prehensive, disciplined, body-to-body observation (‘seeing each leaf as a separate thing’) sets the foundation for relationship, out of which imagistic or intuitive communication (seeing the spirit of the tree and talking to it) may grow. The two worlds or kinds of observation are not, after all, separate. With David Abram, therefore, I would emphasize the primacy of the body to all language, including and perhaps especially intuitive or imag-istic communicating. To communicate as a person, whether a human person or a cloud or wind person or even a dream person, is to commu-nicate from a location: communicating from a body and as a body (however subtle or immaterial the body, as are the bodies of dream persons). Abram calls this ‘the flesh of language’. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Abram emphasizes the ‘reciprocal exchange between the living body and the animate world’ that is perception itself. Any meaning communicated is rooted in bodily experience; ‘meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation’ (Abram 1996: 73-74). Abram’s richly evocative language also calls pointed attention to the situatedness of all knowing, to its basis in bodily experience. During the years I spent living next to the birch tree, our relationship was lived out in sensory, bodily experiences of one another, in the fingering of thready branches (from my perspective) or in feeling the touch of human skin (from the tree’s perspective). These sensory, bodily experiences took place in addition to any more subtle, less physical means of perception that may have been practiced by either the tree or me. The bodily communication too was animistic (from my perspective) because I was regarding and respecting the tree as an agential, inten-tional being, what I am here calling a person. If the worlds of inner and outer are one, as in an Indigenous ontology, then no sharp distinction need be drawn between sensory and intuitive ways of knowing. I thus agree with Bron Taylor (2010: 22-41) that animists are found among scientists such as animal behaviorists, who focus on sensory data, as well as those, such as religious or spirituality practitioners, who focus

11. One cannot, I think, befriend a Platonic ideal; it is persons who communicate.

on less material aspects of experience. The key to animist relating is a felt experience of connection and kinship and the resulting ethical interac-tions that respect the will and intentions of the other, not the presence or absence of intuitive communication. Imagistic or intuitive communication, if not defining of animism, is nevertheless important for navigating a world cocreated by other-than-human persons. If animism means relating as persons, we need to recog-nize many modes of communication—as many as the varied species use. If my experience is an indicator, one of those modes is intuitive or imagistic communication. Pictures and feelings both may be communi-cated by those who do not speak human languages, and acknowledging this mode of communion is necessary to avoid an anthropocentric defini-tion of communication. Intuitive forms of communication, as dialogical, also provide an immediate experience of being the object of someone else’s knowing, as I was of the birch tree’s knowing. Not only Indigenous knowledge systems cultivate inner ways of knowing. Contemplative practices as well as systematic thinking about them also characterize certain traditions of Western knowing, for exam-ple, Christian monastic traditions. Therapeutic and transpersonal forms of contemporary psychology cultivate contemplative awareness, and contemplative methods of research are now being elaborated in disci-plines as far-flung as art, religious studies, law, environmental studies, the sciences, and other fields (Braud and Anderson 1998; Francl 2009; Zajonc 2009; Wapner 2010). Intuitive research methods are being pioneered in environmental education (Barrett 2009). In philosophy of science, Michael Polanyi’s well-known concept of ‘tacit knowing’ acknowledges that knowing may include more-than-conscious modes of perception (Polanyi 1966). Feminist theory has explored the related idea that emotions are ‘vital to systematic knowing’ (Jaggar 1990: 165). Yet when it comes to intuition in particular, it is the field of nursing that has debated its epistemological standing most openly and thoroughly in the mainstream academic literature (Berragan 1998). I suspect that the practice of relationship (between caregiver and patient), which defines the field of nursing, leads some practitioners to find it necessary to stretch modern notions of epistemology and to begin to recognize and evaluate intuitive means of knowing. 4. Knowledge as Communicated through Story Knowing that arises through relating, whether between a birch tree and a human or between humans, is knowing that is communicated most completely through story rather than principles or systematic theory. Story is paramount because it is a medium that can encompass relating,

feeling, and intuition: story describes experience in all its multivocal and emotionally powerful complexity. I have told the story of the birch tree in several public settings, and each time the affective response in the room is palpable. The story carries a power that abstractions never achieve. More than just relating experience, story reawakens experience, making a past event real again in the present. In this way, says Donald Fixico (Creek and Seminole), story unleashes the spiritual and emotional power of the experience, which is the power to move and be moved—that is, the power of change (Fixico 2003: 26-28). Story initiates listeners into transformation. It lies at the heart of ritual, conveying listeners across the chasm between ‘before’ and ‘after’. ‘Story’, says Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), ‘is at the very crux of healing’ (Hogan 1995: 37). Story revivifies, in particular, a moment of relating; it brings each of the characters to life again in all their ambiguity and internal contradic-tions. Persons are less predictable than objects, their actions never repeated twice in exactly the same way. The knowledge gained through knowing other persons cannot be tested through controls or repeated experiments, and so knowing in an animist mode does not fit neatly into systematic theories or categories. Rather than simplifying and smoothing differences, as abstract principles try to do, story preserves the complex-ity of the characters and their relationships to one another. A narrative does not spell out lessons to be learned. When used as a teaching tool, it preserves the agency of listeners by not imposing mean-ings upon them. It relies on the listeners to draw their own conclusions, to parse the complexity of their own lives to see if any elements of the story apply. If parallels are found, listeners experience them affectively; they may be thrilled or horrified, depending on the tale, but in any case they are moved. In other words, a narrative not only communicates the full personhood of the story’s characters, it also demands the full person-hood of listeners, who must engage affectively as well as intellectually with the story being told. Listeners must be cocreators, bringing their own feelings and conclusions to the narrative and thus contributing to the mutual constructing of reality. ‘The truth about stories’, says writer Thomas King (Cherokee-Greek), ‘is that that’s all we are’ (King 2003: 2). Western scholars too in recent decades have paid increasing attention to story. There has been a turn toward narrative in fields from theology to environmental studies, from psychology to education and ethnogra-phy. In the Western academy the recognition is growing that narrative can effect personal and social change—that to change students’ minds, use fiction or case studies because story laces together inner and outer worlds, and in addition it is just plain fun. My own pedagogical methods

have shifted in recent years toward giving priority to narrative in nearly every presentation and paper (including this one). When a session or paper opens with story, there is still plenty of room for theory, but theo-rizing becomes a reflection upon and explanation of story rather than the other way around. The story typically opens a broad field of inquiry and evokes varied ways of knowing, some of which may be foreclosed when teaching or writing focuses on theory alone. A fruitful line of research in the future might be to compare animist and Indigenous narrative theo-ries with Western ones, especially with regard to their role in knowledge building.

Implications of Animist Knowing Animist ways of knowing owe much to Indigenous traditions, as we have seen.12 Identified historically with Indigenous cultures, knowledge gained through animist methods has long been subjugated knowledge—knowledge devalued as ‘primitive’ by a materialist Enlightenment rationality and today by majorities in most countries around the world. Therefore, engaging in animist ways of knowing can provide a means of decolonizing Western thinking—calling Western ways of knowing into question and critically engaging Indigenous thinking and knowledges. However, I am not interested in recovering some supposedly pure form of ancient knowing. As theologian Wohnee Anne Joh reminds us, ‘Decolonization is not about restoration of some allegedly pure and authentic precolonial way, but, rather, is an imaginative creation of what we might call a new form of consciousness and way of life’ (Joh 2008: 172). Animist ways of knowing contribute to decolonizing because through them we can imagine more vital and reciprocal ways of relating to nature, ways of relating that value agency and intention in beings formerly regarding as ‘things’ and that suggest a path toward, in Latour’s words, ‘a different kind of democracy…a democracy extended to things themselves’ (Latour 1993: 142). I am also not interested in reinforcing the binary opposition between Indigenous and Eurocentric ways of knowing, and so throughout I draw from the thinking of both Western and Indigenous scholars. Animist ways of knowing, as we have also seen, parallel critiques of modernity arising in feminist and other Western discourses. By blurring the border between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers, I hope to render more permeable the boundary between these two cultural paradigms and

12. Animist ways of knowing may also arise independent of indigenous traditions, as in my case.

increase the respectful exchange, possibly also collaboration, between them. An animist framework for understanding my relationship with the birch tree—or any relationships with other-than-human persons—places humans on an equal instead of superior epistemological footing with regard to other creatures. When all ‘things’ are potentially persons, all are potentially knowers and all potentially known. Such a radical revi-sioning of humans’ relationships with the rest of nature has the potential to deeply reorient Western ways of knowing. It is precisely this revolu-tion in ways of knowing that is needed in order to reorient human behav-ior toward more respectful relations with the more-than-human world. Animist ways of knowing suggest that humans are but one extension of Earth’s ability to know. It becomes incumbent on us to learn to take our place in a community of knowers, only some of whom are human.

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