“Like you can tell a river where to go”: Floods, ecological formations, and storied pedagogies of place

Abstract

What emerges when climate-related displacement is positioned in conversation within the relational practices of collective resistance and oral tradition? In this article, I consider climate displacement and community placement through multiple layers within present day ecologies, narrative texts, and longer views of time. Situated within Black ecologies, I apply both archival stories and current research to think beyond plantation logics, with river ecosystems and wetlands, extending concepts of climate change education. The article is layered in place and time through the writing of Louisiana author Ernest Gaines, centering Black epistemologies, oral traditions, and storied pedagogies of place. Relating the ecological roles and intimacies of water in and beyond the colonizing US settler state might unsettle current universalized notions of displacement and climate change education.

Keywords:

• Black ecologies
• climate change education
• displacement
• fugitivity
• Ernest Gaines

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the UnderCommons Constellation (UC2) for generating foresight, support, and intellectual practice in relational ways, propelling various forms of writing, pedagogy, and inquiry through and beyond the Collaborative for Global Studies and Transformative Education. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and the guest editors for engagement with the article. Lastly, I am most grateful to Ernest and Dianne Gaines and the people of the Flood City neighborhood.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 River is capitalized whenever engaging with the Mississippi to emphasize form as a life-sustaining, interrelated body carrying life and the elements necessary for life to continue in continuous cycles with solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of matter.

2 Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of Man (white, heterosexual, Christian, economic being) as overrepresented in form is expanded in her essay.

3 Gaines descriptions reference the fictional town of Bayonne, revealed in several interviews and essays as the present-day town of another name near his childhood home. For example, see Gaines et al. (1990). 

4 Floods are commonly classified based on their probability (e.g., 10-year flood, 100-year flood, 500-year flood).

These classifications are increasingly inaccurate and underpredict the frequency and severity of intensifying hydrological patterns. For more information, see https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/floods-and-recurrence-intervals

5 This paper is related to Scherrer’s ongoing study of oral histories and ecologies in rural Louisiana.

6 See GPS locations from the UC Berkeley Louisiana Slave Conspiracies Project based on interpretation of historical documents and contributions from local experts. More information can be found at https://lsc.berkeley.edu/places.