There is no place of nature; there is only the nature of place: animate landscapes as methodology for inquiry in the Coast Salish territory

Abstract

Indigenist scholars have been attending to the research process in ways that highlight the move toward inquiry, the beginnings of the research journey. The energies that animate imagination and inquiry need to be respected and accounted for. If we recognize that place and the consciousness of landscape contain the primordial elements for the Indigenous mind, then it follows that respectful Indigenous research methods should engage with the landscape as the beginning point for inquiry. Centering place and place-ness as containing the ontological meaning of Indigenous methodology is also a way to excavate the specific effects of colonization on Indigenous landscapes and communities. Much Indigenous thought radiates from an invocation of a sentient topography, a land that is aware of human presence. This writing considers what a methodology of place, specifically in the Coast Salish territory, might consist of.

Keywords:

• Indigenous methodology
• place-based pedagogy
• landscape as ontology
• ecological consciousness
• Indigenous epistemologies
• Coast Salish cosmology

Notes

1. Deception Pass was named by George Vancouver in 1792 because he felt that the watery landscape had deceived him. What he thought was a peninsula turned out to be an island. Vancouver named Whidbey Island for his naval officer who found the channel. This history of exploration and colonial naming/mis-naming is just one example of Eurocentric misunderstandings of Indigenous places at even the most basic level. I find it a deep irony that a Coast Salish place of revelation is now named a place of deception. Many aspects of Colonial toponomy in Indigenous landscapes reveal these kinds of dark ironies.