Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures

Anthropocene debate centers on the start-date and the cause of the geologic Epoch. One argument for the Epoch’s start-date is the “Early Anthropocene,” contending humanity “took control” of Earth systems during the Neolithic Revolution. Adherents contend agriculture contributed to rising carbon emissions and laid the groundwork for societal ills such as colonialism and extractive capitalism. Such a deterministic theory erases centuries of relational agriculture practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This article upsets the narrative of the “Early Anthropocene” that would mark all agriculture and agricultural societies as destructive and extractive, and instead offers embodied Indigenous narratives that view agriculture as a relational system of partnerships between humans and other-than-human beings over centuries. First, I trace the “Early Anthropocene” narrative from its origins with paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman to its contemporary adherents and show how such a theory lines-up with the narrative of the Christianized Biblical Fall. I show that “Early Anthropocene” theorists portray agriculture as society’s “ultimate sin,” wherein humans fall from a hunter–gatherer Eden and must toil to cultivate crops, eventually giving way to colonialism and extractive capitalism, ultimately causing environmental degradation and destruction and leading to a second coming of the hunter-gathering Eden. I then argue against such stories, tracing examples of relational agriculture practiced prior to settler colonization into our contemporary moment by Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Western Apache, Karuk, Coast Salish, and Ponca peoples. Such stories show a pattern of missteps, understanding, and knowledge production between human groups and the more-than-human, rather than the environmental and societal destruction that Early Anthropocene theorists portray as the inevitable end of agricultural societies. This study disproves the agricultural “Early Anthropocene” as a starting point for Earth’s Epoch. It also presents relational environmental understanding through decolonized agriculture on repatriated land as a future method for interacting with the other-than-human environment.

Raja Shehadeh’s “Cartography of Refusal”: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.

Cultural Diversity, Ecodiversity, and Music Education

Diversity discourses in music education tend toward anthropocentrism, focusing on human cultures, identities, and institutions. In this chapter, we broaden conceptualizations of diversity in music education to include relationships between music, education, and ecology: understood as interactions among organisms and the physical environment. Diversity in music education can be realized by attending to the ongoing interrelationships of local geography, ecology, and culture, all of which contribute dynamically to local music practices. We situate our analysis within specific Indigenous North American cultures (e.g., Western Apache, Nuu-chah-nulth, Stó:lō, and Syilx) and associated perspectives and philosophies to shed light on the multiple forms of reciprocity that undergird diversity. Indigenous knowledge, in combination with new materialism and political ecology discourses, can help us come back down to earth in ways of being and becoming that are ecologically sustainable, preserving the ecodiversity that exists and grows in place, forging egalitarian relationships and a sense of communal responsibility, fostering reverence for ancestors along with nonhuman lives and topographies, and cultivating musical practices that are one with our respective ecosystems.