Joni Adamson

The Ancient Future: Diasporic Residency and Food-based Knowledges in the Work of American Indigenous and Pacific Austronesian Writers

This essay explores the ways in which a growing number of indigenous women writers around the world are depicting the links between their ancient cultures and foodways, human rights, and environmental justice. Like their North American counterparts, indigenous Austronesian women in Taiwan are drawing attention to a growing movement that is alternatively being called the “local foods,” “food justice,” or “food sovereignty movement.” Adamson examines how these women are illustrating what is at stake when the relationship between people and the “first foods” they gather and cultivate is put at risk or interrupted. Focusing on Navajo, Tohono O’odham, and Austronesian/Atayal women writers, she discusses how traditional place-based people retain their cultural and food-based knowledges and are practicing what environmental educator Mitchell Thomashow has called forms of “diasporic residency” that offers contemporary peoples models for how to live in a rapidly globalizing and environmentally-changing world. Finally, she examines how these literary works are contributing to the creation of an “ancient future” built on the relationship between people and the plants they cultivate for food and medicine.

Encounter with a Mexican Jaguar: Nature, NAFTA, Militarization, and Ranching in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Telling the Difference Between the Border and the Borderlands: Material Reality and Theoretical Practice Border Shopping: American Studies and the Anti-Nation Literary Postcolonial on the Border Border Studies and Globalization Theory Mapping Latinidad: Language and Culture in the Hispanic TV Battlezone Fan Letters to the Cultural Industries: Border Literature about Mass Media Performing the Border A Monolingual Trade Unionist Goes Across the U.S.-Mexico Border The Dynamics of Grassrotts Organization Working Wilderness: Nature, Narrative, and Rangeland Management in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Las Mujeres Invisibles: La Mujer Obrera Iriquois Border Crossings: Place, Politics, and the Jay Treaty Afterword

Review Essay: Cinema and the Emergence of the Environmental Humanities

Adrian Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), 418 pp,

“Spiky Green Life”: Environmental, Food, and Sexual Justice Themes in Sapphire’s PUSH

38.99 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-55458-905-0. Bron Taylor (ed.), ‘Avatar’ and Nature Spirituality (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), 367 pp,

Encounter with a Mexican Jaguar

38.99 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-55458-843-5.

American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place

While Sapphire’s urban novel PUSH explores many themes, includng poverty, failing public schools, racism, neglect, abuse, incest, sexual discrimination, and welfare reform, this chapter focuses on how each of these national problems can be linked to the global movement for environmental justice. Precious enters the classroom of Ms. Rain, her Harlem adult education teacher, and begins learning the basic literacy skills that will give her independence and allow her to take care of her two children. She then escapes her home, where she has been emotionally and sexually battered by her obese and increasingly emotionally crippled mother, and takes shelter in a half-way house. In her journal, Precious writes about walking through her Harlem neighborhood that is checkered with vacant lots, buildings that are literally crumbling and surrounded by steel fences, and trash and dirty baby diapers strewn on the ground (Sapphire 104-05). This is not the kind of setting that most readers associate with “nature” or the “environment.” Yet, Precious is incredibly aware of her connections to the natural world. She is not a child who has ever been to a summer camp for inner-city kids, or traveled to what she calls the “land of tents and lakes” (126), yet she describes herself as a bird that will not be defeated by abuse: “I see flying,” she writes, “Feel flying. Am flying” (129).

Indigenous Literatures, Multinaturalism, and Avatar: The Emergence of Indigenous Cosmopolitics

Any mention of ranching on the U.S.-Mexico border today is likely to touch off fierce debates over armed vigilante cowboys and their friends in the KKK rounding up undocumented Mexican immigrants who are reportedly delivered to the U.S. Border Patrol or, as some suspect, murdered. In several, widely reported press conferences that have drawn attention to the southern Arizona border region, rancher Roger Barnett and his brother Donald have claimed that they and a loose coalition of ranchers and white supremacists from all over the United States are responsible for having “caught” over two thousand immigrants. According to the Barnett brothers, these coalitions are “prepared to kill Mexicans” who are damaging his and other ranchers’ property and causing harm to the environment.1