Small Acts of Care Toward Waste, Weeds, and Wastelands: An Arts-Based Method for Decolonizing Settler Releationship with Land and Tending to Livable Futures

Abstract

This thesis develops a way of confronting current ecological and social crises by working to decolonize settler relationship with Indigenous land through arts-based methods of engaging in small acts of care. A settler living in unceded Mi’kma’ki (the traditional territories of the Mi’kmaw people, colonially known as Nova Scotia, Canada), the author demonstrates that one way to do this is to learn from land and traditional Mi’kmaw knowledge, be responsible to treaty obligations, and make kin with more-than- human relatives. Through a creative and emergent practice, this research explores alternate ways of relating with the more-than-human living world from the destructive roles prescribed by capitalism and colonialism. It does this in three sites of research- creation by performing small acts of care that contribute to building livable multi-species futures from ruins of the Anthropocene present. Plastic marine debris items are understood as artifacts that situate the Anthropocene within the expanses of deep time from which the material emerges and into which it will persist. Understanding plastics as unavoidable and abundant in any possible future worlds, this work explores creative possibilities for attending to these necessary collaborators in building livable futures. Knotweed, a plant capable of breaking through pavement and so invasive that it resists most attempts at its eradication, is considered as a potential resource and collaborator in learning how to act less aggressively on Indigenous land. And in the wasteland of a former forest turned clearcut and then bulldozed and blasted, a creative practice of paying attention to layers of change, remembering that which is being lost, and enacting care in seemingly hopeless situations is a way of mending relationships that form the life-supporting web of the living world. These three iterations of care toward waste, weeds, and wastelands find that decolonizing settler relationship with land and contributing to building livable futures requires an ongoing and emergent practice. They find that there is no end to ways in which creativity is vital to the task of using Anthropocene ruins as the materials with which to mend tears in the fabric of the living world.