Finding our place at the table: A more-than-human family reunion

Abstract

Indigenous worlds are and always have been sites of more-than-human (MTH) agency and relationship, despite their largely marginalised status within geographic scholarship to date. The return to cosmologically-informed earth-oriented Indigenous Lifeworlds holds transformative power for mobilising collective action toward life-affirming MTH futures for all. In this commentary, we, as two Indigenous PhD students (Alice, Naxi Chinese and Georgia, Te Whakatōhea Māori), draw on our respective ancestral instructions of kinship to suggest that engaging in MTH geographies is less a ‘discovery’ of new epistemologies and more akin to a praxis of ‘recovery’, similar to showing up to a family reunion. Thinking-with the metaphor of a reunion, we contend that planetary futurity is contingent on Indigenous futurity, and that epistemic freedom is contingent on epistemic justice.