Introduction

Abstract

The volume as a whole explores how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume traces these developments with a unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America—historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity—in order to help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines.