Sustainable Power: Decolonising Sustainability Through Anishinaabe Birchbark Canoe Building

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between sustainability and social power, as dramatised within Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) efforts to retain cultural sovereignty and to preserve their intangible cultural heritage. The authors propose moving towards a discourse not of sustainability, but rather of sustainabilities, a term that is more inclusive of the diversity of cultural, environmental, economic, and political strategies that are employed to sustain various lifeways in a multicultural world.

The essay focuses on a specific and ongoing public humanities project, developed by the authors and community partners, that aims to create a new generation of birchbark canoe builders in the Anishinaabe communities of northern Wisconsin. In the conception of this project, the production of a material object serves as a catalyst to perpetuate Indigenous knowledge traditions, decolonisation, environmental management, and cultural heritage. Highlighting the interrelationships and inseparability of environmental, economic, cultural, and political sustainability, the authors contend that sustainabilities necessary to the perpetuation of neocolonial states have been, and sometimes continue to be, destructive to the sustainabilities of Indigenous peoples. What one culture needs to sustain its ways of life may destabilise another culture.

The authors suggest that the advisory role, or the proverbial “seat at the table”, of Indigenous communities inadequately balances the power inequities between colonial and Indigenous societies and that cultural heritage preservation requires improved rights of Indigenous people to implement traditional environmental resource management as policy in co-managed lands.