Relatives vs. Resources: Indigenous teachings in the age of radical capitalism (Nicolas Renaud, Concordia University)

To paraphrase Anishinaabe author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, if our Indigenous ancestors were not capitalists, it is not because they were not advanced enough or did not think of it, but because they were advanced enough to choose against it. They made worlds in which they chose against individualism, against upsetting the balance of nature and ignoring future generations; a world tuned to life as a circle and in which animals and plants are relatives. This talk will present examples of Indigenous ecological principles, primarily from ancestral Wendat philosophy. It will address how the forces that currently shape our world are at once deeply adverse to those teachings and proving them right, in a tipping moment of climate crisis and mass extinction. It will also assess the mutations of the settler-colonial project, as some First Nations leaders choose themselves to venture in fossil fuels and articulate it as reconciliation and self-determination.