Professor Tom Havens recently co-edited a book entitled “Global Indigeneities and the Environment” with Karen. L. Thornber.
Professor Havens writes:
“Global Indigeneities and the Environment is a bold experiment in joining two emerging scholarly fields of inquiry, Indigenous Studies and Humanistic Environmental Studies, in a borderless, indeed global, context. This book presumes that indigenous peoples can be known through their cultural products—in word and song, in the dramatic and visual arts—and that their identities, while primarily local, are often global in implication. It also presumes that indigenous peoples interact closely with their environments, whether for inspiration, sustenance, or exploitation, and that they are especially vulnerable to ecological crises, whether human or nonhuman in origin. Equally, the book presumes that the intersections of Indigenous Studies and Humanistic Environmental Studies can best be mapped with tools from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, such as those on display in this volume. Global Studies in the twenty-first century focus on the connections among world regions through a variety of disciplinary optics, without privileging any one region, language, or culture over others. Global environmental studies include scientific analyses of climate change, anthropogenic ecological damage, and threats to biodiversity of plants and animals on a worldwide scale. Humanistic Environmental Studies address these and similar concerns globally with a focus on human impacts, ranging from medicine and public health to people’s engagement with their nonhuman surroundings. In exploring the many exciting insights offered in this volume, I invite you to begin with Karen L. Thornber’s “Humanistic Environmental Studies and Global Indigeneities”, which serves as a concise yet deep introduction to the rich palette of research included in Global Indigeneities and the Environment. The individual chapters that follow bring new light and fresh methodologies to their respective topics, offering challenging opportunities and novel approaches for further research in the study of indigeneity and the environment on a global canvas.”
