• Making Kin in the Chthulucene: how do indigenous texts use multispecies thinking to address climate change?

In the Anthropocene – documenting land loss, climate change and biodiversity erasure – it has never been more prevalent to understand and preserve relationships between human and non-human species. Multispecies thinking is a critical move away from anthropocentrism to examine how humans and nonhumans are connected in a web of creation, reaction and complexity, which thus has enormous implications on our perceptions of climate change. If we cannot live without the species surrounding us, how must we perceive them to preserve the future?

Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of the Chthulucene (an alternative geological era to the Anthropocene), this essay investigates the power of multispecies thinking by focusing upon texts from indigenous communities. In Zacharias Kunuk’s documentary ’Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change’ (focused upon the Inuit people of Nunavut) and Eden Robinson’s novel ’Monkey Beach’ (set in the Haisla community of British Columbia), both authors demonstrate an understanding of the Chthulucene: advocating physical and spiritual levels of connection between all species. Exploring the slow violence imposed upon non-human species by capitalist, Western and industrialist ideologies, both texts encourage a physical, reciprocal relationship with the environment through sustainable hunting practices.

This essay then investigates the intersection of this relationship with cultural mythology and spiritual perception, where both authors address our human fallibility to reinforce the dangers of climate change. With the Haisla mythology of the b’gwus and the Inuit’s animism of land, we are forced to confront preconceived ontological ideas in favour of liminality, metamorphosis and ‘becoming-with’ the environment. By deconstructing the binaries between animal, human and environment to connect us on a spiritual level, Robinson and Kunuk confront Anthropogenic discourse avoiding the blame on climate change by conveying the emotional tragedy of multispecies loss. This essay thus provides an insight into the necessity of multispecies thinking to preserve and save our planet.