This is the first post in the series The Land is Never Silenced: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Literature in Canada, edited by Sabrina Schettino and Deondre Smiles.

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The environment as a site of profound epistemological contestation in Indigenous literature in Canada is the focus of the new NiCHE series “The Land is Never Silenced: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Literature in Canada.” The series seeks to move beyond the Western conception of environment as mere extractive resource. By drawing on the work of two non-Indigenous women scholars, it examines how Indigenous environmental ethics challenge settler-colonial narratives, proposing a view of environment as subject of law, kinship and resistance. 

Alice Salion (University of Padua) opens the series by examining the work of Jeanette Armstrong, a Syilx writer, academic, and activist. In her works, Armstrong dismantles the Cartesian dualism between body and land, asserting that “the body is the Earth itself.” Drawing on Syilx language, she proposes a vision in which the skin becomes a bridge to the natural world. By inextricably linking language and land, writing becomes thus an act of “continuance,” a restorative process that seeks to repair the colonial fracture between Indigenous identity and territory. There is no environmental crisis separate from a crisis of the self.

Carmen Concilio (University of Turin) moves beyond a romanticized view of nature to expose a fundamental biosemiotic rupture, i.e. the inability of industrial forestry to “read” the complex language of the Boreal ecosystem. She analyses the story of K’iid K’iyaas, a 300-year-old Sitka spruce with a rare genetic mutation that gave it golden needles, considered sacred by the Haida people of Haida Gwaii. Felled in 1997 as an extreme act of protest against the logging industry, the tree was a living relative whose presence helped sustain the spiritual and material balance of the Haida world. Its destruction, Concilio argues, symbolizes the clash between ecophilia – Indigenous relations of kinship and care toward the living world – and ecophobia, understood as the settler-colonial fear, objectification, and domination of environment. The death of the Golden Spruce thus stands as a testament to a system that recognizes the value of singularity only after it has been irreversibly destroyed.

With this series, NiCHE opens a vital space for reflection, prompting us to ask: are we ready to abandon our ‘ecophobia’ and embrace a relational governance with the living world?

Feature Image: “Haze over Woods” by Cory Schadt on Unsplash