The Land is Never Silenced: A Symphony of Reciprocity

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

Through the works of two scholars, the series The Land is Never Silenced: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Literature in Canada has invited us to peel back the surface of the Canadian landscape to discover a dense web of meanings that settler-colonial reason has sought to silence for centuries. As Alice Salion and Carmen Concilio have showed, the land is a sentient interlocutor possessing agency, memory, and a voice of its own in Indigenous literature in Canada.

This shared ontological ground is most vividly expressed through the collapse of boundaries between the body and the land. As we have seen in the Syilx epistemology explored by Salion, the assertion that “the body is Earth itself” is a literal, and ontological reality. The human form is inseparable from rhythms, substances, and land-dreaming capacity of the territory. Similarly, the narratives of the Boreal forest presented by Concilio elevate the tree from a botanical object to a spiritual kin. In this sense, the story of the Golden Spruce (K’iid K’iyaas) is exemplary in showing how the Haida community experienced the felling of the tree as a murder of an ancestor.

These authors address a common political goal but from different points of view. Armstrong’s work is a battle for continuance through language, resisting a “language of tyranny” that seeks to bury breathing forests beneath concrete and steel. Concilio’s analysis introduces yet another layer, that of a “biosemiotic rupture”, where the failure of industrial forestry to read the cooperative networks of Mother Trees highlights the clash between ecophilia and ecophobia.

Ultimately, the series suggests that whether through the “geography of skin” or the “wood-wide web” of the forest, the land has never been silent. It is the colonial project that has been deaf. Cultures should converge on a common ground, replacing the logic of destruction and exploration with that of an interconnection between environment and humans. In this view, human identity is a porous skin, always in dialogue with the watershed and the forest, bearing a spiritual imperative to act not as masters of the land, but as dream and land together.