Patty
I come across the coolest people on Twitter. And one of those cool people is Zoe Todd, who is the fish philosopher, and I love that. And another thing that I love I was going through, we have a questionnaire because you know, of course we do. And one of the things that Zoe mentions in the questionnaire because I asked, you know, what kind of books do you know she would? Or would you like to recommend because I am obsessed with books. And and you mentioned, Aimeé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, among other things. And I love that essay, so very much. It's I, a friend of mine recommended it to me, I'd never been exposed to it before. I don't know why. And I live tweeted my reading of it because it was just like, it's just like phrase after phrase of just this gorgeous language, completely dismembering, you know, white settler ideas of colonialism. And it's just, it's just an it's just an it's just an extraordinary essay.
Kerry
Interesting, it's been brought, I haven't read it yet, but it is on my I just …
Patty
It’s a quick read, what maybe an hour because it's but it's just absolutely brilliant. I feel like and then Fanon, you mentioned him to and everybody I read mentions Fanon and I think it's inevitable I'm gonna have to .. Is he really dense and hard to read? Because that's …
Zoe
It depends which things you read, I think, so I've gone back and started rereading, Wretched of the Earth just to sort of, because it's really focuses on, you know, how to decolonize. And but I think, yeah, that's where I'm going back to, but I mean, obviously, so much of his work has shaped a lot of the current scholarship, especially in the US and around critical race theory and thinking through anti Black racism. And so, yeah, I felt like, I needed to go back and, and re-engage with him, especially now that I have more grasp on sort of, like, the issues that he's talking about. And, you know, I tried reading him in my PhD, and I brought him into my thesis. But yeah, that was like seven years ago. So I have, you know, different questions now, and different things that I want to be responsible to. So yeah, yeah.
Patty
So what are those things? Because you, you’ve been through a lot like you've been pretty open about it on Twitter, about, you know, kind of your, your hopes when you went into graduate school, and then your experiences in the academy. So how, what are you bringing to, you know to Cesaire and Fanon, which really isn't going to be the focus? I'm just curious. Yeah, you know, because we reread things, and they're different when we come back to them because we're different.
Zoe
Yeah. So I came to both of their, you know, like scholarship, at the end of my PhD, when I went to defend my thesis, and it was, it was a very difficult experience, because the work I was doing wasn't really in line with the kind of anthropology that was being done in that space in the UK at the time. But I did have a sympathetic internal examiner. And she said, you wrote a thesis of, like, you wrote an ethnography of colonialism. And so what if we just reorganize this and you open with all the decolonial theory? And I was like, okay, and that gave me the okay to then go and bring in these decolonial scholars, and just sort of unapologetically center that, because otherwise, you know, they were trying to take me down the path of, at the time in the early 2010s. Like, it was really, you know, multispecies ethnography, and like, these, like environmental anthropology, sort of discourses were happening that were, like, potentially useful, but they weren't attending to like racism within the academy. They weren't attending to Indigenous people as theorists in our own right. And so like my work was not fitting into what they thought anthropology was. And so that was how I came around.
And really, it's the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and her work on post humanism, and sort of rejecting how that's been framed by white scholars. That was what brought me in. So I really have to credit her writing. And she's also how I came to start reading Sylvia Winter, like, all, you know, I didn't find very much useful in my training in the UK, but it was the work I started to encounter after, when I started to say like, well, how can I actually be accountable, and then it started reading like Black feminist scholars, and then then everything started to open up. And I also that was when I started engaging with Indigenous legal scholars in Canada as well. And then that was what shifted me. So, anthropology was a hard experience to do a PhD in, but I'm still, you know, it shaped me like, it's, it has undoubtedly, like, set me on the path I'm on.
So I'm not like a, I think I'm at peace with how hard it was. But I'm also so grateful that I got, it's almost like I got to do a postdoc afterwards, just reading all the people that I should have been reading in my PhD, but that they weren't teaching. Because I remember at one point in my PhD saying, like, Well, why aren't we reading Fanon? Someone? I'm laughing out of the discomfort of it, someone was like, “Oh, that stuff's really dated.” And, you know, until that just shows you where white scholars worse, you're go, like, 2013. But I'll tell you, so many of them are now saying like, they're decolonizing anthropology. So. So you know, it all comes, you know, back into sort of, you know, relationship. But yeah, so I'm very grateful like that, … friends. And I'm not pretending that I that I have read all of their work or, but I'm trying really hard to be accountable to their work, and then how their work is, like so many people now really brilliant people are in conversation with their work. So I want to be accountable to those spaces
Patty
you had talked about, and this is this is making me think of something you had talked about before Sara Ahmed, who talks about citation or relationship. And we have talked with, and I'm spacing on her name right now, but a Māori academic [note: we are referring to Hana Burgess]. Remember, the one about doing a PhD without quoting any white men?
Zoe
That’s awesome!
Patty
I found her on Twitter, like she had thrown out this tweet about how she was going to do a PhD, without quoting any white men, and we're like, what? We need to talk to you! And then she kind of introduced me to Sara Ahmed and Sarah's work on citational relationship, which in my own book, I think a lot about because I'm mentioning like, you know, this book and that book and how these authors, and thinking carefully about who I'm citing, you know, because two people say the same similar things. But do I really want to cite the white guy who said it? Or do I want to cite the Indigenous women who say it but a little bit differently? In a different context?
Kerry
So then that can tie in bias when we are doing that? Have you? How, how, how have you been grappling with that, you know what I mean? Even even that piece of it, because of what we are told in society we should be putting down and who should be valued as the ones to be cited?
Zoe
Well, in my own work, I'm, like Sara Ahmed, she wouldn't know this, but she kind of saved my life because she was another one of those people whose work I encountered kind of near the end of that process. And and when I realized, like, I don't have to cite all these miserable old white men, like she was modeling it, you know, and, and that was a real, like, it was the fall of 2014 was a real turning point for me, because I kind of wrote this blog post that went viral about this kind of turn in, in anthropology. And and then it started to get attention. And you know, and some people were really unhappy with it and telling me like, I didn't understand the literature and blah, blah, blah, but somehow I connected with Sarah Ahmed on Twitter in that period. And, and she, you know, like, I don't know her personally, but she kind of gave me the confidence to sort of go back and cite Indigenous people, you know, and like, so I quit trying to impress all these like old white anthropologists and, and that has, like, continued to grow.
And I remember at my thesis defense, like, this is, you know, this is 2016 they leaned in close and they were like, Why would you come all the way over here to like a world class environmental anthropology program, and almost none of the people here show up in your thesis. And I received that like this, like, you know, like, it was like a blow and I remember I like gathered just gathered myself. And you know, everything that led up. Some of it was just so hard and I remember I just like gathered myself and like steadied myself against the table. And I, I kind of leaned in and I spoke very softly. So they had to lean in. And I said, because the experience of working here was so hard. And I came here in good faith, you know, as an Indigenous woman, to work with people who work on, you know, similar topics and with our communities. And it wasn't a good experience. And I didn't see people working with, like, with kindness and reciprocity. And so I resolved that the only way I could honor the stories that my friends and interlocutors shared with me when I was working in their community, in the western Arctic, was to tell those stories in connection with Indigenous thinkers and with Black feminist thinkers. And, and, and I went on and on and on, and they finally were like, okay, okay, okay, we get it.
*laughter*
But they really, like I really had to say it, you know, like that, you know, I wasn't there to just reproduce that program. And like, I, you know, and I don't want to harp on, you know, programs are programs, they reproduce themselves. And you know, and like, it's not like people were malicious, per se, it was just, they were like, fulfilling a role that they thought they had to fulfill, which was like to discipline me and mold me in a certain way. And I wasn't molding in the way they wanted. And I was, you know, trouble.
Patty
You were a killjoy
Zoe
I was a killjoy and a troublemaker.
Kerry
So I just I love this because, one, there's such bravery in that. So like, you just, you just did that, you know. I just love it. That is that, that is when you are deadly, you know what I mean? So when you can show up and just say, leaning in, so that they lean into you, and mention that this experience caused me to have to call in all of the rebels to support but I stand with what I know is true. And to me, that's revolution in its highest form.
Patty
Zoe takes it all on. You did a great read on braiding sweetgrass, to us it was it was it was, it was really, really good. I mean, I love braiding, sweetgrass, Robin’s an apostle, It is a lovely book, you brought up some really good points. Did you take any heat for that?
Zoe
No. And I mean, I tried really hard with that one to be really careful. You know, it's one thing for me to kind of say, like, you know, screw Latour, we don't need to cite him. It's a whole other thing to engage with an Indigenous women's writing. And so I wanted to make sure that I was very thoughtful. And I mean, I love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work like, I've taught it now for five years straight, like every term. And I was actually like, I was really shocked when I had those realizations. Like, I was literally out walking in the forest when I was like, wait a minute, she doesn't cite a lot of other Indigenous scholars, and you know, what's going on structurally, that would, that would cause that. And so I wrote it out as a thread. Almost as much to like, help me think out loud about, like, what is going on there. And it you know, and so, but people have been really generous in their responses.
And so but, you know, it's taught me that, like, well, even the most incredible work still can't do everything. So, so asking and, I think, to have been working more and more in these sort of Western conservation spaces and seeing how, you know, Indigenous work sometimes gets taken up by white biologists, scientists, you know, people who are doing this kind of environmental work, and you realize, like, oh, they really love it, when there's a single sort of person, they can credit, they really love that narrative of like the single hero. And yet, so much of our work is just completely rooted in thinking together all the time in different ways. And like, putting pieces together that may not translate and you know, they can't say I learned this from 70 different people, you know, they're not going to do that.
And that's, that's given me some new things to think about about how to my team and I do our work. We're doing fish fish work and how do I make sure I don't recreate those sort of like erasures in my own citation practice so but it's, you know, I'm not here to say you know, this person did did a bad thing. It just, Oh, wow. Here's, I'm sure she wouldn't have even thought when she wrote the book that it would get taken up the way that it has where it's just this like runaway, you know, sort of hit that everyone you know, everyone, everyone's reading it in Canada and US at least.
Patty
Well, seven years after it was written it hit the has hit the New York Times bestseller. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's the gateway into a new way of thinking.,
Kerry
It was my gateway. I definitely know, when we started the podcast, sorry, sorry, when we started the podcast, you brought that book to my attention Patty, Braiding Sweetgrass, and it was my gateway in to understanding. So absolutely, I can see that happening.
Patty
It's just when you know when these things are gateways and then people stop there.
Zoe
Yes.
Patty
And that's I think where you were talking about because when I think about citation or relationships in my book, you know, in, you know, what I what I'm writing, I'm, I'm thinking about my own limited knowledge. And the fact that I'm quoting all of these other people, that I'm referencing all of these other people, is a recognition that I don't know this stuff all on my own. I mean, that's why we do citations, right? Because we don't know. And so what I want people to do is what I do, you know, when something particularly grabs me and I, they've cited it, then I go and I pick up that book.
Zoe
Yeah.
Patty
And so that way, my book becomes a gateway to other books.
Zoe
Yes.
Patty
And then I just joined substack, because of course I did. Because one thing that I really enjoy is putting books in conversation with each other. And I did that with We Do This Til We Free Us and Border & Rule, I read them alternating chapters, and then wrote an essay on it and had them in conversation with each other. You know, so that citational relationship and thinking about who we're quoting, it's, that's what we're doing, we're putting these things in conversation with each other, seeing what happens, and then and then developing something new.
And then this is kind of my segue into your essay on fish. Fish, Kin, and Hope because, although, you know, citing traditional Indigenous knowledge is getting a little bit more, you know, recognized. You start with that. That's what that's what, that's what that essay starts with, with Leroy, and I'm just gonna read it because I I just I love it. I love it so much. And it I had to stop and have a good think. So you're citing Leroy Little Bear. And he says:
We as humans live in a very narrow spectrum of ideal conditions. Those ideal conditions have to be there for us to exist. That’s why it’s very important to talk about ecology, the relationship. If those ideal conditions are not there, you and I are not going to last for very long. Just text Neanderthal. Ask the dinosaurs. What happened to them? We asked one of our elders, ‘Why did those dinosaurs disappear?’ He thought about it for a while and he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t do their ceremonies.’
– Leroy Little Bear
And I loved that. Because it made me think about dinosaurs, they’re ancestors really, related if we're all related, they’re ancestors of a kind. And now we're putting them in our cars. And that's not very respectful. And you kind of get into that in the essay. So can you talk about a little bit because that was super intriguing.
Zoe
You're having a very similar reaction that I did when I you know, when a friend had seen him, give that talk live, and she wrote me and said, Zoe, as soon as that's online, you have to see it, you're going to love it because he brings up fish in that talk. And he said, I remember there's like because I almost haven't memorized I've watched that talk so many times now. It's like my, it's my origin story as a thinker like Leroy Little Bear has shaped me so deeply. And I've never met him. And he's like, evolved with scholars I can ever meet. I really hope I get to meet Leroy Little Bear because he's just, he's so brilliant. And, and so yeah, and in that talk, he talks about like, you know, nobody's talking about the fish a lot at this conference yet. And I was like, yes, yes, we have to talk about the fish.
But from that part of the talk, where he's talking about the dinosaurs like that, that, that sort of just that part of the talk really turned my thinking on its head, especially because I'm from Alberta. I'm from Edmonton. I have settler and Indigenous family in you know, from and in Alberta. My mom is a white settler. And my dad is Métis. And I grew up immersed in the oil economy of Alberta. And it's it's inescapable. It's just everywhere. It's everything the Oilers, you know, just going to university in the early 2000s. And in the engineering building, you know, all these rooms are sponsored by like, oil and gas companies and oilfield services companies and so that that sort of like what he shared about the dinosaurs and ceremonies completely shifted, it refracted my worldview, completely.
And I started to think about, wait a minute, like in Alberta, we live in this place that is full of dinosaur bones, because just just the way the geology has has worked and and we burn fossil fuels, like our whole economy turns on this, and what does that mean for our responsibilities? And so yeah, that that kind of led to some, you know, now I'm thinking through that in another piece that I've submitted that hopefully will get past peer review. I sort of asked some my deeper questions about like, what does that mean for us? Like, What responsibilities does this invoke for us? And I brought I bring in the work of Métis scholar Elmer Ghostkeeper. And then also a story that Tłı̨chǫ writer Richard VanCamp, shares about, that an elder shared with him with permission, a story about a trapper who became a cannibal, I won't use the name. And, and that, that there's sort of elders have speculated that maybe the oil sands in Alberta, if they continue to dig, they might uncover what was buried there. And that something was buried there to protect people. And so all these things, I sort of bring them together in this this other paper that I hope will get published.
Yeah, but you sort of had the same train of thought that I did, or was like, of course, their ancestors, like, they lived before us. And, and I had never thought of them as like, political agents, or like, you know, having their own worlds where, where they would have, of course, they would have had ceremonies, you know, like it just, yeah, that was a really transformative moment for me as an urban raised Métis person living drenched in a wheel, Alberta, and I've never thought about, you know, the interior lives of the beings that had come, you know, millions of years before.
Patty
Yeah, I’m just thinking, Kerry’s like I have a grandson, he's got dinosaurs everywhere.
Kerry
It really is an interesting thought when you said now we put them in my car in our cars. I was like, wait, wait. Yeah, we do like, yet again, to me, what brings that brings up is the interconnectivity, the interconnection that exists between all of us, and how, you know, our, our ancestry, our relatives are from all different shapes, forms, and how and what I find is interesting, even thinking Zoe that you come from this Anthro, this anthropological kind of background, even thinking about those ancestors of ours, who might have been two footed, who didn't make it through, you know, and just this, this realm of how when our worldview stays polarized on this moment, but yet, we don't take into account all the gifts and connections that have come from that path. It's a really interesting space, like my brain is going. And I never thought about thanking the relative dinosaurs, because you guys are the things that fuel our cars. And also then to juxtapose against that, I think about how, once again, the system has used that against us as well. Do you know what I mean? Like, we know, there's so many things happening, because we put gas in our cars.
Zoe
Yeah,
Kerry
so much dissension in the world, and how we've all been displaced in the world, because of this gas, we want to put in our well, we didn't necessarily want to put it in. But that's just how things kind of rolls you know.
Zoe
Yeah. And I wonder about like, do they, if they can feel through the vast sort of like stretches of time? Like, do they feel sorrow for how we're treating them? Or do they feel sorrow for us that we don't understand them as ancestors, or don't think about them as ancestors in that sense. And so in this paper that I recently submitted, I also sort of argue that, like, science claims, Dinosaurs, dinosaurs as a kind of ancestor, in that like, sort of the common ancestor of humankind, or like, you know, that we stretch back to these ancient beings. But I argue that they they claim a kind of ancestry without kinship.
And so and that's a very like white supremacist way of framing relationships is that, yes, I can claim this dinosaur or this being but I don't have any obligations to them. And I get that, you know, I bring in Darryl Leroux and Adam Gaudry, and other who talked others who talk about white people claiming and did Indigenous ancestry contemporarily without kinship, where they sort of say like, well, yes, I have an ancestor from the 1600s. Ergo, you know, thereby I am, you know, you have to honor me. And as I, I try to tease that out. And that's where I sort of, I look to Elmer Ghosttkeeper, who talks about a shift in his own community in northern Alberta, between the 60s and 70s, where when he was growing up, you know, as a Métis person in that community, I think he's from Paddle Prairie.
And they, you know, he describes how they grew up working with the land, making a living with the land. But then when he came back in the 70s, and oil and gas, like, specifically gas exploration was happening, he found himself working in heavy machine operating work, he found himself work making a living off the land, and that just that shift from with and off, shifted, how he was relating to this land that give him life and his family life. And as he just so he did his master's at the University of Alberta anthropology and his thesis is really beautiful. And then he turned it into a book. And I have to credit colleagues at the University of Alberta, including my friend, David Perot, who turned me towards Elmer’s work and also just like, really beautiful, and I love getting to think with Indigenous scholars and thinkers from Alberta, because it's not really a place. You know, I think when a lot of like people in other parts of the country think of Alberta, there's reasons they think about it as like, a really messed up place. And like that, that is a fair assessment of the politics and the racism, I'm not excusing that. But there's also so much richness there, like Alberta is a really powerful place. And, you know, and it is where all these dinosaurs are and, and this incredibly dynamic, like land and water and, and so, I'm just really grateful that that's where I get to think from and I don't like that's Catherine McKittrick, you know, asks people, where do you think from? And where do you know, from? And so, my answer to that question is, you know, I know from Edmonton, which it's been called, Stabminton, Deadminton you know, it has a lot of, you know, negative connotations that have been ascribed to it, but it's home to me, it's on the North Saskatchewan River. It's, I love it. I don't live there right now, but I love it.
Patty
Identity is a poor substitute for relations. That's, you know, that's what you're talking about when you're saying, you know, they recognize science recognizes them as kind of ancestors, you know, creatures that predated us and from whom were descended. But only or, well, they're descended in a kind of way.
Zoe
Yeah,
Patty
as but as progress, right as part of that linear progress. So there's no relation. There's a there's an identification without relationship. And then I was thinking of kind of a my own experience. Because I had identity without relationship, growing up. I was the brown kid in the white family. My mom moved me south I had no contact with my dad's, you know, with my Ojibwe family. And for me, that was very impoverishing, this identity without relationship, because other people identified me as native. You know, they looked at me and they saw a native person. But I grew up in Southern Ontario in the early 70s. Nobody, I didn't know there were reserves within a two hour drive. I had no idea. I thought all the Indians lived out west somewhere. No idea. And so to me, that felt like impoverishment. And so when people make those choices, and they're choosing these relationships, the you know, this, these identifications without relationship. It's like, why would you choose impoverishment, but they don't, they don't feel it like impoverishment, because the relationship is one of exploitation. What can I What can I extract from them by way of knowledge, by way of oil, by way of plastics, by way of, you know, learning off the land instead of with the land, which kind of brings me to anthropology, because it really confused me about you was that you study fish, but you're an anthropologist. And so that's obviously a whole field of anthropology, because I always thought anthropology was like Margaret Mead studying, you know, people living in shacks, and you know, kind of imagining what the world would have been like for, you know, these Stone Age people who somehow magically exist in the present day. So they’re 21st century people, not Stone Age people. But just like, that's kind of I think, and I think that's where most people go when they think of anthropology. So if you can please correct us.
Zoe
Well,white anthropology is still very racist. White anthropology is still like, it's trying. I said,
Patty
I How is anthropology fish?
Zoe
So the long story worry is that I started in biology. And you know, it's a 2001. And it was not a space in 2001, that was quite ready for Indigenous knowledge yet. And I struggled. So like I was really good at science in my in, in high school. And so everyone was saying you are a brilliant young woman, we need more women in biology and in the sciences, you're going to be a doctor, like they were pushing me that direction. So I was like, I guess I have to do a science degree. And I went in really excited because I I'm really fascinated by how the world works. But the way they, they were teaching biology, I'm gonna give them some credit, I think things have shifted and 21 years or 20 years, but the way they were teaching biology at that time, you know, half the class was aiming to get into med school, you know, and the other half was maybe, like really excited about like a specific topic that they were going to spend, you know, their time working on. And, but you know, it's just that experience of like, 600 person classes, multiple choice exams, like, that's just not how I work. And I now like, in my late 30s, understand that, like, Oh, I'm ADHD, and there's a very strong indication that I'm also autistic. And so like, those learning modalities were just not working for me, and definitely not working for me as Indigenous person. So I was sort of gently. I had taken an anthro elective in the first year that I got, like a nine. And it was on a nine point system at the University of Alberta at that time. And I like to joke that my first my second year GPA was a four, but it was on the nine point system.
*laughter*
Patty
Looking for nines is that you're trying again,
Zoe
it was, I was not I mean, it was a little higher than four, but I wasn't doing great. So a mentor who was working in his lab, Alan Thompson, he said, he just sat me down one day, and he said, you know, you're really passionate about people, is there a way you could do a minor that will allow you to finish this degree, but allows you to explore those sort of social aspects. And so we looked at my transcript, and I done really well in Anthro. And so I said, Well, what about doing an anthro minor. And so I did. And that was actually a real turning point for me, because it took a class with someone named Franca Boag, who's who's teaching at MacEwan University now. And it was the anthropology of science. And it was, I think, shortly after, like the Socal affair, where he like that, that scholar submitted, like a sort of fake paper to a postmodern journal, and he got it published. And then he revealed that he had, like, it was fake.
And a, it's like the science wars had just just kind of wrapped up. And so I came in, and like 2014, I was like, what? Science Wars? But I but that was where I learned for the first time, you know, that there was a whole field of study of like science and technology studies, that was questioning science. And so we're reading like Thomas Kuhn and all that, you know, and like these people, and that's where I first encountered Latour, and, and I realized, like, wait a minute, I work in a lab. I'm one of these human, you know, humans shaping science, and it opened doors for me. So not that anthropology was a perfect place to go, because there was still, like, we were still forced to take like physical anthropology classes that still reify like physical characteristics. And I mean, at least they were teaching the problems in that in that and they were, you know, we learned about eugenics. And you know, so like, at least they were critiquing it, but I'm not here to defend anthropology in any way.
So to fast forward, I found myself doing a PhD in anthropology, mainly because it was a space that appeared to be open to doing kind of like Indigenous work. It's debatable whether that was actually the case, my PhD, it was a really hard experience, but it, you know, it opened certain doors for me. And there was a turn in the last 20 years in anthropology towards something called like, multispecies ethnography. And it became very trendy for anthropologists to work on animals. And so I just happened to kind of be there at the time that this movement was very, very popular. And so when I said I wanted to work on fish, people were like, absolutely, totally sure. I don't think they necessarily expected me to go the direction I would, where I was also like, and also anthropology must be dismantled or white anthropology must be dismantled. You know, like, they were hoping I would just do a nice little phenomenological study of the fishiness of a place and, and, you know, be done with that. And, but then, you know, I really went in some different directions, but I can't complain.
Like I've been so lucky. I've been funded, people have supported me. You know, who may have gone on to regret it because it wasn't quite what they thought they were getting. But I've just been really fortunate to connect with amazing people through that experience and to connect with amazing, like Indigenous scholars as well. And so the answer is like I, I practice anthropology, but my projects, everything we're working on is deeply interdisciplinary. So we have like, journalists and architects and scientists and community leaders. And so I take what's useful. This is what Kim TallBear often says, like, she takes what's useful from anthropology, but she leaves the rest. And so you know, and I really take that to heart because she does brilliant work. And she's been able to kind of take some aspects of it that are useful. But I don't I, you know, I haven't read Margaret Mead. I have had to teach some, you know, some critiques of her and my classes. But, yeah, like, I'm not, I'm not someone who would like die to defend anthropology as a discipline. But there's some really cool anthropologists doing covert, the some really cool like the Association of Black anthropologists in the US, like in the American anthropology Association, like there's so many cool anthropologists, who were critiquing and dismantling the harmful aspects of the discipline. So I don't want to throw it all away, because I do think there's really cool stuff happening. But yeah, so to answer your question, I kind of just fell into it. And then, you know, there were aspects of it that were useful that felt less harmful than biology. But I've come back around to working much more closely with the sciences, again, just from a very different angle.
Patty
What’s fish anthropology?
Zoe
Well, I would say like in, like, so I like my PhD work was in the community of Paulatuk in the Northwest Territories. And I spend time hanging out with fishermen, just learning about how they've been applying their own laws to protect fish in their homelands. And so. So in that sense, like, the thing that anthropology offers, that some other disciplines don't, is just, it affords a lot of time to just hang out and listen to people tell their own stories. And it really values that, it values that experience of like people telling stories in their own words, and spending time with people, you know, working in, you know, the context that they work in. And so those aspects of it, I think, can be helpful if they're approached, you know, thoughtfully, and with a very clear understanding of the harms of the discipline and a decolonial, you know, need for decolonization.
But yeah, like I I think part of the reason it's so weird to keep rehashing my PhD is I hope that nobody from that program listens. I mean, I have long since forgiven them, I have, I have, like, you know, spiritually forgiven them. I have no, I have no anger. But I think that, like, where was I going with that? I think that yeah, there's aspects of it that can be very useful. And, and just the opportunity to spend time with people is really valuable. And one of the things that was hard about my thesis, I think that's why they struggled with it was that I wasn't just doing something that was legible to them, I was also going into the archives and looking at like, you know, 60 years worth of correspondence between the RCMP and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and other government and church actors who are talking about, you know, concerns about, you know, the fur trade economy had collapsed in the region in the 1930s.
And they were worried about how people were going to get food. And then fish become this really important role in that story, because people were able to continue fishing, even when other species were, you know, periodically scarce. And an elder that I had worked with, through that project named Annie had repeatedly reminded me that she said, You never go hungry in the land if you have fish. And each time she shared that I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then this other aspect of it would unfold, you know, as we were out on the land, or even years later, I think back to that I'm like yet, this is why we have to protect fish, because they're one of the species that has been in abundance since time immemorial, even for at least in the Arctic, and also in the prairies. And, and for them to be in decline right now in the ways that they are is really alarming.
And so Leroy Little Bear points that out as well. He's you know, they, they've survived longer than the dinosaurs longer than Neanderthals. Fish have been around as well, about half a billion years, but they're barely surviving white supremacist colonial capitalism. So that should tell us something that if something can survive all these other cataclysms, but it can't survive this, that something. So, I don't know if that answers the question about, like, why anthropology? How did the fish fit in, but that sort of the fish you know, I had done this very quantitative research in my masters or we did interviews and, and surveys and sort of asked questions about how people were navigating different, you know, economic and social impacts on their harvesting lives. And it was through that experience that people Paulatuk friends were taking me out on the line to go fishing. And, and, and so women in the community said, you know, you know, not a lot of people have asked us about our fishing lives, and we have a lot of knowledge. And so I, you know, when I started my PhD, I asked, you know, would you be interested if I did a project where I spend time with you, you know, learning about your fishing lives? And and they said, Yes, of course. So, so it started out actually as a project on women and fishing, but then it grew into this project on law. And it really, that was sort of like where it landed.
Patty
Neat. That's, that's really interesting. So, because you had made a comment, centering Indigenous legal orders, and you've talked about this, too, but Indigenous law, can you just explain that a little bit?
Zoe
Yeah, so um, so two of the big biggest sort of people who are working on these topics in Canada are Val Napoleon and John Burrows, and they're at the University of Victoria. And, you know, when I was nearing the end of my PhD, and I was still struggling to sort of frame the stories that people were sharing with me within the literature that was available to me in we call it North Atlantic anthropology. So like UK, US, Canada, anthropology. And, and then I heard John Burrows, give a talk, where he talked about the dynamic but rooted aspects of Indigenous law. And it just like blew my mind. Like I just was like, of course, Indigenous people have law like I had been so like, my mind frame was so colonized that, like, I couldn't see the law around me. And Val Napoleon wrote a paper in 2007, that basically describes the same experience for some of her students who sort of like when she's taught teaching, when she was teaching Indigenous law. Some students were really struggling to see the norms and protocols that we use in our communities as law.
And when I started to read her work, and John's work, and Tracy Lindbergh and other people's work, I realized, like, oh, all of these protocols that people were talking about within my PhD research are law and I so I had conversations with friends about like, you know, does it make sense for me to talk about this as law? And my friend said, Yes. And, you know, in applying to his own harvesting life, and then I realized, like, wait a minute, I also grew up with Indigenous law as a Métis person, and I didn't understand that that's what it was. And and I'm not saying I fully understand what Métis law looks like, because I think there's just a lot of questions that I can't answer, but, you know, Val, Tracy, I was at a conference where Val, Tracy Lindbergh, Patti LaBoucane-Benson, John Burrows and a whole bunch of other people presented. And Patti LaBoucane-Benson and Tracy Lindbergh had talked about Cree law, and how you know, through what they've been taught from elders and knowledge keepers, they work with, like one of the first laws in Cree law, at least on the prairies is love. And then everything sort of built on that and and any mischaracterizations are my own. So, I apologize to people who have far more teachings than me. And I only know a little tiny bit.
But those were experiences that really shaped me because I started to understand well, of course, like this, and Val’s work has really focused a lot also on stories, and how stories contain law and like, you know, instructions and guidance and, and that just that completely shifted how I was thinking about the work I was doing in Paulatuk and the stories that were shared with me. And it has gone on to shape. How I think about the work my team and I are doing now about how do we, how do we shift public perceptions of our responsibility to fish just sort of collectively, like Indigenous and non Indigenous communities in Alberta, especially where we're dealing with .. almost every fish population in Alberta is in trouble in one way or another. And so, you know, one of the questions we were asking in our work is, well, what would it look like if we, if we really focused on fish stories, both Indigenous and non Indigenous and what if we and this is a concept we get both from Robin Wall Kimmerer, but also from Kutcha Zimbaldi where we say we want to re-story fish futures. We want to re-story fish habitats through stories. And you know, and what I've learned from Val Napoleon and all these other amazing thinkers is that of course, stories are components of law. She cites Louis Byrd, who, who says stories are good to think with. And that is a sentiment that other people have sort of echoed it, like Julie Cruickshank has said that and Dell Hymes all these people, you know, stories are good to think with. And so that's what we're trying to bring into our work on protecting freshwater fish in Alberta and beyond, is, well what stories do we tell about fish and, and then when we start from that place of telling stories about fish, you start to sort of learn little bits about like, different experiences people are having, and and when you bring those stories together, then you're having really interesting conversations of like, what what do people in Edmonton experience of the fish, they may not see them, because so many populations have been impacted by urban development. And in the 1950s, Edmonton still put raw sewage in the North Saskatchewan.
And so, you know, I don't know if I’m making sense. So but for me, Indigenous law, you know, dying from the work that folks that you Vic and Alex are doing, Val Napoleon sort of says law, I wish I could pull the quote directly, but there's a series of videos that they've produced for the Indigenous Law Research Unit. And, and one of them, Val gives us really elegant explanation of what law is, and see if I can, if I can paraphrase it from memory, you know, it's sort of to the effect that law is the way that we, like think together and reason together, and work through, like problems together. And so that's something we're trying to capture in our work is how do we work through, you know, the experience of being people together?
Patty
Well, Kerry, that makes me think of like, because it Kerry’s Caribbean, you know, and you know, fish.
Kerry
I'm so funny, you brought that up, because that was exactly what I was thinking now one of my native islands, my father is from Barbados. And so we have the migration of the flying fish, it's actually one of our national dishes,
Zoe
Amazing
Kerry
And, you know, I that is such an integral part of who we are as Bajan people, and, and just what is our space of, of existence, like the migration of the flying fish comes through, and it used to set even the patterns for how we existed I remember my grandmother of my grandfather used to fish but he was more like a, it was more a hobbyist thing for him. But he'd go out onto the waters early, early mornings, right? And, or they go down by the fish markets, and then gather the fish and come home, come back to the house. And then we would all the women in particular, we would all get together and clean and you know, have our conversations around this frying fish.
And then we make like what we call cou cou, which is our national dish. It's like a cornmeal dish, which is very much a something that Africans brought over as slaves. And we make this corn meal that you eat with it, and you'd eat cou cou and flying fish. And so when you when we think about the numbers and the scarcity that is happening, because I know even the migration patterns are starting to shift in Barbados. And it's not in the same abundance, you know, our oceans are being affected all over the world. And I had never, you really brought it home to me. The reality that the fish have survived, you know, cataclysm, they've, comets have hit the Earth. destroyed, you know, atmospheres, and fish have survived. And yet, that is a humbling thing to sit and think that we are in such a fragile point in our existence, that if our fish go, I had never even put it into that perspective until it well, I've thought it but you really brought it home for me. And even for me that the fragility of the patterns of our lives. You know, when I think Barbados I immediately think frying fish, like the two are synonymous for me. And all of that is shifting and changing in the way that we're in our experience now. So, yeah, it's humbling in a lot of ways.
Patty
Well and the eel. I know we talked, I've talked with Aylan Couchie. She's doing some work. She was doing some work on eels and how they used to migrate from the Caribbean. Up down this up the coast down the St. Lawrence Seaway up the Trent water system all the way to Lake Nipissing. And now of course with you know, with the with the canals and the way things are closed off, that connection so the eel features in artwork and stories all the way from Nipissing to the Caribbean. And just the ways that connects us even though we may not have had contact in any other way, the eels did, the eels carried our stories with them. And there's just yeah, it's just really sad. So I just think it's really cool that you're, you know, you're working with on stories there are stories about fish, and I saw how excited you got
Zoe
I love fish stories! *laughter*
Kerry
I was just leaning into that. See how much of a passion it is for you. And it's delightful. It absolutely is delightful to see you just like the people weren't listening to the podcast, she lifts up. Space, our zoom call was lit up with the effervescence of Zoe as she is talking about this. And it's that passion, though, that I also want to mention, because I think that's the stuff that saves this space. I think it's you talking about it with that kind of exuberance with that kind of passion that is actually caused me to be interested in ways that I might not have been before. And it's only I think, with this interest with us calling this to light that maybe we can shift what is happening because as you said, this is gonna affect all of us in the long run.
Zoe
I don't know that I want to be on a planet without fish. Like, because that is a that is the
Kerry
Could we even be on a planet without fish.
Zoe
And I don't know, I don't know, that was like humans have never existed without fish fish have existed without us. We haven't existed without them. And yeah, neither, you know. And it, there's a there's a lot of people who are really passionate about fish. Like I am inspired by my late stepdad who was a biologist who was just deeply passionate about fish. And, you know, it's like, there's a lot of really cool people working on these things. But for you know, any of those other people, it's like, it's worms or snakes or bees, or for me, it's fish, like I just, you know, and I love hearing fish stories like now it's like, Oh, I've never seen a flying fish, you know, and I, they, I bet they're amazing. I bet they’re so amazing.
Kerry
They're really long. Their fins look like literally like wings, and they're long and they're kind of majestic, right? They're tiny, they're not that big, but their fins take up like double the space of them. And they're really cool, when you see the whole thing, and then we used to like cut them open, and then they would be seasoned up, they taste really delicious to kind of a meaty fish. There's, as I said, like, with even that conversation, look at all the memories, I'm thinking of my grandmother and being in her kitchen, and her directing me on to how you know the precision cut, to make to be able to skin it perfectly to pull the spine out so that the fillet stayed together. And you know, the recipe that went into sometimes you because sometimes you would bread them. And so you know that all of those memories and, and even that with it, sometimes we'd eat split peas, that we would that would be harvested from the garden and just peas from the garden that we would have grown. And so all of those memories get tied into that space of when I'm thinking about these fish, and what it meant to the enormity of the experience of my grandmother who is now an ancestor. You know, it's, it's important because it is more than just our survival. These are our memories, these are our histories, these are the things that have created the very space of who we are as humans, as relatives, as families, as mothers, as fathers, our societies. And I just I just I'm recognizing how interconnected and yet fragile those connections are. We truly have to respect our fish relatives. They created so much of who I am today.
Patty
Well, and that's that relationship right just you know, going back to the thing with the Kim had said that identity without relationship is just such an empty impoverished thing. You know, we go to the grocery store and you know, and it's it's just so thin when you when you, you know when you really think about it and dig into it and you know, and you spent that time hearing their stories and seeing how the I don't love that they said, Nobody asks us our stories. They're like, Hey, would you like me to ask you and they’re like,yeah!
Zoe
All the scientists are coming like at that time now more fishing work has happened, which is great, like people need to like. Everyone should be able to do fish work. But at the time, like most of the climate change scientists and the wildlife biologists who are coming up, we're really focused on like the megafauna, the charismatic megafauna, so they're coming up, and they want to know about polar bears and care about and like, all of those are incredibly important species. So I'm not here to diminish that. But, you know, the thing that was exciting about fishing and I think I've tried to remember the name, there was a woman who had written a, like her PhD thesis. You know, before me at Aberdeen and she worked in the eastern Canadian Arctic in Nunavut. And you know, her finding was that everybody wishes. It's not just then you know, it's kids it's it's, it's an intergenerational like, joyful thing that people participate in, in, in the, in Nunavut. And that was very true in Paulatuk, as long as still is like fishing is just a really big part of community life. And I was so lucky to get to spend time, you know, and I really have to credit my friends Andy and Millie Thrasher, and their family who took me out fishing, through that whole time that I was there and took me to lots of their favorite fishing places, and I just got to spend time with them, like their family. And it was a lot like spending time with my dad, my Métis dad teaching me how to fish you know, on small lakes in Alberta, much smaller lakes much different and it was in Paulatuk is so cool, because like, I write about this in one of my articles are like Millie really took my nalgene just, like, dipped it into one of the lakes and was like, Here, here's some water, just that like that incredible experience of like, well, I can just drink straight out of this lake. Like, just the difference in, you know, what that feels like? And that that's the experience people used to have all the time. You know, and so in different places, so I just, yeah, I'm really thankful for it. You know, I just, that was a really amazing experience and, and
Patty
This is bringing to mind I look, I listened to the Media Indigena podcast. And a lot a while ago, Candis Callison was talking about really missing the salmon from home. That because she's Tahltan from Northern BC, and she was talking about really missing the salmon from home that, you know, it tastes different, because it eats differently, right. And so what it eats and where it lives affects how it tastes. And salmon isn't just salmon. And I mean, like we live in wine country, right. And so we know that the wine from the one part of the region tastes different from the exact same grapes grown in a different because it’s digging its roots into different stuff. And so and so it tastes, but it was just that anyway, that just called it to mind what she she was talking about that these kind of intense ways that we can be connected to and shaped by place.
Zoe
Yes,
Patty
how connected it all is, and how important that is a really, really important that is, and we forget that we've got, I mean, people in the chat are just really loving you Zoe..
Zoe
Oh, really doesn't even look good. So I'm like, and the thing that, you know, I think fish can be sites of new memories as well like that. If we work together across many different communities, like fish still have a lot to teach us collectively. You know, my dad has memories when he was a little boy growing up in Edmonton, that it was, it was who he remembers fishing growing up was his friend who was from a Chinese Canadian family who had set lines for suckers, right by the high level bridge. And so, you know, here's my dad, a Métis kid, and his memories of fishing in the city are from Chinese Canadian family. And you know, that kind of like exchange of knowledge in ways that maybe like white settlers weren't really paying attention to who was making relations with the rivers and there's a lot of stories there that I think haven't been explored necessarily about. And so there's I'm forgetting his name. But there was this really cool urbanist in Edmonton who was doing a cool project where he he's from the sort of like the Chinese community in Edmonton, and he was connecting with elders, because both Chinese immigrants and Indigenous community members in Edmonton both relied on the sturgeon and other fish in the river. And so he was collecting stories across both Indigenous and immigrant experience from the like early 1900s, of how people engaged with the river.
And so, you know, I am also very, I, you know, I think that there's restorying to be done to that displaces the white settler imaginary, that they are the voice of the fish, that actually so many other communities also have relationships with fish, and that those stories don't get centered and a lot of the like conservation science and other narrative, you know, there is that real dichotomy like the you were talking about duality versus dichotomy, I was catching up on some of your tweets today. And you're really good points about. So I want to make sure I use the right terminology, that I'm not doing the conflating that you were pointing out, but that, you know, there's a, that settler Indigenous duality, or dichotomy gets emphasized in a lot of conservation work in Canada, to the exclusion of Black histories and other histories that are really important to understanding who has relationships to the water, who has relationships to the fish. And so, yeah, I just think that that's another reason like, fish stories are so exciting to me, because everyone has some kind of story, whether it's beautiful stories, like Kerry’s, or, you know, some people don't like fish and don't have a positive relationship to it. And that's okay to like that. You know, that. But that fish, I keep, you know, instead of say, like, one of my little tag lines for our work is like every part of Canada is a fish place. Just to remind, you know, the government that they can't, they can't, you know, sort of recklessly harm fish habitats, you know, in the name of economic development that, you know, like, the fish shaped this country, you know, yeah, yeah.
Patty
This has been so interesting. Like really surprisingly, interesting because I find your Twitter threads so interesting. And I was really intrigued by an anthropologist who studies fish. That made no sense. Now I understand how those two things go together. And now I'm kind of like, well, of course that goes together.
Kerry
I definitely got to follow you on Twitter. I I need to know can you shout you out for anybody else who's listening?
Zoe
@ZoeSTodd
Kerry
Dr. Dr. Fish philosopher. Yes.
Zoe
I do have a doppelganger named Zoe H. Todd. And I just have to give her a little credit. Because she did her degree at Carleton. Right. She graduated right when I was hired. And then she moved to Edmonton when I moved to Ottawa, and so we, and sometimes she works. I think she's currently working for PBS in the US. And people will email me and be like, you've did such an incredible story on the news. And I'm like, It's not me. It's the other Zoe Todd. She's brilliant, follow her.
Patty
I just really feel like this was an intro to
Kerry
absolutely,
Patty
You know, to the work that you do and to the things that the important things about the ways that the waters connect us and the fish and I mean, I'm thinking about all the memory that fish nation holds. Right, like right from, you know, I read Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumb, which is fish, it's mammals. But still, they're in water. And, you know, the relationships and the memories that they hold. Some of these beings are so old, right? Like they, they're 200 years old, some of these whales and you know, what kind of memories of us are they holding and, you know, just these extraordinary lives and stories. And so I just, I'm just so this was just so much fun. You're just ..
Kerry
I absolutely loved it you on fresh air. It was an amazing, amazing talk.
Zoe
I just want to give a little shout out there's a ton of people doing cool fish work. So Deb McGregor at York. Tasha Beads who's a Water Walker and doing her PhD at Trent and there's a there's a scholar named Andrea Reed at UBC who's doing really cool coastal fish stuff and yeah, there's just a really cool people and then my whole fish freshwater fish futures team like Janelle Baker. I just just really cool people. They want to make sure they get credit because they're doing cool stuff.
Patty
Thank you guys so much.
Kerry
Till next time,
Zoe
till next time, have a great day.
All places are fish places