QUEER NATURE on Reclaiming Wild Safe Space /223 ⌠ENCORE⌡
Photo of Striped Skunk tracks pressed into loose earth via @queernature
How can a queerness guide us as we move through this liminal time period? How can queer ecology radically change our way of knowing? This week’s episode, initially aired in December of 2018, acknowledges that in order to expand ourselves to our fullest capacity, we must bend beyond the cultural and gender binaries that dominant society projects amongst us, to begin this process we need not look further than what has always been. Guided by culturally informed queer ancestral futurist dreams, Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd of Queer Nature explore how queering our awareness can dismantle the supremacist, ecocidal, and genocidal story we have found ourselves in.
Queer Nature is an education and social sculpture project based on Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne territories that actively dreams into decolonially-informed queer ‘ancestral futurism’ through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Place-based skills include naturalist studies, handcrafts, “survival skills,” and recognition of colonial and Indigenous histories of land, and are framed in a container that emphasizes deep listening and relationship building with living and non-living earth systems.
“Ecocide means not just the systematic killing of the environment, but actually the killing of our ability to be at home, which is the dispossession of belonging.”
Photo of Pinar and So courtesy of queernature
Co-envisioned by Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Queer Nature designs and facilitates nature-based workshops and multi-day immersions intended to be financially, emotionally, and physically accessible to LGBTQ2+ people and QTBIPOCs. Queer Nature carries the story and hope that these spaces create resilient narratives of belonging for folks who have often been made to feel by systems of oppression that they biologically, socially, or culturally don’t belong. Queer Nature has collaborated with Wilderness Awareness School, the University of Colorado Boulder, Naropa University, Women’s Wilderness, and ReWild Portland.
Join Ayana in conversation with So and Pinar as they explore how tracking and trailing answers the call of our ancestral bodies and the land, what deep intimacy with the more than human world looks like, how place-based skills are tools of liberation, and how to heal community; we cannot solely be in reciprocal relationships, we must be in accountable ones as well.
♫ Music featured in this episode include “Ponce Pilator” by Y La Bamba, “Arnaq” and “Rodeo (Yadi Yada)” by Elisapie.
QUEER NATURE Recommendations
“Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality” by Pinar Ates Sinopoulos-Lloyd
“Tracking as a Way of Knowing” by Sophia "So" Sinopoulos-Lloyd
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
“Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples” by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Queer Nature’s Action Points
Check out the website https://native-land.ca (it is also an app) that can let you know what First Nations territories you are on!
See if you can find Indigenous dictionaries or language projects that can help inform you of the first names of rivers, mountains, and non-human beings in your bioregion. In our area we consult the online dictionary at the Arapaho Language Project which is part of CU Boulder.
You can support Queer Nature’s Patreon.
You can donate directly to Queer Nature through our website
(though we are an LLC and not a non-profit, so donations are not tax deductible).
Tax-deductible donations through our fiscal sponsor, Youth Passageways, can be directly made here: https://donorbox.org/qn
Donate to Toward Right Relationship Boulder
They have been working with the Northern and Southern Arapaho tribes who were displaced from the Boulder Valley by colonization to give land and land use rights back to the Arapaho people.
We aim to be a gathering place for ideas and solutions ensuring that the growing body of work that we steward remains accessible to the public. If you want to see us continue, or perhaps are especially moved by the episode you are listening to today, please become a monthly sustaining member through our Patreon or consider making a one-time donation directly to us through our website. To stay up-to-date on our work, sign up for our newsletter.
For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.