This panel explores Indigenous perspectives on human-animal relationality, highlighting how colonial forces have disrupted traditional forms of kinship, care, and ecological engagement. The panel centers Indigenous worldviews and histories to emphasize alternative ways of being and knowing. The first paper explores the earth diver motif in Dene traditions of northern Canada, illustrating how Indigenous cosmogony informs ecological and political relationships with the nonhuman world. The next two papers focus on Indigenous and settler engagements with horses in North America, examining shifting horse cultures within missionary encounters, and the equestrian practices of settler nuns in Bitterroot Salish territory. The final paper turns to India, specifically the Bhil Adivasi communities of Gujarat, analyzing the evolving discourse on animal sacrifice as shaped by Jain, Vaishnava, and bhakti influences on Bhil attitudes towards killability of animals. Together, these studies discuss rupture, adaptation, and possibilities for renewal in human-animal relationships within diverse colonial and postcolonial Indigenous traditions.
This paper examines the story of the animal earth-diver. Commonly called a creation story, or myth, the earth-diver motif appears among Indigenous peoples in North America, Siberia, and Northern Europe, nearly everywhere the landscape contains marshes. I examine an example of the earth-diver story among subarctic Dene people, of muskrat creating land in a water world by diving to find mud. It is tempting to call this motif religion and to abstract the story from its material reality and ecological, political, and economic implications for real people and real animals. When contextualized within a traditional Dene framework other elements of the story emerge; such as a rational examination of the natural world, and a political structuring of human relationships and ecology with animals and other other-than-humans, all of which inform a trans-species ethos and is a powerful articulation of sovereignty.
“Our horses, exhausted, died a little while later.” Father Léon Doucet, OMI, wrote these words in his journal on July 13, 1873 while describing the end of a trip in the lands today known as Alberta, Canada. Through Doucet’s 1868 to 1890 journal and other Oblate records, this paper explores the relationship between Indigenous communities, horses, and Oblate missionaries in the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century North West. Many Indigenous communities on the Prairies respected and valued their horses. This included the Blackfoot, Métis, Plains Cree, and Stoney Nakoda communities among whom Doucet worked. In contrast, many Oblates, as evidenced by Doucet, did not understand or adequately care for their horses. Slowly, along with learning Indigenous languages, the Oblates learned local horse cultures as part of their attempts to acculturate themselves and to attract Catholic converts.
In this paper, I demonstrate that the Sisters of Providence insisted upon riding sidesaddle because Native women rode astride. By framing this common and often necessary mode of travel in the U.S. West as a transgression, the nuns also convey their beliefs about their superiority relative to Indigenous women in particular. I am expanding my research to examine the nuns’ relationship with horses, in the context of the horse cultures of the tribes they lived among on the Flathead Indian Reservation, including the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille. Specifically, the paper examines how horses themselves, as well as the tribes’ long-established relationships with horses challenge and reorient the practices and ideas of the nuns described above.
This paper examines the shifting perceptions of animal sacrifice among Bhil Adivasi (Indigenous) communities in Gujarat, India, interrogating when and how sacrificial killing comes to be framed as “violence” (hiṃsā). Traditionally, Bhil Adivasis conceptualize animal sacrifice (vadhervu) as a ritual exchange with deities, reinforcing human-animal reciprocity and spiritual oneness. However, with the growing influence of reformist bhakti traditions, particularly BAPS Swaminarayan Hinduism, a competing ethical discourse has emerged around this human-animal oneness, reinterpreting animal sacrifice as an act of violence while advocating for vegetarian offerings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores how this reformist critique aligns with historical Jain, Vaishnava, and devotional discourses on nonviolence while simultaneously reshaping Adivasi cosmology, ritual obligations, and divine expectations. The paper argues that this transformation is entangled with broader economic, secular, and religious shifts that are now redefining human-animal interactions.