The thee scholars with formal presentations in the session deploy Indigenous methodologies and texts to dwell in what Cherokee scholar Joseph Pierce has called the articulation of land-based speculative relations: a radical form of relationality that underscores how “Indigenous land co-constitutes Indigenous life.” Their presentations foreground how the human, the nonhuman, and the land cannot be extricated from one another in Indigenous cosmologies; and how, in turn, territoriality can not be conceived within the bounds of state-nations or any other colonial category. Following K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme, this session reframes the territories of the Hemispheric Americas under the Guna notion of Abiayala—meaning “land in full plenitude and maturity”—as a way to conceive of the territory from a decolonial vantage point that reclaims Indigenous epistemologies. Finally, it contests settler understandings of the written world as the only entryway to think about what a body of literature entails; as Paul Worley and Rita Palacios have thoroughly theorized in their book Unwriting Maya Literature.

The intersection between environment and literature is at the fore of Paul M. Worley’s formal presentation (12'). In “Hijos de la tierra: Hubert Matiúwàa, Pedro Uc Be, and the Systematization of Ecological Knowledges,” Worley considers recent essays and poetry by these two authors as opening up dialogues about the nature of knowledge itself. He demonstrates how both authors argue for the undeniable relevance of land-based Indigenous knowledges as responses to the ongoing global catastrophe of the climate crisis, with there not so much being a need for “global solutions enacted globally,” but “local solutions enacted on a global scale.”

Rita Palacios expands on Worley’s ideas in her formal presentation “Memory of Living Worlds in Maya Poetry and Art” (12'). By proposing a capacious understanding of Mayan literary inscription, Palacios looks at the dynamic record of living worlds kept in Maya poetry and art. Part and parcel of the argument is the impossibility of isolating the notion of the environment in the work produced by Maya artists. Palacios argues that these works demand a look from within, informed by their understanding of the world. The presentation begins with Kaqchikel artists Angélica Serech’s and Ángel Poyon’s work on textiles and everyday Maya objects to show that memory, from an Indigenous perspective, is a simultaneous forward and backward movement in time that captures loss and environmental degradation while allowing for ancestral and renewed forms and expressions.

Finally, in the last formal presentation “Threading Revolution: Narratives of Resistance” (12'), Sue Haglund continues to show the interdependencies between literature and life as ecological embodiment. Haglund departs from the premises of Dule scholar Aiban Wagua who affirms that in Dule society “literature is life,” and Kanien’kehaka scholar Beth Brant who asserts that “writing is done with a community consciousness”. She goes on to analyze how the poetry of Aristeydes Turpana reflects not the thoughts of a Dule poet as an individual; but rather as from a nation. Her analysis aims to exemplify Dule cultural actions to protect the intellectual knowledge of autonomous nations in Indigenous Abiayala.

These presentations will be followed by a response by John Kennedy Godoy (12'), who is Assistant Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and Latine/x Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He will draw on his work on Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous histories to respond to the presenters' interventions. After the response, the panel will be open to an unstructured discussion with the audience facilitated by presider Valeria Meiller, another emerging scholar working at the intersection of Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanties (15').