Rewilding Activism: Weaving Resistance, Reskilling, and Re-Membering

Abstract

Inspired by Joanna Macy and the Great Turning, this dissertation explores one deep adaptation response to the Great Unraveling of humanity’s socioecological systems by weaving together three land-based movements: those resisting through land defense, water protection, and anti-extractivism; those reskilling in ancestral lifeways, permaculture, and traditional ecological knowledge; and those re-membering through ritual, ceremony, and expanded states of consciousness. Specifically, this dissertation explores the intersections of these movements, asking how they can better support one another in turning towards a life-sustaining society.

Bookended by the Ferguson Uprising and the George Floyd Uprising, this dissertation covers the era of activism defined by Standing Rock and what it represents—Mní Wičóni, defending the sacred, indigenous sovereignty, #LandBack, #KeepItInTheGround. Encompassing thirteen frontline land defense campaigns, ten land-based lifeways gatherings, and fifteen healing ceremonies between 2015 and 2018, this activist-scholarship uses the deliberately politicized methodology of militant ethnography to generate practical, embodied knowledge as one body within a movement body.

Placed within the “movement of movements” of “new anarchism,” the emergent property of this dissertation is its alignment with yet another movement—the human rewilding movement. If human rewilding is “embodied primal anarchy,” and if ancestral skills gatherings are the “gateway to rewilding,” then this dissertation develops the activism of an applied rewilding praxis. This praxis is explored across eighteen auto-ethnographic essays which center my own rewilding journey through various rewilding skills including pattern literacy, navigation, animal processing, bird language, star gazing, acorn processing, mutual aid, fire ecology, sit spots, tracking, plant communication, rites of passage, trauma-informed activism, and more. Together, these stories weave the container for an “ecology of rewilding” rooted in resistance, reskilling, and re-membering.