Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Emil' Keme "Land, Learning, and Resistance: Yanomami Knowledge and Environmental Justice"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Abstract: In conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Land as Pedagogy” (2014), this paper explores how the Yanomami people of the Brazilian Amazon cultivate relational knowledge and survivance practices (Vizenor) through their deep engagement with the forest. Despite the existential threats posed by historical and ongoing extractivist violence and genocide—particularly the invasion of garimpeiros (illegal gold miners)—the Yanomami continue to assert epistemologies and life-ways grounded in reciprocity, care, and interdependence. Focusing on the teachings of Yanomami elder Davi Kopenawa, as recorded in The Falling Sky (2010), I examine how Indigenous environmental thought positions land not only as a source of material sustenance but also as a site of learning, resistance, and futurity. Ultimately, I argue that Yanomami survivance challenges dominant paradigms of land use and development, offering vital insights for agrarian studies and environmental justice