Indigenous Poetics and Transcultural Ecologies

This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, anti-modern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as “The Dreaming” or “Pachamama” (“World Mother”), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.