Indigenous Feminism in Environmental Sustainability: Zora Neale Hurston’s <i>Dust Tracks on A Road</i> (1942)

Abstract In this essay, I explore and analyze Zora Neale Hurston’s autoethnography The Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) as an alternative to the modern anthropological simplification of nature and the African American indigenous identity. Hurston’s indigenous feminist subjectivity is focused on environmental sustainability and her resistance to anthropocentrism and racialized labor. Hurston’s subjectivity as an indigenous feminist scholar can be articulated as minoritarian in the critical posthumanities since it is not about margin; rather, it revolutionizes anthropological discourse by re-signifying the African American lumberer identity and environmental sustainability in a robust, appealing, and unique manner. She reconceptualizes Black indigenous lumberers by articulating their historical and cultural relationality with the forests owned by forest industries in Polk County, Florida.