<em>Jami Chadiba Nahin</em> (We Will Not Leave this Land): Materiality and Imagination in Indigenous Land Ethics

This is a reflective essay on materiality and imagination of Indigenous land ethics as expressed in global Indigenous writing. I explore Adivasi land ethics, particularly from the contexts of Odisha and Jharkhand, placing them alongside North American First Nations writings. The paper traces a range of resonances to inform queries on land ethics; in this, it begins from particular sites to global spaces to articulate broader questions for Environmental Studies. This is in the hope that the questions might enlighten and reify contemporary concerns in these respective geographical and intellectual locations, complicating the site and probing the intellectual divide between the Global North and the Global South in area studies, to see how Indigenous concerns globally are aligned in the face of a global climate crisis, as they are disproportionately affected due to historical injustices of empire, settler colonial enterprise, caste orders and religious nationalisms. While I draw from American Environmental Studies to situate the materiality of Indigenous philosophies, the essay affirms the enabling mindfulness of metaphors and how they can inform and strengthen material claims in the negotiation for Indigenous political rights in India, and elsewhere, by resisting co-options of Indigeneity that accompany pitfalls of literality. In this, the essay attempts to connect the generative iterations and expressions of ‘imagination’ as written by Indigenous writers who envision collective futures through Indigenous ‘humanisms’ that account the impact of colonial histories of dispossession, and affirm ethical responsibility towards the human and non-human world.