Walking Toward Relationality

In this essay, I share an autoethnographic walking experience that is part of my inner work as an early-career sustainability scholar seeking to relate differently with land, people, and knowledge. This research began after I learned about the Exodus: the 1875 forced removal of Yavapai (Yavapé) and Apache (Dilzhę́’é) peoples from their ancestral lands in today’s Arizona, USA—the region where I, a white settler, was born and raised—which provoked in me intense shame. To unpack my relationships with settler colonialism and begin a process of becoming naturalized to place, I walked a section of the Arizona Trail that is part of the Exodus route. Employing a critical, relational walking methodology, as well as arts-based methods, I propose an autoethnography to illustrate six personal (un)learnings that aim to be insightful for the emerging relational paradigm in sustainability science. This includes drawing attention to the ways in which settler colonialism, intertwined with religions and science, may unconsciously orient relationships to land (ontology), people (axiology), and knowledge (epistemology) that are anti-relational. My walking experience underscores the importance of relational ethics as embedded in Indigenous relationality, which taught me that learning to relate differently with land in a more-than-human sense necessitates healing relationships with the First Peoples. This situates the turn toward relationality as far more than an intellectual endeavor that includes embodied experience, embracing difficult emotions, and acknowledging inner work as important for systems change.