They'rehere—I canfeelthem: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges

Abstract

Indigenous Knowledges (IK) are continually contrasted with Western positivist sciences. Yet the usual conception of IK—as a translatable knowledge about things—renders incomprehensible its discussion as a spiritual or ethical practice. A practice taking place within what we call an epistemic space. A moose hunting event can demonstrate how IK is produced through the epistemic spaces within which hunting is performed. Part of the performance is becoming-animal; as practiced by Koyukon Athabascans, a moose hunt reproduces the social relations between hunter and prey, spiritual relations that demonstrate an ontology and ethics seemingly distinct from those of the Western wildlife sciences founded upon Enlightenment humanism. Yet such ‘Western–Indigenous’ dichotomies falsely indicate entirely separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality. Instead, this account of a moose hunt demonstrates an assemblage of actors within one space, who together become more than the authors' individual positions and selves, and becomes an event. We additionally argue that more faithfully representing this assemblage requires changing the form of the usual academic paper. Thus tacking between a narrative and theoretical approach that switches from each of our first-person points of view, we aim to depict how knowledge of one hunting event becomes assembled.