Sherri Mitchell Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset: We Need a Kincentric Worldview | Atmos

From my perspective as a Native American woman, I have always been taught from an early age by my parents, grandparents, and relatives to respect all beings. I have been taught that I am part of everything that exists—from the elements of air, fire, water, Mother Earth, and the ethers, the stones, and the stars in the heavens.17 This interconnected

We are embedded in the living world, not separate from or above it: we live within the biosphere, not on the planet.

It is a beautiful illustration of the kind of decentring of ourselves and of human experience at which we must become adept in order to live better and more responsibly in a more-than-human world. This decentring, an admission that the human race is not the only game in town, does not correspond to any reduction of our world.

But to survive, we have to understand our relationship with all other living things. The survival of my species depends on understanding the salmon’s relationship to the ecosystem upon which I depend.

I want to understand how we humans do that—how we earn a place on this precious planet, get in the “right relationship” with it.5 So I am focusing on the ways creatures and ecosystems function together in and with the natural world.