Session Description: One of the characteristics of modernity has always been its' autocentric image of itself as the expression of universal certainty. This is nowhere more apparent than in discussions about Nature, where the impact and contributions of regions beyond 'Europe' have barely begun to enter scholarly awareness. Among geographers some preliminary attempts have been made to recognize Indigenous agency, either through a focus on the role that Indigenous knowledge can play in resource management, or through the recognition of a Native presence in textual analyses of narratives of exploration and scientific discovery. Our interest here is to examine how the Native, both informant and scholar, can be re/placed within this construction of Nature, ending a temporal, spatial and textual dis/placement which has denied the agency of Indigenous voices within discussions of Nature, other than as a bounded category called 'Indigenous Knowledge'. This dis/placement of Indigenous voices came at a moment in time when Western thought was dichotomizing (nature from culture, space from place, etc.) creating separations and uneven relationships between the dualisms. In this paper session we intend to begin healing the separation and uneven relationship between culture and nature through papers that re/place the Native voice within constructions of Nature in the 'contact zones', both historical and contemporary.
