Witnessing Indigenous Dispossession and Academic Arboricide: Visual Auto-Ethnography as Anti-Colonial Didactic

Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics are witnesses to the "more than human" ecological impacts of the academic condition, such as the deforestation that occurs in relation to infrastructure expansion of campus sites. In this essay, I use auto-ethnographic photography to evoke the necessity of academic answerability by framing the act of deforestation within the academic boundary as that of land theft and ecological conquest, with political, cultural, and epistemic implications. My visual narrative about my employing university begins with an archival image from the time of the clearing of the campus site, and is sustained by a visual inquiry process that examines the liminal zones of the campus as it expands into the surrounding forest. My intention in this photography-led research practice is to "witness" campus deforestation, seeing it as part and parcel of the colonial academic enterprise in situ.