Graduation Year
Spring 2013
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Environmental Analysis
Second Department
International/Intercultural Studies
Reader 1
Paul Faulstich
Reader 2
Joe Parker
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2013 Lauren M. Bitter
Abstract
My project is centered around a community garden in Upland, California called the People and Their Plants garden. This garden represents a five hundred year living history designed to show the changes in the ecological landscape of Southern California caused by colonization. This autoethnographic thesis works towards personal, interpersonal, and community-wide decolonization through building reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Elders. I explore, critique and problematize research and ethnography by examining the politics of knowledge, language, history, and ecology. I interrogate my own learned knowledge systems as well as colonial/capitalist food systems—and recognize how those systems/relations have worked to render Indigenous ways of knowing as invisible. Furthermore, I examine the connection between colonialism, gender, and capitalist food systems. I explain how the People and Their Plants garden is an act of resistance to colonial/capitalist food systems as it creates space for alternative economic practices and decolonial food practices. As part of this project, I co-authored a brochure about the garden with a Tongva Elder.
Recommended Citation
Bitter, Lauren M., "Decolonizing Ecology Through Rerooting Epistemologies" (2013). Pitzer Senior Theses. 41.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/41
