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Can You Hear Nature Sing? Enacting the Syilx Ethical Practice of Nʕawqnwixʷ to Reconstruct the Relationships Between Humans and Nature

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Abstract

This study sheds new insight on how historically oppressed and marginalized actors are able to pursue environmental sustainability based on alternative worldviews (e.g., Indigenous worldviews) rather than succumbing to those dominant in the Western society, based on a study of the Syilx (“Okanagan”) people in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the Syilx people enacted the ethical practice of nʕawqnwixʷ (“the reciprocal gentle dropping of thoughts, like water, into everyone’s minds to address the issue at the centre of discussion and to reach collective consensus for action”), anchored in the Syilx worldview, to reconstruct the relationships between humans and nature. Two overlapping processes are involved: developing foundational principles for human–nature relations and carrying out reconstruction work. Ongoing enactment of nʕawqnwixʷ practice provided community-based agency, enabling the Syilx people to shift the conversation around environmental sustainability. From this, we discuss the theoretical potential of community-based agency for the study of environmental sustainability, and the role of Indigenous worldviews for (re)imagining human-nature ethics (and reorienting the theoretical lens of human-animal or human-plant ethics form a firm-centric focus to a community-oriented lens), and important implications for practitioners and policymakers in the field of environmental sustainability.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the associate editor Steffen Böhm and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful guidance and insightful comments. We appreciate feedback from Zoe Cunliffe, Tina Dacin, Angelique Slade Shantz, and the Syilx people and non-Indigenous actors during the course of writing this paper. We would like to thank UBC for funding the fieldwork on which the paper draws. We are indebted to Indigenous leaders, knowledge keepers, and water researchers for sharing their time and stories with us. We are grateful for the conversations that we had with Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Dr. Armstrong, and Dr. David Suzuki.

Funding

This study was partly funded by the University of British Columbia.

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  1. The University of British Columbia, 1137 Alumni Avenue, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7, Canada

    Grace H. Fan

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Fan, G.H. Can You Hear Nature Sing? Enacting the Syilx Ethical Practice of Nʕawqnwixʷ to Reconstruct the Relationships Between Humans and Nature. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05634-x

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