As we welcome new people to the FEELed Lab, we want to make space for longer introductions to project team members and research affiliates joining us this year. This profile is on Erin Delfs who is joining the FEELed Lab to work on her master’s thesis and as a Research Assistant for Earth Sense.
1.Can you tell us about your work/research?
My master’s thesis (co-supervised by Anita Girvan and Virginie Magnat, and supported by Bill Cohen and Onyx Sloan Morgan) is a small component of a continual process. I am exploring how settler climate activists in the Okanagan can go about understanding and enacting our responsibilities to syilx people and land/show up in meaningful solidarity with syilx-led climate justice work. I am focusing on this topic in response to a 2023 talk between climate writer and activist Naomi Klein and syilx scholar and knowledge carrier Jeanette Armstrong, titled “Syilx-led Climate Justice in a Global Context,” at which Dr. Armstrong expressed that syilx people “are the best protectors of our syilx lands, waters and timixʷ, and we need everyone who lives here on our territory to feel and act that way.” Fellow settler climate activists and I felt the power of this call to action and a pull to “promote and undertake urgent actions needed in community-led solutions by advancing the theories and practice of environmental justice by engaging Indigenous knowledge and laws,” but the “how” remained murky.
Thus ensues an iterative, process-oriented thesis of figuring out how to show up in solidarity with syilx sovereignty and climate justice. This how requires unpacking the power structures and paradigms which currently guide our activism (i.e. White Settler Environmentalism); critically reflecting on our intentions and transforming our behaviours (as generously reminded by Indigenous leaders and land defenders time and time again, well-meaning settlers often inflict harm on the Indigenous communities and movements we are attempting to support, and we need to do better); and learning through action, relationship-building, and radical collaborations (e.g. Participating in syilx-led programs and educational opportunities; leveraging time and resources towards syilx-led environmental and community work; and more…).
2.Why did you want to work with the FEELed Lab?
I’ve long been a FEELed Lab lurker, if you will, welcomed graciously by Astrida to use the lab space byway of my dear friend Dani, former FEELed Lab manager. The FEELed Lab values knowledge that arises from process, feelings, and embodied experiences, and this is important to me. Over the summer of 2023, Sierra (fellow FEELed Lab lurker) and I did a lot of thesis work and had an appropriate number of thesis meltdowns at the FEELed Lab. We also watered the plants and talked to the river, and replenished the oat milk supply once in a while. Due to the alignment between my thesis topic and the focus of Earth Sense – a project Astrida is collaborating on with Carrie Terbasket, Kelly Terbasket, and Sarah Sandy from IndigenEYEZ – Astrida recently welcomed me into this project as a research assistant to support the UBCO/FEELed Lab cohort (lurker no more!). It is an extreme privilege to be part of Earth Sense, and part of the FEELed Lab.
3.Why are expansive engagements with environmental issues important?
Thanks to graduate school, community engagement, and the work of many activist-organizer-educators, I have come to understand climate justice as a mosaic of entangled movements towards decolonization, racial justice, queer and gender justice, anti-capitalism, and liberation/liveable futures for everyone. Accessing safe housing and enough food to eat is climate justice. Blocking the UAE from fuelling war and genocide in Sudan and Darfur is climate justice. Pressuring Canada to impose an arms embargo on Israel is climate justice. Feeling connected to your community is climate justice. Following syilx laws on syilx territory is climate justice.
Understanding climate justice and environmentalism expansively is critical because working in the relationships between struggles yields possibility, creativity, collaboration, and collective power (Cohen 2001; Davis 2015). We are all interconnected, and we need to act like it.
Note: Through my involvement in Earth Sense, I am learning what climate justice means on syilx territory and whether this term is even useful, especially given that the worldviews and practices of syilx people have generated sustainable ways of life and reciprocal relationships of respect between people, land, water, and more-than-human relatives for thousands and thousands of years (long before a term such as “climate justice” even existed). So while I believe climate justice is expansive, it also requires a place-based approach.
The FEELed lab 