Image of CLEAR lab member Natasha Healy processing samples. Photo credit: Rich Blenkinsopp for Memorial University An important aspect within your practice is feminist science studies. How does feminist science studies inform your work? Illustration of a laughing owl, a New Zealand species that went extinct around 1914 due to loss of habitat. Image: John Gerrard Keulemans Indigenous Land relations, delicious as they may be for “thinking with” or “drawing upon,” are not for consumption or appropriation by settlers. In earlier drafts of this chapter, I had framed the discussion around the thesis that “Plastics Are Kin,” but I changed this after conversations with various Indigenous thinkers and Elders about complex issues of kinmaking with bad kin and the already rampant fetishization of nonhumans as kin by academics as acts of possession and redemption. I removed conversations that were not fit or ready for public consumption, changing the chapter to “Plastics Are Land.” But even that left a lot of room for creepiness, so I instead reframed the chapter around scale as relationships that matter, with only a small introduction to Land-plastic relations with an indigenous frame, here. Michelle Murphy: The question is like, how are you working towards building something else? So when it comes to pollution, it’s not just documenting that pollution is colonialism, but thinking what could be a different theory of pollution. That’s about making the world I’d rather be in.

Max: Yeah, with the exception of extractive models, I don’t think there’s an inherently best way to do anti-colonial work. Yeah. And then I also, yeah, like I do research as a plastic pollution scientist with, you know, mostly Inuit plastic pollution researchers who may not have degrees and it doesn’t matter. And we make data together that answers their nations questions and needs, so that they can govern their lands in ways that matter to them.An emotive, immersed commentary of the state of knowledge, research, and ethics that concern us all as social scientists, whether or not we study plastics, or indeed, pollution." — Vasudha Chhotray, Contributions to Indian Sociology To make capitalism and colonialism synonymous, or to conflate environmentalism and anticolonialism, misses these complex relations... Because of this nuance and its repercussions for political action, political scientist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has called for scholars to shift their analysis away from capitalist relations (production, proletarianization) to colonial relations (dispossession, Land acquisition, access to Land)” Provocative and highly readable, Pollution Is Colonialism challenges readers, specifically whites and settlers and particularly those who like to think of themselves as supportive of Indigenous people’s struggles, to consider how seemingly innocent or well-intentioned research methods, techniques, and modes of dissemination can reproduce dominant science. . . . Liboiron’s contribution is of great value for STS and adjacent fields.” — Miriam Tola, Tecnoscienza

To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about.”VS: So it’s partly about doing homework and understand, you know, educating oneself. But it’s also about starting a relationship with, you know, the nations or the nation or the communities of where you are living. Max: So I have a big section in my book, and I know Murphy has a lot of experience in this too, which is that if you skip over colonialism, then you think things that are good and well-intentioned are automatically not colonial. But if you say do a beach clean up and you go on to Indigenous land and you clean that beach without permission, that’s not Indigenous access to Indigenous land for non-Indigenous schools, even though it’s benevolent, and that is colonialism. So there are the things that count as good and well-intentioned and benevolent and environmentalism are frequently, almost ubiquitously also colonial. Like hydroelectric power. Well, that’s actually putting methylmercury into Inuit fish around here or right? There’s all of these sort of environmental goods that are also colonial bads. VS: Well, how can we on the outside support? And also, how do you think you can help spread this idea of anti-colonial science? Pollution Is Colonialism provides desperately needed analytic clarity on this settler colonial present.... This book invites readers first and foremost to look at knowledge practices and forms of knowledge creation, to think about their land relations, and to recognize colonial land relations in their familiar, seemingly benign practices and techniques.” — Anna Stanley, Antipode