The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)

by Thom van Dooren

Inheritance is a productive concept for extinction studies and the broader environmental humanities. It is a concept with a long and rich history across the biological sciences and the humanities more broadly, including in diverse spaces of Indigenous scholarship and activism. Reading these literatures alongside and through one another, we are able to begin to develop an appreciation for entangled biocultural inheritances in which the movements of genes, ideas, practices, and words between and among generations are all tangled up with one another, unable to be isolated into separate processes or channels of inheritance. If we scratch the surface just a little, these entanglements are palpable in Hawai‘i’s shrinking forests: as the island’s biotic diversity continues its long role in helping nourish and shape local cultures, cultures that are, in turn, remaking those ecologies and the futures of their many inhabitants. Thinking in this entangled way draws us, inexorably, into an understanding of the ethical work of inheritance. While it may be a gift or a burden, a heritage is always a responsibility. Something to be dwelled with—to be honored and acknowledged, even if not always avowed—placing us in relationship, perhaps under obligation, to those who have come before as well as those who will follow after. Where species, ecologies, and cultures are in processes of ongoing and dynamic change, much of what is and is not passed on is not up to any of us. Where we can and do ...