Indigenous ecologies and an ethic of connection

I aim to generate further dialogue that will enable Indigenous people's understandings of ecology to find conversational and practical ground in current world environmental justice debates. My work with dialogue is embedded both in Levinas's philosophy of ethical alterity and in my work with Indigenous people. Levinas teaches an ethic of human connectivity: ‘consciousness and even subjectivity follow from, are legitimated by, the ethical summons which proceeds from the intersubjective encounter. Subjectivity arrives, so to speak, in the form of a responsibility towards an other’ (Newton, 1995:12).