Coffee & Geography Season 6 Episode 6
It is always an immense privilege for me when someone of Indigenous culture and heritage agrees to come on the podcast. I often find myself quite sheepish when it comes to asking – because on one hand, no Indigenous person ever should feel like they owe someone like me, a white Westerner, anything at all. And time and companionship are rich special gifts. On the other hand, I absoultely want to use the platform I have to amplify voices and experiences that have long been surpressed by my culture. As time has gone on, I’ve become more confident in simply asking and respecting the answer or lack of response – but that isn’t owed to me either. So when someone like Dr Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, an Indigenous geographer, opens up their time for me, I really am deeply grateful. Joining me from Victoria, British Columbia, our conversation was rich, generous, expansive, and rooted in a geography that moves far beyond lines on a map.
We started simply enough, talking about where we were sitting — me in my fox onesie late at night, him eight hours behind with a Cherry Coke Zero — but very quickly we were navigating the places that have shaped him: Minneapolis, Ohio, and now the mist‑softened, rain‑soaked Pacific coast of Canada.
“We are shaped by the different places that we move through and that we spend time within,”
Geography is never passive background. It is active, formative, shifting. Deondre talked about carrying pieces of Minnesota with him — the cold tolerance, the love of hockey and hotdish — while also absorbing parts of Ohio, and now the rhythms of coastal British Columbia: the hiking boots, the rain gear, the subtle linguistic shifts (“zed,” “pasta,” “washroom”). Identity, for him, is cartography of the self, drawn through movement.
The belief that we are assemblages of the places we traverse became a doorway into the Indigenous geographies he researches. When he described the Ojibwe migration from the eastern coast of Canada to the Great Lakes, following the prophecy to find “the place where food grows on water,” it reframed so much of what Western geography tends to flatten: a journey of relationship, story, vision, and belonging, whereas colonial journies tend to be one of borders or territorial claims.
We pulled up Native-Land.ca together, its colourful overlaps spreading across North America like a tapestry. I use it often, but sharing it with an Ojibwe geographer adds layers of meaning. He talked about how students are startled by the overlapping territories and how it challenges the Western obsession with hard edges and crisp boundaries. While maps such as these are structurally flawed, given that they are a product of a colonial lens, Native-Land.ca does a decent job of illustrating how Indigenous geographies are porous, relational and fluid, defined not by control but by connection.
From land we moved to sky. Deondre’s work on Indigenous geographies of outer space is one of the most beautiful intellectual threads I’ve ever encountered. Before my love of terra-based geography (i.e. classically ‘physical geography’, I adored everything to do with space and the stars. If I had the smarts I might have become an astrophysist rather than an environmental scientist. And so I absoultely loved listening to Deondre talk about how the stars hold stories, teachings, clan identities, and reminders of where we come from. In many Ojibwe teachings, humanity itself originates in the star world. Constellations are give guidence on governance, responsibility and kinship.
And then we came to Turtle Island. I had pulled up a map, and he described how, if you look just right you can see the outline of a turtle: the head in northern Canada, the front legs in Alaska and Quebec, the hind legs in Baja and Florida. The creation story, in which the turtle offers its back so that a new world can be formed.
Indigenous cosmology and Star Trek might seem worlds apart, yet when I asked whether any piece of popular culture reflects Indigenous perspectives on the cosmos, Deondre named the Prime Directive — the ethic of non‑interference, the recognition that our power carries responsibility, the need to take up as little space as possible when invited into the worlds of others. That parallel was striking, epecially so when (after the chat) I did some further reading about the Anishinaabe clan system and the “Law of Non-interference”.
The conversation wasn’t all weighty topics; there was music, too. Percussion, viola, bassoon, the joy of concert bands, and the piano behind him (acquired for free if they could just manage to move it!) The household tarantulas and jumping spiders didn’t unfortunately make appearances during the chat, but Deondre said that inevitably do on occassion! Beloved creatures and objects that make our homes feel like home.
When our conversation finally wound down, I found myself reflecting on something he said earlier: that every place he’s lived has been “the best place,” because each one has shaped him into who he is today. I loved talking with Deondre and listening to his take on how land, water, stars, creatures, humans, and histories are all woven into relationship. And really, ever since I started on my own journey to break out of ‘colonialised geography’, this was a really refreshing chat. I guess I felt it deeply given that my own identity also refuses neat boundaries because life itself refuses them – I sure feel my own life has. No wonder why when people ask me how ‘do I identify’, my natural answer is a geographer! On that note, I think I’m ending this blog post with a realisation that I probably shouldn’t be so hard on myself in inviting Indigenous people onto the podcast – as a deep connection to geography is something we share in common.
Weblinks:
🔗 Dr. Deondre Smiles – personal website: https://deondresmiles.com/
🔗 Native Land Digital / Native-Land.ca: https://native-land.ca/
🔗 Anishinaabe Astronomy and Identity: https://ojibwe.net/anishinaabe-astronomy-and-identity/
🔗 Star Stories: Ojibwe Indigenous Star Map – An Artist’s Rendition: https://www.zhaawanart.com/post/star-stories-part-9-ojibwe-star-map
🔗 Ojibwe People’s Dictionary: https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/
🔗 Star Trek’s “Prime Directive”: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Prime_Directive
Geogramblings 