Situated Lineages
Situated Lineages is a letter-writing and storytelling practice that invites participants to reflect on the conditions, inheritances, and relations that brought them to a particular Territory. Through writing, conversation, and collective poetry-making, participants trace their histories of arrival, complicity, and connection to place. The activity creates space for unforgetting, relational accountability, and collective reflection on how extractivism lives within personal, historical, and territorial storylines.
Tools
Situated Lineages is a re-storying practice that begins with the pre/proposition of from the Territory. This small word, from, signals both a point of departure and a source of provenance. It situates us within particular spatiotemporal relations that bind us to place and reminds us that our stories do not begin with us alone. We arrive to this land already entangled in histories, inheritances, desires, violences, and relations that exceed the present moment.
Grounded in practices of unforgetting (see Redacting Colonial Legacies of the Rubber Genocide for more on the concept), the activity invites participants to introduce themselves to the Territory and to one another through letter writing. Participants respond to questions about how they arrived to the Territory and what relations, inheritances, and structures made that arrival possible. Fragments from these letters are later transformed into a collectively arranged poem in space. Through reading the poem together, participants encounter their stories as intertwined threads moving across generations, territories, and shared or distinct conditions.
Although the activity does not explicitly ask participants to connect their stories to extraction or extractivism, these histories often come out through the tracing of lineages, labor practices, migrations, and inheritances. Participants may recognize how their lives are connected to extractive histories and relations they previously understood as distant from themselves. This recognition can surface discomfort, guilt, contradiction, or grief, particularly as participants begin to see themselves as implicated within histories of violence they may have imagined themselves exempt from.
As Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2020) notes, recognizing our implication in histories of violence can feel harsh or accusatory, yet this discomfort is part of the work of unforgetting and learning to live responsibly within the contradictions of our relations. Similarly, the activity embraces what Anna Tsing (2015) describes as contamination: refusing innocence and acknowledging that we are already inside damaged worlds. Situated Lineages invites participants to remain with these entanglements and to consider what obligations emerge once we recognize ourselves as part of them.