Indigenous knowledges in CES thinking: How invisible forest beings can inform more equitable science

This chapter brings CES thinking into conversation with Indigenous critique and shows how divisions between culture/nature, human/nonhuman and natural/supernatural entrench a structural privilege of Western science over Indigenous knowledges. CES thinking is a specific form of knowledge making practice that separates out elements of an entangled socioecological web and often fail to account for the multitude of life that constitutes many Indigenous ways of knowing and living with nature. For CES scholars, this means, first, acknowledging that CES has its own troubled lineage rooted in historically engrained dualisms and, secondly, actively probing their effects on the worlds in which we work and intervene. To this end, I build on a case study of Munyama Forest, inhabited by a historically marginalized Indigenous group of the Lenje people in central Zambia. In Munyama, humans, plants, rivers, animals and humans form a political alliance that mounts both human and non-human resistance against eviction. In this context, applying the CES frameworks risks cementing colonial conceptions of Indigenous ways of knowing and living as "culture". A more ethically oriented CES scholarship must, instead, recognize how plants and spirits emerge as political actors, and rethink the categories and knowledge hierarchies upon which CES frameworks rests.