De-growing settler colonialism: Elena Gomez, ‘Degrowth and the Indigenous ecopoetics of dg nanouk okpik’s Blood Snow’, Textual Practice, 2026

09Sep26

Abstract: This article considers the ways poetry can attend to the tensions and compatibilities between degrowth and Indigenous sovereignty within a broader ecopoetics framework. Both Indigenous sovereignty and degrowth movements reject growth-based economic models and propose alternative future models that reimagine social and economic systems for planetary survival. At the same time, Indigenous activists are suspicious of settler-led ecological proposals that reproduce the violent hierarchies of settler colonialism. This article considers the distinctions and connections of these spheres through the Indigenous standpoint in contemporary lyric poetry. Through an analysis of key poems from the 2022 collection Blood Snow by Iñupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, this article finds that Indigenous subjectivity constructed within a place-based ecopoetic mode emphasises not only the specificity of natural environments but also the complex and multivalent relations that link social, economic and ecological spheres. Such a construction provides an essential intervention into degrowth discourse that might move towards a decentring of Western perspectives.