The Art of Sustainable Shelter-Making: Bakhtiari and Métis Craft Adaptation in Response to Environmental Change

Abstract

How can craftwork offer ethical approaches to homemaking amid environmental change? In this paper, craftwork is both the technical knowledge and the aesthetic expression of homemaking that brings together human and more-than-human relations into an ethico-political tension. This paper was shaped by a web of relations and responsibilities stemming from my Iranian-Bakhtiari ancestry and my diasporic positionality in so-called Canada. I follow the craft practices of Bakhtiari nomads of southwest Iran to redefine homemaking, not in terms of land ownership, resource accumulation, or the exclusion of others, but in terms of sheltering. Following Bakhtiari teachings, sheltering is the ongoing labour of sustaining ethical and incongruent relations with human and more-than-human communities through collective care and socio-ecological mutual orientation. By thinking with Bakhtiari and Métis textiles and contemporary art, such as Métis artist Christi Belcourt’s Water Song (2010-2011) and Bakhtiari artist Amin Roshan’s My Father’s Contract (2013), as shelter-making practices, I explore how these diverse crafts enact sustainable sheltering through mindful reorientations to place. Both Bakhtiari and Métis crafts enact forms of remembering and resistance that reveal the far-reaching and interrelated extractive violences of British imperialism across Indigenous lands. This paper argues that a transnational and cross-cultural comparative analysis of Indigenous crafts can help mediate the ethical and political tensions of diasporic disorientation to new environments—what I name as the ab-be-ab or water-to-water experience—refiguring this disorientation into a long-term, water-based pedagogy for learning with Indigenous peoples, watersheds, and creative works, to resist being comfortable with/in settler colonial societies.