Mara Jill Goldman, Associate Professor
University of Colorado-Boulder
As the global community grapples with how to improve biodiversity conservation efforts, Indigenous communities around the world are demanding the process of conservation itself be decolonized. In this talk, I ask what this means globally, and where I work in Northern Tanzania where colonial models of violently separating indigenous people from their homes in the name of conservation continues at pace. I present some aspects of my own approach to the work of decolonizing conservation through my book, Narrating Nature: Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing (University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book draws on over two decades of fieldwork among Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. In the book, I seek to unsettle established ways of knowing, talking about, and managing human-wildlife relations and wildlife conservation in these landscapes and beyond, where Euro-American scientific approaches have historically dominated.