Donna Haraway, “Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival”

Summary

Central Argument

Donna Haraway argues that living on a damaged planet requires more than describing environmental destruction or hoping for a complete return to an undamaged past. People need to cultivate ways of living and working with human and nonhuman beings, accepting that repair will be incomplete and that loss is real.

She calls these encounters “contact zones”: situations in which different beings, communities, forms of knowledge, and histories meet and may change one another. Her stories show that environmental problems cannot be separated from colonialism, economics, science, animal lives, or questions of who has the authority to make decisions.

Concepts and Approach

• Live in a “thick present.” Drawing on an account shared by an Aboriginal Australian teacher with Deborah Bird Rose, Haraway describes a way of understanding time that faces those who came before. The responsibility is to care for country and leave it quieter for those who come after—not to imagine that we can directly face or control the future.
• Use storytelling as a method. Haraway’s stories bring together scientific knowledge, history, activism, art, and speculative imagination. She uses “SF” to mean not only science fiction but also string figures and speculative fabulation: ways of making connections and imagining possibilities.
• Think relationally. Species, people, and other beings are not isolated units. They are formed through relationships and “relatings.” Haraway favors understanding categories such as species, race, and gender as processes and positions rather than fixed, self-contained things.
• Make “oddkin.” Kinship need not be limited to biological family. People can form durable obligations and relations with human and nonhuman companions, while recognizing that different histories shape what kinship means.
• Practice partial healing. Repair matters, but it cannot erase irreversible loss or restore an earlier, supposedly whole state. Haraway cautions against both despair and fantasies of total restoration or technological rescue. The task is to make conditions more livable for Earth’s many beings while remaining accountable for the damage.

Contact-Zone Stories

1. Inuit seal hunting, climate change, and Sila

   • Haraway discusses the ringed seal, or natsiq, and the importance of hunting and land-based food practices for Inuit communities.
   • Inuit knowledge of changing ice, water, and air is expressed through Sila, described as the circulating breath of the world. Haraway argues that this knowledge should not simply be translated into—or subordinated to—southern scientific frameworks of “climate change.”
   • A genuine encounter would allow Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems to challenge and alter one another. It must also reckon with pollution concentrated through northern food chains, colonial histories, and disputes over hunting rights.

2. Navajo Churro sheep, colonial violence, and land management

   • Haraway traces the importance of Navajo Churro sheep to Navajo life and weaving, and recounts the destruction of sheep, orchards, and crops during forced removal under Kit Carson.
   • Later officials invoked “carrying capacity” and overgrazing without adequately understanding Navajo relations to land, matrifocal pastoralism, or the pressures created by trade and debt.
   • She presents this as a missed contact zone: ecological concepts and Navajo knowledge could have been brought into accountable conversation, but unequal power shaped the outcome.
   • She also highlights the Black Mesa Water Coalition, whose work includes climate justice, clean water, renewable energy, food programs, and a just transition. Its efforts show why stories of destruction should be told alongside stories of organizing and coalition-building.

3. Taiwanese dogs and Indigenous rights

   • Haraway’s dog Shindichu leads her to discuss Taiwan’s free-roaming dogs and the history of the Formosan mountain dog, associated with Indigenous communities and hunting practices.
   • Colonization, forced displacement, the killing of hunting dogs, and the later importation of consumer breeds have shaped the dogs’ present-day populations. Rescue networks, foster homes, adopters, and dog communities form another complex web of relations.
   • Haraway connects current Indigenous struggles for land and hunting rights with questions about tourism, conservation, and the interests of animals themselves. She urges people not to assume that every human group shares the same interests as the wild animals affected by hunting and land-use decisions.

4. Pacific Island tree snails and the work of conservation

   • Haraway describes the severe decline of Hawaiian tree snails following habitat destruction, introduced predators, collecting, and other pressures.
   • Biologist Michael Hadfield and colleagues studied the snails’ biology and used endangered-species protections to resist further destruction. Conservation requires detailed, sustained work: maintaining lab conditions, culturing food sources, building predator-exclusion fences, and monitoring small populations.
   • This example makes care concrete. Preventing extinction involves ongoing labor, infrastructure, scientific practice, political advocacy, and alliances with Pacific Island communities.
   • Haraway stresses that extinction is a process, not merely a single event, and asks what it takes to hold open space for a species to continue.

5. Monarch butterflies and ancestral return

   • Haraway closes with monarch butterflies that overwinter in Michoacán. In the account she shares, Mazahua and other local communities understand the returning butterflies as returning ancestors around Día de los Muertos.
   • She presents this as a way of thinking beyond biological symbiosis: relationships among living beings, ancestors, stories, and places also shape how people understand the world.

Art, Imagination, and Speculative Storytelling

• Haraway uses Lynn Randolph’s cyborg paintings to show how technology, history, animals, cosmology, and human experience can be brought together in a single figure.
• Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale becomes an occasion for speculative storytelling about evolution, pregnancy, flight, and ecological possibility. Haraway’s playful imagining of the whale and her calf illustrates how speculative imagination can be part of serious thinking.
• The novel The Man with the Compound Eyes provides a speculative environmental story set in Taiwan, linking ecological catastrophe with the possibility of renewed ways of living together.
• Across these examples, imagination is not an escape from reality. It is one way to notice relations and possibilities that conventional categories or narratives can obscure.

Main Points from the Q&A

• Species: Haraway does not advocate abolishing the idea of species. She favors treating species as relational and changing, rather than as fixed categories that automatically authorize exploitation.
• Kinship and solidarity: “Kin” can describe lasting, accountable relations beyond biological family. Haraway emphasizes that this is not a rejection of biological kinship, but an effort to broaden how belonging and responsibility are understood.
• Conservation and colonial histories: “Partial healing” does not mean accepting unjust ownership or jurisdiction. Haraway says that reparations and return of title must be part of the discussion, while acknowledging that there is no simple restoration to an uncontested past.
• Animal advocacy and killing: Haraway describes animal advocacy as diverse and internally complex. She opposes factory-farming conditions and recognizes tensions between animal advocacy, Indigenous hunting rights, and different ways of life. She rejects a position of moral purity that denies the realities of killing, while insisting that the lives and deaths of animals remain matters of ethical concern.

Speakers and Sources Featured

Speakers

• Inderpal Grewal — Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; co-introduced the event.
• Joanna Radin — Professor in the History of Science and Medicine; co-introduced the event.
• Donna Haraway — Lecturer and respondent during the Q&A.
• Audience members — Several people asked questions during the Q&A; they are not identified by name in the subtitles.

Key Thinkers, Collaborators, Artists, and Works

• Deborah Bird Rose and an unnamed Aboriginal Australian teacher, whose account of time and caring for country informs Haraway’s discussion.
• G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Grace Pickford, whom Haraway discusses in recalling her Yale years.
• Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Marisol de la Cadena, whose work and thinking inform Haraway’s approach to Indigenous knowledge, relations, and contact zones.
• Lynn Randolph, Patricia Piccinini, and Satoru Abe, artists whose work Haraway discusses.
• Paulette Metuq, Kevin O’Connor, and Dustin Drum, associated with the ringed-seal image discussed in the lecture.
• Michael Hadfield, a biologist whose work on Pacific Island tree snails is a major example.
• Jim Clifford, Kathy McCloskey, Jihan Gearon, and Tom Van Dooren, whose work or contributions Haraway refers to.
• Marilyn Strathern and Angela Davis, cited in the Q&A.
• Works and concepts mentioned include Dingo Makes Us Human, The Man with the Compound Eyes, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Paradises Lost, Wastelanding, Swept Under the Rug, Dreaming of Sheep, The Cyborg Manifesto, Situated Knowledges, The Teddy Bear Patriarchy, When Species Meet, and The Companion Species Manifesto.
• Organizations and initiatives discussed include the Black Mesa Water Coalition, the American Rare Breeds Association, and the Institute for Society and Animals.