Prayer in the Pluriverse: Resisting Extractivism across Worlds

Elane Westfaul
Political Science
UC Irvine

Based on participant observation and interviews with Indigenous and settler individuals who have engaged extensively in environmental resistance efforts in Manitoba, Canada, I argue that International Relations (IR) can benefit from analyzing embodied and spiritual actions as political acts of resistance to settler-colonialism and neoliberalism. Prayer has the capacity to be utilized by its adherents as a humbling, or a surrender, to kinds of cosmic wisdom, wherein the limits of knowledge might not be fully accessible to humans in their relationship with the Sacred. Using autoethnographic and creative methods to situate myself plainly and reflexively as a settler, I analyze ways in which the discipline of IR sustains biases against ways of knowing that are important for both their political interventions within IR and for their broader resistances to settler-colonialism. In addition to challenging secularist tropes about religion and prayer as irrational/emotional/private, I argue that prayer can create reflexive and self-critical possibilities to act politically in relation to environmental issues through creating pluralistic forms of solidarity and community construction. Interview and participant observation findings among settler Christian and Indigenous individuals suggest that prayer, through surrender, can deepen environmental commitments or “living Otherwise” to mend relationships with Earth and other Beings.

Learn more about Elane Westfaul’s work as a Climate Political Scientist.