We are making a major change to our publishing schedule this year. We’re asking our followers, former contributors, and subscribers to read this post in its entirety. We will be asking for feedback at the end of this post, so please stick around to the last slide.

As a publication, we have some core principles and goals to help guide our focus and decision-making.

They aren’t listed anywhere, nor are they static, nor do we generally feel the need to articulate them publicly. For the most part, we simply work to reflect these values in the work itself. These are basic political and ethical principles that guide us throughout the creative process or when we come across internal, editorial, interpersonal, or structural challenges. Before explaining the change we are making to our year’s publishing schedule, we have listed some of those goals and principles on the next slide to contextualize the decision we have made for our community.

1. We seek to make a small contribution to the process of building broad solidarity across our region in order to support the process of ecological, social, and political transformation.
2. We seek to platform an array of left political viewpoints and strategies for accomplishing #1.
3. We seek to platform contributors from diverse communities, prioritizing marginalized communities, with the understanding that (a) Appalachia is not the monolith many purport it to be, and (b) the wisdom needed to achieve a healthy future is most deeply stored within the communities who have suffered various forms of oppression most directly.
4. We seek to visualize what it means to heal the relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world in the face of ongoing colonial violence and late-stage capitalism.
5. We seek to engage in the process of self-criticism often, and to remain open to critical feedback that is communicated respectfully and in good faith as an opportunity to engage in that process.

We have had a handful of people ask us why we wanted to do this issue. “Shouldn’t you want Indigenous contributors to be participating in every issue?” The answer to that question is simple: Yes. We seek to draw from a diverse pool of contributors for every issue.

The more important reality is that Indigenous communities steward at least 20% of land mass and 80% of biodiversity across the world, while they make up only 5% of the global population as a result of historic and ongoing colonization and genocide.

We have learned from activists, like the recently departed Klee Benally (Diné), that these statistics are often cited as apologia to leverage greenwashed programs for “clean energy” capitalism, thereby running cover for greenwashed neo-extractive industries.

Here, though, we cite these statistics as a reminder that the logic of Indigenous erasure remains at the center of US political, legislative, and academic institutions—as we will make clear below. We also cite these statistics to acknowledge the complexity of Indigenous leadership against colonial systems that have burdened Indigenous communities with being the saviors of all living beings.

What’s more, while we work toward building diverse representation into each issue, we think there are important opportunities within the framework of this publication to consolidate the representation of specific marginalized groups within a single issue.

This impulse was also reflected in our recent issue, Kindly of a Queer Nature, which was designed to center queer and trans voices from our region. We already have plans to do this in other ways for future issues. This also reflects another of our core beliefs, that ecology is a plane upon which all lineages of oppression directly intersect. We believe the left must align upon the planes of political ecology (environmentalism) and political economy (labor and class interests). Failing to do so leads to bare identity politics, splintering communities and often thwarting the possibility of broad and dynamic intersectional collaboration.

With the aforementioned statistics in mind, along with our desire to occasionally concentrate voices from one marginalized community or another into a single issue—the insight of Indigenous people is WILDLY underrepresented in the extant scientific literature.

This is a direct result of the colonial and white supremacist moorings of our institutions along with the structural barriers to entry that exist within the institutional publishing apparatus. For that reason, we think it is essential to intentionally create opportunities for concentrated representation of Indigenous people (and all marginalized communities in Appalachia) in our publication. What’s more, from an internal editorial perspective, we believed that including an issue on the theme of Indigeneity would be a great way to make a first attempt at prioritizing concentrated Indigenous representation into one edition. We thought this approach would provide an opportunity for our readers to engage with nuanced thoughts about the connections between ecological and cultural nativity, thereby creating a stronger foundation for engaging with the problem of invasive species. Our goal in doing so was to strengthen our thesis that the current crisis of invasive species is deeply rooted in colonization.

For the Indigeneity edition, we now realize we need to have the freedom to move patiently—even slowly—through the process of building healthy relationships with multiple peoples and communities.

There are complex dynamics to understand and networks of relationships to build in order to execute the editorial process with the appropriate amount of care.

With our short editorial turnarounds, we are simply unable to manage the preparatory needs of this issue in a way that we think is ethical. For that reason, we are postponing the specific theme of Indigeneity for at least a year.

Our motivation behind postponing the theme is to spend a year strengthening our relationships, broadening our knowledge base, and patiently developing a framework where we can most effectively include the diverse array of Indigenous experiences and perspectives that exist in our region.