Osiki Ancestral Tree Roots - NTRO Submission
Overview: Osiki Ancestral Tree Roots is a collaborative cultural art installation that explores the interdependence of humans, nature, and culture through the symbolic lifting of the Osiki root system, a living ancestral archive of the Luo people in western Kenya. It provides inspiration and awareness on the innate resilience and reciprocity of socio-ecological systems.
Research Background: Indigenous perspectives emphasising kinship with nature are often overlooked in human-environment studies (Gauthier et al., 2025). Among Kenya's Luo people, Osiki (Siala tree roots) symbolise intergenerational connection in trees planted for future generations, that are cut and regrown cyclically. When government road development threatened these roots, they were typically burned for charcoal. This installation instead lifts them up, reframing destruction as regeneration.
Research Contribution: This work addresses a gap in dominant climate resilience discourses by embodying Indigenous and ecological perspectives, relational ontologies and multispecies kinship, contributing to decolonized methodologies in environmental art. The project reframes resilience not as a technical fix, but as a cultural and spiritual capacity rooted in intergenerational belonging. Created through participatory, community-engaged practice, Osiki elevates the root system - literally and symbolically - to communicate enduring knowledge systems. The research contributes a non-traditional output (NTRO) that bridges academic and community worlds through multisensory engagement, offering a new way to understand human–nature–culture relationships.
Research Significance: This interdisciplinary work advances environmental humanities by centering Indigenous knowledge systems in climate adaptation discourse. The installation challenges mechanistic resilience views, offering holistic frameworks for socio-ecological transformation. Created through community partnership, it demonstrates excellence in participatory research methodology and cultural collaboration, providing accessible engagement with complex environmental concepts while honouring Luo cultural protocols and knowledge systems.
References
Gauthier, P. E., Chungyalpa, D., Goldman, R. I., Davidson, R. J., & Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D. (2025). Mother Earth kinship: Centering Indigenous worldviews to address the Anthropocene and rethink the ethics of human-to-nature connectedness. Current Opinion in Psychology, 64, 102042. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2025.102042