Biography
Frédérique is a Congolese Canadian raised on Treaty 6 Territory in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta). Currently in her second year of doctoral work, her academic and research interests lie at the intersection of religion, gender, identity, migration, and trauma. She focuses on the experiences of forcibly displaced women who settle in settler-colonial contexts across North America, exploring how their identities—and processes of identity formation or reformation—interact with and challenge dominant narratives of belonging in their new “home.”
Paper Abstract
In conversation with Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World and Sylvia Wynter’s “Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of Caliban's Woman',” this paper argues that contemporary climate catastrophe is inseparable from the spiritual and material devastations of colonial modernity. Through an examination of the waters and soil that marked Black bodies as disposable and “demonic,” and through the historical displacement of Africville, I show how ecological struggles function as interconnected theological sites of racialized dispossession. I contend that colonial projects of “development” and “progress” in Canada perpetuate enduring structures of environmental racism, in which water—sacred and life-giving—becomes a site of suffering, neglect, and structural abandonment.
Engaging ecowomanism and decolonial thought, the paper reinterprets the Anthropocene through a moral and spiritual critique of empire, demonstrating how extractive economies and racial capitalism deform both land and body. By returning to the “roots” of place—the ancestral, spiritual, and material ground beneath communities such as Africville and other Black Nova Scotians—I argue that our present ecological crisis cannot be disentangled from the historical and theological wounds of colonial modernity. Yet these very roots also gesture toward possibilities for hope: place-based relations, communal memory, and emerging forms of intercommunion across oppressed communities and traditions. In attending to what lies below our feet, this paper explores how rootedness itself may offer pathways toward ecological and communal healing.