This paper examines how an Asian American family engages with waste through walking on Indigenous land in the Midwest United States. Drawing on six months of autoethnographic inquiry using the Learning in Places curriculum, I trace how a Chinese American mother and child encounter waste across Minnesota suburban wetlands, urban parkways, a Dakota sacred site, and Chicago's Chinatown. Rather than treating waste as an object or problem, I approach it as a relational condition through which colonial infrastructures, bodily knowledge, and accountability are negotiated. Analysis of parent-child dialogues, fieldnotes and walking encounters reveals three findings: first, non-Western metabolic logics shape what waste becomes knowable and how; second, when waste flows through infrastructure and bodies, different epistemological accounts are needed to make hidden connections across scales; third, historical inquiry reveals that waste under settler colonialism operates as a compounding temporal condition. The deeper waste is embedded in settler colonial structures, the less materially visible it becomes, and the more labor is required to trace it. This paper contributes to children's geographies by showing how waste, approached through diasporic epistemologies and intergenerational dialogue, exposes the entangled workings of racialized belonging and accountability across settler-colonial landscapes.
