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Is it Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate
Injustice
Kyle Powys Whyte, Michigan State University
Timnick Chair in the Humanities, Associate Professor of
Philosophy and Community Sustainability
In Press (November 2016 publication). Humanities for the
Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of
Practice. Edited by Joni Adamson, Michael Davis, and Hsinya
Huang. Earthscan Publications. Pages 88-104.
Introduction
Indigenous peoples are emerging as among the most audible voices
in the global climate justice movement. As I will show in this
chapter, climate injustice is a recent episode of a cyclical history of
colonialism inflicting anthropogenic (human-caused) environmental
change on Indigenous peoples (Wildcat). Indigenous peoples face
climate risks largely because of how colonialism, in conjunction
with capitalist economics, shapes the geographic spaces they live in
and their socio-economic conditions. In the U.S. settler colonial
context, which I focus on in this chapter, settler colonial laws,
policies and programs are ‘both’ a significant factor in opening up
Indigenous territories for carbon-intensive economic activities and,
at the same time, a significant factor in why Indigenous peoples face
heightened climate risks. Climate injustice, for Indigenous peoples,
is less about the spectre of a new future and more like the
experience of déjà vu.
Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Change
‘Indigenous peoples’ refer to the roughly 400 million persons
worldwide who, prior to a period of invasion, colonisation or
settlement, exercised collective self-determination according to their
own cultural (cosmological) and political systems. Indigenous
peoples continue to exercise collective cultural and political self-
determination today within territories in which they live as non-
dominant populations in relation to nation states, such as the U.S.
or New Zealand. Problematically, most people in the world assume
it as fact that nation have cultural and political primacy over
Indigenous peoples (Anaya).
Consider the Indigenous people to which I belong, the Potawatomi,
who have lived since time immemorial as an ecologically mobile (i.e.
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moved often within and across ecosystems for sustenance), culturally
distinct, and politically independent society that has maintained
kinship and harvesting relationships with hundreds of particular
plants and animals, and stewarded their habitats and cultivated
crops across an area of 30 million acres in the Great Lakes region of
North America. Potawatomi people organise themselves through
diverse cultural and political institutions, from families to villages to
winter/summer houses to ceremonies to bands to clans, each of
which is designed to relate to plants, animals and ecosystems in
some way.
Potawatomi society is ‘multispecies’ in the sense that it has its own
conceptions of responsibility, agency and value for the hundreds of
plants and animals that humans interact with in the Great Lakes
region. Potawatomi and closely related Anishinaabe/Neshnabé
(including Ojibwe and Odawa) peoples usually identified themselves
in environmental terms based on where they resided (e.g. a river
valley) (Secunda) and in clan animal (e.g. crane) or plant (e.g. birch)
terms that referred to large kinship networks centered around those
particular animals or plants (Bohaker).
Potawatomi people engage in political alliances with other groups,
such as the Three Fires Confederacy involving Odawa and Ojibwe
peoples. We have a legacy of trading with numerous other
Indigenous peoples across the region and continent. As the result of
French and British colonisation during the fur trade, starting in the
1600s, and then subsequent U.S. and Canadian settlement, which
fragmented and relocated our society, we are now 7 distinct Tribal
nations on the supposed U.S. side; and there are several Potawatomi
communities living within First Nations on the supposed Canadian
side.
Today, each of these communities exercises self-determination in
different ways, from having their own governments to continuing to
identify distinctly as Potawatomi to practicing certain ancient or
more recently developed cultural practices associated with being
Potawatomi or Indigenous North American. Potawatomi participate
in numerous trading and business transactions, diplomatic
relationships, and cultural exchanges with many Indigenous peoples
as well as with settler and other non-Indigenous societies. There are
thousands of Indigenous peoples living in the world today who
share comparable histories of continuing their self-determination in
spite of invasion, colonisation, or settlement, such as the Saami in
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the Arctic, the Maasai in Africa, the Maori in the Pacific and the
Mapuche in South America.
Importantly, it is here, at the point where we are discussing what it
means to be Indigenous, that environmental change and climate
change come to the fore as significant topics. For many Indigenous
peoples today, the concept of societies’ having to adapt constantly to
environmental change is not new. Potawatomi peoples and the
larger Anishinaabe/Neshnabé group have long traditions of cultural
and political systems that are based on designing institutions that
have capacities for adapting to seasonal and inter-annual change.
The ‘seasonal round’ refers to such a cultural and political system.
In the seasonal round, the purpose, organisation and size of cultural
and political institutions (from ceremonies to villages to bands),
changed throughout the year depending on what plants and animals
needed to be harvested, monitored, stored or honored.
According to my own knowledge, the institutions of the seasonal
round are organised differently depending on what plants and
animals need to be monitored, harvested, stored or honored. For
example, during sugar bush (maple syrup) harvesting (coming out of
the winter), a small extended family unit might be the primary
organisation; in the summer during berry harvesting and fishing
seasons, larger bands are formed; during wild rice season (late
summer, early fall), larger rice camps convene as coordinated
organisations of multiple families. Complex clan, gender, and
intergenerational norms over-lay institutions such rice camps or
sugar bush camps, mediating each person’s leadership authority and
particular responsibilities to plants, animals and other humans.
In a seasonal round, Potawatomi peoples do ‘not’ have the same
political and cultural institutions all year round, which is very
different from how, say, U.S. governmental institutions operate,
such as the senate or Environmental Protection Agency. The
expansion and contraction of institutions throughout the year
attempts to order society to be as responsive as possible to
environmental change in ways that respect how little humans
ultimately comprehend of the dynamics of ecosystems. In the
seasonal round, we have an example of anthropogenic activities that
are not in themselves ignorant of the tight coupling of human
cultural and political systems with ecological conditions. In fact,
cultural and political institutions are designed to approximate, as
best as can be known, the dynamics of changing ecological
conditions.
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A key point I want to highlight is that Potawatomi cultural and
political systems are structured rather ‘explicitly’ on the concept that
society must be organised to constantly adapt to environmental
change. So the importance of being mindful of how to adapt is not
a new one to Indigenous peoples such as the Anishinaabe and
others. This shows that ‘Anthropogenic’ environmental change is
not new as an idea nor does it date to the invention of Western
machines or technologies. Potawatomi and other
Anishinaabe/Neshnabé societies directly attempt to cultivate
ecosystems, using the institutions and ‘technologies’ of the seasonal
round, such as the implements and skillsets for sugar bushing, so
that there would be ecological conditions characterised by sufficient
abundance of plants and animals. This also shows that one way of
adapting to change is to work directly with ecosystems, whether
through seasonal burning, strategic planting, or tapping a maple
tree.
As trends in seasonal change are related to climate change, it is also
true in a sense that something like what we understand today in the
English language as adaptation to ‘climate’ change was also part of
Indigenous cultural and political systems as community members
keep track of, share and compare memories of seasonal change over
the years. Anishinaabe/Neshnabé stories, traditions and memories
can be used as decision-making processes for adapting to inter-
annual change (Nelson; Davidson-Hunt and Berkes).
My observations in this section offer just the basic idea that the
seasonal round is built on and emphasised institutions with
capacities to adapt to environmental change and to relate to local
ecological conditions. I am not making any comparative claims
about the superiority of Indigenous systems and institutions for
values such as sustainability or resilience. Though Indigenous
peoples everywhere vary widely in their being more sedentary or
more mobile, or having members living in less populated areas or
large urban centers, I want to convey that Indigenous peoples
generally are not surprised by the idea that their history consists of
the adaptive interplay between their cultural and political systems
and institutions and environmental change (Trosper; Colombi).
Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change
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For Indigenous peoples of different nations and heritages, because
we often share ways of life and histories that explicitly consider
adaptation to environmental change, we think very specifically
about different kinds of anthropogenic environmental change. That
is, human-induced alterations to the environment can range from
the ‘anthropogenic’ change involved with cultivating landscapes in a
seasonal round to those involved at earth system scales such as the
massive amounts of burning fossil fuels that have been occurring
through carbon-intensive economic activities. Colonialism, such as
U.S. settler colonialism, can be understood as a system of
domination that concerns how one society inflicts burdensome
anthropogenic environmental change on another society.
More specifically, settler colonialism, in the U.S. context (but also
others too), very specifically targets the ecologically mobile, adaptive
systems of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism refers specifically
to a system (or structure) of oppression by which one society settles
the territories of another society. More precisely, the structure of
oppression involves the settler society seeking to fully establish itself
in that territory according to its own cultural and political systems,
which requires erasing the Indigenous population (see Lefevre for
an overview of major sources). Erasure can be understood as the
strategic process of instantiating cultural and political institutions
that destroy the Indigenous mobile, adaptive cultural and political
systems and institutions that are tightly coupled with certain
ecological conditions. Consider some examples of one settler
colonial strategy, that of ‘containment,’ which engenders cultural
and political institutions designed to inhibit or ‘box in’ Indigenous
capacities to adapt to environmental change. Strategic institutions of
containment were used by the U.S. to facilitate the proliferation of
extractive industries, such as coal mining and oil drilling, large-scale
agriculture, deforestation and the creation of large urban areas—in
short, the drivers of today’s ordeal with anthropogenic climate
change.
Consider some examples. The fixed rights of treaty areas and fixed
jurisdictions of reservations, established during the 19th century,
place limits on Indigenous peoples, effectively rendering them
immobile. In the case of treaties, the idea that they represented
‘fixed rights’ is a U.S. settler interpretation, as Indigenous peoples,
in some cases, understood the treaties as open to flexibility and
renewal (Stark). Settlers eventually ‘filled in’ treaty areas and
reservation areas with their own private property and government
lands, which limit where and when Indigenous peoples can harvest,
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monitor, store and honor animals and plants; settlers then
stigmatise containment through social discourses that cast
reservations as bad places or that simply disappear reservations
altogether as neighboring communities; or settler discourses cast
Indigenous harvesters and gatherers as violating ‘the law,’ among
many other types of stigmatisation.
The consequences of capitalist economics, such as deforestation,
water pollution, the clearing of land for large scale agriculture and
urbanisation, generate immediate disruptions on ecosystems,
‘rapidly’ rendering them very different from what they were like
before, undermining Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous
peoples’ capacity to cultivate landscapes and adjust to
environmental change. These changes ‘contain’ Indigenous peoples
because they limit the abundance of plants and animals and the
number of locations for harvesting, monitoring, storing and
honoring. Many plants, animals and habitats are simply destroyed.
Boarding schools and other problematic forms of education strip
Indigenous peoples of languages that express knowledge and skills
related to particular ecosystems, seasonal change and knowledge.
Anishinaabe/Neshnabé languages, for example, are derived from
Potawatomi and other peoples’ specific engagements with certain
plants, animals and ecosystems and are primarily verb-based,
referring very explicitly to particular practices arising from ecological
contexts (Borrows). The forced adoption of English limits the range
of meanings, knowledges and skill-sets that Indigenous persons can
draw on for sustenance. Many Indigenous peoples in the 1830s were
forcibly removed from their territories altogether to take up small
pieces of reservation land or private property hundreds of miles
away in different ecosystems and climate regions.
Forms of recognition, such as U.S. Indian Reorganization Act of
1934, created Tribal governments and Alaska Native corporations
that seek to redefine Indigenous peoples’ governments as capitalist
enterprises whose goal is to mimic the U.S. economy by investing in
carbon-intensive economic activities, including Tribes that are
heavily involved in coal-fire energy and mining. These governments
inhibit Indigenous seasonal and clan-based cultural and political
systems and institutions by creating a profit-dependent entity the
citizens of which rely on its revenues for their well-being—which
becomes defined primarily in terms of financial stability. The
governments have been particularly hamstrung in their capacity to
address key human rights issues, such as sexual violence (Deer).
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All of these examples are cases where settler colonialism seeks to
erase Indigenous peoples’ adaptive capacity and self-determination
by repeatedly containing them in different ways, destroying the
ecological conditions that are tightly coupled with Indigenous
cultural and political systems. While some Indigenous peoples
manage to find ways to use forms of containment to their
advantage, such as through winning court cases within the U.S. legal
system that protect ecological conditions such as fish habitat for
certain valuable species, settler colonial institutions tend to render
Indigenous persons more susceptible to adverse health outcomes,
sexual violence, loss of cultural integrity and political turbulence,
among other common issues facing many Indigenous peoples today.
In this sense, though Indigenous cultural and political institutions
can adapt to change, what cannot be denied is that U.S. settler
society has required rapid adaptations in which preventable harms
become unavoidable harms. And Indigenous peoples incur these
harms for the sake of facilitating U.S. settler society’s instantiation
as the dominant and legitimate nation and peoples within North
America. We can look at this history as a cyclical history in which
U.S. repeatedly instantiates settler institutions that contain
Indigenous peoples, reducing their capacity to adapt to
environmental change on their own terms (consensually) and
without suffering preventable harms.
Climate change fits succinctly within this pattern. For this reason,
many contemporary Indigenous peoples are concerned about their
vulnerability, or susceptibility to be harmed, by impacts associated
with the observed rise of global average temperature, or climate
change. That is, they are concerned about climate risks as they are
increasingly confronted by change stemming from the carbon
intensive economic activities of settler and other colonial societies.
Climate change impacts can be seen through the lens of forms of
containment (among other forms of domination), this time arising
from settler contributions to increasing the concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Warming waters and receding glaciers affect the fish habitats in
Indigenous territories all over the world, such as on the Pacific coast
of North America where many Tribal nations harvest salmon for
economic and cultural purposes (Bennett et al.). Sea level rise is
pushing people living in the Village of Kivalina in Alaska, the Isle de
St. Charles in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Carteret Atoll in Papua
New Guinea to relocate (Maldonado et al.). In these cases we see
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both shrinking habitats and relocation occurring again. The Loita
Maasai peoples in Africa face droughts that affect the rain
conditions required for performing many of their ceremonies
(Saitabu). Indigenous women, girls and two spirit persons in the
Arctic and Great Plains regions are subject to greater sexual
violence, abuse and trafficking as work camps for oil and gas
extraction, such as ‘fracking,’ bring in male contractors to profit
from the resources found within Indigenous territories (Sweet).
Climate change impacts and drivers represent another form of
inflicted anthropogenic environmental change.
Scientific reports confirm many of the threats just described. In
2014, the U.S. National Climate Assessment states that Indigenous
peoples face the ‘loss of traditional knowledge in the face of rapidly
changing ecological conditions, increased food insecurity… changing
water availability, Arctic sea ice loss, permafrost thaw, and relocation
from historic homeland’ (Bennett et al. 2). The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report claims
Indigenous peoples face ‘challenges to post-colonial power relations,
cultural practices, their knowledge systems, and adaptive strategies’
(Adger et al.).
Indigenous peoples’ own descriptions of climate risk indicate that
settler and other colonial societies are imposing rapid
environmental change that generates otherwise preventable harms.
The Mandaluyong Declaration quotes Miskito women in the
Americas who say, in response to changing environmental
conditions, that “We now live in a hurry and daughters do not cook
as grandmothers… We do not catch fish as before, do not cook as
before; we cannot store food and seeds as before; the land no longer
produces the same; small rivers are drying up… I think that along
with the death of our rivers, our culture dies also.” (300-01).
For many Indigenous peoples, these rapid changes are experienced
as a continuation of settler colonialism and other forms of
colonialism that they have endured for many years. For we have
experienced these types of environmentally-related impacts before—
from dietary change to relocation to sexual violence—though caused
by different factors, such as multiple settler institutions of
containment. Though institutions of containment represent just
one limited example of a much more complex history with settler
colonialism. Anthropogenic climate change is of a piece with forms
of nonconsensual and harmful environmental change inflicted on
our societies in the past. Some Indigenous peoples look at futures of
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rampant climate injustice as looking to the cyclical history of settler
and other colonial inflictions of anthropogenic environmental
change on Indigenous peoples in order to instantiate erasure.
Yet what is more insidious about climate injustice against
Indigenous peoples is that the settler institutions such as those of
containment, that inflicted environmental change in the past, are
the same institutions that fostered carbon-intensive economic
activities on Indigenous territories. That is, containment strategies,
such as removal of Indigenous peoples to reservations or the forced
adoption of corporate government structures, all facilitated
extractive industries, deforestation and large-scale agriculture. What
is more, and as I will discuss in more detail in later sections, these
are the same institutions that today make it hard for many
Indigenous peoples to effectively cope with climate change impacts.
In this way, climate injustice against Indigenous peoples refers to the
vulnerability caused by ongoing, cyclical colonialism both because
institutions facilitate carbon-intensive economic activities that
produce adverse impacts while at the same time interfering with
Indigenous people’s capacity to adapt to the adverse impacts.
The Indigenous Climate Justice Movement and Colonialism
Indigenous voices are among the most audible in the global climate
justice social movement. Over 200 Indigenous delegates attended
the 2015 Conference of Parties (COP) in Paris, France, where they
pressed for (1) greater inclusion and leadership of Indigenous
peoples at the COP and in the developing climate change plans of
all nation states and (2) respect for the United Nations Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Previously, at the
Rio +20 Earth Summit in 2012, over 500 Indigenous persons
gathered at a culturally significant Kari-Oca Village in Rio de Janiero
to discuss and express their concerns about sustainable development
and climate change. Voices in the Indigenous climate justice
movement call attention to how colonialism and capitalist
economics facilitate the role of rich, industrialised countries and
transnational corporations in bringing about risky climate change
impacts. Many assert how climate injustice is a colonial structure of
domination because Indigenous peoples are being erased.
The International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) states that
“Indigenous peoples have been severely impacted by the main cause
of climate change, which is fossil fuel extraction carried out on our
lands without our free prior and informed consent. That makes it
essential that our rights are fully respected in this agreement and in
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the implementation of real solutions for the survival of our future
generations” (Native News). For IITC, carbon-intensive economic
activities occur non-consensually on Indigenous territories;
establishing climate justice involves states and corporations coming
to respect Indigenous rights to develop their own lands instead of
being exploitative for the sake of extracting fossil fuels.
In North America, the climate justice movement includes
declarations such as the Mystic Lake Declaration and the Inuit
Petition and direct actions against fossil fuel industries organised by
Idle No More, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the
International Indian Treaty Council. Indigenous Peoples often call
for stringent reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases than
nations do. For example, the Mystic Lake Declaration claims that
“Carbon emissions for developed countries must be reduced by no
less than 40%, preferably 49% below 1990 levels by 2020 and 95%
by 2050” (The Mystic Lake Declaration 2).
Indigenous peoples take leadership in creating (or updating) and
implementing their own cultural and political institutions for
adapting to adverse climate change impacts. They have set up
educational initiatives such as the Sustainable Development
Institute at the College of Menominee Nation in Keshena,
Wisconsin (founded in 1994), written their own programs and
policies, such as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes
Climate Change Strategic Plan (in 2013) and—globally—designed
their own metrics for how to assess climate change, such as the
Indigenous Peoples Biocultural Climate Change Assessment
Initiative and the Mauri Meter (for Maori cultural based
environmental and climate change assessment) (Morgan).
North American networks such as the Indigenous People’s Climate
Change Working Group (started by Tribal college students), the
Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, the Rising Voices
of Indigenous Peoples, and the First Stewards Symposium continue
to bring attention to the climate risks faced by Indigenous peoples.
Each network works to develop strategies for best dealing with
climate risks. An important aspect of what these networks seek to do
is resolve conflicts between Indigenous people and climate scientists
that prevent both groups from working productively together to
understand the nature of climate change and solutions for achieving
climate justice (see, for example, Climate and Traditional
Knowledges Workgroup).
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In my experience as a Potawatomi, as well as an organiser and
participant in the Indigenous climate justice movement, all the work
just referenced in this section seeks to bring to the fore the idea that
climate injustice occurs when settler and other colonial institutions
inflict rapid environmental change on Indigenous peoples.
Consider the 20 Treaty Tribes of in Western Washington, which
include the Nisqually Indian Tribe, the Lummi Nation and
Quinault Indian Nation, who in the last 10 years have taken
significant action on climate change. According to some of the
scientific reports cited earlier, climate change, and other
anthropogenic environmental change, is destroying salmon habitat
in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S.
The Treaty Tribes produced the Treaty Rights at Risk movement to
address these problems with climate and environmental change ‘as’
the U.S. settler state’s failure to live up to its treaty obligations to do
its part in ensuring it does not interfere with salmon and other
species that are integral to Tribal cultural and political systems
(Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington 2). The Treaty Tribes
have cultural and political systems that are designed to adapt to
changes in salmon habitat since time immemorial. According to the
late Billy Frank Jr. (Nisqually), “Through the treaties we reserved
that which is most important to us as a people: The right to harvest
salmon in our traditional fishing areas. But today the salmon is
disappearing because the federal government is failing to protect
salmon habitat. Without the salmon there is no treaty right” (2).
The Tribes seek to remind and pressure the U.S. government to
interpret the significance of the treaties as the Tribes do, which
would require the U.S. to address how its own cultural and political
institutions foster climate and environmental changes that degrade
salmon habitat and erase the Indigenous relationship to the fish.
At the same time, the Lummi Nation, one of the same group of
Treaty Tribes, has taken action to block the establishment of a coal
shipment terminal and train railway near its treaty protected sacred
area of Xwe’chi’eXen. In addition to environmental protection, the
Lummi reject the industrial capitalist values and colonial strategies
that ignore treaties for the sake of expanding carbon intensive
industries such as coal. The Tribal chair, Tim Ballew II, claims
“We’re taking a united stand against corporate interests that
interfere with our treaty-protected rights…Tribes across the nation
and world are facing challenges from corporations that are set on
development at any cost to our communities” (Schilling).
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In this case, respect for treaty rights from the U.S. is a key climate
justice issue. Simply calling for reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions will not occur in time to protect salmon and other
species. Importantly, the Treaty Tribes of Western Washington have
articulated clearly an insidious feature of climate injustice against
Indigenous peoples: disrespect for treaty rights concerns ‘both’ why
U.S. has gotten away with establishing carbon-intensive economic
activities on Indigenous territories ‘and’ why it is hard for the Treaty
Tribes to adapt effectively to today’s climate injustice ordeal. That is,
the Tribes see respect for treaty rights as both stopping the
continued interference with their cultural and political systems and
curtailing the carbon intensive economic activities that play a
significant part in anthropogenic climate change. Climate justice is
matter of breaking the cyclical history of colonial strategies that
interfere with our environmental responsibilities, rights to self-
determined adaption to environmental change and rights to reject
industrial, capitalist and colonial values.
The Indigenous climate justice movement brings to the fore why it
is hard to claim that ‘at least’ indigenous peoples would be harmed
less if rich, industrialised countries lowered their emissions without
dealing with colonialism. For many strategies for lowering emissions
impose harms themselves on Indigenous peoples if colonialism is
not addressed. Beymer-Farris shows how Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
(REDD+), a United Nations program promoting forest
conservation, was implemented in Kenya in ways that displaced
Indigenous peoples’ cultivation of rice in protected forests,
rendering these Indigenous communities worse off than before
(Beymer-Farris and Bassett). Or in the U.S., bills for clean energy
often exclude recognition for funding to Indigenous peoples for
supporting clean energy and retrofitting of housing within the
jurisdictions of Indigenous nations (Suagee). Or in the case of treaty
rights or the Inuit petition, lowering emissions too slowly, may
render change at too lumbering a pace for the rapid changes
Indigenous peoples are experiencing in some regions. Hence,
lowering emissions without addressing colonialism can be highly
problematic even if we assume that some of the types of solutions
just referenced will ultimately have beneficial results on reducing
concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The Bad Luck View
While ongoing, cyclical colonialism is a major issue taken up by the
Indigenous climate justice movement, it is rarely considered in the
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governmental and academic literatures that can be and often are
used to understand Indigenous vulnerability to climate change and
justice. These literatures include those specifically about Indigenous
peoples and vulnerability, as well as literatures on climate justice
that primarily refer to the vulnerability of global south countries
(that Indigenous peoples live in). The latter literatures nonetheless
discuss issues relevant to Indigenous peoples in the global north. In
these views on vulnerability expressed in these literatures,
Indigenous peoples are often seen as facing greater risks as a matter
of happenstance or bad luck. Here, my goal is not so much a direct
criticism of these literatures; rather, I aim to examine how well they
are suited to some Indigenous peoples’ situations given that they are
often used to understand the nature of vulnerability and climate
injustice.
To begin with, the Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Backgrounder
produced by the United Nations describes Indigenous peoples as
vulnerable “owing to their dependence upon, and close relationship
with the environment and its resources. Climate change exacerbates
the difficulties already faced by vulnerable Indigenous communities,
including political and economic marginalization, loss of land and
resources, human rights violations, discrimination and
unemployment” (UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, pg.
1). Similarly, the proceedings from the United Nations Conference
on Indigenous peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate
Change, states, “Impacts on their territories and communities are
anticipated to be both early and severe due to their location in
vulnerable environments, including small islands, high altitude
zones, desert margins and the circumpolar Arctic. Indeed, climate
change poses a direct threat to many Indigenous and marginalized
societies due to their continuing reliance upon resource-based
livelihoods” (McLean, Ramos-Castillo and Rubis, pg 5). The U.S.
Department of Interior makes a comparable claim, citing
Indigenous peoples as “heavily dependent on their natural resources
for economic and cultural identity” (Secretarial Order 3289 –
Section 5, pg 4).
These understandings of vulnerability lean heavily on two ideas.
First, for some Indigenous peoples, heightened vulnerability arises
from their ‘continuing’ dependence on local ecosystems, which
somehow suggests that Indigenous peoples are ‘more’ dependent on
the environment than others. Moreover, this idea also suggests that
it is by dint of Indigenous peoples own choosing or simply
happening to live in certain places and living in certain ways that
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they are at risk. In this sense, all that is going on is Indigenous
peoples ‘living close to the land’ and climate change impacts
occurring on top of this geographic and lifestyle situation.
Second, Indigenous peoples endure legacies of colonialism ranging
from poverty to marginalisation. The resulting socio-economic
conditions ‘happen to’ not absorb or withstand climate change
impacts well. That is, Indigenous peoples are not resilient to climate
change impacts owing to their socio-economic conditions. For
example, lack of employment and lack of strong infrastructures (e.g.
buildings, roads, transportation options, etc.) are not going to
protect communities well from climate change impacts such as sea
level rise and severe droughts. That climate change impacts visit
populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who have socioeconomic
problems, is also happenstance.
It is important to note that both ideas in the previous paragraph are
not associated with the drivers of climate change. Drivers of climate
change are the carbon-intensive economic activities that contribute
to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Climate change impacts mix with Indigenous local lifestyles and
socioeconomic conditions to make the consequences of injustice
more severe. Colonialism is rarely referenced in relation to local
Indigenous lifestyles and socio-economic conditions beyond the
obvious fact that the latter is colonialism’s legacy (Cameron;
Haalboom and Natcher).
Ethicists and political philosophers such as Shue (1992), Gardiner
(2006), and Preston (2012) have developed concepts of compound
injustice or skewed vulnerability to describe the relationship
between vulnerability and injustice, especially for people in the
global south, but that also can be used in relation to Indigenous
peoples who share comparable vulnerabilities to populations in the
global south (and are also often living in global south countries).
These concepts of vulnerability and justice extend the two ideas
referenced above almost exactly. Preston summarises well some of
the main threads of the literature on compound injustice and
skewed vulnerabilities. He writes that “Less developed nations had
already lost the economic lottery through colonialism and military
and economic imperialism,” which creates three kinds of
vulnerability:
(1) “Geographically increased vulnerability to climate change,”
which refers to how climate change “wreaks the greatest havoc and
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destruction on the lives of the global poor partly as a result of
nothing more than geographical bad luck. Many of the global poor
happen to live in locales that will be most susceptible to the
consequences of increasing global temperatures….” (Preston 80-81).
(2) “Economically increased vulnerability to climate change.
Situated squarely on top of the geographically bad luck is the
fact that persons who lack resources and economic mobility
are less capable of extricating themselves from life-
threatening situations (Preston 80-81)”
(3) “Historical responsibility. The geographic and economic
vulnerability of the poor nations to rising temperatures is
particularly unfortunate given their lack of historical
responsibility for creating the problem in the first place.”
(Preston 80-81).
For Preston, “the three factors described illustrate how, through a
combination of skewed vulnerabilities and skewed responsibilities,
climate change appears to be particularly unfair to poorer nations.”
(Preston 80-81).
In these readings/arguments about risk, vulnerability and injustice,
the reason why harms are seen as bad luck is that climate ‘injustice’
primarily refers to the origins of climate change impacts on carbon-
intensive economic activities, such as burning fossil-fuels and
deforestation. Yet these climate change drivers are ‘not’ related any
further to the reasons why Indigenous peoples live locally in ways
that are more sensitive to climate change impacts or endure the
legacies of colonialism such as poverty and declining infrastructure.
According to Preston’s summary, climate change impacts occur ‘on
top of’ the fact that Indigenous peoples continue to live off the land
and continue to endure legacies of colonialism. Climate change
impacts are like new problems that exacerbate old problems—and
the old problems (e.g. colonialism) are themselves unrelated to
climate change.
According to my analysis of these accounts from the U.S.
Department of Interior to Preston’s summation of the literature,
‘bad luck climate injustice’ against Indigenous peoples occurs when
there is an accidental convergence of three histories. The first
history is that of anthropogenic climate change brought about
thanks to the carbon-intensive economic activities of
industrialisation and capitalism. The second is the history of
16
Indigenous local lifeways, that is, Indigenous cultural and political
systems that have persisted over time in ways that turn out to be
more sensitive to climate change impacts because they are “resource-
based livelihoods” (McLean, Ramos-Castillo and Rubis, pg 5). The
third is the history of entanglements with colonialism that render
Indigenous peoples today living under socio-economic conditions
characterised by poverty, isolation, discrimination and social
invisibility.
Climate change impacts arise from the history of carbon-intensive
economic activities ‘as something new’ that Indigenous peoples have
to reckon with on top of everything else they have to deal with. The
bad luck of the convergence of these three histories is ‘something
new.’ Since climate change and colonialism are dissociated in the
accounts of the bad luck view I am examining here, it is simply
unfortunate that Indigenous and other populations are threatened
the most. Accordingly, the main focus for efforts to establish climate
justice should be on the responsibility of industrial countries and
transnational corporations for their contributions to climate change
without considering their continued participation in settler and
other forms of colonialism. Resolving bad luck climate injustice
primarily must involve reducing emissions and compensating
victims for adaptation—solutions that remain silent on colonialism.
No Case of Bad Luck: The Village of Shishmaref
Thinking about climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is less
about envisioning a new future and more like the experience of déjà
vu. This is because climate injustice is part of a cyclical history
situated within the larger struggle of anthropogenic environmental
change catalysed by colonialism, industrialism and capitalism—not
three unfortunately converging courses of history. Today’s climate
injustice ordeal reminds us of historic climate injustices that began
well before the last 250 years of industrial development (Wildcat).
Consider one example in detail, that of Marino’s work with the
Kigiqitamiut people, who live in Shishmaref, Alaska, a small Inupiat
island community in the Bering Sea. The community’s cultural and
political systems are located at the central convergence of animal
migration routes that support Inuit subsistence hunting. Because
they live so far north, to most people in the world, Shishmaref is
largely unknown or considered somehow spatially separate from all
other societies. For this reason, the climate injustice being
experienced by community members is also largely unacknowledged
by the rest of the world. A community member, Fred Eningowuk,
17
cited by Marino, says, “Shishmaref is in the middle of a circle of
subsistence.” (377). Impacts such as increases in windiness,
storminess and erosion and diminished sea ice threaten the low-
lying island with habitual flooding and eroding Oceanside bluffs,
risking a life-threatening disaster (Marino).
Globally, these changes are associated with anthropogenic climate
change. But locally, Shishmaref is grappling with the immediate
problem of not having the required mobility to shift and adapt in
response to these impacts. Prior to settler colonisation, the
community was quite mobile, with multiple adaptive institutions as
part of their cultural and political systems. As Marino claims,
“Previous flexibility to environmental shifts and unexpected hazards
allowed the community to adapt to abrupt changes” (374). Yet now
a “relatively immobile infrastructure and development requires
people to stay in place in order to carry out their daily lives.”
(Marino 374). The community’s immobility—a key reason for why
they are vulnerable—results from colonial strategies that sought to
missionise, educate, and render sedentary Indigenous peoples in the
Arctic, replacing the Indigenous institutions with settler ones. These
policies were likely pursued out of diverse motivations, but they
subsequently facilitated resource extractive industries, from fishing
to the oil industry.
For example, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, one strategy
of settler colonialism was to consolidate mobile family groups to
sedentary villages with central nodes, such as a post office,
government school and a mission. The last 100 years then, is one in
which the “previously mobile Kigiqitamiut have become intimately
tied to this infrastructure for school, work, life, and livelihood.
Development and ‘sedentarization’ policies rapidly decreased the
ease of mobility.... Lives and work became rooted in specific, new,
critical infrastructure. Thus, traditional strategies became less
practical.” (Marino 378).
In light of this history, Marino argues that the village is particularly
vulnerable to climate change owing to a number of key factors: (1)
procedural injustice, or a lack of input into development decisions,
which led to the building of infrastructure in already marginal and
increasingly exposed locations (such as flood prone areas); (2)
containment, or the ending of high mobility as an adaptive strategy
(via sedentarisation) “without replacing it with other readily
identifiable adaptation strategies;” and (3) settler centralisation, that
is, decision-making and political power were shifted outside the
18
local community to the state of Alaska, exposing the village to
distant political and economic fluctuations. “In Shishmaref, the
colonial history and inequities inherent in colonizing decisions
contributes heavily to current vulnerabilities to flooding, in the ways
we observe here, among others.” (Marino 379)
I interpret Marino’s work as suggesting three different strategies of
settler colonialism to erase the way of life of Kigiqitamiut as a way of
creating a U.S. homeland based on carbon-intensive economic
activities. Each strategy curtails the community’s capacity to adapt to
environmental change. Today, we see the cycle again. Relocation is
very expensive, and the policies governing relocation are highly
problematic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, who
would share responsibility for the relocation, is governed by 1988
Stafford Act, which requires rebuilding “in place” and “without
improvement” (378) as the way to respond to disasters. This fails to
adequately protect the community. Moreover, since there is no
agency that works with communities on “preemptive disaster
planning or risk reduction in these cases where erosion increases
exposure to flooding hazards,” the solution requires herding the cats
that are multiple federal agencies and their budgets (Marino 378).
According to Marino, the U.S. interferes with Shishmaref’s capacity
to adapt to environmental change, and has done so multiple times
throughout its settler colonial history. The settler colonial strategies
that impede adaptation today are the ones that were originally
designed to facilitate carbon-intensive economic activities in the
Arctic. Again, as with the Potawatomi, these recountings of cyclical
history in relation to climate change are not unique to Indigenous
peoples—though there will certainly always be exceptions given the
diversity of Indigenous experiences globally. This cyclical history
locates colonialism at the heart of the problem of both vulnerability
and climate change mitigation. There is no bad luck. Climate
injustice against Indigenous peoples, then, refers to the vulnerability
caused by settler and other forms of colonialism ‘both’ because
colonial institutions facilitate carbon-intensive economic activities
that produce adverse impacts while at the same time interfering with
Indigenous peoples’ capacity to adapt to the adverse impacts.
Conclusion: The Experience of Déjà Vu
The recounting of Indigenous histories, such as the Village of
Shishmaref, suggest different perspectives on the history of climate
injustice than the bad luck view, which compounds three histories,
one associated with carbon-intensive economic activities driven by
19
industrial capitalism; another with colonialism and the socio-
economic conditions Indigenous peoples face; and yet another with
Indigenous cultural and political systems. For many Indigenous
peoples, climate injustice does not involve, simply, an ‘age of the
human’ dated to industrial development. Indigenous peoples often
see themselves as participating in cultural and political systems that,
from hundreds even thousands of years of experience, are explicitly
designed to adapt to environmental change; climate injustice
emerges as an issue more recently that is part of a cyclical history of
disruptive anthropogenic environmental change caused by settler
and other colonial institutions that paved the way for extractive
industries and deforestation. Colonial institutional strategies that
historically made it harder for Indigenous groups to adapt to climate
change from the 1500s to the mid-1800s, continue to complicate
abilities to adapt to accelerating climate change today. We will
understand the nature of climate injustice against Indigenous
peoples better—and perhaps its solutions too—the more we see it as
more like the experience of déjà vu.
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