Indigenous-Settler Climate Change Boundary Organizations Contending With U.S. Colonialism

Abstract

Indigenous peoples who are taking actions on climate change issues have formed networks that are at the intersect between Indigenous knowledges and various environmental science fields. These climate organizations work across many boundaries in science, politics, and culture. This article asks how large-scale U.S. climate boundary organizations that convene Indigenous and non-Indigenous climate practitioners contend with ongoing colonialism. Analysis indicates that Indigenous-settler networks offer avenues for Indigenous values to be practiced in collaborative climate science. Such organizations also provide limited opportunities to utilize climate science in tribal climate adaptation. While these boundary organizations aim to build meaningful cross-cultural and mentoring relationships, uneven power dynamics and resources also permeate the partnerships. These structural inequalities cause tensions to arise. Tensions further arise from uses of new terminology to navigate longstanding struggles over places, political sovereignties, and human relationships to natural worlds. I argue that a decolonial environmental framework discerns roles for Indigenous governance in attending to anthropogenic climate change. The approach broadens sociological understandings of climate change by examining the attempts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors to build climate networks.

Diversifying Indigenous Vulnerability and Adaptation: An Intersectional Reading of Māori Women’s Experiences of Health, Wellbeing, and Climate Change

“…A substantial body of work indicates that Indigenous peoples experience heightened vulnerability to the impacts of climate change because of the social, economic, political, and cultural marginalisation they continue to experience through their encounters with colonial states [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Despite evidence for internalised power dynamics within Indigenous societies that flow from interacting categories of difference (subjectivities) such as gender, sexuality, age, and class [22][23][24], very few studies examine how intersections of subjectivity may influence Indigenous peoples' experiences of climate vulnerability and adaptation, especially in settler colonial societies including Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) [25,26]. Accordingly, in this paper, I address this large gap within the Indigenous climate adaptation scholarship and draw on intersectionality to extend understandings of Indigenous women's experiences of and vulnerability to climate change.…”