Indigenous Justice is Climate Justice
Why Indigenous Sovereignty Movements Are Essential for Climate Justice
A note: With this being Native American Heritage Month and Thanksgiving week–where the cognitive dissonance of celebrating a day that seems to wholeheartedly embody the settler-colonialist lies we were brought up in is very real–this feels like an appropriate time to dive into Indigenous sovereignty movements. And Y’all, this article was a bit of a beast for me because there is just so much. I have so many thoughts and I’m still learning so much about Native sovereignty movements so this newsletter feels so very long but also incomplete. Nonetheless, I’ve hopefully connected the dots enough. So with that, forgive the lengthy post but hopefully it’s useful to show you my own journey to understanding more about Indigenous climate justice movements.
As I’ve written in a previous post, the idea of “connecting with nature” has always felt like an abstract concept to me. While I’m still very new to noticing the little details of nature and engaging in curiosity around them, I’ve at least spent the last couple of years transforming my relationship with nature from a historical perspective. In particular, I’m learning more about Indigenous relationships with nature–both in modern times and historically. And at the same time unlearning the harmful Euro-centric settler narratives that we were/are subjected to in U.S. schools. This process has uncovered for me how we’ve been duped into assuming that before Europeans arrived, the beautiful pieces of nature we want to rightly protect were untouched wilderness.
Yet, the truth is, humans have been stewarding and moving through these places for millennia. What’s more, learning about this history and unlearning the erased narratives of Indigenous presence for time immemorial can actually be a key to solving the climate crisis.
Why is the “Untouched Wilderness” Narrative Harmful?
So, let’s back up a moment and investigate why this “untouched wilderness” narrative that still often shows up in National Parks literature is harmful. In modern times, the story assumes that humans mess up everything we touch, so let’s leave it as Mother Earth intended it to be (as “untouched wilderness”). However, that’s not the complete truth. Yes, that’s true for the colonizers and the people with financial interests in the land, so we can be somewhat excused for thinking this. However, this is not the case for the thousands of years that Indigenous people walked the earth prior to capitalist interests arriving to ruin everything.
Take the history of Yellowstone National Park. Researchers have found countless pieces of evidence of how Indigenous people moved through and stewarded the land for thousands of years before it became a national park/major tourist attraction.
“The big myth about Yellowstone is that it’s a pristine wilderness untouched by humanity,” says researcher Doug MacDonald in this Smithsonian article. “Native Americans were hunting and gathering here for at least 11,000 years. They were pushed out by the government after the park was established. The Army was brought in to keep them out, and the public was told that Native Americans were never here in the first place because they were afraid of the geysers.”
This narrative from the outset was meant to perpetuate the erasure of Indigenous peoples of the United States. And while even for those of us well-intentioned nature-loving folks in the present day might not have those intentions, the misunderstanding about what nature was like pre-settlers helps to keep that negative narrative alive to the detriment of both Indigenous peoples and the environment. Because, through omission of important historical perspectives, the harmful narrative undermines Native sovereignty that is linked to the protection and stewardship of the land.
How does that narrative do this, do you ask? Well, it’s complex, but I’ll do my best to explain how I have interpreted this with the disclaimer that I’m, of course, writing from a settler perspective that is very new to the awakening of the true Indigenous history of the United States thanks to the colonial narratives perpetuated in the U.S. education system and beyond, and therefore, I’m still very new to learning about what this all means in terms of all the intersectional social justice issues. But I’ve learned a lot from the resources referenced here, so I point you in that direction if you’d like to learn more about this. But I hope this is helpful to those of you on a similar unlearning journey.
How Do Native Sovereignty Movements Help with Climate Change?
“‘Sovereignty’ holds many meanings for Indigenous people around the world,” wrote Christina Delucia, Doug Kiel, Katrina Phillips, And Kiara Vigilin in this essay in The American Historian, showing that Indigenous peoples and tribes are not a monolith. But the importance of sovereignty is consistent across nations and tribes. So they attempted to bring together a diverse set of values around sovereignty into “core qualities” that they found encompass the following: “the longstanding autonomy and inherent self-determination of Native nations; foundational relationships and responsibilities within and between Native people and homelands; and exercises of authority over how Native experiences are represented, understood, and shared.”
They go on to note that there are often legal and political implications of sovereignty as well as how it is “vital to cultivate a more expansive vision that encompasses Indigenous languages, cultures, popular expressions, activism, environment, and much more.” As such, the varying movements around sovereignty (which I’ll go into later) are related to these different meanings of sovereignty depending on the context.
So how is Indigenous sovereignty connected to the climate crisis? Because sovereignty is rooted in the intrinsic cultural connection Indigenous people have with the land that they and their ancestors stewarded for millennia.
“Climate justice is about building ties between people, their land, and their traditional, ancestral ways,” wrote Jade Begay in the Stanford Social Innovation Review referencing how a colleague had explained it to her. “Removing Indigenous Peoples from our land took away our ability to carry and pass on traditional ecological knowledge, like how to manage lands, our connection to traditional food ways, and our traditional economic structures. There is much to learn, for example, from the Indigenous Peoples who have practiced controlled and deliberate burns that restore ecosystem-wide health.”
In addition to attempting to separate Native Americans from one another and, thus, their traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous people around the world are among the most vulnerable to the changing climate. In this Yale Environment 360 interview with Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians provides examples including the Hopi people in Arizona facing a megadrought harming crops and livestock, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw people in Louisiana losing lands to rising seas, and Sharp’s own tribe, the Quinault in Washington State having to relocate two seaside communities because of increasing floods. The challenges are not just in North America, from the Amazon to the Arctic, Indigenous livelihoods and health outcomes are being affected worldwide.
The point is that Indigenous people are, indeed, the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but their traditional knowledge of the lands and seas rooted in their cultural relationship with the Earth provides key answers on how to take action. Through learning about, supporting, and joining as an ally/accomplice with various Indigenous sovereignty movements is one of the most effective ways to engage in climate action.
What are Indigenous Sovereignty Movements I Can Get Behind?
With that, it’s probably helpful to go highlight some of the various sovereignty movements that are particularly powerful. While these focus on larger-scale movements and actions, there are likely local Indigenous-led groups that are doing the work as well.
The Land Sovereignty Movement/LANDBACK
The LANDBACK movement, launched by the NDN Collective is a macro-level movement that involves both the literal return of Indigenous land as well as the spiritual return of tradition and culture to Native people. This larger movement is enacted in different ways depending on the context. The literal returning of land can be through advocating for honoring original treaties or about donating land and/or enabling a tribe’s purchase of land.
There’s also a spiritual component to LANDBACK which The Sogorea Te' Land Trust, an Indigenous women-led organization seeking to rematriate Lisjan (Ohlone) land in Northern California has a mission rooted in healing and transforming "the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do." they call this “rematiration” and see it as both a literal and spiritual act.
Examples of successes include Congress transferring 18,000 acres of bison range in Montana to the Salish and Kootenai tribes, the Yurok tribe in Northern California’s purchase of 70,000 acres of their traditional land, and Mendocino County returning over 500 acres of coastal redwood forest land to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. Writer, David Treuer also highlighted the potential of regional and federal land being transferred to Native peoples through his incredible story in The Atlantic, “Return the National Parks Back to the Tribes.”
I wrote more about the LANDBACK movement in this Portals of Possibility article. Learn more and join in solidarity with the LANDBACK movement with this organizations: The NDN Collective ; Sogorea Te' Land Trust; and Native Governance Center. And the Native-Land.ca is a great place for tools to learn whose land you live, work and play on.
Indigenous Food Sovereignty
The LANDBACK movement goes hand-in-hand with Indigenous food sovereignty. The approach is meant to resist the centuries of colonization that “have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems,” as noted in the description of Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover.
Indigenous peoples across North America have disproportionately high rates of food insecurity. A lot of this has to do with the colonization of food systems that stripped Native communities of their lands, their food systems, and their food traditions. Food sovereignty is a way to reclaim ecological connections with traditional foodways which is also a means of fighting climate change.
Learn more with these organizations: The Indigenous Food Systems Network; Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance; Native Conservancy; and I-Collective.
Securing and Maintaining U.S. Tribal Sovereignty Laws
There are entities that are actively continuing the colonial work of disenfranchising and dismantling Native American tribes in the name of capitalist interests, in particular Big Oil. One of the most palpable examples of this is the Indigenous-led resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock. This massive uprising also shows why Big Oil sees Indigenous sovereignty standing in the way of their business interests.
In fact, the oil industry was behind a 2021 Supreme Court case that put Oklahoma tribes’ treaty rights on the line.The Oklahoma tribes prevailed this time around. However, this isn’t the end of the road for the crafty oil industry. This case shows the many complex layers of Native sovereignty that intersect with so many Indigenous justice issues from land rights and cultural preservation to environmental justice.
The other major case that’s happening right now is a Supreme Court case that could potentially overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was established in 1978 in order to protect Native kids from being removed from their families. However, because some White families who sought to adopt Native children took issue with legal hurdles, they are taking their cases (and ICWA) to the Supreme Court. Rebecca Nagle–journalist and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation–has done some incredible investigative reporting on this story, particularly in Season 2 of the This Land podcast and in this recent story in The Nation. If ICWA is overturned, Native children and families are at greater risk of being fractured and therefore putting more children at risk. ICWA, though, has proven to be the “gold standard” for child welfare as it’s focused on keeping children with or connected to their families. Outcomes for children through ICWA have been far better than for children in the traditional foster care system. And now, because of capitalist and White settler interests, Native children’s well-being is on the line.
How is this connected to climate change? Well, it turns out that Big Oil is also behind this case. The law firm leading the case (pro bono I might add), Gibson Dunn, is behind fights against tribal casinos, has represented Chevron and Shell among other large-scale crappy-ass corporations, and represents Energy Transfer, the energy company behind the DAPL (see above). “The issue is that not only would overturning ICWA hurt Native children, it would also impact mineral rights and tribal self-determination.” wrote Brittney Habbart in the Law Journal for Social Justice, “Attorneys who work for Big Oil and other industries have chosen to fight ICWA as a measure to destroy tribal sovereignty so they can make a tribal land and natural resources grab.Tribal nations hold 2% of all land but their total value of tribal fossil fuel resources is around $1.5 trillion. So while this case may seem like it’s about the well-being of Native children, the children ‘have become pawns in a colonial chess game.’ “
Protecting ICWA is incredibly urgent and one that allies can get behind immediately. I recommend following @ProtectICWA on Instagram for action alerts. Additionally, you can sign this petition to show your support for ICWA. It’s a case that shows that Big Oil will stop at nothing–including putting children at risk–in order to continue their climate ravaging agenda. It’s an example of the intersection of social justice issues.
The Intersectionality of Climate Justice Issues
What is clear to me as I learn about Indigenous justice is how interconnected it is with environmental issues. ICWA is a perfect example of this and Big Oil sees this. They understand how important Indigenous solidarity and sovereignty are to holding the biggest environmental extractors accountable and away from natural resources. And what these big companies are doing is using the same tools from early colonization to separate and erase Indigenous people, it’s just somewhat less obvious by using capitalism and the courts. They’ll stop at nothing–including hurting children–to get what they want.
So to bring this meandering story somewhat full circle, I hope that readers of this see how when we think about and interact with nature, we have Indigenous people to thank for the preservation of the lands that we hold so dear. And for that, we owe it to the original stewards of the land to work in solidarity for all Indigenous sovereignty movements.
That’s how we should be showing our gratitude this week and beyond.