Indigenous resistance, planetary dystopia, and the politics of environmental justice

ABSTRACT

This article examines the critical interplay among Indigenous resurgence, settler colonialism, and the politics of environmental justice. Critical questions need to be asked: How are Indigenous political demands for decolonization taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia? How might ‘environmental justice’ work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests? This article takes up these questions vis à vis Standing Rock, paying particular attention to the way that the politics around water become reconfigured through notions of kinship, justice, Indigenous temporalities, and multiple frontlines. I argue that an anti-colonial indictment of environmental justice compels us to (re)imagine decolonial research/ praxis around environmental politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous resistance
• environmental justice
• colonialism
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kyle Whyte (2018) refers to dystopia as ‘post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios’. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2514848618777621.

2 For a fulsome discussion of tribal water governance, which stands in opposition to the commodification of water as ‘resource,’ see Cohn et al's ‘Spatio-Temporality and Tribal Water Quality Governance in the United States’ available at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/11/1/99.

3 Goeman also points out that language plays a key role in simplifying the way we think about land. An excellent companion piece to this point is Keith Goulet's ‘Our Land’ (forthcoming in 2017).

4 See UN reports citing the impact of climate change, and https://wecaninternational.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/wecan-women-for-climate-justice-on-the-ground-nycdc-april-2017/.

5 For a critique of a ‘rights-based’ approach to social justice, please see http://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-09-24_Amnesty_Can-human-rights-bring-social-justice_essay1.pdf.

6 Or in the parlance of Kyle Whyte, ‘settler colonial injustice is environmental injustice’.

7 Also see Tasha Hubbard's Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth- Century North America: Kill, Skin, and Sell (2015).

8 See http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/09/climate-justice-without-gender-justice-women-forefront-peoples-climate-march/ for further information on this point.

9 See https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1017-this-fight-has-become-my-life-and-it-s-not-over-an-interview-with-zaysha-grinnell.

10 See Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies, Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 2016 for recent research in this area, available at: http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/VLVBReportToolkit2016.pdf.

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Notes on contributors

Jaskiran Dhillon

Jaskiran Dhillon is an anti-colonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Cultural Anthropology, Truthout, The Nation, Feminist Formations, Environment and Society, Social Texts, and Decolonization among other venues. She is the author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017) and co-editor of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (2019). Dr. Dhillon is Associate Professor of Global Studies & Anthropology at The New School in New York City.