Exploring Environmental Communication in the U.S. Indigenous Diaspora

ABSTRACT

Indigenous people living away from their homelands represent a substantial but under-researched population in environmental communication. Through a series of interviews with 21citizens living in the U.S. Indigenous diaspora at four separate field sites, the present study explores how environmental information moves to and through this population, with particular focus on the roles of social media, government communicators, and multimedia storytelling. For the citizens interviewed, mediated environmental communication helped maintain cultural connections and sometimes provided the basis for political action. Social media, particularly Facebook, were cited as key channels of environmental information. Elected leaders served as sources of environmental information with the official communications of environmental departments rarely cited as sources. Newspapers and newsletters still played an important role, but citizens also saw multimedia storytelling as an important new way to both maintain traditional ecological knowledge and communicate about the foundations of Indigenous environmental governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Native American
• indigenous
• diaspora
• environment
• multimedia

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical approval

The study received approval from the Institutional Review Board at Indiana University – Bloomington (IRB #1808921512).

Notes

1 Note on positionality: The researcher is a citizen of an Indigenous Nation and, lives in the Indigenous diaspora. While the researcher held in-group status in some regards, the researcher was not a member of all the community hubs sampled in this project and thus entered many interviews with a complex in-group / out-group status. The researcher discussed this positionality with participants and drew upon personal examples to check for understanding and construct probing questions during the interview process.