Indigenous perspectives for strengthening social responses to global environmental changes: A response to the social work grand challenge on environmental change

ABSTRACT

The “Grand Challenges for Social Work,” is a call to action for innovative responses to society’s most pressing social problems. In this article, we respond to the “Grand Challenge” of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment from our perspective as Indigenous scholars. Over the last several decades, diminishing natural resources, pollution, over-consumption, and the exploitation of the natural environment have led to climate change events that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. We present how environmental changes impact Indigenous peoples and suggest culturally relevant responses for working with Indigenous communities. We propose a decolonizing cyclical, iterative process grounded in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

KEYWORDS:

• Traditional ecological knowledge
• social work grand challenges
• Indigenous social work
• environmental justice

Summary of Declarations

Competing interests: None declared

Ethical approval: Not required (the development of this conceptual model did not involve human subject research).

Declarations of interest: none declared

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank our senior mentors who encouraged this publication, Karina Walters and Susan Kemp.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Specific examples include: 1) the forced removal of the American Indian Choctaw (1831–1833) approximately 500 miles from their original homelands (Akers, 2004), 2) the forcible removal of over 100,000 Australian Aboriginal children (1910–1970) to residential schools and orphanages as well as through adoption (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 1997), and 3) ongoing exploitation and contamination of Indigenous lands through gold mining operations leading to adverse health outcomes in a Guatemalan Mayan community (Caxaj, Berman, Ray, Restoule, & Varcoe, 2014).

2. In this paper we use “land” to refer to all landscapes and seascapes from which Indigenous peoples belong.

3. Defined as “the processes through which Aboriginal people’s access to the resources of their traditional environments is reduced,” (Richmond & Ross, 2009, p. 403). Examples include “widespread displacement, environmental contamination, forced assimilation, unprecedented resource extraction, and land rights disputes,” (Tobias & Richmond, 2014, p. 26).

4. Yellow Bird defines decolonization as actions taken to “weaken the effects of colonialism and create opportunities to promote traditional health practices in present-day settings” (Yellow Bird 2016, p. 65).

5. On November 29, 1864, a U.S. militia attacked a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members, killing an estimated 160 women, children, and elders near what is present day Eads, Colorado. John Evans was governor of Colorado territory and territorial superintendent of Indian affairs (Clemmer-Smith et al., 2014).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number HHSN271201200663P and award number R01DA037176 and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under award number P60MD006909.