Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• Anthropocene
• Pacific Islands
• Oceanic cosmopolitanism
• *banua

Acknowledgments

We thank the special issue editors, particularly Andrew Baldwin, and the two anonymous reviewers of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Only one author is an Indigenous Pacific Islander.

2. Farbotko and McMichael (forthcoming) distinguish a notion of voluntary immobility from ‘trapped populations.’ This latter concept gained prominence in the UK Government’s Migration and Global Environmental Change Foresight report (Foresight 2011). It refers to impoverished people who are unable to move from environmentally high-risk areas due to lack of resources required to move, with this socio-economic vulnerability further amplified by the erosion of livelihoods via climate change impacts (Foresight 2011; Nawrotzki and DeWaard 2018). Ayeb-Karlsson, Smith, and Kniveton (2018) argue that labelling a person or population as ‘trapped’ can, like the term ‘vulnerable’, potentially reduce recognition of agency and thus limit independence and self-determination. In contrast, the notion of voluntary immobility commences with the perspectives, agency and rights of people who do not want to leave their homes and homelands (Farbotko and McMichael forthcoming).