Settler Colonialism Conspiring as Climate Change

BY MIIGIS CURLEY

Recognizing that colonial activity is not limited to the past but rather a consistent factor dictating Indigenous life is critical to understanding how climate change creates communal displacement from homelands and cultural genocide. Various Indigenous communities in America and Oceania experience attest to the contemporary navigation of colonial violence. Who are leading Indigenous knowledge resurgence in mitigating the dangerous effects of climate change, which is fundamental to effective climate mitigation and adaptation methods. However, Indigenous voices are often left out of critical decision-making. Thus, including and supporting Indigenous communities in fighting climate change constitutes the essential integration into foreign and domestic climate change conversation. 

Settler colonialism is evident in climate change’s active disallowance of Indigenous livelihood. The Global North’s systems of knowledge typically negate the importance of Indigenous involvement because of the guise that colonization and attempts of genocide against Indigenous peoples are no longer a reality. Many Indigenous communities have interconnected epistemologies of land, water, and being, which are highly integrated in languages, cultural practices, and world understandings. Settler colonialism seizes and removes these ways of living in the name of assimilation or eradication through the means of enslavement, displacement, or illegalizing cultural and religious practices and languages like the US and Canadian implementation of Indian residential schools.¹ These methodologies of erasure continue to be interwoven into global socioeconomic systems. However, the lack of widespread coverage of continued contemporary colonialism makes it challenging to demonstrate how settler colonialism manifests through climate change. 

To understand the level of threat climate change poses to Indigenous communities and how it manifests as an instrument of colonialism, it becomes critical to examine the history of settler colonialism and genocide in land displacement and unsustainable living conditions. How Industrialization, origins in the creation of global powers like the US or France, feeds into aspects of settler colonialism through large-scale resource extraction that harms the natural environment. During the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, in Article II of the Genocide Convention, the assembly defined genocide with the following conditions: “Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”² Through the configuration of a global standard this becomes the baseline of climate change as a product of settler colonialism adherent to the means of this article. 

For example, the growing consumption of uranium in eco-friendly or carbon-neutral technology like solar panels or nuclear energy is a call for caution since these methods harbor historical racial and environmental violence that is ignored. This industrial need for minerals is inciting precaution from Sovereign Indigenous nations because of the possibility of repeating historical events like the Uranium mining on Navajo Nation territory (1944-1986), which contributed to the current clean water crisis and the high rates of cancer on the reservation.³ This track record supplements precaution because the uranium mining crisis is a prime example of past enactments of settler colonialism legacy in environmental violence that procreates today, and will continue to affect future generations.

Another rising threat is the rising sea levels, how the climbing coasts impact the lives of Islanders and coastal communities. Rebecca Lindsay, a writer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), authored Climate Change: Global Sea Level (2023), Contributing the new record-breaking sea levels to the greenhouse effect because it amplifies global warming, which increases oceanic water volume and temperature.⁴ Contemporary technology does not possess the capability to deflect coastal erosion, extreme weather, or changing food systems, summarizing an inescapable challenge to Islanders’ and coastline communities’ ability to safely remain in their homes. An Aboriginal people dealing with these extremities are those on Kiribati islands, located in the Micronesian and Polynesian areas of the South Pacific Ocean. For the Kiribatian people, and much like other communities surrounded by water, kinship with the ocean is central to culture, language, and worldviews. However, the crushing reality is that Kiribatian peoples are predicted to be the first climate change refugees due to the unavoidable submergence of their homelands, the dying coral reefs that create food insecurities, and increasing fears of tsunamis.⁵ Following the UN definition, Kiribatian people are facing attempts of genocide. Whilst the land loss will change Kiribatian culture forever, the community is using innovative methods for heritage preservation with a vast digital archive of cultural and geographical information like the Kiribati – Digital Government Project.^6,7 The Kiribatian response is bittersweetly becoming the leading example for strategic response to settler colonialisms formation as climate change for Island and Coastal communities.

Another way that global warming is harming Indigenous communities is through the rapidly changing landscape that contributes to various animal extinctions, the diminishment of food stability, and the continued legal protections that disallow hunting. Land loss also means a decrease in plant population because of abnormal environmental conditions, further contributing to food insecurity. In an interview with Yale Professor ​​Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kānaka Maoli), she discussed how climate change has impacted food sovereignty for peoples of Oceania and, more specifically, her homelands of Hawai’i. Hobart underscored that Hawai’i’s mountainous geography puts the islands in a support role for other Oceanic communities in times of climate crisis, stating that “Natives people have ingenious forms of adaptability that have just been part of who we are. It is not that we have a static environmental past that we need to get back to; [instead] we have to become intimate [with our environment] again.” Hobart underlined the strength of Indigenous resilience while highlighting presence of settler colonialism and cultural genocide, how it creates unsustainable settlements and damages the ability to continue cultural practices. Essentially, understand that land loss is language loss: language revitalization is a predominant journey for many Indigenous communities after the initial destruction of settler colonialism. As seen in the Iñupiat community, people who have traditionally learned to communicate about their environment through working with it by harvesting, hunting, or exploring.^8,9 When other animals adjust to the changing climate, altered migration patterns and abnormal or short hunting seasons occur, diminishing crucial moments for practicing food sovereignty and language revitalization. 

In an interview with University of Washington Professor Joshua Reid (Snohomish, Yale’ 94), he revealed how the climate crisis affects Coast Salish peoples and what action tribes respond with. Reid described the effects of rising sea levels and hotter water temperatures as detrimental for communities across the US and Canadian west coastline, for the Quinault Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Reservation, and Lower Elwha Indian Reservation¹⁰, with many more sharing similar storylines. Due to the increased risk of flooding and tsunamis, Quinault people are navigating displacement, leaving their ancestral village for higher elevation further away from their coastal kin.¹¹ The change in surrounding underwater environments is equally devastating, as seen in the decreased salmon population, the increased deaths of southern resident orcas, and the record-breaking heat wave that devastated shellfish populations in 2021.¹² The Swinomish community has been navigating the response to the shellfish incident, which Reid described as being “unbearably hot” and “cooked millions of shellfish around the Swinomish reservation, Anacortes area, and a little inland, [which was] devastating for the community…miles and miles of dead shellfish.” Much like Hobart discussed, Reid states that climate change is not an abnormal experience and that “the roots of the tough lessons in many of our creation stories” are tied to how past generations handled climate change— which contemporary peoples must now learn from. Reid followed this statement by highlighting how Swinomish peoples are “now leading the returning Indigenous technology of clam gardens which are safe spaces for shellfish and buffers zones of climate change [effects].” Whilst this is the harrowing reality for many, Coast Salish tribes attest to the resilience of Indigenous knowledge. Swinomish tribal government and community have begun the reimplementation, as Reid describes, of Indigenous knowledge seen in clam gardens, which act as buffer zones against erosion and pollution filtering. Other significant actions led by Native peoples include the Lower Elwha Indian Reservation, in which this group pressured the Washington state government to invest in dam removal, watershed restoration, and river revival. Reid stresses that Indigenous communities cannot be the only contributors who repeatedly advocate actions like reviving wetlands or establishing Native-lead or ethically processed hatcheries, but that the “state needs to be better partners, land owners, and companies too… Non-Natives need to step up and do better.” 

These effects of colonialism can be seen in various ways, whether displacement or destruction. The cause of these effects is climate change, a way in which historical and ongoing settler colonialism can thrive under a new name. While many native communities are trying to protect their practices and relations with beyond human kin, it is not enough to be the only ones facing the unavoidable force of climate change and global warming.

Miigis Curley (Anishinaabe/Diné) is a first-year in Jonathan Edwards College.

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References

1. Colonialism, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism. York University.
2. Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes. in (United Nations).
3. Navajo Nation: Cleaning Up Abandoned Uranium Mines. Environmental Protection Agency https://www.epa.gov/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup/aum-cleanup.
4. Lindsey, R. Climate Change: Global Sea Level. Natl. Ocean. Atmospheric Adm.
5. Kiribati and climate change Kiribati, the first country rising sea levels will swallow up as a result of climate change. Iberdrola.
6. Cooper, J. Oceania’s Indigenous Peoples Rising. Cult. Surviv.
7. Kiribati – Digital Government Project. https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/852781653593751829/kiribati-digital-government-project (2022).
8. Murphy, A. The Revival of Indigenous Subsistence Whaling Hangs in the Balance. Civil Eats (2022).
9. Effects of Colonization and Climate Change on Indigenous Languages. Climate in Global Cultures: Promoting Climate Literacy Across Disciplines.
10. About Us: Tribes. Puget Sound Regional Council https://www.psrc.org/about-us/tribes.
11. Quinault Indian Nation Plans for Village Relocation. US Clim. Resil. Toolkit (2015).
12. Ma, M. New study: 2021 heat wave created ‘perfect storm’ for shellfish die-off. University of Washington (2022).