[ Selectively borrowing Indigenous practices cannot truly address
the climate crisis or injustices to Indigenous peoples perpetrated by
white settler colonialism.]
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INDIGENOUS AND CLIMATE JUSTICE REQUIRES HOLISTIC LANDBACK  
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Ray Levy Uyeda
October 6, 2022
Prism
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_ Selectively borrowing Indigenous practices cannot truly address the
climate crisis or injustices to Indigenous peoples perpetrated by
white settler colonialism. _

Indigenous community members join activists during a rally organized
by youth climate awareness group Fridays for Future to declare a
"climate justice emergency" in New York City on Sept. 23, 2022, (Photo
by Ed Jones / AFP)

 

On April 22, 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an agency housed
within the Department of Defense, sent a letter
[[link removed]] to
the North Dakota Historical Society. Richard Harnois, an agency field
archaeologist, shared that the government analysis found the Dakota
Access Pipeline
[[link removed]] wouldn’t
impact any historical sites where the pipeline would cross Lake Oahe
on the Missouri River. But declaring the land ready for the pipeline
was never up to the military’s construction arm or a state-run
agency—this land was, and is, Native land protected by treaties
entered into by the federal government and Native tribes, said Matt
Remle, the Lakota co-founder of the divestment umbrella
organization, Mazaska Talks [[link removed]]. It’s
been that way—officially—for over a century and a half. 

One hundred and forty-eight years before Harnois sent the impact
statement, U.S. military generals and Tribal leaders signed the 1868
Fort Laramie Treaty
[[link removed]], which codified
the agreed-to territories as the “absolute and undisturbed” land
of tribes that had stewarded the land since time immemorial. A decade
later the U.S. broke the terms
[[link removed]] of
the treaties, sending its military to seize the Black Hills and large
swaths of the surrounding land. That action remains one of the most
blatant violations of treaty law and degradations of Native land, for
inscribed in the Black Hills are the faces of individuals who ordered
the removal of Native peoples from their land. 

The treaty-protected territory goes all the way up from the Black
Hills—aka Mount Rushmore—to the areas surrounding the Standing
Rock and Cheyenne River reservations. If the 1868 treaty were upheld
and Native land respected, the pipeline might not have been completed,
Remle said. In the five years that the pipeline has been operational,
a new iteration of an old movement to return Native lands has rooted
itself as necessary to correcting historical injustice and tackling
the ballooning impacts of climate change. 

“LANDBACK is going to do a whole hell of a lot [to address climate
change] because one of the most significant acts of decolonization we
can do is returning lands,” said Nicholas J. Reo, a citizen of the
Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and an associate professor
of Native American and Indigenous studies and environmental studies at
Dartmouth College.

“I think we have a tremendous amount of evidence that shows that
Indigenous peoples’ management of land and water and resources can
actually increase biodiversity,” said Hayden King, who is Beausoleil
First Nation Anishinaabe and the executive director of the Yellowhead
Institute [[link removed]], an Indigenous research
and education center based out of Toronto Metropolitan University.
An oft-cited statistic
[[link removed]] from
the UN reports that Indigenous peoples throughout the world steward
80% of the planet’s biodiversity yet comprise 5% of the global
population. 

“Ultimately, that means Indigenous peoples should be responsible for
managing land if we’re going to avoid the worst consequences of
climate change,” King said. 

While Western institutions and research organizations have recently
begun to recognize how Indigenous land stewardship maintains
biodiversity and healthy ecologies, King notes that the LANDBACK
movement can offer so much more than simply being deputized to protect
remaining lands against climate change. LANDBACK digs out the causes
of climate change, and more specifically, the movement rebukes the
land-based economic system of racial capitalism
[[link removed]], which
demands that the land be cleared of its Indigenous peoples so that
surveyors can mine, plant, and frack it as they see fit.  

While ecological changes in the landscape might look different in
other regions of the U.S., the LANDBACK struggles are no less urgent.
As elements of LANDBACK gain momentum, King said that it might be
possible to draw some connections—and cautionary tales—from the
climate movement. 

Even as countries like the U.S. and Canada, where King is based,
acknowledge the potential for climate change to upend our lives as we
know them, the solutions offered don’t really address the root
causes of these changes and how they’re deeply entwined with Western
ideas about economy and dominance. Rather, they focus on strategies
that may appear less harmful to the environment, like recycling, and
that more importantly, don’t require challenging existing systems of
capitalism, extraction, and land ownership that contribute to ongoing
climate change. A land acknowledgment is not a land return; the first
part is helpful, the second is fundamental. 

A reciprocal relationship with the land 

Before Samantha Chisholm Hatfield was born, her grandparents moved
from their home in Siletz, Oregon, two hours east to the Willamette
Valley, where she was raised. Chisholm Hatfield, ​​an enrolled
member of the Confederated tribes of Siletz Indians from the Tututni,
Kalapuya, and Chinook Bands who is also Cherokee, grew up fishing and
collecting traditional foods and medicines. Her grandfather had a
sweat lodge by the river, and her dad told stories of how they would
use traditional fire and burn the Willamette Valley from Portland to
Eugene to ready the land for a new season. 

Chisholm Hatfield, now an assistant professor in the Department of
Agricultural Education and Agricultural Sciences with a specialization
in Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Oregon State University, said
it’s more difficult to interact with the land as she and her family
once did because of development, pollution, and climate change. Where
one building went up, a field of camas, a native flower with violet
petals, was paved over. In another area, healthy, native oak trees
were ripped out to make way for a bulk grocery and homegoods store,
Chisholm Hatfield said. The development is an ongoing threat to
traditional collection practices, through which Native peoples can
fulfill a reciprocal relationship with the landscape. 

“It’s really troubling. Some of these plants [and] areas are being
cleared for apartment complexes or strip malls,” Chisholm Hatfield
said. “It’s astounding to me how disregarded and disrespected
[tribes are].” 

The name for the collection of millennia worth of wisdom and
practices, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), has been recognized
in its formal practice since the 1970s
[[link removed]],
Chisholm Hatfield said. The field of study has gained a following
outside of tribes in recent years, she explained, largely because of
“climate change impacts where Western science was not fulfilling or
making even a dent in it.”

Tribal use of cultural and traditional fire is a well-recorded example
of this, a practice that was for many decades explicitly outlawed or
suppressed informally through land theft and assimilation policies
like boarding schools. While Chisholm Hatfield’s father grew up with
this practice, wildfire suppression in California started with the
colonial force of the gold rush, and similar policies in Oregon and
Washington ripened forested ecosystems for the intense and frequent
fires we experience today. To quell these fires, state policies
are starting to mirror
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centuries-old techniques of tribes that mainly use fire to regenerate
ecosystems. 

“It’s very frustrating to be the last ditch consult, if you
will,” Chisholm Hatfield said. 

She added that there’s also the issue of selecting only a few
elements of TEK to implement while disregarding the rest. The world is
comprised of holistic and intersecting ecologies; to take one practice
without the others will only get you so far. To put it another way,
Reo explained that a forest isn’t a simple mechanism that can be
“fine-tuned.” 

“A wetland isn’t a system—it’s more than that,” Reo said.
“The way that we care for our homelands, it’s a very spiritual
process; it’s a very relational process. It’s taking care of your
relatives that are more than human.”

Within models of Western science and colonial land practices, that
spirituality and relationship with the land is erased, and yet Native
peoples are still being asked for their land knowledge while
simultaneously being given few avenues for themselves to act on that
knowledge. LANDBACK could solve that, Reo said. 

“You don’t need to be asking us how to do our thing; you need to
let us do our thing,” Reo said.  

What happens when there’s no land left to return?

Where land theft separated Native peoples from their traditional
homelands, and where colonization gave life to climate change, the
products of a changing climate push up against Native peoples first.
And while the wheels of the LANDBACK movement gain momentum among
allies both inside and outside of settler governments, questions
remain unaddressed of how to return land that no longer exists. 

This isn’t a hypothetical question for the United Houma Nation in
the bayous of southern Louisiana—according to Principal Chief Lora
Ann Chaisson, the nation loses a football field worth of land every
100 minutes
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to coastal erosion, hurricane impact, rising sea levels, and
externalities of oil and gas operations. The land loss is swift and
unrelenting. 

Freshwater fish are declining in numbers, and saltwater fish are
moving in. Alligators are adapting to the salty bayous, but many trees
and plants aren’t so lucky and are slowly suffocating from the
aquatic intrusion. Tribal general counsel Michael Billiot said that a
web of policy decisions have led to this point, from state decisions
to dredge the bayous to federal priorities regarding the construction
of dams and levees. 

“Twenty-one years ago we were hunting deer in my backyard; now
we’re fishing in my backyard,” Chaisson said.

There’s also the lack of accountability that privately owned
polluting companies have to the United Houma Nation, a non-federally
recognized tribe. Chaisson said that after the catastrophic BP oil
spill in 2010, the tribe was “hit first” but received no funds to
address the oil pollution on its lands because the Oil Spill
Pollution Act
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applies to federally recognized tribes. Houma peoples rely on
shrimping, fishing, and crabbing for income; after the spill all of
that was gone, she said.

For a tribe whose land loss is ongoing, the clock can’t be turned
backward. Actions marketed as climate change panaceas
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like purchasing carbon offsets or buying an electric vehicle, require
spending or selling, and neither get to the root cause of the threats
facing the United Houma Nation.  

Land return: from the mountain to the ocean

There’s still time to prevent land loss—and the loss of culture
that accompanies—in Kaua‘i, where Peleke Flores is the Kū Hou
Kuapā Coordinator at Alakoko fishpond
[[link removed]].
For decades, invasive red mangrove has wound its way through the
Huleia River, strangling native plants and impeding the ability for
young fish to navigate the river and spawn. This is just one challenge
young fish face, among overfishing, pollution, and changes to water
temperature and levels. 

For 800 years, fishponds provided a source of food for an entire
community or ahupua‘a. After the colonization of the islands by
Captain James Cook in the late 1770s, and later, with the illegal
overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 by the U.S. government,
Hawaiian foodways and cultural practices suffered. A plantation
economy dependent on sugar and pineapple, coupled with the
introduction of invasive species like cattle, pigs, and red mangrove,
changed the landscape. Anti-Hawaiian sentiment, both by way of formal
assimilation policies and a tourist economy that fetishized Hawaiian
culture, separated Hawaiians from their ancestral and traditional
foodways. 

“[We] almost lost a lot of that knowledge … after the
overthrow,” Flores said. For Flores, LANDBACK means the returning to
the meaning of ʻāina, which he said translates to “the land which
feeds.” ʻĀina is a guide that points to the foundation of the
Hawaiian people and a means for understanding how and where to move
forward. 

“Once we can get our ʻāina back and start feeding our people,
[they can] rebuild their foundation, and they will have the mental
capacity to keep looking forward to correct the wrong that’s been
happening for the past 130 years,” Flores said, referring to the
illegal overthrow. 

During the pandemic, Flores said that more people started to farm and
grow their own food. Fishpond restoration projects are underway across
the islands, not just where Flores lives in Kaua‘i. The significance
of their restoration goes beyond the benefit of a culturally
significant and self-sustaining food source. Flores said that
fishponds, which are a part of connected water systems that flow from
the sky to the mountain to the ocean, are bioindicators of ecological
health. 

“There’s a lot of politics hidden within there,” Flores said.
“But we’re talking about straight-up basic food and how we live
off the land, how we make balance within the land, how our systems
work, and how we’re not forcing the system to amplify food
resources.” 

By working to restore the fishpond, Flores is able to build a
sustainable system for his children and future grandchildren to eat
from and interact with. The work is also for his own ancestors, the
people he can’t see, who he knows are there with him at the Alakoko
fishpond even still. 

“The people you bring with you that you don’t see [are] helping
give mana
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to this movement … they’ve been waiting for a long time,” Flores
said. 

Return land to heal land 

Referring to climate change as “human caused” is a misnomer, one
that perpetuates the colonial myth that the land was “untouched”
when Western settlers arrived and that climate change is an inevitable
outcome of human interaction with nature. On the other side of that
myth is a truth: that land has long known the touch of human hands and
ingenuity of Native peoples. 

“The fact is there are very few places on earth that haven’t been
stewarded by somebody, where human interaction hasn’t been an
important part of that natural history,” Reo said. 

Climate change isn’t a result of humans acting on the land, said
Reo. Rather, climate change is the “outgrowth of settler colonialism
and the form of capitalism that we’re so wedded to around the
world.” In that sense, climate change is the product of policy
decisions. The extraction of fossil fuels, reliance on oil, and carbon
pollution have shifted the world’s ecological balance off scale:
from ocean acidification to deforestation to hotter summers and colder
winters, impacts of climate change touch every aspect of human life. 

Yet traces of justice are within view, both in the work that’s being
done to heal history—the history that lives in the legacies of land
loss—and in the steps taken to prevent further degradation of
ecosystems. Healing history heals the land.

_THIS IS THE THIRD AND FINAL ARTICLE IN PRISM’S LANDBACK SERIES. If
you haven’t read parts one and two, you can __do so here_
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_Ray Levy Uyeda is a staff reporter at Prism, focusing on
environmental and climate justice. Find Ray on Twitter
@raylevyuyeda. _

_When Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the
status quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the
truth—and it wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective
liberation and justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we
could forge by disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering
the hard truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the
acute impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of
color to tell their own stories, and those of their communities._

* Climate Change
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* Native Americans
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* settler colonialism
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