Kyle Whyte | University of Michigan (original) (raw)
Kyle Whyte is a faculty member at the University of Michigan where he is George Willis Pack Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, and Professor of Philosophy in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Kyle teaches in the SEAS environmental justice specialization. He is founding Faculty Director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, Principal Investigator of the Energy Equity Project, co-Principal Investigator of SEAS' Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters, Faculty Associate of Native American Studies, and Senior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Kyle is currently a U.S. Science Envoy and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the National Academies' Resilient America Roundtable, and the National Academies’ Committee on Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge, Methods, and Approaches. He has served as an author for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, including on the National Climate Assessment, and for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II. He is a former member of the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science in the U.S. Department of Interior and of two environmental justice work groups convened by past state governors of Michigan. He is President of the Board of Directors of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition and the Pesticide Action Network North America.
The National Science Foundation has been a major supporter of Kyle’s research and educational projects for over a decade. Supporters also include the NorthLight Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Builders Initiative, Mellon Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, Crown Family Foundation, Sustainable Michigan Endowed Program, Spencer Foundation, Marsden Fund, and Health Research Council of New Zealand. Kyle’s publications appear in journals such as Climatic Change, Weather, Climate & Society, Science, Daedalus, WIREs Climate Change, Environment & Planning E, Synthese, and Sustainability Science.
Kyle is involved with a number of organizations that advance Indigenous research and education methodologies, including the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation, the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence. He is a certificate holder of the Training Programme to Enhance the Conflict Prevention and Peacemaking Capacities of Indigenous Peoples’ Representatives, from the United Nations Institute of Training and Research.
He has received the Breaking Barriers Award from the Michigan Democratic Party, the Superior Teaching Award from the Student Governing Board of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, the Community Engagement Scholarship Award and Distinguished Partnership Award for Community Engaged Research from Michigan State University, the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, and the Forty Under 40 Alumni Award and Don Ihde Distinguished Alumni Award from Stony Brook University. Kyle has served as Austin J. Fagothey Distinguished Visiting Professor at Santa Clara University, Rudrick Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Waterloo, Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University, and Distinguished Visitor at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
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Papers by Kyle Whyte
Pluriverse: A Journal of Decolonial Ecology, 2024
Indigenous peoples’ consent has an important relationship with the speed of progress toward stopp... more Indigenous peoples’ consent has an important relationship with the speed of progress toward stopping the climate change crises. Certain dimensions of “climate crises” are perhaps instead “consent crises.” Recognizing that there are “consent crises,” as opposed to simply “climate crises,” bears important lessons about what types of climate action can expeditiously stop the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
Before moving on to make this point, I’d like to just take a pause and write about my intended
meanings of Indigenous peoples, climate action, and consent
Heart of the Wild, 2024
Typically, terms like “the wild” signal a culturally specific set of assumptions about how humans... more Typically, terms like “the wild” signal a culturally specific set of assumptions about how humans relate to land, plants, and animals. One of the assumptions is that such relationships can be understood in terms of degrees of human influence on ecosystems and on plant and animal behavior. On this understanding, wild lands or wild animals have been influenced little by humans. Numerous Indigenous peoples of what’s currently called the US never really used anything like wild concepts to describe their relationships with land, water, plants, animals, and ecosystems. They were more concerned with respecting and enacting specific relationships of interdependence within ecosystems and with nonhuman beings, flows, and entities. Given the colonial origins of wild concepts in settler societies like the US, does it even make sense to divide up the world as wild and not-wild, or even in terms of degrees of wildness? I am unclear on what advantages accrue to me or the planet when I use the term “wild” to understand certain places or living beings, whether from a traditional, scientific, or ethical standpoint. Moreover, given the painful history and the current suffering associated with the protection of wild places, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples risks being greatly hindered by any further proliferation of concepts of wildness. I think the issue of reconciliation is critical here. If more people today are committing to reconciliation, that involves undoing erasure of Indigenous culture, history, self-determination, and governance. I’m just not familiar with any contexts where wild concepts would bubble up from attempts to undo the suppression of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. My solution is that people should look to how Indigenous conservationists today, throughout their own tribal parks and 'wilderness areas', are focusing carefully on language and history, and finding ways to express relationships that can motivate spiritual experiences and stewardship knowledge without having to ignore the consent status of any lands or the colonial genocide that has occurred.
Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter to Idle No More, 2020
This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it,... more This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it, I seek to show why environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples are problems of consent. I compare the current situation of consent today with Indigenous traditions that privilege consent in terms of how a society is organized. Part of colonialism in contexts like the U.S. and Canada has been the reorganizing of societies in North America to undermine Indigenous consent. The dismantling of traditions of consent is one way to understand how colonialism attacks self-determination. Although the U.S. is a unique context, many of the consent issues in relation to environmental justice arise in other contexts around the world. Readers should come away from this chapter with a good sense of why consent matters in relation to injustice, and why affirming consent is a strategy for achieving environmental justice for the sake of future generations.
The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, 2021
Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This essay covers the meaning... more Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This essay covers the meaning of linear time and its implications for how climate change is narrated. There are concerns about how narrating climate change in this way can eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition. There are of course different ways of telling time. This essay provides a narration of climate change inspired by particular Indigenous scholars and writers. These conceptions of time narrate time through kinship, not linearity. One implication is that issues of justice are inseparable from the experience of climate change.
WIRES Climate Change, 2020
It may be too late to achieve environmental justice for some indigenous peoples, and other groups... more It may be too late to achieve environmental justice for some indigenous peoples, and other groups, in terms of avoiding dangerous climate change. People in the indigenous climate justice movement agree resolutely on the urgency of action to stop dangerous climate change. However, the qualities of relationships connecting indigenous peoples with other societies' governments, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations are not conducive to coordinated action that would avoid further injustice against indigenous peoples in the process of responding to climate change. The required qualities include, among others, consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity. Indigenous traditions of climate change view the very topic of climate change as connected to these qualities, which are sometimes referred to as kin relationships. The entwinement of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization failed to affirm or establish these qualities or kinship relationships across societies. While qualities like consent or reciprocity may be critical for taking coordinated action urgently and justly, they require a long time to establish or repair. A relational tipping point, in a certain respect, has already been crossed, before the ecological tipping point. The time it takes to address the passage of this relational tipping point may be too slow to generate the coordinated action to halt certain dangers related to climate change. While no possibilities for better futures should be left unconsidered, it's critical to center environmental justice in any analysis of whether it's too late to stop dangerous climate change. Free access here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.603
Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science, 2020
Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relatio... more Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relationship between science and consent. Some Indigenous scientific traditions emphasize consent as a significant characteristic of empirical inquiry. Consent means that responsibilities are acted out in ways that are accountable to the animacy of diverse beings and entities of the world. Responsibility and consent are significant to the role of science in governance systems, or its governance value. Consent is not a restriction or regulation on science, nor is consent a characteristic that merely increases the objectivity of empirical inquiry. By focusing on Indigenous accounts of knowledge and science, the essay builds concepts for understanding science and consent.
![Research paper thumbnail of Indigenous Environmental Justice: Anti Colonial Action through Kinship [for EJ primer]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/64121210/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Environmental Justice: Key Issues, 2020
Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of conceptualizing and practicing environmental justic... more Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of conceptualizing and practicing environmental justice. Today, they face some of the most severe harms and inequities due to pollution, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. Many such harms and inequities stem from historic and ongoing forms of colonialism that Indigenous people endure globally. From a North American Indigenous perspective, this article describes some of the environmental injustices that Indigenous peoples face today, focusing on U.S. and Canadian contexts, but making global connections too. Indigenous peoples, in some of these struggles, often express their own solutions as involving the establishment or repair of kin relations. Kin relations can be understood as moral bonds that connect humans and non-humans, modeled after certain ideals of family life. Kinship represents a central approach to environmental justice that has its own place among other leading theories and practices.
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology, 2021
This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including t... more This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin a conversation for the philosophy of technology, philosophies of science fiction narrative discuss the different roles that imagination plays in projecting our concerns with the present onto futures that have not occurred and future generations who are not yet living. One of the key issues that the chapter explores is how science fiction imagination is based on assumptions and values about the history of technological change, including industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. These issues reveal ways in which technology, future narrative, and climate justice are related.
Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, 2020
People who perpetrate colonialism often defend their actions as necessary responses to real or pe... more People who perpetrate colonialism often defend their actions as necessary responses to real or perceived crises. Epistemologies of crisis involve knowing the world in such a way that a certain present is experienced as new. I will discuss newness in terms of the presumptions of unprecedentedness and urgency. In contradistinction to an epistemology of crisis, I will suggest that one interpretation of certain Indigenous intellectual traditions emphasizes what I will just call here an epistemology of coordination. Different from crisis, coordination refers to ways of knowing the world that emphasize the importance of moral bonds—or kinship relationships—for generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant change. Epistemologies of coordination are conducive to responding to expected and drastic changes without validating harm or violence.
Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice, 2019
In my experiences, most Indigenous peoples have complicated stories to tell about anthropogenic c... more In my experiences, most Indigenous peoples have complicated stories to tell about anthropogenic climate change that often start with their being harmed by fossil fuel industries. The stories continue on to discuss how current laws and policies render them more vulnerable to climate change impacts. Climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is insidious, as it involves years of coupled colonial and capitalist domination. Is there a succinct way to convey an Indigenous perspective on climate justice that makes the connections between capitalism and industrialization and colonialism? This short essay uses a story of vessels, in allegorical form, to describe the complexity of Indigenous climate justice. The allegory seeks to convey how in the absence of a concern for addressing colonialism, climate justice advocates do not really propose solutions to climate change that are that much better for Indigenous well-being than the proposed inaction of even the most strident climate change deniers. Decolonization and anti-colonialism, understood in senses appropriate to the allegory, cannot be disaggregated from climate justice for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous climate justice movements are distinct in their putting the nexus of colonialism, capitalism and industrialization at the vanguard of their aspirations.
Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 147 (2): 136-147
Indigenous peoples are among the most active environmentalists in the world, working through advo... more Indigenous peoples are among the most active environmentalists in the world, working through advocacy, educational programs, and research. The emerging field of Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences (IESS) is distinctive, investigating social resilience to environmental change through the research lens of how moral relationships are organized in societies. Examples of IESS research across three moral relationships are discussed here: responsibility, spirituality, and justice. IESS develops insights on resilience that can support Indigenous peoples' struggles with environmental justice and political reconciliation; makes significant contributions to global discussions about the relationship between human behavior and the environment; and speaks directly to Indigenous liberation as well as justice issues impacting everyone.
Journal of Global Ethics 14 (2): 277-289, Issue on "Reconciliation, Resurgence and Indigenous Justice," edited by Krushil Watene and Eric Palmer, https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjge20
Political reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethica... more Political reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethical issues of the twenty-first century for millions of Indigenous peoples globally. Political reconciliation refers to the aspiration to transform violent and harmful relationships into respectful relationships. This essay discusses how efforts to achieve reconciliation are not feasible when settler nations and some of their citizens believe Indigenous peoples to be clamoring for undeserved privileges. Settler colonialism often includes the illusion that historic and contemporary settler populations have moral grounds for their mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. This illusion masks historical and ongoing practices of settler colonialism that thwart effective practices of reconciliation.
Handbook of Indigenous Education. Edited by E.A. McKinley and L.T. Smith. Springer.
The essay offers reflections on the purpose of Indigenous environmental education. Indigenous peo... more The essay offers reflections on the purpose of Indigenous environmental education. Indigenous peoples engage in wide-ranging approaches to environmental education that are significant aspects of how they exercise self-determination. Yet often such educational practices are just seen as trying to genuinely teach certain historic traditions or scientific skill-sets. Through reviewing the author's experiences
and diverse scholarly and practitioner perspectives, the essay discusses how Indigenous environmental education is best when it aims at cultivating qualities of moral responsibilities including trust, consent and accountability within Indigenous communities. The concept of collective continuance is one way of thinking about how moral responsibilities play significant roles in contributing to social resilience. Understanding education in this way can be used to address some of the major issues affecting Indigenous peoples everywhere, including environmental justice, gender justice and the resurgence of traditions.
Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the ... more Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples' facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples' social resilience as self-determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.
Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of clima... more Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives miss the populations of people, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with their descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literatures on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by non-Indigenous persons, such as the holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies’ narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies’ capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. [open access @ http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/enea/0/0]
Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of hum... more Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of humanity can live sustainably or resiliently. Yet it is rarely acknowledged in many literatures that for Indigenous peoples living in the context of settler states such as the U.S. or New Zealand, our own efforts to sustain our peoples rest heavily on our capacities to resist settler colonial oppression. Indigenous planning refers to a set of concepts and practices through which many Indigenous peoples reflect critically on sustainability to derive lessons about what actions reinforce Indigenous self-determination and resist settler colonial oppression. The work of the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation (SDI) is one case of Indigenous planning. In the context of SDI, we discuss Indigenous planning as a process of interpreting lessons from our own pasts and making practical plans for staging our own futures. If there are such things as Indigenous sustainability lessons for Indigenous peoples, they must be reliable planning concepts and processes we can use to support our continuance in the face of ongoing settler colonial oppression.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Updated July 2020] The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and US Settler Colonialism](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/63892726/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Contemporary Moral Issues 5th Edition
Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered ... more Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—creating the #NoDAPL movement. I am concerned with how critics of #NoDAPL often focus on defending the pipeline’s safety precautions or the many attempts the Army Corps of Engineers made at consulting the Tribe. Yet critics rarely engage what LaDonna Brave Bull Allard calls “the larger story.” To me, as an Indigenous supporter of #NoDAPL, one thread of the larger story concerns how DAPL is an injustice against the Tribe. The type of injustice is one that many other Indigenous peoples can identify with—U.S. settler colonialism. I seek to show how there are many layers to the settler colonial injustice behind DAPL that will take me, by the end of this essay, from U.S. disrespect of treaty promises in the 19th century to environmental sustainability and climate change in the 21st century. Updated in July 2020, and will be republished in updated form in 2020 (or 2021) in Contemporary Moral Issues 5th Edition, edited by Lawrence Hinman and published by Taylor Frances. May be cited with this pagination and referencing academia.edu URL. Originally published as Whyte, K. 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism. RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities: 19 (1): 154-169. Republication (2019) in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change. Edited by C. Miller and J. Crane, 320-337. University of Colorado Press.
![Research paper thumbnail of Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance [updated 11-11-2017]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54972505/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous p... more Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous peoples' collective self-determination over their food systems, or food sovereignty. Violations of food sovereignty are often food injustices. Yet Indigenous peoples claim that one of the solutions to protecting food sovereignty involves the conservation of particular foods, from salmon to wild rice. This essay advances an argument that claims of this kind set forth particular theories of food sovereignty and food injustice that are not actually grounded in a static conception of Indigenous culture; instead, such claims offer important contributions to how settler colonial domination is understood as a form of injustice affecting key relationships that support Indigenous collective self-determination through food sovereignty. The essay describes some of the significant qualities of reciprocal relationships that support food sovereignty, referring widely to the work of Indigenous leaders and scholars and Tribal staff on salmon conservation in North America.
Whyte, K.P. 2018. Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance. Oxford Handbook on Food Ethics. Edited by A. Barnhill, T. Doggett, and A. Egan, 345-366. Oxford University Press.
Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leade... more Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leaders are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. As a Potawatomi scholar-activist working on issues Indigenous people face with the U.S. settler state, I perceive at least three key themes reflected across the field that suggest distinct approaches to inquiries into climate change:
1. Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism.
2. Renewing Indigenous knowledges, such as traditional ecological knowledge, can bring together Indigenous communities to strengthen their own self-determined planning for climate change.
3. Indigenous peoples often imagine climate change futures from their perspectives (a) as societies with deep collective histories of having to be well-organized to adapt environmental change and (b) as societies who must reckon with the disruptions of historic and ongoing practices of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization.
In engaging these themes, I will claim, at the end, that Indigenous studies offer critical, decolonizing approaches to how to address climate change. The approaches arise from how our ways of imagining the future guide our present actions. The article is forthcoming in English Language Notes.
Pluriverse: A Journal of Decolonial Ecology, 2024
Indigenous peoples’ consent has an important relationship with the speed of progress toward stopp... more Indigenous peoples’ consent has an important relationship with the speed of progress toward stopping the climate change crises. Certain dimensions of “climate crises” are perhaps instead “consent crises.” Recognizing that there are “consent crises,” as opposed to simply “climate crises,” bears important lessons about what types of climate action can expeditiously stop the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
Before moving on to make this point, I’d like to just take a pause and write about my intended
meanings of Indigenous peoples, climate action, and consent
Heart of the Wild, 2024
Typically, terms like “the wild” signal a culturally specific set of assumptions about how humans... more Typically, terms like “the wild” signal a culturally specific set of assumptions about how humans relate to land, plants, and animals. One of the assumptions is that such relationships can be understood in terms of degrees of human influence on ecosystems and on plant and animal behavior. On this understanding, wild lands or wild animals have been influenced little by humans. Numerous Indigenous peoples of what’s currently called the US never really used anything like wild concepts to describe their relationships with land, water, plants, animals, and ecosystems. They were more concerned with respecting and enacting specific relationships of interdependence within ecosystems and with nonhuman beings, flows, and entities. Given the colonial origins of wild concepts in settler societies like the US, does it even make sense to divide up the world as wild and not-wild, or even in terms of degrees of wildness? I am unclear on what advantages accrue to me or the planet when I use the term “wild” to understand certain places or living beings, whether from a traditional, scientific, or ethical standpoint. Moreover, given the painful history and the current suffering associated with the protection of wild places, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples risks being greatly hindered by any further proliferation of concepts of wildness. I think the issue of reconciliation is critical here. If more people today are committing to reconciliation, that involves undoing erasure of Indigenous culture, history, self-determination, and governance. I’m just not familiar with any contexts where wild concepts would bubble up from attempts to undo the suppression of knowledge about Indigenous peoples. My solution is that people should look to how Indigenous conservationists today, throughout their own tribal parks and 'wilderness areas', are focusing carefully on language and history, and finding ways to express relationships that can motivate spiritual experiences and stewardship knowledge without having to ignore the consent status of any lands or the colonial genocide that has occurred.
Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter to Idle No More, 2020
This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it,... more This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it, I seek to show why environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples are problems of consent. I compare the current situation of consent today with Indigenous traditions that privilege consent in terms of how a society is organized. Part of colonialism in contexts like the U.S. and Canada has been the reorganizing of societies in North America to undermine Indigenous consent. The dismantling of traditions of consent is one way to understand how colonialism attacks self-determination. Although the U.S. is a unique context, many of the consent issues in relation to environmental justice arise in other contexts around the world. Readers should come away from this chapter with a good sense of why consent matters in relation to injustice, and why affirming consent is a strategy for achieving environmental justice for the sake of future generations.
The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, 2021
Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This essay covers the meaning... more Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This essay covers the meaning of linear time and its implications for how climate change is narrated. There are concerns about how narrating climate change in this way can eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition. There are of course different ways of telling time. This essay provides a narration of climate change inspired by particular Indigenous scholars and writers. These conceptions of time narrate time through kinship, not linearity. One implication is that issues of justice are inseparable from the experience of climate change.
WIRES Climate Change, 2020
It may be too late to achieve environmental justice for some indigenous peoples, and other groups... more It may be too late to achieve environmental justice for some indigenous peoples, and other groups, in terms of avoiding dangerous climate change. People in the indigenous climate justice movement agree resolutely on the urgency of action to stop dangerous climate change. However, the qualities of relationships connecting indigenous peoples with other societies' governments, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations are not conducive to coordinated action that would avoid further injustice against indigenous peoples in the process of responding to climate change. The required qualities include, among others, consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity. Indigenous traditions of climate change view the very topic of climate change as connected to these qualities, which are sometimes referred to as kin relationships. The entwinement of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization failed to affirm or establish these qualities or kinship relationships across societies. While qualities like consent or reciprocity may be critical for taking coordinated action urgently and justly, they require a long time to establish or repair. A relational tipping point, in a certain respect, has already been crossed, before the ecological tipping point. The time it takes to address the passage of this relational tipping point may be too slow to generate the coordinated action to halt certain dangers related to climate change. While no possibilities for better futures should be left unconsidered, it's critical to center environmental justice in any analysis of whether it's too late to stop dangerous climate change. Free access here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.603
Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science, 2020
Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relatio... more Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relationship between science and consent. Some Indigenous scientific traditions emphasize consent as a significant characteristic of empirical inquiry. Consent means that responsibilities are acted out in ways that are accountable to the animacy of diverse beings and entities of the world. Responsibility and consent are significant to the role of science in governance systems, or its governance value. Consent is not a restriction or regulation on science, nor is consent a characteristic that merely increases the objectivity of empirical inquiry. By focusing on Indigenous accounts of knowledge and science, the essay builds concepts for understanding science and consent.
Environmental Justice: Key Issues, 2020
Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of conceptualizing and practicing environmental justic... more Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of conceptualizing and practicing environmental justice. Today, they face some of the most severe harms and inequities due to pollution, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. Many such harms and inequities stem from historic and ongoing forms of colonialism that Indigenous people endure globally. From a North American Indigenous perspective, this article describes some of the environmental injustices that Indigenous peoples face today, focusing on U.S. and Canadian contexts, but making global connections too. Indigenous peoples, in some of these struggles, often express their own solutions as involving the establishment or repair of kin relations. Kin relations can be understood as moral bonds that connect humans and non-humans, modeled after certain ideals of family life. Kinship represents a central approach to environmental justice that has its own place among other leading theories and practices.
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology, 2021
This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including t... more This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin a conversation for the philosophy of technology, philosophies of science fiction narrative discuss the different roles that imagination plays in projecting our concerns with the present onto futures that have not occurred and future generations who are not yet living. One of the key issues that the chapter explores is how science fiction imagination is based on assumptions and values about the history of technological change, including industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. These issues reveal ways in which technology, future narrative, and climate justice are related.
Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, 2020
People who perpetrate colonialism often defend their actions as necessary responses to real or pe... more People who perpetrate colonialism often defend their actions as necessary responses to real or perceived crises. Epistemologies of crisis involve knowing the world in such a way that a certain present is experienced as new. I will discuss newness in terms of the presumptions of unprecedentedness and urgency. In contradistinction to an epistemology of crisis, I will suggest that one interpretation of certain Indigenous intellectual traditions emphasizes what I will just call here an epistemology of coordination. Different from crisis, coordination refers to ways of knowing the world that emphasize the importance of moral bonds—or kinship relationships—for generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant change. Epistemologies of coordination are conducive to responding to expected and drastic changes without validating harm or violence.
Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice, 2019
In my experiences, most Indigenous peoples have complicated stories to tell about anthropogenic c... more In my experiences, most Indigenous peoples have complicated stories to tell about anthropogenic climate change that often start with their being harmed by fossil fuel industries. The stories continue on to discuss how current laws and policies render them more vulnerable to climate change impacts. Climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is insidious, as it involves years of coupled colonial and capitalist domination. Is there a succinct way to convey an Indigenous perspective on climate justice that makes the connections between capitalism and industrialization and colonialism? This short essay uses a story of vessels, in allegorical form, to describe the complexity of Indigenous climate justice. The allegory seeks to convey how in the absence of a concern for addressing colonialism, climate justice advocates do not really propose solutions to climate change that are that much better for Indigenous well-being than the proposed inaction of even the most strident climate change deniers. Decolonization and anti-colonialism, understood in senses appropriate to the allegory, cannot be disaggregated from climate justice for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous climate justice movements are distinct in their putting the nexus of colonialism, capitalism and industrialization at the vanguard of their aspirations.
Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 147 (2): 136-147
Indigenous peoples are among the most active environmentalists in the world, working through advo... more Indigenous peoples are among the most active environmentalists in the world, working through advocacy, educational programs, and research. The emerging field of Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences (IESS) is distinctive, investigating social resilience to environmental change through the research lens of how moral relationships are organized in societies. Examples of IESS research across three moral relationships are discussed here: responsibility, spirituality, and justice. IESS develops insights on resilience that can support Indigenous peoples' struggles with environmental justice and political reconciliation; makes significant contributions to global discussions about the relationship between human behavior and the environment; and speaks directly to Indigenous liberation as well as justice issues impacting everyone.
Journal of Global Ethics 14 (2): 277-289, Issue on "Reconciliation, Resurgence and Indigenous Justice," edited by Krushil Watene and Eric Palmer, https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjge20
Political reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethica... more Political reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethical issues of the twenty-first century for millions of Indigenous peoples globally. Political reconciliation refers to the aspiration to transform violent and harmful relationships into respectful relationships. This essay discusses how efforts to achieve reconciliation are not feasible when settler nations and some of their citizens believe Indigenous peoples to be clamoring for undeserved privileges. Settler colonialism often includes the illusion that historic and contemporary settler populations have moral grounds for their mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. This illusion masks historical and ongoing practices of settler colonialism that thwart effective practices of reconciliation.
Handbook of Indigenous Education. Edited by E.A. McKinley and L.T. Smith. Springer.
The essay offers reflections on the purpose of Indigenous environmental education. Indigenous peo... more The essay offers reflections on the purpose of Indigenous environmental education. Indigenous peoples engage in wide-ranging approaches to environmental education that are significant aspects of how they exercise self-determination. Yet often such educational practices are just seen as trying to genuinely teach certain historic traditions or scientific skill-sets. Through reviewing the author's experiences
and diverse scholarly and practitioner perspectives, the essay discusses how Indigenous environmental education is best when it aims at cultivating qualities of moral responsibilities including trust, consent and accountability within Indigenous communities. The concept of collective continuance is one way of thinking about how moral responsibilities play significant roles in contributing to social resilience. Understanding education in this way can be used to address some of the major issues affecting Indigenous peoples everywhere, including environmental justice, gender justice and the resurgence of traditions.
Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the ... more Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples' facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples' social resilience as self-determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.
Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of clima... more Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives miss the populations of people, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with their descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literatures on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by non-Indigenous persons, such as the holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies’ narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies’ capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. [open access @ http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/enea/0/0]
Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of hum... more Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of humanity can live sustainably or resiliently. Yet it is rarely acknowledged in many literatures that for Indigenous peoples living in the context of settler states such as the U.S. or New Zealand, our own efforts to sustain our peoples rest heavily on our capacities to resist settler colonial oppression. Indigenous planning refers to a set of concepts and practices through which many Indigenous peoples reflect critically on sustainability to derive lessons about what actions reinforce Indigenous self-determination and resist settler colonial oppression. The work of the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation (SDI) is one case of Indigenous planning. In the context of SDI, we discuss Indigenous planning as a process of interpreting lessons from our own pasts and making practical plans for staging our own futures. If there are such things as Indigenous sustainability lessons for Indigenous peoples, they must be reliable planning concepts and processes we can use to support our continuance in the face of ongoing settler colonial oppression.
Contemporary Moral Issues 5th Edition
Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered ... more Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—creating the #NoDAPL movement. I am concerned with how critics of #NoDAPL often focus on defending the pipeline’s safety precautions or the many attempts the Army Corps of Engineers made at consulting the Tribe. Yet critics rarely engage what LaDonna Brave Bull Allard calls “the larger story.” To me, as an Indigenous supporter of #NoDAPL, one thread of the larger story concerns how DAPL is an injustice against the Tribe. The type of injustice is one that many other Indigenous peoples can identify with—U.S. settler colonialism. I seek to show how there are many layers to the settler colonial injustice behind DAPL that will take me, by the end of this essay, from U.S. disrespect of treaty promises in the 19th century to environmental sustainability and climate change in the 21st century. Updated in July 2020, and will be republished in updated form in 2020 (or 2021) in Contemporary Moral Issues 5th Edition, edited by Lawrence Hinman and published by Taylor Frances. May be cited with this pagination and referencing academia.edu URL. Originally published as Whyte, K. 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism. RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities: 19 (1): 154-169. Republication (2019) in The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change. Edited by C. Miller and J. Crane, 320-337. University of Colorado Press.
Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous p... more Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous peoples' collective self-determination over their food systems, or food sovereignty. Violations of food sovereignty are often food injustices. Yet Indigenous peoples claim that one of the solutions to protecting food sovereignty involves the conservation of particular foods, from salmon to wild rice. This essay advances an argument that claims of this kind set forth particular theories of food sovereignty and food injustice that are not actually grounded in a static conception of Indigenous culture; instead, such claims offer important contributions to how settler colonial domination is understood as a form of injustice affecting key relationships that support Indigenous collective self-determination through food sovereignty. The essay describes some of the significant qualities of reciprocal relationships that support food sovereignty, referring widely to the work of Indigenous leaders and scholars and Tribal staff on salmon conservation in North America.
Whyte, K.P. 2018. Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance. Oxford Handbook on Food Ethics. Edited by A. Barnhill, T. Doggett, and A. Egan, 345-366. Oxford University Press.
Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leade... more Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leaders are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. As a Potawatomi scholar-activist working on issues Indigenous people face with the U.S. settler state, I perceive at least three key themes reflected across the field that suggest distinct approaches to inquiries into climate change:
1. Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism.
2. Renewing Indigenous knowledges, such as traditional ecological knowledge, can bring together Indigenous communities to strengthen their own self-determined planning for climate change.
3. Indigenous peoples often imagine climate change futures from their perspectives (a) as societies with deep collective histories of having to be well-organized to adapt environmental change and (b) as societies who must reckon with the disruptions of historic and ongoing practices of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization.
In engaging these themes, I will claim, at the end, that Indigenous studies offer critical, decolonizing approaches to how to address climate change. The approaches arise from how our ways of imagining the future guide our present actions. The article is forthcoming in English Language Notes.
This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provid... more This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.
We invite applications to the inaugural meeting of the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Hu... more We invite applications to the inaugural meeting of the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities. In this Mellon Foundation-funded institute, participants will work closely with seminar leaders Amanda Boetzkes, Stephanie LeMenager, and Kyle Whyte for an intensive week of collaborative seminars and workshops on contemporary issues in the field. Applications are due Feb. 1, 2019.
More information can be found at colby.edu/EHSummerInstitute.