“Medicine Food: Critical Environmental Justice Studies, Native North American Literature and the Movement for Food Sovereignty.” Special Issue: Indigenous Studies, Guest Edited by Kyle Powys Whyte, Environmental Justice, Vol. 4 No. 4 (December 2011): 213-219. (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism
Environmental justice (EJ) commonly refers to the problem that people of color, Indigenous peoples, women and people with disabilities, among others, are more likely than privileged white populations to live in toxic environments that are bad for human health and community cohesion. The idea underlying this conception of EJ is that justice concerns how the distribution of certain environmental nuisances, such as pollution, or environmentally-related harms, such as asthma in children, burden populations who already face multiple forms of oppression, from structural racism to systemic poverty. Environmental nuisances and harms are treated as so many objects or states of affairs for which social institutions bear responsibility either to distribute equitably or to strive to lessen and, if possible, eliminate. The conception of EJ just outlined covers many important dimensions of the nature of injustice, especially the impact of social institutions on the distribution of environmental quality across different populations. Yet Indigenous peoples’ EJ movements and scholarly work focus on additional dimensions of injustice beyond the responsibility of social institutions for the distribution of nuisances, harms and goods. For many Indigenous peoples, I will argue, injustice also occurs when the social institutions of one society systematically erase certain social-ecological contexts, or horizons, that are vital for members of another society to experience themselves in the world as having responsibilities to other humans, nonhumans and the environment. Injustice, here, involves one society robbing another society of its capacities to experience the world as a place of collective life that its members feel responsible for maintaining into the future. I seek to show how this understanding of environmental injustice is highlighted in theories and research from the domain of Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism can be interpreted as a form of environmental injustice that wrongfully interferes with and erases the social-ecological contexts required for Indigenous populations to experience the world as a place infused with responsibilities to humans, nonhumans and ecosystems. Forthcoming in Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment. Edited by B. Bannon. Rowman & Littlefield.
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Global Environmental Politics, 2010
Environmental justice (EJ) has become an important frame for understanding battles over environmental conditions and sacred sites on indigenous lands. Native Americans have long been a part of the US environmental justice move-ment, and indigenous peoples have used EJ ...
Canadien Review of COmparative Literature, 2017
Extrait/Excerpt: Often, and in many ways, the contemporary productions of Indigenous scholars, activists, writers, and filmmakers relate to Maracle’s assertion that “violence to earth and violence between humans are connected” (53). In their respective works, for instance, Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (2014), Blood and Sámi filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (2011), and Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2016) have exposed the intricate connections between the settler colonial project, the devastation of ecosystems, and the lives of Indigenous women and girls. Their poetic, filmic, and scholarly narratives contribute to ongoing conversations on environmental ethics and social justice at times of climate crisis by exposing the planetary and the community implications of the state of relationships between the land and the people.
Indigenous resistance, planetary dystopia, and the politics of environmental justice
Globalizations , 2021
This article examines the critical interplay among Indigenous resurgence, settler colonialism, and the politics of environmental justice. Critical questions need to be asked: How are Indigenous political demands for decolonization taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia? How might 'environmental justice' work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests? This article takes up these questions vis à vis Standing Rock, paying particular attention to the way that the politics around water become reconfigured through notions of kinship, justice, Indigenous temporalities, and multiple frontlines. I argue that an anti-colonial indictment of environmental justice compels us to (re)imagine decolonial research/ praxis around environmental politics.
Indigenous Food Systems, Environmental Justice, and Settler-Industrial States
Whyte, K.P. 2015. Indigenous Food Systems, Environmental Justice and Settler Industrial-States. Global Food, Global Justice: Essays on Eating under Globalization. Edited by M. Rawlinson & C. Ward, 143-156, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Environmental injustices impacting Indigenous peoples across the globe are often described as wrongful disruptions of Indigenous food systems imposed by settler-industrial states such as the U.S. I will discuss how focusing on Indigenous food systems suggests a conception of the structure of environmental injustice as interference in Indigenous peoples’ collective capacities to self-determine how they adapt to metascale forces, from climate change to economic transitions. This conception of environmental justice can be contrasted to conceptions focusing on wrongfully disproportionate allocations of environmental hazards. I conclude by making a connection between environmental justice, the movements of global settler-industrial states, and the food and environmental justice issues of other populations, such as African-Americans in the Detroit, Michigan area.