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00:00:30.000Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Kyle White.
00:00:42.520It's not about saving something about today, but it's actually about grappling with
00:00:47.380the fact that the current landscape we live in, that our ancestors would have understood that
00:00:53.560as a dystopian time at the same level of extremity that you see in many Hollywood movies.
00:01:00.000Kyle is a professor and Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Departments of Philosophy
00:01:13.100and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. His research addresses moral and
00:01:19.180political issues concerning climate policy and indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative
00:01:24.660relationships between indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of indigenous
00:01:29.860justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice,
00:01:36.000and the Anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
00:01:46.180Well, Kyle, welcome to For the Wild podcast. Great, and thanks for having me, Ayana. I'm a
00:01:53.100fan of the podcast and all the work that you all are doing at the intersection of conservation,
00:01:58.460justice, and the arts? So I wanted to tell you that I was first introduced to your work
00:02:05.740through your essay, The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice and U.S. Settler
00:02:11.240Colonialism. And I think to begin our conversation today, it would be really helpful for listeners
00:02:17.980if we started by discussing the connection between settler colonialism and environmental
00:02:23.560injustice. How does the undermining of ecological conditions act as a strategic tool in the violent
00:02:31.120project of settler colonialism? And how can we contextualize the energy networks of today,
00:02:37.260not merely as a part of the global market, but as a present manifestation of settler colonialism?
00:02:44.380Settler colonialism, for me, is something that for many, many decades,
00:02:48.640the or at least some of the different parts of the environmental movement didn't really take on
00:02:55.620and one thing that i noticed when the the indigenous struggle against the dakota access
00:03:02.840pipeline was getting media attention that so many non-indigenous persons were just
00:03:08.660focusing on the pipeline itself as sort of an isolated, individualized problem that that
00:03:20.160indigenous peoples, that indigenous community was facing. And activists, scholars who are Dakota or
00:03:30.080Lakota who are from those communities, I saw them really pushing back and saying, wait a minute,
00:03:35.580it's not just that the land has been fine for decades and decades, and now there's this pipeline.0.94
00:03:43.940Instead, the United States has been actively transforming, terraforming, changing the land
00:03:51.980to suit the U.S.'s energy needs, the U.S.'s water needs. And the ancestors of people who are now
00:04:01.220members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe would probably have not even recognized the land today.
00:04:07.720I mean, they would have recognized certain aspects of it, but it's been completely changed.
00:04:13.440And for someone to say that the only issue is the pipeline would be to ignore decades of
00:04:21.040indigenous environmentalism that's attempted to stop the dispossession of their lands,
00:04:26.780the transformation of their lands into industrial agriculture, the massive damming that occurred.
00:04:32.640So scholars like Nick Estes, for example, in his new book, Our History is the Future,
00:04:38.280do a very good job documenting the history of that indigenous environmentalism. And so when
00:04:44.860people forget about settler colonialism, they tend to isolate our environmental issues as just
00:04:50.900one-off items and forget that we're in a much longer and deeper struggle than that.
00:04:56.780Thank you for speaking to that. The so-called United States harbors 2.4 million miles of pipelines, more than any other country in the world. But I don't think many of us visualize the Great Lakes region as being a prominent part of this expanding pipeline network.
00:05:15.860As an introduction to Indigenous-led movements to protect this region from pipeline disasters, can you speak to the Lakehead system, which is owned and operated by Enbridge Energy Partners, and why, for somewhat obvious reasons, this system is located in one of the worst possible areas?
00:05:34.540You know, linking your previous question to the current question, one thing that I think is rather eye-opening for a lot of people, if they haven't thought about it before, is when you see those maps of oil and gas pipelines, maps of energy infrastructure across North America.
00:05:57.060And it really gets one to thinking about just how deep of a transformation has occurred in the land since the generations that our ancestors were among the primary stewards of the land, as well as a number of non-human stewards as well.
00:06:18.680And so when you see how extensive it is underneath the ground, underneath water, above ground, above water too, and all the different transportation networks in addition to the pipelines themselves, it really is like being in a science fiction narrative where we're in the apocalyptic time, we're in the dystopian time, and a dominating society has completely transformed the environment underground, above ground, in the air.
00:06:48.680And that we're trying to find ways to get out of that matrix of power into a future that's going to be better for us and for the generations to come.
00:06:58.860And so in the Great Lakes region, for example, we're dealing with a number of pipeline related issues and energy infrastructure issues.
00:07:08.540I remember when I first moved to Michigan about 10 years ago, one of the issues we were dealing with at the time was that some of the byproducts of the tar sands were being dumped in Detroit in areas that would likely affect predominantly people of color or communities.
00:07:26.040And the idea that Detroit was plugged into this global energy network centered around the tar sands very much cemented in people's minds the depth of the energy infrastructure and how connected it all was.
00:07:44.600And so when you mentioned the Lakehead system, for me, I've been very focused on doing what I can to support several issues that are related to that.
00:07:56.040One is we have the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline, which is an old, old pipeline, and it's one of the only ones that actually crosses the different lakes.
00:08:08.400It's not been updated. It's not a safe pipeline.
00:08:11.500It affects waters that are not only significant for Native people, but are significant for all people of the Great Lakes and for all non-humans in the Great Lakes region.
00:08:20.760But Enbridge, the state, not only are they not effectively addressing those safety issues, but they're not addressing the larger issue that we can't just clean up or rebuild energy infrastructure that is based on energy systems that we shouldn't even be investing in anymore.
00:08:40.540And so recently in the state of Michigan, we've benefited from having an attorney general, Dana Nessel, who's actually engaged in a lawsuit against Enbridge.
00:08:50.840And indigenous activists and advocates like Andrea Pierce have done tremendous work as part of some of these indigenous-led activities like the annual flotilla that occurs, which attempts to present an alternative way of thinking about our relationship to water.
00:09:07.600But in thinking about the lakehead system and thinking about Line 5, thinking about Line 3, which goes through Minnesota, as well as a number of other pipeline issues, it's quite horrifying that for years this energy infrastructure was placed in the areas that it is placed in, and people weren't taking it seriously until just recently.
00:09:29.560Yeah, it's insane to think about the Great Lakes. And collectively, they're the largest available source of surface water on the planet. They contain 21% of the world's freshwater supply and 84% of the freshwater in North America. So yeah, it's insanity.
00:09:47.580And as I understand it, Line 5, one of the most notorious pipelines, is gaining attention, which is great.
00:09:57.620It was built in 1953, and Line 5 is now 16 years past its 50-year expiration date,
00:10:04.100meaning it is in a severely neglected condition with parts of it being corroded, missing protective coating, and operating over capacity.
00:10:14.620Now, in response, Enbridge has proposed a solution to maintaining the pipeline, but
00:10:19.340many communities are calling for its decommission.
00:10:22.500So can you speak to the importance of decommission and what are the far-reaching implications
00:10:27.700for the rest of the Enbridge system if protectors are able to decommission Line 5?
00:10:33.220The way that I try to approach these issues with a lot of my colleagues who live here
00:10:38.780in the region does go back to some of the great questions you were asking earlier about
00:10:43.380about settler colonialism. You know, one thing about settler colonialism is when you have a
00:10:48.860dominant society or more than one dominant society that's attempting to lay claim to an
00:10:54.560area of land, what they're trying to do is not just to take the resources from the land and
00:11:01.420ship it somewhere else. What they're actually trying to do is create the illusion that they
00:11:08.340are the rightful stewards of that land, that they're the rightful protectors of the land,
00:11:14.200that they're the rightful and sovereign people of that land.
00:11:19.400And what concerns me is that, you know, Indigenous people in the Great Lakes, we have treaty
00:11:24.900rights and treaty rights are more than just legal protections.
00:11:28.900They actually speak to Indigenous people's environmentalism, to the different ways in
00:11:34.880which our communities for generations have passed on lessons about what it means to live ethically
00:11:42.440with the land and to live in a world where we respect non-humans, whether fishes or insects
00:11:48.020or rivers or bodies of water as their own agents, as their own spiritual beings, as having their
00:11:54.260own personalities and their own special ways of living. And people in Michigan, including
00:12:01.720indigenous people never chose in the past for that pipeline to be there. We didn't choose the1.00
00:12:09.160regulatory mismanagement of the pipeline, which I appreciate your reading some of those facts
00:12:17.240about the pipeline. And we also didn't choose to be invested in the type of energy associated
00:12:25.700with the pipeline. You know, indigenous people have never benefited from the emergence of the0.95
00:12:31.240fossil fuel industry. We were displaced to make way for fossil fuel extraction. We haven't benefited
00:12:37.500from any of the employment opportunities associated with fossil fuels, except for in the case of
00:12:43.080certain individuals at different points in time. And we certainly are now among the populations
00:12:49.800facing some of the most dramatic effects of climate change, which is a product of the
00:12:56.180predominance of the fossil fuel industry. And so decommission is not just about the regulatory
00:13:04.100issue, the policy issue, but it's about people in the Great Lakes, including indigenous people,
00:13:09.900people of color, actually being able to choose, actually being able to be stewards and protectors
00:13:16.460of the land. And it's not Enbridge's choice about what they choose to do. It's everybody's choice.
00:13:25.400and the choices of indigenous people and people of color matter greatly because these are our
00:13:33.080homelands too and some of us have roots in these lands that are much much deeper than the people
00:13:40.220from Enbridge and for our views to be neglected and for our conception of what it means to have
00:13:46.760a just and ethical energy future is a tremendous problem.
00:13:52.340So around 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids move through line
00:13:59.320On the stretch of line five that includes the Bad River Reservation, Enbridge identified
00:14:04.640844 anomalies referring to cracks or features resembling cracks in 2011.
00:14:10.480And according to data acquired by the National Wildlife Federation in 2017, they also
00:14:16.720found that Line 5 itself has leaked at least 29 times since 1968, spilling more than a million
00:14:22.840total gallons of oil. So yeah, this is a huge issue. And I'm glad that it's picking up steam
00:14:31.000in people's engagement. And it has recently been revealed as well that Enbridge's private security
00:14:38.580contractor Merrill's Investigations has been surveilling water protectors located on the
00:14:44.440Straits of the Mackinac. Now, this comes as no surprise given that we see a wave of legislation
00:14:51.800criminalizing protectors in the aftermath of Standing Rock. But that being said, can you
00:14:58.000speak to the ongoing surveillance of essentially community members who are merely seeking oversight
00:15:03.520of polluters? Yeah, I've been especially disturbed to see this transition in the energy industry
00:15:13.160toward what I think they would call public participation or democratic engagement.
00:15:20.200You know, I think for people that don't work directly on the ground on these issues,
00:15:24.760they oftentimes are not aware of the different things that the energy industry is doing.
00:15:31.900You know, for example, in the case of Standing Rock and almost any other energy-related issue I can think of,
00:15:38.320The companies actually directly seek public support through advertisements, through local meetings, and they in some ways see themselves as attempting to play the role as a government.
00:15:51.220But in my experience, whether it's as an advocate or as a conflict mediator or researcher, what I find is that their motivations for doing so is barely to quell any opposition to what their plans are.
00:16:04.760They're not actually acting in good faith, where good faith means that in their interactions with other people, with the public, with indigenous people, that there is a chance that they might not go along with their original plans.
00:16:16.780Now, what you're speaking to is something that people are now becoming even more aware about, which is that at the same time that a lot of these companies were claiming that they were rolling out a more democratic approach,
00:16:29.780They were also continuing to invest in surveillance tactics in ways that would provide them a legal advantage or a capacity to threaten just people who are trying to protect the water.
00:16:44.200So, for example, in the Great Lakes region, we've been very inspired by the model of water stewardship that Josephine Mandamin gifted to us through the Mother Earth Water Walk.
00:16:56.840And that started as a movement tied to Anishinaabe women and their historic relationship to water, but is inclusive of people of all genders and all walks of life.
00:17:08.220But that model of environmental stewardship in which people are supposed to see water as a relative and are supposed to walk along the water and see that relationship ceremonially and to practice it as part of their life way, even when they're not near the water, people that are just engaging in acts of ceremony are being surveilled in ways that a company could then attempt to use legally as a threat to them.
00:17:35.340and what is important to think about with regard to settler colonialism is that it's always been
00:17:42.380part of settler colonialism to outlaw our ceremonies and this is actually another form
00:17:47.980of attempting to punish people for engaging in ceremony and indigenous people of course and this
00:17:55.080came out through the water protectors at standing rock that they didn't want to be seen as doing0.95
00:17:59.800you know direct action they wanted to be seen as engaging in ceremony but again right the
00:18:06.300settler population was trying to find ways for ceremony to be outlawed to be regulated to be
00:18:10.780controlled and it's not just indigenous people you know there's other groups as well that see
00:18:15.940their connection to the environment ceremonially whether it's historic ceremonies whether it's
00:18:22.400ceremonies that have been more recently developed by different communities but the point being is
00:18:26.740that these companies are on one level saying that they're being democratic, but another level,
00:18:35.940if they're really being democratic, why are they investing in all of this secretive surveillance
00:18:40.960that is just doing things that the fossil fuel and other extractive industries have been doing
00:18:46.900for generations? Yeah, this part of the conversation makes me think back to the
00:18:53.740conversation I had with Mariam Kaba, she discussed the importance of reframing our understanding of
00:18:59.700violence and crime to include those who steer powerful corporations. And yeah, it's just
00:19:06.680interesting because these people are permanently poisoning communities and environments. And it
00:19:11.620just feels important to mention that while private contractors are looking for any sort of evidence
00:19:16.920or information to incriminate protectors, the CEO of Enbridge received a $2 million raise in the
00:19:23.300aftermath of the 2001 oil spill, which is considered one of the worst inland spills in
00:19:29.200the country. So again, just seeing who is punished for what, it's really disturbing how quote-unquote
00:19:36.900justice is played out in this culture, this dominant culture. But I also want to talk about
00:19:45.580the Great Lakes region in terms of the mining industry. So could you share more about the
00:19:51.820history of mining interest and the current struggles, whether in terms of the operations
00:19:56.640of the Canadian mining firm, Aquila Resources, or the proposed Back 40 mine?
00:20:03.300Yeah, absolutely. Some people today, if you're not living in this region, or even if you are
00:20:08.940living in this region, there is a kind of a forgetfulness of the history here. Not only
00:20:16.640the indigenous history, but what came immediately afterwards. So for example, in Michigan, going
00:20:22.680back over 100 years, Michigan has been a leading economic producer in the industrial sense in a
00:20:29.320number of different industries, whether agriculture, mining, the automobile industry. So if you name
00:20:35.400an extractive industry, including tourism, Michigan has had an era where it was one of the leaders
00:20:42.720in the United States. And that's had a huge and dramatic impact on the land here. And so areas
00:20:51.160like what's currently called the Upper Peninsula, historically, and still through today, is a major
00:20:57.360area for mining. And while I would have hoped that there'd be a greater appreciation for the impact
00:21:07.260of mining on the communities whose lands are affected by mining, we still see companies
00:21:14.240today that are pushing, and like you mentioned, often transnational companies that are pushing
00:21:19.300to establish mines in areas that it's clearly not right to put land there.
00:21:25.420So the Back 40 mine is something that I know and I've supported a lot of Menominee people
00:21:32.820who are greatly affected by that mine.
00:21:35.400So the Menominee Nation, and I've had about a 10-year relationship working with the Sustainable Development Institute at the College of Menominee Nation.
00:21:43.740I frequently visit the community there for my work.
00:21:48.240They have land in their ancestral area that goes well into what's currently called Michigan.
00:21:55.520And the Back 40 mine is a mine in Michigan that actually, you know, it's a sulfide mine that will affect land that's part of the Menominee origin story. It's land that's at the core of Menominee culture. It's land that if it's affected, it affects the Menominee people's very memories as a people and a community.
00:22:19.740And what I don't understand is that in cases where you'd see an equivalent effect to, say, a Christian community, a white Christian community, would there be as much resistance as the mining company has posed to the claim that this is deeply unjust and unfair and inappropriate?
00:22:43.420And so in this way, we're in this settler colonial landscape where even the most powerful of cultural, religious, and social arguments still means nothing to some of these companies who nonetheless just see it as a cost of doing business to create mechanisms, including some of the surveillance that you referred to before,
00:23:05.640to lessen the legal and social and media impact
00:23:12.400of our resistance to these industries.
00:24:26.460Now, I'd like to transition to discussing some of your writing on dystopias and fantasies as
00:24:43.080it relates to the environmental movement. In your article, White Allies, Let's Be Honest
00:24:47.980About Decolonization, you write, quote, decolonizing allyship requires allies to be
00:24:53.500critical about their environmental realities and about the purpose of their environmentalism.
00:24:58.840To do this, allies must realize they are living in the environmental fantasies of their settler0.74
00:25:04.280ancestors. Settler ancestors wanted today's world. They would have relished the possibility that some0.92
00:25:11.020of their descendants could freely commit extractive violence on the indigenous lands and then feel
00:25:15.400with no doubts they are ethical people end quote goodness initially what comes to mind
00:25:24.440is the sort of visible colonial fantasy represented by vast pipeline networks oil fields
00:25:31.180open pit mines and clear-cut landscapes but i'd really like to focus on the topic of dystopia as
00:25:40.040it relates to the very harmful trajectory dominant culture seems to be on when it comes
00:25:45.760to addressing climate change. So can you speak to the ways in which our greenwashed pursuit of
00:25:51.860climate justice will continue indigenous dystopias? Yeah, thanks for that important1.00
00:25:58.040question. And I'm glad that some of my work has been supportive of the work that you're doing.
00:26:04.460The thing that struck me, and I can't remember exactly when, but when I started really thinking about how many environmentalist positions or campaigns or points were about saving something.
00:26:23.020And if there's something about today that's being saved, and if we compare it to points that you raised earlier about the extensiveness of the pipeline network, but also combining that with the idea that lands that are unaffected by pollution are also lands that indigenous people largely do not have the right in the eyes of others to live and steward those lands in ways that their ancestors had from generations.
00:26:50.140You know, to me, that doesn't sound like something that is worth saving. And so when I thought about this idea of what is worth saving about today, I realized that actually, at least with respect to the indigenous folks that I've worked with and learned from,
00:27:09.560that it's not about saving something about today,
00:27:13.420but it's actually about grappling with the fact
00:27:16.220that the current landscape we live in,
00:27:19.340that our ancestors would have understood that
00:27:21.320as a dystopian time at the same level of extremity
00:27:24.520that you see in many Hollywood movies.
00:27:28.320And recently, this thought has taken me
00:27:36.940Because part of greenwashing is the idea that somebody from a privileged background whose ancestors did tremendous harm and somebody whose own education and own capacity as a scientist or as a leader or as a media person is based on having been raised with the advantages that come from the fossil fuel economy, coming from the fossil fuel energy sources, right?
00:28:05.280That was the basis of how one developed one's skill sets was through technologies and infrastructures
00:28:12.360that were created by that industry, right?
00:28:14.840And that those people would like to become the heroes, that they want to have every bad
00:28:21.320thing that they may be associated with in the past, but at the same time, in a single
00:28:27.080generation, they also want to be known as the heroes, as the ones that saved the environment.
00:28:32.760And that notion of heroism, to me, is very offensive, because why would they get to be the heroes? Why do they expect to be the heroes? And do they really think that the way that things are going, that within a generation, there's anything heroic that anybody could do?
00:28:55.160And so in some of my recent writings, what I've been thinking a lot about is that there's an obsession with what I think a lot of people call an ecological tipping point, that we are on the verge or have already passed an ecological tipping point of which there's no going back.
00:29:14.440But what people don't talk about is the relationship tipping point, the tipping point about whether globally and locally, people relate to each other in ways that as we move toward greener technologies, that people will be able to work together in ways that are ethical and just.
00:29:36.980And so in a recent article that I published in the journal WIRES Climate Change, I pointed out that if we look at the current literature on sustainable technologies, whether it's wind power, well, I wouldn't want to call it sustainable, but, you know, hydropower, whether it's solar, the emerging literature and very credible literature shows that when these technologies proliferate,
00:30:00.980proliferate, even if they might be associated with a lowering of concentrations of greenhouse
00:30:07.280gases in the atmosphere, it's still indigenous people. It's still people of color. It's still1.00
00:30:12.080people impacted by poverty. It's still people impacted by other forms of domination that are
00:30:18.980not winning. So for example, most attempts to reform the energy system do not make it possible
00:30:27.100for tribes or neighborhoods of color to be central to those new energy networks. In fact,
00:30:32.940we're often excluded from them. And so to me, this suggests that there's a relational tipping point,
00:30:40.920a state of relationships among people that was passed a long time ago through colonialism and
00:30:46.360capitalism. And it's made it so that greenwashing is not only a false promise, but it's one that
00:30:53.920even if the best green technologies are implemented, it could just be as bad for many of our communities
00:31:00.520as the previous system. I think that savior mentality also leads to the erasure of so
00:31:08.060many people and histories. And also, I think more realistic solutions, if we're going to talk about
00:31:17.040the word solution, which I don't even like, but I think that the savior mentality of big green
00:31:22.580really wipes out solutions that people have known about for thousands of years that aren't
00:31:28.100implemented because they're not maybe they're not able to make the same kind of money because
00:31:32.980they're not about industry and they're not about creating big companies that will then be bought
00:31:37.740and sold on the marketplace so i'm really happy we spoke about this because it's something that's
00:31:43.200on my mind a lot and yeah and you know of course there's also the examples of red and the world
00:31:48.540bank programs and the UN. And that's connected definitely to this renewable energy monster0.59
00:31:55.760that I kind of see it. None of them are really supporting people. And I think it's dangerous
00:32:01.460because it gives the image as if things are getting done in some type of regenerative way,
00:32:08.200but they're not. If you don't mind, I did want to follow up on something that you mentioned,
00:32:43.200they were actually taught that environmentalism has to be democratic. They were taught the ideas
00:32:51.040that public involvement and public participation are critical to a successful environmental
00:32:57.900program or campaign or green technology development. But that's given the illusion
00:33:04.860that if you just create the activities, the democratic activities, then that by itself
00:33:14.160will somehow stop domination, that that will heal distrust, that that will heal decades of
00:33:23.120a lack of consent that Indigenous and communities of color have faced. That itself will provide the
00:33:31.360solution, which will then enable the person who enacts those types of activities, those
00:33:37.320democratic activities, the hero or the changer or the transformer.
00:33:42.600But what I think a lot of younger people are going to have to grapple with and come to
00:33:46.920terms with is that when they do engage in those activities, it doesn't solve distrust.
00:33:53.420It doesn't change the landscape of power.
00:33:55.840and instead there has to be a different model in which people invest in the relationship building
00:34:03.600that it will take to build trust consent reciprocity but the problem with that is that
00:34:09.360those relationships they don't establish themselves quickly for me to build trust
00:34:16.160with somebody else if we work at it even if we work at it quickly it won't get done in a year
00:34:22.640It might even be a project over the course of a lifetime. But as we watch dangerous climate change exacerbate, we have to change our conception of what it means to be an environmentalist.
00:34:36.140maybe that ecological crisis is not the best way to frame or to motivate the actions we're taking.
00:34:43.400Maybe it's best to go into some of these traditions that were excluded from our education
00:34:48.160that focus on the importance of consent and trust and reciprocity as the basis for how
00:34:53.700not only relate to the environment, but how we relate to each other.
00:34:56.980Yeah, I just keep thinking maybe I'm thinking about the root of why people are not willing
00:35:02.080to slow down in order to well and maybe it's a like I said maybe it's a thing of fear maybe it's
00:35:07.280also seems less controllable like if you were to have a company and you built a thing and you get
00:35:13.160it funded you could just do it where to build trust and consent the savior let's just say the
00:35:19.160environmental savior they're not the ones in control they're not the ones in power and I think
00:35:23.960just even questioning that in the savior mentality is really challenging because the savior mentality
00:35:29.300about ego and control, and not really having to wait around for somebody to consent to what they
00:35:34.920think they should do. So yeah, that's a very deep question, deep analysis. And I think it's
00:35:40.680something that I'll probably be thinking about for my whole life and asking people questions about
00:35:45.020the entire life of the podcast because it's so I think at the core of our issues and the way that
00:35:52.640we relate to climate catastrophe. And this kind of relates to this next question I want to ask you.
00:36:00.860When I was preparing for this conversation, I came across an article you co-authored titled
00:36:04.920Invasive Species, Indigenous Stewards, and Vulnerability Discourse. It explores the
00:36:11.120indigenous stewardship in relationship to invasive species, which as it pointed out in the article,
00:36:16.520it's rarely discussed in scientific or environmental circles. So I'm hoping you can speak to this topic
00:36:21.800a little bit more, both in terms of what it means for Indigenous agency in environmental research
00:36:27.500and how it works towards addressing the larger issue of the pervasiveness of vulnerability
00:36:32.820narratives in the environmental realm. And I guess as well, what does this negation of
00:36:38.780vulnerability mean in terms of policy? Ayanna, I'm definitely going to quote you.
00:36:44.180Some of the good points you were making about the relationship between urgency and
00:36:51.220I guess what you could call saviorism or heroic intentions and how that relates to also a
00:36:59.740assumption of a capacity to control and I think especially the way that you said it you know
00:37:08.000philosophically relates to this this issue of of vulnerability that I deal with in a lot of my work
00:37:16.800especially when I work specifically with tribes on their climate change planning efforts.
00:37:23.700So the topic of invasive species is an extremely challenging one. Scholars like Megan Bang and some
00:37:33.000of her co-authors have done really important work on trying to sort of decolonize this term
00:37:40.660invasive species. Because on the one hand, when a new species, a new plant, animal, insect, fish
00:37:48.500comes into your land, that presents all sorts of challenges, right? But the model has been to look
00:37:55.000at the actual plants and animals themselves, the non-humans themselves, as what's invasive.
00:38:00.980Instead of recognizing that actually those particular beings are responding to what is
00:38:09.100truly the invasive species, which is the human industrial culture or settler colonialism
00:38:19.100And so in Megan Bang's work, but then we're also seeing work by scholars like Anne Spice
00:38:24.380on invasive infrastructures and beginning to make that change and saying, wait a minute,
00:38:30.580why is it that it's the fish that are invasive and not the pipelines or the dams or the,
00:38:36.560right it was just bizarre because if you no matter how you look at it why would one be invasive and
00:38:43.500the other not it it makes no no no no sense right but this is tied to a couple of different you know
00:38:53.080so the second thing is this is tied to a couple of different ways that vulnerability is used
00:38:58.320problematically and so you know on the one hand even among privileged societies when they talk
00:39:04.240about invasive species that affect their recreational culture, their industrial culture,
00:39:09.880they imagine themselves as vulnerable to something from the non-human world, which to me is completely
00:39:16.940ridiculous given it's their own actions that are engendering the environmental issues that
00:39:24.720they're concerned about. But in terms of indigenous people and people of color, when climate change0.89
00:39:32.800you know 10 20 30 years ago right became more and more of a topic that people were looking at in
00:39:40.720terms of the issue that not everybody's going to be affected in the same way the original model
00:39:48.920that many white and privileged people created for how to understand inequality was the idea that
00:39:56.640you have vulnerable communities so indigenous people are vulnerable why are they vulnerable
00:40:00.480Well, they live lives closely connected to the land was one of the common explanations for that, right? They live off of natural resources. And hence, they're more vulnerable than people in other societies. And when you look at an example like that, it is just rife with so many problems.1.00
00:40:20.260You know, so only indigenous people live off of the land, right? Nobody else lives off of the land. Isn't it everybody that lives off the land? That indigenous people only are people that live in very rural areas and are not people that are everywhere.
00:40:39.180In fact, in some places more predominantly in cities, and that Indigenous people are primarily reactive, which excluded generations of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous adaptation and capacity, as well as solutions that Indigenous people are engaging in today to deal with climate change.
00:41:01.520Completely erase that. And so, for example, if you look at a lot of the climate science literature, if you're an activist, if you're an anti-fossil fuel person, I think you'd be really surprised by what you see.
00:41:16.520Because you'd see some of the same communities that you know have been out front opposing energy infrastructure and proposing alternatives, referred to in the science literature as just people that are worried about declines in salmon.
00:41:33.040And all of those actions that they're taking to make change are not talked about.
00:41:40.680You know, and if science is primarily understanding Indigenous people in that way, and in one of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the 1.5 degree report, I think, if you look at where Indigenous people are referred to, they're oftentimes referred to just in terms of regions that are at risk, or they're referred to themselves as just a vulnerability.
00:42:08.800with no further elaboration on their culture, their history, and their current activism.
00:42:38.800So I do want to talk about indigenous climate justice, and perhaps we can discuss this in context to the framing of climate change as both a rapid assault and an episode of colonialism.
00:42:52.040Two ideas I have come across in your work.
00:42:54.380So ultimately, how is indigenous climate justice the only long-term climate justice?
00:43:00.580Yeah, I think it goes back to something I mentioned earlier about your work relating to conservation, justice, the arts, and how we imagine ourselves, how we create expressions that can begin to create an alternative to the mainstream way in which industrialization is privileged and environmentalism remains naive and remains participatory in systems of society.
00:43:30.580power that it claims to resist. So one of the big myths is that climate change as an issue
00:43:41.160is a new thing for humans to grapple with. And by a new thing, I mean something that humans
00:43:47.200explicitly grapple with. In fact, in most educational systems in a country like the United
00:43:53.380States, climate science itself is seen as a fairly new science, one that has some origins
00:44:00.180in the 19th century, but really gets put together as a field in the 20th century and has built a
00:44:07.480lot of steam in the 21st century. And when people say things like that, they ignore the fact that
00:44:13.000for a lot of cultures, including indigenous ones, our oldest sciences were about understanding
00:44:20.660our relationship to the climate system and its relationships to weather, to ecosystems,
00:44:27.180to habitats. And so historically, if you look at many North American indigenous peoples,
00:44:34.140to say Anishinaabe people, of which Potawatomi are a part, you know, our sciences are based on
00:44:42.300the idea that we need to have a good understanding of what it means to be a people
00:44:48.200who can respond to a constantly changing environment, an environment that changes
00:44:52.440over the long term in terms of climate and environment that changes each year through
00:44:57.980seasons, but also that human relations with each other and human relationships with plants
00:45:05.560or animals or fishes or insects, depending on how those relationships play out, can also
00:45:11.480make changes that we have to prepare for and understand.
00:45:16.900And so I would argue at a highly speculative level that for many cultures, probably the
00:45:21.640majority of human people that climate science is the oldest science, actually. And that if somebody
00:45:27.260were to take a class on the history of science, or even a class on political philosophy, that
00:45:35.540the original philosophies dealing with science or politics were ones that had to do with how do
00:45:42.480humans live in relation to a constantly changing environment. And so with that in mind, Indigenous
00:45:48.660people have tracked through generations how their interactions with other societies
00:45:54.580have affected the climate system. So in some of my writing, I've looked at testimonies from
00:46:03.060times when people like in the 19th century were talking about treaty relationships. And they were
00:46:09.100saying things like the problem with settlement is that it deforested, it wiped out the game,
00:46:15.060It wiped out the fish. And we're arguing, if we were to use today's language, that the treaty was a way for them to have a relationship with the dominant society that would make it possible to continue certain livelihoods that they'd been depending on for generations in a world that was very much changing.
00:46:40.700That the weather system, the climate system, the landscape was being changed by colonialism. So for that reason, human-caused climate change was absolutely a part of colonialism in the 19th and 18th century.
00:46:57.860When you deforest the landscape, you change the soil, you change the temperature, you change everything. It's an absolute terraforming of land. And if you look at how indigenous people have often understood this, that colonialism itself can be understood as a form of power that inflicts environmental change on other people.
00:47:22.820And some of that is climatic, similar to how deforestation or similar to how the development of industrial agriculture or the changing of hydrological systems, how that has that dramatic effect.
00:47:38.460It's not just an effect on weather, it's an effect on climate too in a certain way.
00:47:44.420Now, the last thing I want to mention is that that's just looking at one type of change.
00:47:50.620the other part of it is that deforestation industrialization inflicts immediate climate
00:47:59.080change but we now know that it puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which then generate
00:48:06.920changes of their own and so colonialism is like a double whammy especially industrial
00:48:15.220versions of colonialism. It inflicts environmental change, dangerous environmental change on colonized
00:48:22.780people in order to set up an economy that generations down the road will be extremely
00:48:31.160disruptive to the climate system at a global scale. And so for somebody to argue that colonialism and
00:48:39.920climate change are somehow detached, they would be wrong. In fact, you have to talk about them
00:48:46.700together. I can talk about colonialism while only talking about climate change. I could talk about
00:48:53.200climate change while only talking about colonialism. That's how interchangeable they are.
00:48:59.440So for my last question for you, Kyle, I'd like to again revisit your essay,
00:49:06.340white allies let's be honest about decolonization and specifically the following passage quote
00:49:12.620i want to experience the solidarity of allied actions that refuse fantastical narratives of
00:49:19.240commonality and hope determining what exactly needs to be done will involve the kind of creativity
00:49:24.720that indigenous peoples have used to survive some of the most oppressive forms of capitalist
00:49:30.380industrial, and colonial domination. But above all, it will require that allies take responsibility
00:49:37.840and confront the assumptions behind their actions and aspirations, end quote. So perhaps I could ask
00:49:44.400you to expand on the importance of refuting commonality and hope in this context.
00:49:50.240Absolutely. So hope, I think, is one of those assumptions that has, in a lot of ways, gone out of control. I hear people a lot of times using hope in a way that I actually don't understand what they mean by it.
00:50:14.480For example, they'll talk about indigenous people who are facing extreme forms of domination and say, well, when I look at these people's situation, I see an example of hope.
00:50:23.840And I've never understood what that really means, because hope in a lot of contexts, right, especially where it's privileged people talking about the importance of hope, if they're telling me that I am right for hoping,
00:50:46.480that just sounds like they're trying to say that i should hope for a future that we should already
00:50:55.000know is not going to happen which again is a way to quiet the direct actions that i could take to
00:51:01.520make change it's a way for me to lessen my motivation to do things that are truly transformational
00:51:08.380because i have hope and i actually think that the entire idea of hope should be completely removed
00:51:15.980from environmental ism, environmental discourse. I think it has no place or no role.
00:51:27.000Instead, and I think a lot about my own ancestors, I think a lot about ancestors of other people who
00:51:34.900they've shared with me stories about, a lot of these particular individuals are ones that
00:51:42.820They were about the business. They confronted power directly. They didn't need hope. They recognized that the way in which formations of power were constructed was so stacked against them that to engage in something that was driven like hope would not have been effective.
00:52:08.500And instead what you see are, and this is what I hope arises in future allyship relationships, instead realizing that what we have together is the potential to build coalitions that are based on strong standards of consent and trust and reciprocity and transparency.
00:52:32.280And if we focus directly, even if it seems to be daunting, given the power that we face, we focus directly on building those relationships, on creating the basis, for example, for genuine consensuality.
00:52:47.300What does genuine consensuality actually mean and what does it take to achieve?
00:52:53.280That itself is a project much more powerful than hope.
00:52:57.440I don't hope for a better climate future.
00:53:00.400instead i'm adamant that i will do whatever i can to build consensuality to build trust to
00:53:08.100build reciprocity with other people i don't need an illusion of a carrot at the end of that
00:53:13.920to be devoted in that way i don't need to hold out that there might be something better
00:53:20.520when there's no reason for me to think that there would be in the absence of genuine trust
00:53:27.660consensuality, reciprocity, and other qualities. And so in that way, when you say are just focused
00:53:36.240on something like consent building, which means grappling with the idea that a lot of our
00:53:41.200relationships are one in which it's very hard to establish direct consent. We have to grapple with,
00:53:47.120especially with non-humans, we don't know what they consent to. And sometimes they do things1.00
00:53:51.360to us that we would not consent to. It's challenging. But if we are focused directly
00:54:00.800on building out those qualities, then it completely removes the temptation to be a hero.
00:54:09.120And we can actually accept that maybe my role is not that different from generations of
00:54:17.120anti-colonialists some of whom we remember some of whom we don't but they knew that they were
00:54:24.420doing what had to be done and the fact that some of us and some of our communities are still around
00:54:30.280today is based on their work whether we remember them directly or we remember them indirectly
00:54:37.200because we know they must have existed they we know they must have been part of that work
00:54:42.400wow i'm really with you i i love what you're saying about consent rather than hope it's about
00:54:50.420consent reciprocity relationship building and i think about how many times consent has been
00:54:59.340not only broken but never even attempted for in the first place and i think also about
00:55:09.580transparency. And I think, well, why don't people want to try for consent or transparency? And it
00:55:15.620goes back to the savior mentality. It goes back to me for control. It goes back to the urgency
00:55:21.940thing. If you just want your thing done, if you want your project done, if you want to feel like
00:55:26.800you're doing something, you don't want to have to wait for somebody to consent. And you sure as hell
00:55:33.060don't want to tell them all the transparent issues that may arise in this project or whatever you're
00:55:38.420doing because then people may object and you don't want objections if you just want to steamroll
00:55:42.860bulldoze through and do what you want to do as the savior and i do think that a lot of the oil
00:55:48.060and gas companies think they are saviors in their own way i think they think that they're supplying
00:55:52.700the world with technology and modernity and comfort and energy and we all need energy so i
00:55:59.620actually think they kind of fit into the savior mentality in their own way but what if resource
00:56:06.200extraction project or even environmental projects if they were transparent from the beginning
00:56:11.840it's true that people may not consent but what happens when people don't consent then it takes
00:56:18.180longer to make decisions and I think we have to be okay with that and I almost think almost all
00:56:24.140the time at this point we have to really take a lot longer to actually come to a decision before
00:56:30.120we start to do physical changes to the land, whether it's restorative or not, that slowing
00:56:36.920down that transparency and consent building and trust building and relationship building bring
00:56:42.560is so important because we would not rush into these decisions that we've made as a culture
00:56:48.320that have really been detrimental. So I am, oh my gosh, I'm so with you. It's a slowing and it's a
00:56:56.300steady. It's more steady to me when we're able to build that consent. And I think it also really
00:57:03.280makes us have to shift our ideas of success because, okay, again, if you're in the savior
00:57:11.500mentality and you have a project that you think is going to be good for somebody, you just want
00:57:15.720it done and you want to show the outcomes and you want the data on the, on the graphs and the
00:57:20.080numbers and to show how well you did. But again, if you go the other direction where it's relationship
00:57:25.280consent transparency and all these other things we've talked about i think one really has to get
00:57:30.560out of that colonial mindset of what success is and what measurables are and realize like what
00:57:36.820you're saying there's folks that have been busting their ass way before us and perhaps they weren't0.50
00:57:44.480in their ego state that they had to somehow have a measurable of what they did they were just doing0.95
00:57:49.140the right thing. And I think when we do these other modalities or modes of being in relationship
00:57:56.980with each other on the earth, it doesn't have the same type of sometimes flashy outcome that
00:58:03.740greenwashed colonial environmentalism dot, dot, dot, dot, dot have. And so again, it's like really
00:58:09.860going into our minds and shifting our concept of how we can feel ethical, how we can feel
00:58:16.000quote unquote successful and realizing that at the end of the day, the relationships we have
00:58:21.620will really measure how well we were able to do what we were trying to do. It's something that
00:58:27.420I've been thinking about a lot, especially because people are really scared and people want to see
00:58:33.660changes now because they're seeing the changes they don't want to see. And so it's hard to get
00:58:38.980through to people. And I've heard a lot too of, but you know, this species is going extinct or
00:58:44.900the water is running dry or this or that. So we have to try something. We have to try something.
00:58:49.980And it's like, well, why don't you try to deal with your consumerism? Why don't you try to get
00:58:55.300the logging to stop? We don't have to try these greenwash solutions. I mean, there's a lot of
00:58:59.860other things like stopping pipelines that we absolutely know need to be taken out. Anyways,
00:59:05.560I'm totally going on a tangent now because you really got me going on this. But anyways,
00:59:10.720Maybe for another interview, we can dive into these topics even deeper, because I do feel like these are at the root of how we can actually bring justice to the movement space in a way that feels authentic and genuine, all of the things you mentioned.
00:59:29.480Yeah, thank you. I think that was like totally well said. And I'm definitely going to quote you because I like the way that you're describing the decision making process, because I think you really went directly to the issue that it's a difference in how we think about time.
00:59:48.180If you say, well, how long is it going to take to protect the environment? Where it's going to take as long as it takes to establish trust, consent, reciprocity, transparency. It's not like it's going to take a year, two years, 10 years, 20. That's the duration of time is measured through kinship, right? Through those qualities.
01:00:06.080And so people who say, whether they're corporate or environmentalist, and using your own words, that we don't have to embrace the time it will take to make genuine decisions, not only are they violating ethics and justice, but similar to what I was mentioning about what I found out about energy solutions, for many of us, even if they do lower greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
01:00:33.800it won't be a better future for us because our communities will be flooded our communities will
01:00:39.660be sucked for resources again for solar or wind it won't be better for us right we won't be central
01:00:44.960to those new energy systems and that's a reality that i hope people uh and i used hope just now
01:00:52.040but but i want people to really i want people to really embrace that and thanks for your
01:00:57.240articulations of your own thoughts about that which to me are also very powerful
01:01:01.500thank you Kyle this has been such a stimulating conversation thank you so much for being on for
01:01:09.300the wild podcast I know that folks who are listening are probably feeling that there are
01:01:15.200ways to be engaged and there are ways to be in integrity and we really need to shift the way
01:01:23.600that we show up and are contributing to the movement so this has been great thanks okay
01:01:30.340Great. Well, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to staying in
01:01:34.460touch. Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast. I'm audio producer Andrew
01:01:47.620Storrs. The music you heard today was from Carrie Morin and Bonnie Prince Billy. I'd like to thank