00:00:00.000Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Kyle White.
00:00:13.500It's not about saving something about today, but it's actually about grappling with the fact
00:00:19.480that the current landscape we live in, that our ancestors would have understood that as a dystopian
00:00:25.580time at the same level of extremity that you see in many Hollywood movies.
00:00:37.860Kyle is a professor and Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Departments of Philosophy
00:00:44.060and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. His research addresses moral and
00:00:50.160political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative
00:00:55.640relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous
00:01:00.760justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice,
00:01:06.880and the Anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
00:01:12.260well kyle welcome to for the wild podcast great and thanks for having me ayana i'm a fan of the
00:01:24.760podcast and all the work that you all are doing at the intersection of conservation justice and
00:01:30.540the arts so um i wanted to tell you that i was first introduced to your work through your essay
00:01:37.860the Dakota Access Pipeline, environmental injustice, and U.S. settler colonialism.
00:01:43.660And I think to begin our conversation today, it would be really helpful for listeners if
00:01:49.400we started by discussing the connection between settler colonialism and environmental injustice.
00:01:56.120How does the undermining of ecological conditions act as a strategic tool in the violent project
00:02:02.540of settler colonialism and how can we contextualize the energy networks of today not merely as a part
00:02:09.780of the global market but as a present manifestation of settler colonialism settler colonialism for me
00:02:16.960is something that for many many decades the or at least some of the different parts of the
00:02:23.900environmental movement didn't really take on and one thing that i noticed when the the indigenous
00:02:31.980struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline was getting media attention, that so many non-Indigenous
00:02:38.300persons were just focusing on the pipeline itself as sort of an isolated, individualized
00:02:49.320problem that that Indigenous peoples, that Indigenous community was facing.
00:02:55.300And activists, scholars who are Dakota or Lakota who are from those communities, I saw them really pushing back and saying, wait a minute, it's not just that the land has been fine for decades and decades, and now there's this pipeline.
00:03:14.080instead the united states has been actively transforming terraforming changing the land
00:03:22.940to suit the u.s's energy needs the u.s's water needs and that the ancestors of people who are
00:03:32.000now members of the standing rock sioux tribe would probably have not even recognized the land
00:03:38.260today. I mean, they would have recognized certain aspects of it, but it's been completely changed.
00:03:44.980And for someone to say that the only issue is the pipeline would be to ignore decades of
00:03:52.020indigenous environmentalism that's attempted to stop the dispossession of their lands,
00:03:57.860the transformation of their lands into industrial agriculture, the massive damning that occurred.
00:04:03.640So scholars like Nick Estes, for example, in his new book, Our History is the Future, do a very good job documenting the history of that indigenous environmentalism.
00:04:14.980And so when people forget about settler colonialism, they tend to isolate our environmental issues as just one-off items and forget that we're in a much longer and deeper struggle than that.
00:04:30.300The so-called United States harbors 2.4 million miles of pipelines, more than any other country
00:04:37.720in the world. But I don't think many of us visualize the Great Lakes region as being a
00:04:43.800prominent part of this expanding pipeline network. As an introduction to Indigenous-led movements to
00:04:50.040protect this region from pipeline disasters, can you speak to the Lakehead system, which is owned
00:04:56.280and operated by Enbridge Energy Partners, and why, for somewhat obvious reasons, this
00:05:02.700system is located in one of the worst possible areas?
00:05:06.980You know, linking your previous question to the current question, one thing that I think
00:05:13.380is rather eye-opening for a lot of people, if they haven't thought about it before, is
00:05:19.300when you see those maps of oil and gas pipelines, maps of energy infrastructure across North
00:05:27.540America, and it really gets one to thinking about just how deep of a transformation has
00:05:38.260occurred in the land since the generations that our ancestors were among the primary
00:05:45.560stewards of the land, as well as a number of non-human stewards as well. And so when you see0.80
00:05:51.400how extensive it is underneath the ground, underneath water, above ground, above water too,
00:05:57.020and all the different transportation networks in addition to the pipelines themselves,
00:06:02.060it really is like being in a science fiction narrative where we're in the apocalyptic time,
00:06:09.380We're in the dystopian time and a dominating society has completely transformed the environment underground, above ground, in the air, and 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.
00:06:29.660And so in the Great Lakes region, for example, we're dealing with a number of pipeline-related issues and energy infrastructure issues.
00:06:39.500I 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.
00:06:57.000And 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.
00:07:15.360And 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.
00:07:27.240So one 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.
00:07:42.000It 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.
00:07:52.540But 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.
00:08:12.000And 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.
00:08:21.820And 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.
00:08:38.580But 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.
00:09:00.540Yeah, 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.
00:09:18.540And as I understand it, Line 5, one of the most notorious pipelines, is gaining attention, which is great.
00:09:28.600It was built in 1953, and Line 5 is now 16 years past its 50-year expiration date,
00:09:35.080meaning it is in a severely neglected condition with parts of it being corroded, missing protective coating, and operating over capacity.
00:09:45.600Now, in response, Enbridge has proposed a solution to maintaining the pipeline, but
00:09:50.320many communities are calling for its decommission.
00:09:53.480So can you speak to the importance of decommission and what are the far-reaching implications
00:09:58.680for the rest of the Enbridge system if protectors are able to decommission Line 5?
00:10:04.200The way that I try to approach these issues with a lot of my colleagues who live here
00:10:09.760in the region does go back to some of the great questions you were asking earlier about
00:10:14.360about settler colonialism. You know, one thing about settler colonialism is when you have a
00:10:19.840dominant society or more than one dominant society that's attempting to lay claim to an
00:10:25.540area of land, what they're trying to do is not just to take the resources from the land and
00:10:32.400ship it somewhere else. What they're actually trying to do is create the illusion that they
00:10:39.320are the rightful stewards of that land, that they're the rightful protectors of the land,
00:10:45.180that they're the rightful and sovereign people of that land.
00:10:50.380And what concerns me is that, you know, Indigenous people in the Great Lakes, we have treaty
00:10:55.860rights and treaty rights are more than just legal protections.
00:10:59.880They actually speak to Indigenous people's environmentalism, to the different ways in
00:11:05.860which our communities for generations have passed on lessons about what it means to live ethically
00:11:13.420with the land and to live in a world where we respect non-humans, whether fishes or insects
00:11:19.000or rivers or bodies of water, as their own agents, as their own spiritual beings, as having their
00:11:25.240own personalities and their own special ways of living. And people in Michigan, including
00:11:32.700indigenous people never chose in the past for that pipeline to be there. We didn't choose the1.00
00:11:40.140regulatory mismanagement of the pipeline, which I appreciate your reading some of those facts
00:11:48.220about the pipeline. And we also didn't choose to be invested in the type of energy associated
00:11:56.660with the pipeline. You know, indigenous people have never benefited from the emergence of the0.95
00:12:02.200fossil fuel industry. We were displaced to make way for fossil fuel extraction. We haven't benefited
00:12:08.480from any of the employment opportunities associated with fossil fuels, except for in the case of
00:12:14.060certain individuals at different points in time. And we certainly are now among the populations
00:12:20.780facing some of the most dramatic effects of climate change, which is a product of the
00:12:27.160predominance of the fossil fuel industry. And so decommission is not just about the regulatory
00:12:35.080issue, the policy issue, but it's about people in the Great Lakes, including indigenous people,
00:12:40.880people of color, actually being able to choose, actually being able to be stewards and protectors
00:12:47.440of the land. And it's not Enbridge's choice about what they choose to do. It's everybody's choice
00:12:56.380and the choices of indigenous people and people of color matter greatly because these are our
00:13:04.060homelands too and some of us have roots in these lands that are much much deeper than the people
00:13:11.200from Enbridge and for our views to be neglected and for our conception of what it means to have
00:13:17.740a just and ethical energy future is a tremendous problem.
00:13:23.340So around 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids move through line
00:15:35.740They'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.
00:15:47.740Now, 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,
00:16:00.760They 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.
00:16:15.180So 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. And 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.
00:16:39.200But 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.
00:17:06.320and what is important to think about with regard to settler colonialism is that it's always been
00:17:13.360part of settler colonialism to outlaw our ceremonies and this is actually another form
00:17:18.940of attempting to punish people for engaging in ceremony and indigenous people of course and this
00:17:26.060came out through the water protectors at standing rock that they didn't want to be seen as doing0.90
00:17:30.780you know direct action they wanted to be seen as engaging in ceremony but again right the settler
00:17:37.520population was trying to find ways for ceremony to be outlawed to be regulated to be controlled
00:17:42.180and it's not just indigenous people you know there's other groups as well that see their
00:17:47.100connection to the environment ceremonially whether it's historic ceremonies whether it's
00:17:53.360ceremonies that have been more recently developed by different communities but the point being is
00:17:57.700that these companies are on one level saying that they're being democratic, but another level,
00:18:06.900if they're really being democratic, why are they investing in all of this secretive surveillance
00:18:11.920that is just doing things that the fossil fuel and other extractive industries have been doing
00:18:17.880for generations? Yeah, this part of the conversation makes me think back to the
00:18:24.720conversation I had with Mariam Kaba, she discussed the importance of reframing our understanding of
00:18:30.680violence and crime to include those who steer powerful corporations. And yeah, it's just
00:18:37.660interesting because these people are permanently poisoning communities and environments. And it
00:18:42.600just feels important to mention that while private contractors are looking for any sort of evidence
00:18:47.900or information to incriminate protectors, the CEO of Enbridge received a $2 million raise in the
00:18:54.280aftermath of the 2001 oil spill, which is considered one of the worst inland spills in
00:19:00.180the country. So again, just seeing who is punished for what, it's really disturbing how quote-unquote
00:19:07.880justice is played out in this culture, this dominant culture. But I also want to talk about
00:19:16.540the Great Lakes region in terms of the mining industry. So could you share more about the
00:19:22.780history of mining interest and the current struggles, whether in terms of the operations
00:19:27.620of the Canadian mining firm, Aquila Resources, or the proposed Back 40 mine?
00:19:34.280Yeah, absolutely. Some people today, if you're not living in this region, or even if you are
00:19:39.920living in this region, there is a kind of a forgetfulness of the history here. Not only
00:19:47.620the indigenous history, but what came immediately afterwards. So for example, in Michigan, you know,
00:19:53.480going back over a hundred years, you know, Michigan has been a leading economic producer
00:19:58.760in the industrial sense in a number of different industries, whether agriculture, mining, the
00:20:03.440automobile industry. So if you name an extractive industry, including tourism, Michigan has had an
00:20:11.120era where it was one of the leaders in the United States. And that's had a huge and dramatic
00:20:19.180impact on the land here. And so areas like what's currently called the Upper Peninsula
00:20:24.400historically, and still through today, is a major area for mining. And while I would have hoped
00:20:33.460that there'd be a greater appreciation for the impact of mining on the communities
00:20:40.380whose lands are affected by mining, we still see companies today that are pushing, and like you
00:20:47.600mentioned, often transnational companies that are pushing to establish mines in areas that it's
00:20:53.640clearly not right to put land there. So the Back 40 mine is something that I know and I've supported
00:21:01.620a lot of Menominee people who are greatly affected by that mine. So the Menominee Nation,
00:21:07.480and I've had about a 10-year relationship working with the Sustainable Development Institute at the
00:21:13.280College of Menominee Nation. I frequently visit the community there for my work. They have land
00:21:20.720in their ancestral area that goes well into what's currently called Michigan. And the Back 40 mine
00:21:28.220is a mine in Michigan that actually, you know, it's a sulfide mine that will affect land that's
00:21:34.680part of the Menominee origin story. It's land that's at the core of Menominee culture. It's
00:21:42.540land that if it's affected, it affects the Menominee people's very memories as a people
00:21:49.860and a community. And what I don't understand is that in cases where you'd see an equivalent
00:21:57.140effect to say a christian community a white christian community would there be as much
00:22:06.500resistance as the mining company has posed to the claim that this is deeply unjust and unfair
00:22:13.760and inappropriate and so in this way we're in this settler colonial landscape where even the
00:22:20.520most powerful of cultural, religious, and social arguments still means nothing to some of these
00:22:27.860companies who nonetheless just see it as a cost of doing business to create mechanisms, including
00:22:34.220some of the surveillance that you referred to before, to lessen the legal and social and media
00:22:42.740impact of our resistance to these industries.
00:24:07.460Now, I'd like to transition to discussing some of your writing on dystopias and fantasies
00:24:13.720as it relates to the environmental movement.
00:24:15.700In your article, White Allies, Let's Be Honest About Decolonization, you write, quote,
00:24:21.820Decolonizing allyship requires allies to be critical about their environmental realities and about the purpose of their environmentalism.0.76
00:24:29.800To do this, allies must realize they are living in the environmental fantasies of their settler ancestors.0.64
00:24:38.960they would have relished the possibility that some of their descendants could freely commit1.00
00:24:43.620extractive violence on the indigenous lands and then feel with no doubts they are ethical people
00:24:49.120end quote goodness initially what comes to mind is the sort of visible colonial fantasy represented
00:24:58.800by vast pipeline networks oil fields open pit mines and clear-cut landscapes but i'd really
00:25:08.360like to focus on the topic of dystopia as it relates to the very harmful trajectory dominant
00:25:14.140culture seems to be on when it comes to addressing climate change. So can you speak to the ways in
00:25:20.880which our greenwashed pursuit of climate justice will continue indigenous dystopias?0.99
00:25:27.500Yeah, thanks for that important question. And I'm glad that some of my work has been,
00:25:32.240you know, supportive of the work that you're doing. The thing that struck me,
00:25:37.740And 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.
00:25:54.540And 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,
00:26:03.160But 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.
00:26:22.060You know, to me, that doesn't sound like something that is worth saving.
00:26:28.040And 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, that it's not about saving something about today, but it's actually about grappling with the fact that the current landscape we live in, that our ancestors would have understood that as a dystopian time at the same level of extremity that you see in many Hollywood movies.
00:26:58.040And recently, this thought has taken me in some directions that I'm not sure that I'm even that comfortable with, because 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
00:27:28.020raised with the advantages that come from the fossil fuel economy coming from the fossil fuel
00:27:34.940energy sources right that was the basis of how one developed one's skill sets was through
00:27:41.340technologies and infrastructures that were created by that industry right and that those people would
00:27:47.240like to become the heroes that they want to have every bad thing that they may be associated with
00:27:53.880in the past. But at the same time, in a single generation, they also want to be known as the
00:28:00.780heroes, as the ones that saved the environment. And that notion of heroism, to me, is very
00:28:09.060offensive. Because why would they get to be the heroes? Why do they expect to be the heroes?
00:28:17.000And do they really think that the way that things are going, that within a generation,
00:28:22.940There's anything heroic that anybody could do.
00:28:27.060And so in some of my recent writings, what I've been thinking a lot about is that there's
00:28:32.220an obsession with what I think a lot of people call an ecological tipping point, that we
00:28:39.620are on the verge or have already passed an ecological tipping point of which there's
00:28:46.060But what people don't talk about is the relationship tipping point.
00:28:50.340The 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.
00:29:07.960And 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,
00:29:31.960proliferate, even if they might be associated with a lowering of concentrations of greenhouse
00:29:38.240gases in the atmosphere, it's still indigenous people. It's still people of color. It's still1.00
00:29:43.060people impacted by poverty. It's still people impacted by other forms of domination that
00:29:49.280are not winning. So for example, most attempts to reform the energy system do not make it possible
00:29:58.060for tribes or neighborhoods of color to be central to those new energy networks. In fact,
00:30:03.860we're often excluded from them. And so to me, this suggests that there's a relational tipping
00:30:10.940point, a state of relationships among people that was passed a long time ago through colonialism
00:30:17.000and capitalism, and it's made it so that greenwashing is not only a false promise, but it's
00:30:24.560one that even if the best green technologies are implemented, it could just be as bad for many of
00:30:30.860our communities as the previous system. I think that savior mentality also leads to the erasure
00:30:38.000of so many people and histories. And also, I think more realistic solutions, if we're going to talk
00:30:47.880about the word solution, which I don't even like, but I think that the savior mentality of big green
00:30:53.540really wipes out solutions that people have known about for thousands of years that aren't
00:30:59.060implemented because they're not maybe they're not able to make the same kind of money because
00:31:03.960they're not about industry and they're not about creating big companies that will then be bought
00:31:08.700and sold on the marketplace. So I'm really happy we spoke about this because it's something that's
00:31:14.180on my mind a lot. And yeah. And, you know, of course there's also the examples of red and the
00:31:19.320World Bank programs and the UN. And that's connected definitely to this renewable energy
00:31:26.040monster that I kind of see it. None of them are really supporting people. And I think it's
00:31:32.180dangerous because it gives the image as if things are getting done in some type of regenerative way,
00:31:39.160but they're not. If you don't mind, I did want to follow up on something that you mentioned,
00:32:13.440they were actually taught that environmentalism has to be democratic they were taught the ideas
00:32:22.000that public involvement and public participation are critical to a successful environmental program
00:32:29.500or campaign or green technology development but that's given the illusion that if you just create
00:32:39.300the activities, the democratic activities, then that by itself will somehow
00:32:46.320stop domination, that that will heal distrust, that that will heal decades of a lack of consent
00:32:55.580that Indigenous and communities of color have faced. That itself will provide the solution,
00:33:02.740which will then enable the person who enacts those types of activities, those democratic
00:33:08.780activities, the hero or the changer or the transformer.
00:33:13.560But what I think a lot of younger people are going to have to grapple with and come to
00:33:17.900terms with is that when they do engage in those activities, it doesn't solve distrust.
00:33:24.800It doesn't change the landscape of power.
00:33:26.800and instead there has to be a different model in which people invest in the relationship building
00:33:34.560that it will take to build trust consent reciprocity but the problem with that is that
00:33:40.320those relationships they don't establish themselves quickly for me to build trust
00:33:47.120with somebody else if we work at it even if we work at it quickly it won't get done in a year
00:33:53.620It 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.
00:34:07.120maybe that ecological crisis is not the best way to frame or to motivate the actions we're taking,
00:34:14.360maybe it's best to go into some of these traditions that were excluded from our education
00:34:19.140that focus on the importance of consent and trust and reciprocity as the basis for how
00:34:24.680not only relate to the environment, but how we relate to each other.
00:34:27.960Yeah, I just keep thinking maybe I'm thinking about the root of why people are not willing
00:34:33.060to slow down in order to well and maybe it's a like I said maybe it's a thing of fear maybe it's
00:34:38.260also seems less controllable like if you were to have a company and you built a thing and you get
00:34:44.120it funded you could just do it or to build trust and consent the savior let's just say the
00:34:50.140environmental savior they're not the ones in control they're not the ones in power and I think
00:34:54.940just even questioning that in the savior mentality is really challenging because the savior mentality
00:35:00.280about ego and control and not really having to wait around for somebody to consent to what they
00:35:05.880think they should do. So yeah, that's a very deep question, deep analysis. And I think it's
00:35:11.660something that I'll probably be thinking about for my whole life and asking people questions about
00:35:16.000the entire life of the podcast because it's so, I think, at the core of our issues in the way that
00:35:23.620we relate to climate catastrophe. And this kind of relates to this next question I want to ask you.
00:35:31.840When I was preparing for this conversation, I came across an article you co-authored titled
00:35:35.880Invasive Species, Indigenous Stewards, and Vulnerability Discourse. It explores the
00:35:42.080indigenous stewardship and relationship to invasive species, which as it pointed out in
00:35:46.880the article, it's rarely discussed in scientific or environmental circles. So I'm hoping you can
00:35:51.840speak to this topic a little bit more, both in terms of what it means for Indigenous agency in
00:35:57.460environmental research and how it works towards addressing the larger issue of the pervasiveness
00:36:02.860of vulnerability narratives in the environmental realm. And I guess as well, what does this negation
00:36:09.560of vulnerability mean in terms of policy? Ayanna, I'm definitely going to quote you.
00:36:15.160some of the good points you were making about the relationship between urgency and I guess what
00:36:23.740you could call saviorism or heroic intentions and how that relates to also a assumption of
00:36:32.280a capacity to control. And I think especially the way that you said it, you know, philosophically
00:36:39.760relates to this issue of vulnerability that I deal with in a lot of my work, especially when I work
00:36:48.740specifically with tribes on their climate change planning efforts. So the topic of invasive species
00:36:57.380is an extremely challenging one. Scholars like Megan Bang and some of her co-authors have done
00:37:06.220really important work on trying to sort of decolonize this term invasive species.
00:37:13.740Because on the one hand, when a new species, a new plant, animal, insect, fish comes into your land,
00:37:21.200that presents all sorts of challenges, right? But the model has been to look at the actual
00:37:26.660plants and animals themselves and on humans themselves as what's invasive. Instead of
00:37:32.740recognizing that actually those particular beings are responding to what is truly the invasive
00:37:41.660species, which is the human industrial culture or settler colonialism and capitalism.
00:37:50.080And so in Megan Bang's work, but then we're also seeing work by scholars like Anne Spice
00:37:55.340on invasive infrastructures and beginning to make that change and saying, wait a minute,
00:38:01.460Why is it that it's the fish that are invasive and not the pipelines or the dams or the, right?
00:38:08.920It was just bizarre because no matter how you look at it, why would one be invasive and the other not?
00:38:20.720But this is tied to a couple of different, you know, so the second thing is this is tied to a couple of different ways that vulnerability is used problematically.
00:38:30.080And so on the one hand, even among privileged societies, when they talk about invasive species that affect their recreational culture, their industrial culture, they imagine themselves as vulnerable to something from the non-human world, which to me is completely ridiculous given it's their own actions that are engendering the environmental issues that they're concerned about.
00:38:56.860But in terms of indigenous people and people of color, when climate change 10, 20, 30 years ago, right, became more and more of a topic that people were looking at in terms of the issue that not everybody's going to be affected in the same way.
00:39:16.700The original model that many white and privileged people created for how to understand inequality was the idea that you have vulnerable communities. So indigenous people are vulnerable. Why are they vulnerable? Well, they live lives closely connected to the land was one of the common explanations for that, right?
00:39:37.640They live off of natural resources, and hence they're more vulnerable than people in other
00:39:44.540And when you look at an example like that, it is just rife with so many problems, you1.00
00:39:51.640know, so only indigenous people live off of the land, right?
00:39:57.000Nobody else lives off of the land.0.99
00:39:59.860I mean, isn't it everybody that lives off the land?0.67
00:40:02.520that indigenous people only are people that live in very rural areas and are not people that are
00:40:09.660everywhere in fact in some places more predominantly in cities and that indigenous people
00:40:16.140are primarily reactive which excluded generations of indigenous knowledge and indigenous adaptation
00:40:24.540and capacity as well as solutions that indigenous people are engaging in today to deal with with
00:40:31.840climate change. It completely erased that. And so, for example, if you look at a lot of the0.93
00:40:38.600climate science literature, if you're an activist, if you're an anti-fossil fuel person, I think
00:40:45.700you'd be really surprised by what you see because you'd see some of the same communities that you
00:40:50.480know have been out front opposing energy infrastructure and proposing alternatives
00:40:55.880referred to in the science literature as just people that are worried about declines in salmon
00:41:03.700and all of those actions that they're taking to make change are not talked about it's completely
00:41:10.800separated out you know and if science is primarily understanding indigenous people in that way and
00:41:17.960in the one of the recent intergovernmental panel on climate change reports the 1.5 degree report
00:41:23.800If 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 with no further elaboration on their culture, their history, and their current activism.
00:41:53.800so i do want to talk about indigenous climate justice and perhaps we can discuss this in
00:42:15.600context to the framing of climate change as both a rapid assault and an episode of colonialism
00:42:22.460Two ideas I have come across in your work. So ultimately, how is Indigenous climate justice the only long-term climate justice?
00:42:31.560Yeah, 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 conservation.
00:43:01.560power that it claims to resist. So one of the big myths is that climate change as an issue
00:43:12.140is a new thing for humans to grapple with. And by a new thing, I mean something that humans
00:43:18.180explicitly grapple with. In fact, in most educational systems in a country like the United
00:43:24.360States, climate science itself is seen as a fairly new science, one that has some origins
00:43:31.160in the 19th century, but really gets put together as a field in the 20th century and has built a
00:43:38.460lot of steam in the 21st century. And when people say things like that, they ignore the fact that
00:43:43.980for a lot of cultures, including indigenous ones, our oldest sciences were about understanding
00:43:51.640our relationship to the climate system and its relationships to weather, to ecosystems,
00:43:58.160to habitats. And so historically, if you look at many North American indigenous peoples,
00:44:05.120to say Anishinaabe people, of which Potawatomi are a part, our sciences are based on the idea
00:44:14.500that we need to have a good understanding of what it means to be a people who can respond to a
00:44:20.680constantly changing environment, an environment that changes over the long term in terms of
00:44:25.680climate, an environment that changes each year through seasons, but also that human relations
00:44:33.100with each other and human relationships with plants or animals or fishes or insects, depending
00:44:39.680on how those relationships play out, can also make changes that we have to prepare for and
00:44:47.880And so I would argue at a highly speculative level that for many cultures, probably the
00:44:52.600majority of human people that climate science is the oldest science, actually. And that if somebody
00:44:58.240were to take a class on the history of science, or even a class on political philosophy, that
00:45:06.520the original philosophies dealing with science or politics were ones that had to do with how do
00:45:13.460humans live in relation to a constantly changing environment. And so with that in mind, Indigenous
00:45:19.640people have tracked through generations how their interactions with other societies
00:45:25.560have affected the climate system. So in some of my writing, I've looked at testimonies from
00:45:34.040times when people like in the 19th century were talking about treaty relationships,
00:45:39.260and they were saying things like the problem with settlement is that it deforested, it wiped out the
00:45:45.660game. It wiped out the fish. And we're arguing, if we were to use today's language, that the treaty
00:45:53.940was a way for them to have a relationship with the dominant society that would make it possible
00:46:03.860to continue certain livelihoods that they'd been depending on for generations in a world that was
00:46:10.560very much changing, that the weather system, the climate system, the landscape was being changed by
00:46:16.440colonialism. So for that reason, human-caused climate change was absolutely a part of colonialism
00:46:27.080in the 19th and 18th century. When you deforest the landscape, you change the soil, you change
00:46:33.380the temperature, you change everything. It's an absolute terraforming of land. And if you look
00:46:42.760at how indigenous people have often understood this, that colonialism itself can be understood
00:46:48.520as a form of power that inflicts environmental change on other people. And some of that is
00:46:55.740climatic, similar to how deforestation or similar to how the development of industrial agriculture
00:47:02.460or the changing of hydrological systems, how that has that dramatic effect.
00:47:09.340It's not just an effect on weather, it's an effect on climate, too, in a certain way.
00:47:15.500Now, the last thing I want to mention is that that's just looking at one type of change.
00:47:22.060The other part of it is that deforestation, industrialization,
00:47:27.480inflicts immediate climate change but we now know that it puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
00:47:35.020which then generate changes of their own and so colonialism is like a double whammy
00:47:43.680especially industrial versions of colonialism it inflicts environmental change dangerous
00:47:51.860environmental change on colonized people in order to set up an economy that generations down the
00:47:59.900road will be extremely disruptive to the climate system at a global scale. And so for somebody to0.78
00:48:08.260argue that colonialism and climate change are somehow detached, they would be wrong. In fact,
00:48:16.280you have to talk about them together. I can talk about colonialism while only talking about climate
00:48:22.600change. I could talk about climate change while only talking about colonialism. That's how
00:48:27.140interchangeable they are. So for my last question for you, Kyle, I'd like to again revisit your
00:48:36.900essay, White Allies, Let's Be Honest About Decolonization, and specifically the following
00:48:42.700passage, quote, I want to experience the solidarity of allied actions that refuse fantastical
00:48:49.480narratives of commonality and hope. Determining what exactly needs to be done will involve the
00:48:54.900kind of creativity that indigenous peoples have used to survive some of the most oppressive forms
00:49:00.720of capitalist, industrial, and colonial domination. But above all, it will require that allies take
00:49:08.060responsibility and confront the assumptions behind their actions and aspirations, end quote.
00:49:13.820So perhaps I could ask you to expand on the importance of refuting commonality and hope
00:49:20.260in this context. Absolutely. So hope, I think, is one of those assumptions that
00:49:32.480has in a lot of ways gone out of control i hear people a lot of times using hope in a way that
00:49:41.560i actually don't understand what they what they mean by it for example they'll talk about
00:49:46.680indigenous people who are facing extreme forms of domination and say well when i look at these
00:49:51.820people's situation i see an example of hope and i've never understood what that what that really
00:50:00.360means. Because hope in a lot of contexts, right, especially where it's privileged people talking
00:50:08.700about the importance of hope, if they're telling me that I am right for hoping,
00:50:18.540that just sounds like they're trying to say that I should hope for a future that we should already
00:50:25.980know is not going to happen, which again is a way to quiet the direct actions that I could take to
00:50:32.500make change. It's a way for me to lessen my motivation to do things that are truly transformational
00:50:39.360because I have hope. And I actually think that the entire idea of hope should be completely removed
00:50:46.960from environmentalism, environmental discourse. I think it has no place or no role.
00:50:57.980Instead, and I think a lot about my own ancestors, I think a lot about ancestors of other people who
00:51:05.880they've shared with me stories about, a lot of these particular individuals are ones that
00:51:13.800They 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.
00:51:39.480And 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.
00:52:03.260And 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. What does genuine consensuality actually mean and what does it take to achieve?
00:52:23.280that itself is a project much more powerful than hope i don't hope for a better climate future
00:52:31.380instead i'm adamant that i will do whatever i can to build consensuality to build trust to
00:52:39.080build reciprocity with other people i don't need an illusion of a carrot at the end of that
00:52:44.900to be devoted in that way i don't need to hold out that there might be something better
00:52:51.500when there's no reason for me to think that there would be in the absence of genuine trust,
00:52:58.900consensuality, reciprocity, and other qualities. And so in that way, when you say are just focused
00:53:07.220on something like consent building, which means grappling with the idea that a lot of our
00:53:12.180relationships are one in which it's very hard to establish direct consent. We have to grapple with,
00:53:17.820Especially with non-humans, we don't know what they consent to. And sometimes they do things to us that we would not consent to. It's challenging. But if we are focused directly on building out those qualities, then it completely removes the temptation to be a hero.1.00
00:53:39.400And we can actually accept that maybe my role is not that different from generations of anti-colonialists, some of whom we remember, some of whom we don't, but they knew that they were doing what had to be done.
00:53:56.820And the fact that some of us and some of our communities are still around today is based on their work, whether we remember them directly or we remember them indirectly because we know they must have existed.
00:54:11.040We know they must have been part of that work.
00:54:16.200I love what you're saying about consent rather than hope.
00:54:20.600It's about consent, reciprocity, relationship building.
00:54:23.600And I think about how many times consent has been not only broken, but never even attempted for in the first place. And I think also about transparency. And I think, well, why don't people want to try for consent or transparency?
00:54:46.140And it goes back to the savior mentality.
00:54:53.260If you just want your thing done, if you want your project done, if you want to feel like
00:54:57.760you're doing something, you don't want to have to wait for somebody to consent.
00:55:02.880And you sure as hell don't want to tell them all the transparent issues that may arise
00:55:07.780in this project or whatever you're doing, because then people may object.
00:55:11.620And you don't want objections if you just want to steamroll, bulldoze through, and do
00:55:15.540what you want to do as the savior. And I do think that a lot of the oil and gas companies think they
00:55:20.300are saviors in their own way. I think they think that they're supplying the world with technology
00:55:25.820and modernity and comfort and energy, and we all need energy. So I actually think they kind of fit
00:55:31.760into the savior mentality in their own way. But what if resource extraction project or even
00:55:38.880environmental projects, if they were transparent from the beginning, it's true that people may not
00:55:45.340consent but what happens when people don't consent then it takes longer to make decisions and I think
00:55:51.140we have to be okay with that and I almost think almost all the time at this point we have to
00:55:57.440really take a lot longer to actually come to a decision before we start to do physical changes
00:56:02.960to the land whether it's restorative or not that slowing down that transparency and consent building
00:56:11.240and trust building and relationship building bring is so important because we would not rush
00:56:17.060into these decisions that we've made as a culture that have really been detrimental.
00:56:21.600So I am, oh my gosh, I'm so with you. It's a slowing and it's a steady, it's more steady to me
00:56:29.420when we're able to build that consent. And I think it also really makes us have to shift our
00:56:36.940ideas of success because okay again if you're in the savior mentality and you have a project that
00:56:44.500you think is going to be good for somebody you just want it done and you want to show the outcomes
00:56:48.520and you want the data on the on the graphs and the numbers and to show how well you did but again if
00:56:54.540you go the other direction where it's relationship consent transparency and all these other things
00:56:58.980we've talked about i think one really has to get out of that colonial mindset of what success is
00:57:05.480and what measurables are and realize like what you're saying there's folks that have been busting
00:57:10.880their ass way before us and perhaps they weren't in their ego state that they had to somehow have
00:57:17.880a measurable of what they did they were just doing the right thing and i think when we do0.98
00:57:23.080these other modalities or modes of being in relationship with each other on the earth it
00:57:29.140doesn't have the same type of sometimes flashy outcome that greenwashed colonial environmentalism
00:57:38.120dot dot dot dot dot have. And so again, it's like really going into our minds and shifting our
00:57:42.840concept of how we can feel ethical, how we can feel quote unquote successful and realizing that
00:57:50.120at the end of the day, the relationships we have will really measure how well we were able to do
00:57:56.440what we were trying to do. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot, especially because
00:58:00.720people are really scared and people want to see changes now because they're seeing the changes
00:58:07.340they don't want to see. And so it's hard to get through to people. And I've heard a lot too of,
00:58:13.220but you know, this species is going extinct or the water is running dry or this or that. So we
00:58:17.900have to try something. We have to try something. And it's like, well, why don't you try to deal
00:58:23.980with your consumerism? Why don't you try to get the logging to stop? We don't have to try these
00:58:28.880greenwash solutions. I mean, there's a lot of other things like stopping pipelines that we
00:58:33.280absolutely know need to be taken out. Anyways, I'm totally going on a tangent now because you
00:58:38.200really got me going on this. But anyways, maybe for another interview, we can dive into these
00:58:44.600topics even deeper because I do feel like these are at the root of how we can actually bring
00:58:50.880justice to the movement space in a way that feels authentic and genuine, all of the things you
00:58:57.720mentioned. So yeah, wow. Kyle, thank you. Yeah, thank you. I think that was like totally well
00:59:03.820said. And I'm definitely going to quote you because I like the way that you're describing
00:59:09.660the decision making process, because I think you really went directly to the issue that
00:59:15.700it's a difference in how we think about time. If you say, well, how long is it going to take to
00:59:21.560protect the environment? Where it's going to take as long as it takes to establish trust,
00:59:26.440consent, reciprocity, transparency. It's not like it's going to take a year, two years, 10 years,
00:59:31.40020. That's the duration of time is measured through kinship, right? Through those qualities.
00:59:37.800And so people who say, whether they're corporate or environmentalist, and using your own words,
00:59:43.580That 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, it won't be a better future for us because our communities will be flooded.
01:00:09.740Our communities will be sucked for resources again for solar or wind.