Considering within Canadian historical and constitutional place-based frameworks:
1. How might climate science, adaptation, and mitigation models, schemes and policies continue to reproduce and reinforce colonial relations of power systemically and culturally?
2. What geopolitical and intersectional contexts are and are not being considered in these spaces?
3. How might Indigenous communities (as well as black, people of colour and marginalized populations) be denied opportunities to be creators and lead their own solutions in these spaces?
It has been well documented that the impacts of planetary overshoot have been unevenly distributed along the lines of race, class, gender, ability and ethnicity. Imperialism, colonialism, and the resulting supremacy culture’s policies and economics have contributed greatly to planetary overshoot, resulting in massive climate disruptions that are being experienced today. We are no longer in right-relations.
What we do not address we will continue to reproduce. Colonial regimes are still at play because they are built into foundational legal and constitutional structures which pre-date Canada (thanks to the British imperialists of yonder-year and the 1493 Catholic Church papal bull called the Doctrine of Discovery). As such, historical inequitable power relations (practically invisible now) established by imperial/colonial regimes have been upheld and reinforced through mechanisms such as research across multiple fields.
In chapter 2 of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, she notes that Britain (and all of the Commonwealth countries) have legal frameworks about what is and isn’t admissible evidence and valid research. This is supremacy culture (pg 48-49). She goes on to list how this supremacy culture shows up in what is preferenced in writing, language, rules, time, space, accountability, expertise, politics and media. It is coded into systems.
Context matters because beliefs that form world-views matter as much as the ‘facts’ behind them. This image is just one slice of the ‘mechanistic reductionist worldview’ pie and how the power dynamics are still ongoing and systematic.
Image Credit: Rupa Marya, from 2018 keynote speech at Bioneers, with adaptation by Michelle Holiday
Dr. Rupa Marya is an author, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. I came to know her body of work through the intersections of supremacy, healthcare and soil-care/land use. In her Bioneer speech she says “This slide shows also how we are all impacted by this violence — across all races, we are all being traumatized with black, brown and indigenous being affected more intensely.”
Another author Max Liboiron, an activist, scientist, mentor and associate professor at Memorial University, works at the intersection of colonialism, environmentalism and research impacting Indigenous groups. It is pointed out in their book Pollution is Colonialism, that ‘Colonialism, first and foremost, and always, is about Land,…’ (pg 10) and ‘Colonialism doesn’t come from asshat goons, though it certainly has a large share of such agents. Colonial land relations are inherited as common sense, even as good ideas.’ (pg 11-12).
My thoughts are that risk assessment and management as well as its research are tied to lands and waters. Infrastructure interacts with land and waters, but this fundamental aspect easily gets lost in the complexity of the work and the structures of institutions.
A quote from Linda Tuhiwai Smith that resonates with me is “institutions never remember, communities never forget”.
Risk assessment and management, like other fields in the climate arena needs to be planned with geography, land-use and social justice in mind. Climate impacts are increasing and severe impacts are here earlier than projected. So, I would think that this type of planning is also part of the work called adaptation.
Those who have been most impacted (BIPOC & marginalized communities) have traditionally been the least centered and the least consulted in systems processes and assessments. In fact, according to the Cultural Rights of First Nations and Climate Change, Indigenous people are often considered as just another stakeholder by federal and provincial governments, when in fact they are rights-holders and nation-to-nation partners (BCAFN, 2020).
I’ve come to learn, over the last 10 years, that it isn’t enough to have an Indigenous Relations Coordinators. Yes, non-native communities and work spaces need guidance however, dismantling colonialism and supremacy culture is ongoing collective work. It begins with our awareness because these rivers run deep and wide.
References:
BC Assembly of First Nations. (2020). Cultural rights of First Nations and climate change
Liboiron, M. (2021) Pollution Is Colonialism, Duke University Press.
Simons, N., & Brooks, C. (n.d.). Rupa Marya – Health and Justice: The Path of Liberation through Medicine. Bioneers. Retrieved January 8, 2023, from https://bioneers.org/rupa-marya-health-and-justice-the-path-of-liberation-through-medicine/
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies – Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd Edition. Zed Books, pp. 256. Chapter 2