Climate Change: An Unprecedentedly Old Catastrophe

  • Kyle Powys Whyte

Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have already passed through human-caused ecological catastrophe at least once in their history. Speaking of the U.S. here, an integral part of its settler colonial domination is the infliction of harmful environmental changes on Indigenous peoples. For example, in the nineteenth century, the U.S. forced some Potawatomi peoples to relocate from the Great Lakes region to the Great Plains region, some 1,000 miles south. This relocation required our ancestors to adjust rapidly to a completely different ecosystem and climate in what was then called the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Over time, U.S. settlers worked to privatize the land, dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land, and subsequently steal property held by Indigenous persons. They established extractive industries, including coal and other mining, oil drilling, agriculture, and livestock. Land privatization and dispossession stressed Indigenous kinship and gender systems, while residential and boarding schools stripped Indigenous children of generations of their history, memories, and knowledge. Extractive industries also generated pollution and contributed to the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Unwise farming practices rendered the landscape vulnerable to drought, culminating in the dust bowl period of the 1930s. Today, many Indigenous Oklahomans are seriously concerned about climate change impacts, such as drought effects on their water, agriculture, health, and energy supply. They are doubly concerned that the state and the U.S. still have not improved their respect for Indigenous self-determination sufficiently for Oklahoma Tribes to prepare for climate change.1

For Indigenous peoples, it’s by no means a new notion that human societies can inflict ecological catastrophe on one another. Way beyond the experience of U.S. colonialism, Indigenous intellectual traditions are rooted in philosophies that work to understand how the actions of human societies are entwined with environmental change. One aspect of these traditions concern political philosophies of diplomacy for peoples who share ecosystems. The ancient Dish with One Spoon treaty between Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples is one such example in Great Lakes region. The treaty establishes reciprocal responsibilities for caretaking of the environment.2

Today, it is not entirely incorrect to fear that we are hurtling toward ecological catastrophe due to human-caused climate change. I have witnessed many hundreds of Indigenous persons testify about the climate change threats their peoples are facing across the globe. My experiences include participating in or planning events such as the First Stewards Symposium and the Shifting Seasons Summit, authoring and advising for scientific synthesis reports on climate change vulnerability such as the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and creating educational programs for dozens of Tribes who are preparing for climate change. Indigenous peoples are reporting climate-related threats to their economies and cultures related to rapidly shifting seasonal patterns, sea-level rises, ocean acidification, thinning sea-ice, and the increased severity of extreme weather events.

Yet, in all my experiences, what is noticeable is that Indigenous peoples are bracing for climate change impacts that—in a certain sense—would not have been as risky for their ancestors. Many Indigenous peoples facing relocation due to sea-level rises in the Arctic or Gulf of Mexico are only in such a position because they were forced give up their more mobile governance practices and instead live permanently on small islands to make way for U.S. settlement.3 Climatic threats to fish populations on the West Coast of North America are further stressors, adding to a longer list environmental stressors occurring because the U.S. has not respected Indigenous treaty rights to protect fish habitats.4 I already mentioned how some Indigenous people in Oklahoma are concerned about whether the state will respect their self-determination. On the climate-mitigation side, some Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and Mountain regions have been slow to transition to renewable energy because the U.S. re-engineered their governments in the twentieth century to promote a dependence on fossil fuels.5 These realities are why Indigenous leaders globally say that climate change and colonialism are interrelated. Sheila Watt-Cloutier claims that “Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way.”6 I would encourage readers to read her recent book, The Right to Be Cold.

While warranted, fears of ecological catastrophe must be put in context. Dale Jamieson, who recently published a book, Reason in a Dark Time, emphasizes how human-caused climate change is an “unprecedented problem.” The problem is driven by “greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness... manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.”7 For Indigenous peoples, the current climate change ordeal is bad, but not unprecedented. Jamieson’s list of drivers, starting with greed, sounds a lot like U.S. settler colonialism. It sounds a lot like Canadian settler colonialism too, which explains why many of my interlocutors in this article are Indigenous persons working north of the border. Candis Callison, speaking of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic in her book, How Climate Change Comes To Matter, writes that we need to recognize what “climate change portends for those who have endured a century of immense cultural, political and environmental changes.”8

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd argue convincingly that non-Indigenous persons are sometimes rather unreflective when they fear future ecological catastrophe or deem climate change as unprecedented.9 Their concern is really that their children may be harmed by loop-back effects of the same capitalist-colonialist-industrialist systems that have hitherto benefited them and secured their aspirations for future well-being. So, when settler Americans or Canadians express concerns about a coming catastrophe, it’s imagined to be a catastrophe disruptive of today’s ecological status quo for them. Today’s status quo, of course, is already an Indigenous ecological dystopia.

Ironically, I have not yet seen any settler American or Canadian offer an imagined projection of a climate future that is more ecologically dire than what Indigenous peoples have already endured due to colonialism. Like our peoples who relocated to Oklahoma in the nineteenth century, many Indigenous peoples have already experienced the irreversible collapse of their ecosystems. They have forever lost relationships with hundreds of species. They were forced to ration the commodity foods available to them, separate from their kinship and family relationships and lose much of their linguistic and knowledge systems. They had to have their labour exploited by settlers. Of course, all the while, it was the settlers who believed that they—the settlers!—were morally superior while oppressing Indigenous peoples. This is a scenario worthy of the most horrific science fiction.

Settler narratives of preventing tomorrow’s ecological catastrophe can be dangerous, for they involve future imaginations clouded by crisis-mode thinking. They ignore why Indigenous peoples—and other groups too—are threatened by climate change in the first place. The U.S. and Canada have not yet reconciled their laws, education systems, scientific institutions, and cultural norms sufficiently. They have failed to support Indigenous cultural and political self-determination in climate adaptation, honour treaty rights, or promote Indigenous leadership in local and global climate-change mitigation. Today’s failures stem directly from the lack of reconciliation of the original settler colonial legal, educational, scientific, and cultural strategies for dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands to make way for the drivers of human-caused climate change.

Indigenous peoples, of course, are not waiting for the U.S. or Canada to change—even though it would be beneficial if they did change. Many are making their work on climate change public, which is inspiring kindred efforts across diverse Indigenous peoples. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribe has created its climate change plan, organized entirely around relationships of reciprocal responsibility with plants, animals, spiritual beings, and ecosystems, with the plan’s sections divided into chapters with titles such as “Mother Earth” and “Three Sisters.”10 As well, the Lummi Nation has taken action to block the establishment of a coal shipment and train railway near its treaty-protected sacred area of Xwe’chi’eXen, citing the U.S. failure to honour treaty rights as enabling the continuation of dangerous fossil fuel industries that commit harms locally (e.g. pollution) and globally (e.g. climate change).11

In these and many other efforts, Indigenous peoples are drawing on their own intellectual traditions in preparing for climate change. They are calling on settler nations like the U.S. to finally live up to moral and just expectations for diplomacy and reciprocal responsibility by taking care of shared environments, including the climate system. But non-Indigenous leaders in the U.S. and Canada will never be in the position to do right by Indigenous peoples until they acknowledge climate change as the unprecedentedly old ecological crisis that it is.



Kyle Powys Whyte holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability there, as well as a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, the Geocognition Research Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. Whyte is Potawatomi and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. His research, teaching, training, and activism address moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, as well as the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations.

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