The green transition will deepen entrenched socioeconomic barriers for Indigenous peoples — unless Western forms of science and ongoing settler colonialism are addressed by researchers. That’s according to a new study out this month focused on the use, and abuse, of Indigenous knowledge to solve climate change. Despite disenfranchisement, researchers added, Indigenous nations remain the best stewards of the land.
Focused on environmental oral histories of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, the study examined how the nation strengthened tribal sovereignty by revitalizing connections to land. This has included re-introducing freshwater mussels into the ecosystem as a way to clean local waterways, and growing ancestral plants for food, medicine, and textiles in urban areas.
“We as a people, and all the Native people on the East Coast, have been dealing with environmental changes for thousands of years,” said Dennis White Otter Coker, the principal chief of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, in the report.
Researchers argue that it is impossible to separate the effects of climate change from the history of land dispossession and violence endured by Indigenous peoples, and contend that that legacy continues in Western science practices aimed at finding climate solutions. For example, previous studies have found that organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are biased towards Western sciences over Indigenous knowledge, and their reports “problematically unquestioned,” regardless of the international organization’s own reports finding colonialism to be a key factor in climate change.
“Western Science is really what dominates the way we talk about climate adaptation,” said Lyndsey Naylor, an author on the paper from the University of Delaware. She added that Western science has a hard time meaningfully integrating tribal projects into research, sometimes dismissing their insights completely. Western researchers often have an extractive relationship with tribes where institutions will come into communities, take what they need, and leave.
“Indigenous knowledge is either subsumed [or] appropriated,” Naylor said. “Or like, ‘Hey that’s cute, but we know what we are doing.’”
But despite biases by governments toward Western sciences, Indigenous nations are integrating traditional knowledge to fight climate change across the world. From the plains in North America, where tribes are reintroducing buffalo as a way to support healthy habitats and ecosystems, to the Brazilian Amazon, where Indigenous-protected territories show 83 percent lower deforestation rates than settler-controlled areas. Indigenous science, and control, hold keys to fighting climate change.
However, those Indigenous innovations still face challenges, notably from the green transition. In Arizona, for example, the San Carlos Apache have been fighting for years to protect Oak Flat — an area of the highest religious importance to the tribe and a critical wildlife habitat — from copper mining. The proposed mine would be integral to the production of batteries for electric vehicles while entrenching long-term climate impacts and destroying an integral piece of the Apache’s culture and wiping out important ecology in the area.
Faisal Bin Islam, a co-author on the study who specializes in the effects of climate change in colonial contexts, said that Western science has a “savior complex,” and continuing to ignore historical and contemporary colonial violence in Indigenous communities only deepens those ways of thinking.
“In a settler colonial future, we might end up inventing a technology or process that reduces emissions significantly to avert the consequences of climate change,” he said. “However, it will not end colonial dispossession and violence.”
