This response was written by author and academic Danielle Celermajer, whose principal focus is human rights policy, advocacy and scholarship, and seeking a greater integration between these dimensions of human rights work.
“In answering this question, I am required to speculate, because, in my experience, ‘people’, presumably meaning non-indigenous people (but perhaps more narrowly ‘white people’ or people who enjoy particular types of privileges) neither explain their fear, nor even acknowledge such fear. Yet when Indigenous people say that they experience themselves and their perspectives as provoking fear, that experience needs to be taken seriously.
My speculation points me in three different, but linked directions. Before I articulate them, it is critical to say that I have drawn them from my reading and listening to Indigenous people themselves. As the black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins put it so well, it is people who are placed in positions where they are dominated, and not those who dominate, who best learn to understand not only themselves but the others.
First, whatever knowledge Indigenous peoples might bring to the conversation about environment and climate change cannot be sifted out from the background reality of dispossession, persistent colonialism and the myriad forms of violence that flow from these political realities. In this sense, even knowledge that, attended to superficially, has no political valence and makes no political claim, always carries truths that for most non-Indigenous peoples are confronting. Thus, even when an indigenous person is speaking about say, care for the lands and waters where they are traditional custodians, implicit are claims about historical and ongoing wrongs from which non-Indigenous peoples benefit and in which we are complicit in various ways.
Second, the types of knowledges that Indigenous peoples bring to discussions about the environment depart from hegemonic western knowledges not only with respect to information or data, but in their fundamental orientations and understandings. In this regard, foundational assumptions about the basic distinctions used to organize knowledge of, and action in the world are destabilized by Indigenous knowledges; assumptions about what it is to be human, about the distinction between nature and culture, about beings other than humans, about the distinction between life and non-life. And again, as Indigenous scholars like Zoe Todd and Eve Tuck insist, it is critical to acknowledge that this knowledge does not float freely, but is rooted in legal and political systems, lived realities, and embodied ways of life that have consistently been under attack, and that Indigenous peoples are keeping in existence.
Third, where non-Indigenous knowledge systems do depart from fundamental assumptions, say when they deconstruct the dichotomy of nature and culture or recognize the sentience of beings other than humans, as Christine Winter and Makere Stewart Harawira point out, they often do so without acknowledging the millennia of Indigenous philosophies that have articulated these other ways of understanding, nor recognizing the legal, political and social systems in which these knowledges form the foundation and background. This may be
because non-Indigenous speakers and writers do not know about indigenous knowledge systems, but even then, this is the result of their systematic erasure and marginalization and practices of citation that privilege usually white male scholars.
Finally, I want to say a few words about what it would mean not to exclude Indigenous people from these conversations. In Australia, following the black summer fires, there was a lot of talk about learning from Aboriginal peoples about traditional forms of fire management (cultural burning). Aboriginal people were invited to speak on panels and to write in books and journals to share their knowledge and practices. On the one hand, this recognition that Aboriginal peoples had been working with fire in this country for millennia was a positive sign. At the same time, as Oliver Costello, from the Firesticks alliance, insisted, fire management for Aboriginal peoples is not a technique, but embedded in an integrated complex of law, spirituality, social relationships, and material forms of life. In this regard, if inclusion is to mean anything more than a way of allaying guilt and managing the fear that this question points to, it needs to include more than shorn off bits of knowledge that non-Indigenous peoples realise they need. Inclusion means that Indigenous peoples get to define, or at least co-define the terms and scope of the conversation and how talk about say the environment then reaches out into social, political and legal relations. This, I suspect, would be even more frightening for many non-indigenous people. Perhaps though, we might take our fear as an index of the consequence of the transformation this process could occasion.”
