Between ecology & indigeneity
By Stefanie Fishel, Christine Winter & Anthony Burke
We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and socio-political crisis: pandemic, extinction, climate emergency, neo-fascist resurgence. Yet dig beneath their entangled roots and we find imperial logics, trauma, and capitalism, all which rest on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and a view of nature as an infinite and exploitable resource with no agency, rights or presence separate from human and capitalist desire.
Recent events underline the persistence, connection, and crisis across these political ontologies. Scientists publish research which shows that after decades of deforestation, dispossession and uncontrolled burning, the Amazon has become a net carbon emitter rather than one of the world’s most crucial carbon sinks. Global Witness publishes a report citing 2020 as a record year in the murder of environmental defenders, with half the killings occurring in the Philippines, Colombia, and Mexico. In the latter country, half the attacks were directed at Indigenous communities. Three senior executives of the global resources giant Rio Tinto resign after shareholders revolt at the government-approved blasting of 46,000-year-old caves in the Juukan Gorge of Western Australia sacred to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples—yet the company still holds 1,780 approvals to destroy sacred sites. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities continue long battles with vast coal mines in Queensland, India, Colombia, and Venezuela. Yet pro-environment politics also generate concern: international legal efforts to protect biodiversity are being warned against perpetuating ‘fortress conservation’ models that exclude Indigenous peoples from traditional lands and leave them vulnerable to repression while commodifying protected areas.
Rowena Lennox & Fiona Robyn-Rapsey write about the use of dingos on Pelorus Island to control goats, becoming both pest and pesticide.
Between ecology and Indigeneity
This special issue of Borderlands is organised around no single question beyond our shared conviction that environmental struggles and harms are bound together with the histories and struggles of Indigenous peoples, and that the multiple ways in which they intersect deserve space and scholarly consideration.
It came together following a 2020 Sydney Environment Institute workshop The Re-(E)mergence of Nature in Culture, and was formed around our awareness, as scholars of environmental politics and political theory, that Indigenous peoples and struggles are everywhere present in questions of environmental crisis and despoliation, and that the deliberate severing of Indigenous authority and relations to land are central to Anthropocene environmental histories. These histories are colonial and imperial histories that, whether we consider resource extraction or fortress conservation, are perpetuated in settler-colonial and endo-colonial forms in an ostensibly post-colonial era. Most of these essays focus on the politics of settler-colonial states such as the USA, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada. However, in the global South—from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and the Philippines, to Brazil and other states sharing jurisdiction over the Amazon—post-colonial states also exist in endo-colonial relationships of repression, theft and violence to Indigenous peoples and lands. This is underlined powerfully in Sophie Chao’s analysis of the palm oil industry in Indonesian-controlled West Papua. If we consider the state’s colonial appropriation of nonhuman nature—one that dates from the social contract theory of John Locke and is now embedded in the international customary law doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources—the settler-colonial is not a type of state; the state is settler-colonial.
But there are worlds other than these.
What possibilities exist for understanding how life and politics are bound together beyond biopolitics, colonialism, and capitalism? This special issue is a how-to manual for answering this question. The articles provide clear and relevant examples of the needed structural changes, theoretical reframings, paradigm shifts, and policy modifications and transformations for better living on an entangled Earth.
Each article in this issue tangles with issues and concepts fundamental to political life: sovereignty, law, time, and space. They build on and pressure current systems to recognize how land and bodies are intertwined and harm against either is a grave intersecting injustice. This reality must be recognized in new legal fictions that incorporate the nonhuman and ecologies into its statutes and policies. Each offers ways of understanding freedom and connection in different assemblages of care and response, and in interpretations of time and space as interconnected and nonlinear.
Law, sovereignty and authority
Our times call for imagination. Liberal settler states built from the principle of freedom from domination live with internal contradiction, and Indigenous people are challenging that contradiction—as McEvoy & Midzain-Gobin show us from British Columbia. To establish their own energy utility to supply its own, the S’cianew First Nation community requires permission from the state. And the state does not have the structures that can enable this sort of internal sovereignty and it assumes it has the power to determine how a recognised Tribal Nation may or may not act. Meanwhile, in Aotearoa New Zealand three iwi groups have blended Māori epistemology and ontology with western legal corporate law to gain the right for bio-geo-regions to be self-managing. A small step towards reimaging shared sovereign responsibilities. It is one, however, that ensures the Crown retains a voice.
Why do we suggest that these issues of sovereignty are ones of the moment—this moment of accelerating climate change, species loss, desertification, forest fires, floods, and heating oceans? Why do these times call for listening, for full and thorough decolonisation, for reimagining sovereignty? Because we cannot address ecosystem collapse using the same tools and the same philosophical framing that created and now accelerates it. Because a liberal state cannot be liberal if it continues to dominate members of its own society, and because the impulse to cast the ‘Indigenous’ to the margins, to modernise along well-trodden paths, remains. Furthermore, Indigenous cultures harness a different set of philosophical tools to those employed by settler states and global regulatory bodies. Indigenous philosophies are, of course, not uniform. However, nor do they derive from the Enlightenment imaginary that etches deep insurmountable divides between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, and spirit and reason.
The path to Indigenous sovereignty calls for imagination, and simultaneously Indigenous sovereign engagement with the nonhuman realm may open pathways to addressing global, or indeed, planetary injustice of the kind Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for. There is no one answer to how to establish effective sovereign borders and sovereignty for marginalised Peoples. However, that the time is ripe for open listening and imaginative solutions is indisputable in the face of the planetary, where the borders between human and nonhuman are exposed in their porosity, and as oppression and domination continue as blunt instruments of statehood, law, and sovereign power.
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This article is an abridged version of the editorial introduction to the Borderlands special issue, “Between Ecology and Indigeneity: Intersections of Earth, Country and Power”. This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
