Abstract
The designation of climate change as crisis has the potential to direct global attentions to both the past and the future. Yet, dominant societal narratives most notably in mainstream media have primarily focused on potential futures that draw on a range of scientific modeling with little awareness of diverse colonial histories and other knowledges. The turn to global climate services and discussions about usable climate science exemplifies approaches built on scientific ideals of standardization, establishing shared baselines, and an orientation towards both tracking dangerous moves away from and mitigating for a more stable ecological future. This paper suggests that Indigenous climate change studies as proposed by Whyte (English Language Notes 55(1-2):153-162, 2017) offer a differentiated approach and critique to thinking about context, climate events utility, and ecological relations. This has already become particularly salient in considerations of events like major wildfires, for example. Climate change is increasingly being understood in public arenas as legible through these kinds of events that signal crisis. How the future is imagined, what kinds of journalism emerge as heralds of crisis, and who is deemed useful are related to both scientific findings and colonial ordering of societies and knowledge.
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Notes
I have argued similarly in Callison 2020 about crisis and stability as conceptual terrains that mark and define climate change narratives.
Wood reported for The Narwhal, an environmental digital news source. I am a volunteer board member for The Narwhal.
Boutsalis reported for The Narwhal, an environmental digital news source. I am a volunteer board member for The Narwhal.
For example, where consistent diversity data exists in the public sector, at the US public broadcaster, NPR (2021), 1% of employees are American Indian/Alaska Native/Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian; 0% of supervisors are. At Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC (2020), 2.2% of employees are Indigenous. Most of the prestige press, the national newspapers, in both the USA and Canada have no Indigenous journalists or editors. Canada’s Globe and Mail is an exception because it very recently hired an Indigenous journalist and an Indigenous columnist.
Whyte’s articulation of “the future” as an apocalypse that has already been underway and ecological changes and apocalypse as something Indigenous people have survived previously is a thread that can be found in Indigenous histories and scholarship as well as in art and fiction. Dillon (2012) coined the term, Indigenous futurism, precisely to describe how Indigenous writers consider apocalypse as cyclical, and something in the past, present, and possible futures (in which Indigenous people are very much present). See also Dillon 2016.
See Cochran et al. who state “The extent that indigenous issues are considered, assessments have been largely about indigenous people, not by them. This reflects, in part, a rejection by western science of indigenous worldviews that integrate spiritual, biophysical, and cultural dimensions of reality” (Cochran et al. 2013, p. 558-559).
Smith and Sharp (2012) and Ford et al. (2016a, 2016b) suggest that the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report sets a high standard for integrating Indigenous knowledge and should have served as a model for the UNFCCC and the IPCC. Additionally, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has enacted a process where Indigenous people are able to comment, draft text, and participate on issues of concern (Schroeder 2012; Ford et al. 2016b). See Callison 2017 for a longer discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Mary Lynn Young and two anonymous reviewers for reading early drafts of this essay. I am additionally grateful to Zoe Todd, Olga Ulturgasheva, and Kyle Whyte who joined me to give the CASTAC talk at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Vancouver in 2019 where we discussed challenges for Indigenous scholars researching and writing about climate change. I also thank the scholars and journalists who engaged in discussions at the 2018 Princeton University International Symposium on Indigenous Communities and Climate Change, co-organized by myself and Simon Morrison while I was visiting Princeton in 2018–2019. My final thanks to Deborah Coen and Adam Sobel who invited me to participate in the 2019 Usable Climate Science and the Uses of History workshops at Yale University and this special edition.
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This article is part of a topical collection on Critical and historical perspectives on usable climate science, edited by Deborah R. Coen and Adam H. Sobel
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Callison, C. Refusing more empire: utility, colonialism, and Indigenous knowing. Climatic Change 167, 58 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03188-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03188-9