Indigenous Readings

Marino

• Discussed Shishmaref’s Inupiat people as a case of “climate refugees” and how they were affected by colonialism, sedentarization, and the idea that they are ‘helpless’

• Compared the differences between traditional ways of life along with post-colonization and cultural demands for relocation

• disasters are largely social rather than just natural since the social and ecological factors that make a population more vulnerable than others

DeLoughrey

• the ocean is the most visible sign of the anthropocene planetary change

• competing visions between the sea as capitalist extraction vs. ancestral localized space

• New Zealand's state’s appropriation of seabed disenfranchises Maori rights

• instead of terra nulius there is aqua nullius

• humanity is linked to nonhuman matter, and there are sea ontologies

• there are gender dynamics of manthropocene

Whyte

• defines Indigenous climate change studies

• frames anthropogenic climate change as an intensified episode of colonialism

• connection to Marino - socially produced vulnerability

• connection to kimmerer - forced adaptation affects nonhuman relatives (renewing relatives to restore reciprocal relationships/knowledge)

• Indigenizing futures, decolonizng the anthropocene

Warner

• righs of nature seeks to shift environmental protection by granting legal standing and substantive rights to nature

• US implementation has been heavily restricted to local municipalities or vice versa

• tribes serve as ideal laboratories of the future from which non-native govs can learn from

• RoN is in some tribal law and can avoid obstacles because of a different legal system and different environmental ethic, can also make it more difficult

• in Wilde Cypress Branch case, the municipal RoN law was invalidated bc the state preempted it

Mere Roberts

• Discussed how Maori have a reciprocal, familial relationship with the land and its resources

• western consercvation separates humans from nature, while Maori view humans as part of the natural world.

• Advocates for maori perspective in scientific literature which is often not heard since it is less objectiveand testable, and hard to translate

Kelly

• water-related harm caused by extractive industries and climate change develops gradually over decades rater than a single catastrophic event

• inadequate environmental data and the lack of indigenous knowledge let these disasters go unrecognized

• climate change and extractivism are both slow processes that emphasizes the impacts of each other

• ex. hydropower and aquaculture in southern Chile; lithium mining and water scarcity in northern chile

Brown

• Mauna a Wakea

• Ho’omana Hawaii continued on in hiding until the late 1950s and truly revilitalized in the 1990s when archives of Hawaiian language could be accessed

• author critizes the institutions that force Oiwi to prove that Ho’omana Hawai’i exists and is still practiced, and that Mauna a Wakea will continue to be a sacred site

Curnow

• talks about wilderness and how the meovemtn is rooted in colonial logics

• environmentalism has used indigenous people as symbolic and romanticized

• settler environmentalists utilize solidarity

Emanuel

• Relationship between Lumbee River and Lumbee identity

• Protection of people by the River ( complex waterways provided privacy as colonial mapping was inaccurate, made it difficult for settlers to navigate)

• Contemporary environmental challenges of industrialized agriculture + CAFOs

• Federal recognitional that has since 1956 been granted in 2025

The Kigiqtaamiut

An Inupiat group whose name translates to ‘people of the island’ who traditionally use Sarichef Island as a seasonal staging ground for sea mammal hunting

Primary traditional adaptation strategy to coastal flooding

High mobility and flexible seasonal migration, which allowed communities to quickly retreat to higher ground or change locations based on weather

Primary catalyst for the forced sedentarization of the Inupiat in Shishmaref

The introduction of colonial infrastructure, specifically the construction of government schools with mandatory attendance policies and Christian missions

Traditional Inupiat dwelling structures

skin tents, icehouses, and semi-subterranean sod houses, which were built from local materials and supported a highly mobile lifestyle

Ugruk

The bearded seal, a profoundly important marine mammal that provides staple foods like black meat and seal oil for the Shishmaref community

Role of subsistence in Inupiat culture

Interdependent way of life that maintains social relationships, cultural continuity, physical survival, and a direct connection to the landscape, rather than just an economic activity

political ecological model of disaster in shishmaref

the extreme vulnerability is caused by the intersection of changing climate hazards with a history of colonial marginalization and inflexible modern infrastructure

greatest fear regarding unorganized climate displacement

diaspora and the dissemination of the community into urban centers, which is viewed as an annihilation of their cultural integrity

Inupiat relocation demands

remain together, self-determined village, within traditional subsistence territory, maintain access to ocean

barriers to Inupiat relocation

no centralized protocol, high turnover for agency workers, FEMA policies that favor rebuilding in place - not mitigation

Critical Ocean Studies

A recent scholarly turn that conceptualizes the ocean as an active agent, an embodied place, and a space of ontological connection, countering historical views of the sea as a blank, non-signifying void

Sea Ontologies

Indigenous reckonings of place that view the ocean and its inhabitants through deep kinship and mutual constitution, challenging Western binaries that separate human from nonhuman “nature”

New Zealand Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004

State legislation that alienated Maori communities from customary title to the coast to facilitate corporate mining, sparking mass protests and a shift to assert mana moana (power of the sea)

Whakapapa

A Maori genealogical concept that links all animates and inanimate things in the universe to the primal parents (Rangi and Papa), establishing an immutable kinship bond between humans and the physical world

Blue-Green Capitalism

The neoliberal push to treat the ocean as an extractable frontier for deep-sea mining, bioprospecting, and libertarian floating utopias, entirely erasing Indigenous histories and territorial claims

Keri Hulme’s Stonefish

A collection of speculative fiction that uses ordinary sea creatures (like the paua, or abalone) to illustrate human adaptation, mutability, and interspecies merger in response to sea-level rise

Critique of Apocalyptic Narrative

The argument that Western, spectacular “end-of-the-world” climate narratives privilege a linear timeline and assume a “fall from nature,” ignoring the ongoing history of colonial violence and Indigenous epistemologies of constant change

Indigenous Climate Vulnerability

experienced not as a new phenomenon, but as an intensification of colonially-induced environmental changes, echoing historical displacements and ecological disruptions

The Three Removals (Daniel Wildcat)

The history of Indigenous displacement categorized into three waves: 1. geographic, 2. social/psycho-cultural, and 3. climate forced relocation caused by the carbon-intensive lifestyles of advanced societies

Renewing Relatives

The process of restoring Indigenous knowledges and reciprocal relationships with humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems to mobilize and unite communities for self-determined climate adaptation

Rights of Nature

A legal framework that grants legal personhood to natural entities and recognizing substantive rights, such as the right to exist, flourish, and regenerate

Anthropocentric vs. Biocentric EnVS Law

traditional U.S. environmental laws are anthropocentric, focusing on permitting pollution levels to protect human health and interests while RoN laws are biocentric, centering the inherent rights and self-worth of the natural world itself

Hurdles for U.S. Municipal RoN laws

local governments frequently see their RoN laws invalidated due to state or federal preemption, unconstitutional vagueness, or the threat of severe financial sanctions

Tribal Sovereignty Advantage

Tribes possess inherent, pre-constitutional, and extra-constitutional sovereignty. Because they are not bound by the U.S. Consitution or state law, tribal RoN provisions easily bypass the preemption and vagueness hurdles that block municipal laws

The Second Montana Exception

A supreme Court precedent allowing Tribes to exercise civil authority over non-Indians on fee lands within a reservation if the non-Indian’s conduct threatens the political integrity, economic security, or health and welfare of the tribe

Manoomin

Wild rice, a sacred relative to the Ojibwe, which was granted legal personhood in 2018

Lumbee River

An ecological and cultural landscape in North Carolina that shapes the identity of the Lumbee people, who in turn respect, honor, and influence the riverscapes

Topological Map Analysis

a method used by emanuel to show that pre-1800 historical maps largely omitted or distorted the lumbee river, highlighting the region’s historical isolation and its function as an indigenous refugium from colonial violence

1956 Lumbee Act

A termination-era federal law that acknowledged the lumbee as american indians but explicity denied them a govenment-to-government relationship with the US, stripping them of the right to formal environmental consultation

terra nullium and wilderness concept

colonial legal and ideological concepts underpinning mainstream environmentalism that treat land as “empty” or pristine, directly justifying the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples for the sake of conservation

The “Ecological Indian” trope

a racist stereotype movilized by environmentalists that romanticize Indigenous people as inherently tied to nature in the past, effectively rendering modern indigenous people and colonialism invisible

The contradiction of Solidarity

the paradox wherin privilege white activists attmept to support marginalized groups, but in doing so they center their own voices and leverages their priviledge

Remianing Unreconciled (Whetung)

an ethical and political stance requiring settlers to sit with the reality of colonial violence without rushing to “move to innocence” or seeking easy absolution through performative solidarity

Kaitiakitanga

the Maori act of environmental guardianship or stewarship, which can only be carried out by the tangata whenua and is inseperable from the exervise of tribal authority

Mauri

the spiritual life force present in all things, which kaitaki have strict obligation to protect and restore if it becomes depleted or polluted by unnatural components

Extractive Water Disasters

Catastrophic hydro-geological events that are not isolated natural events, but are co-proudced over time by the combination of cliamte change and aggressive natural resource extraction

Slow Disasters (slow violence)

disasters characterized by gradual, delayed distruction dispersed over time and space, making their hazards hgihly uncertain, largely imperceptivle to traditional disaster management, and easily ignored by the state

Procedural vulnerability

the political and administrative inequalities embedded in disaster planning and environmental assessments that systematically minimize Indigenous knowledge and exclude local communities from decision-making

The baseline problem

the reality that foundational environmental data is often missing, politically manipulated, or exclusively generated by extractive companies, leading to contested and structurally unjust understandings of disaster risk

Mauna a Wakea

a dormant volcano on the Island of Hawaii considered by the Kanaka Maoli to be a highly sacred landscape and the literal firstborn child of papahanaumoku and Wakea where the sky and earth meet

Ho’omana Hawaii

the indigenous hawaiian set of beliefs and belief-related practices, which is not defunct, but has continuously evolved and survived despite massive colonial efforts to eradicate it

The Thirty Meter Telescope Conflict

A struggle over meaning and knowledge where Kanaka Maoli assert the sacredness of Mauna Kea against state and corporate astronomical development, facing public backlash that dismissed their religion as invalid or primitive

Kimmerer

• Reclaiming the honorable harvest (reciprocal vs. extractive interaction)

• key principals of never take the first gift, ask for permission, take only what you need, minimize harm, reciprocate the gift, etc.)

• Ensure ample resources for future generation

New Zealand Conservation & Resource Mangement Act

sets aside land and preservation with the colonial idea of stewardship in mind

Kaitiaki

guardians (gods, ancestors, nature, etc)

Kaitiakitanga

act of guardianship