Racial Ecologies

Leilani Nishime, Kim D. Hester Williams, Leilani Nishime, Kim D. Hester Williams

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780295743721
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people's lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world. Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.

PART ONE

RETHINKING RACE AND ECOLOGY

CHAPTER ONE

“WE ARE THE LAND, AND THE LAND IS US”

Indigenous Land, Lives, and Embodied Ecologies in the Twenty-First Century

DIAN MILLION

On April 1st, 2016, tribal citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, & Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po,” founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), owned by Energy Transfer Partners, L.P., is proposed to transport 450,000 barrels per day of bakken crude oil (which is fracked and highly volatile) from the lands of North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois.

STATEMENT, CAMP OF THE SACRED STONES, 2016

The death of a traditional food system is the death of a nation … physically and culturally. We can and must protect and restore practices that can make us healthy and well as indigenous people.

SECOND GLOBAL CONSULTATION ON THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND FOOD SECURITY FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, NICARAGUA, SEPTEMBER 7–9, 2006

i loved the fish

and now the fish are scarce here

i think i must believe it will better further north

at home whatever place you cannot bear to see stripped not

always somewhere else

what is left is sacred no reason is enough

no one can tell me this will not be about the water my

frantic love

laughs out loud

tells them not to spray paint their lawns green

DIAN MILLION

THE Standing Rock Lakota’s 2016 effort to protect the Mni Sose, the Missouri River, from the Dakota Access Pipeline rallied Indigenous peoples and myriad ecological warriors of different stripes worldwide. In many ways, Standing Rock presents us with a heretofore unimagined assemblage in solidarity to protect water, the source of life on this planet. The Lakota people led with a powerful prayer of hope. As the winter of 2016 set in with unprecedented blizzard conditions, Donald Trump, a New York real estate baron, was elected president of the United States, and Energy Transfer Partners, the Dakota Access pipeline’s corporate sponsors, prevailed. The subsequent drilling beneath the Missouri River (at Lake Oahe) was an act of rape, a violence that ignored Standing Rock’s long-embodied sovereignty in that Lakota place. The amount of militarized police mobilized against the allied Lakota Water Protectors to “finish the job” testifies loudly to the ongoing matrix of uneven power relations between the United States and the Lakota. These are relations that Standing Rock has negotiated and struggled with for over a century.1

Now, in late December 2017, the United States is again poised to invade an Indigenous place, Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (the sacred place where life begins), as it is known in Gwich’in Athabascan, and in English as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The porcupine caribou calving grounds that have sustained a way of life for millennia are about to go under the knife, casually sacrificed as an add-on to a tax bill that few have read. Again, this move is about oil, and need, and places that are not imaginable to most of the citizens of the United States (and Canada).

Any appeal in this moment to liberal “human” rights for the Indigenous can never bring the entirety of the Gwich’in or Standing Rock people’s full relations to entities like rivers, air, land, and other beings into its logic. A just inclusion of the nonhuman in this place already exists under Lakota law that far exceeds any “rights”-based appeal for states to be better actors. Thus, at Standing Rock, the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota obeyed their own sacred law, their ages-old responsibilities that they do not shirk. These Indigenous laws are often in direct opposition to national and international laws, whose primary responsibility is to protect the “property” of global enterprise and a settler imperative of emptying sacred places of Indigenous relations. This is settler colonialism as it is lived in our Indigenous places now, in this moment. The stepped-up intensity of our Indigenous-led resistance movements—Standing Rock, Idle No More in Canada, and the Gwich’in’s defense of Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit—should be understood as decision points, moments when we, as inhabitants, victims, and recipients of benefits wrought by the destruction of our own conditions for life on this planet, might do something different. It is critical that we imagine a future for more than “just us.”

In this chapter, I join in conversation with others who foreground our lives lived, in different locations, ones that come from our racialized, gendered, and class experiences of ecological life and death in the presence of globalized capital. I seek first to acknowledge our relations as we come together, in this collection, rather than to just identify differences. At the same time, I believe that there is great worth in learning from the interstices, rivulets, and streams that represent meetings and differences that our peoples’ histories and different economic, political, and cultural positions give us. The Indigenous peoples of this continent hold up a difference that is not fully captured by the matrix of race and “ecology.” I enter the conversation titled “Racial Ecologies” by problematizing its terms. This chapter seeks to present Indigenous experience in its ability to complicate what we imagine as “justice” if we cannot imagine our relations. I first examine the myth of our Indigenous absence but racialized presence in the heart of capitalism. I then turn to the land, to argue for what Indigenism means where it can be read, not through any pristine or primordial lens, but in its worth as a different matrix of values. I do so that we might ask harder questions about what “ecology” is to any equitable, safe, or healthy lives we might desire. I end with a discussion of the relations of Indigenous survivance and presence in an Arctic “last frontier.” Imagined as a great empty space, the Arctic is actually the site of one of the oldest ongoing struggles in North America.

HUBS

One increasingly antithetical split created in our minds is that there is an “urban” and a “rural.” What exactly do these terms mean? In the 2016 US presidential election, that split was imagined by one political party as a racial and class divide, between “multicultural” and “educated” white urban dwellers and poor rural uneducated “whites.” We should be suspicious of this oversimplification.

In the configurations of race, class, and gender that map the megacities that now cover huge swaths of the United States, Indigenous peoples are disappeared. In the statistics that account for the racial and economic fabric of the United States, the racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples disappears them. These cities rose in the ashes of Indigenous places and gained their prosperity from capitalizing on the same abundance that nourished our economies for thousands of years. These megacities, the “urban,” now serve as hubs for a capitalism that operates transnationally and globally. These are places that are served up as imaginary nodes of progress, cited as epitomes of “freedom” for a mobile “creative” class.

In 2002, Richard Florida, the economist author of The Rise of the Creative Class, graphically illustrated five major cities, with their “creative” classes surrounded by poorer, suburban “service” classes, and with small pockets of “working class” residents in their peripheries. These “class” geographies reflect the intensity of financial centers, surrounded by those there to service them while being pushed to the periphery, unable to live in the intensified gentrification created by housing-market values and shifting racial codes.2 This core embedded in these inner cities represent “creative class” jobs and housing that are 73.8 percent white.3 The racial and multicultural are mostly accounted for in “service class” jobs, which they are often pushed into once white suburbs are transformed by immigration, while any “working class” thins.

In the United States and Canada, capitalist interests have sought to represent their labor policies as benign among peoples pushed into diaspora. Capitalism in North America presents in the establishment of multicultural democracies that have promised equity, progress, and opportunity for all. This benign reading of capitalism has become eclipsed in the twenty-first century as the facts of capital’s voracious needs and the violence of resource wars have now pushed myriad peoples into the realities of established settler-colonial xenophobia.

The Indigenous peoples of the North American continent are not represented in these megacities (even when they are greatly present) because they are associated with another narrative, that of “frontiers” and of a past rather than a future. Indigenous peoples, characterized as the primitive past, anchor the narratives of progress that built these megacities on their lands, cities that disappear their difference within the hierarchies that keep our capitalist relations in place. Indigenous peoples are very present in these cities and the environments that they are also a part of. A US Census report states that “in 2010, the majority of the American Indian and Alaska Native alone-or-in-combination population (78 percent) lived outside of American Indian and Alaska Native areas.” In this same report much is made of race: “Nearly half of the American Indian and Alaska Native population reported multiple races.”4 The US Census produces a “rationalized” statement of the nation-state’s biopolitical interest in the management of its “populations.” In the above assessment, the United States declares that the population deemed “American Indian and Alaskan Native” statistically exceeds a state expectation of its place and composition. It is a “population” that exceeds the boundaries of its colonization and its racialization. When the myriad peoples of Turtle Island were colonized, they were rationalized, singularly reduced to a race, “Indian,” putting a numerical quantity on their bountiful multiplicity.

The implication of this constant numerical assessment of the assimilation of Indigenous peoples reveals an ardent hope. The nation-state (the United States, in this case) dutifully accounts for the moment when such people are no longer numerically significant; until the moment when no “pure” population defined by the original “contracts” of their status exists. At that time, “Indians” pass into the general population with “other” mixed, minoritized, and racialized populations without claims to treaties and sovereignties. In the face of this rational epistemology, those who attempt to live on as Indigenous often report the affective weight of being an ontological and moral challenge to the dominant order. In this setting, the relations that inform the fight for the Mni Sose at Standing Rock and for the Arctic seem absent, or unrecognizable. In urban settings Indigenous peoples suffer from the same kinds of “environmental” disasters that have become familiar to many. We suffer from the failure of systems that serve capital but not people who are insignificant to it, from the fate of those whose labor is not needed, or who are no longer legible—the homeless, the addicted, and the old. These great hubs of capitalist life have relations and a “lifestyle” that is now so ascendant that we might mistake it as a natural force. Yet, these lives we live, however nourished or abandoned by capitalist infrastructure, are actually lives with profound relations.

What are these relations? How do they make us? Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellow Knives Dine) reminds of these relations in his Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition in his Indigenous reading of Marx: “[A] mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce [it].”5

The modes of life that capitalism produces are profoundly anchored by hierarchies of race, class, and gender. They present as places of great excitement, great extremes of income and consumption, and the capitalist vie joyeuse for some. Yet, these are increasingly “urban,” cities within cities that are themselves only nodes in great streams of capitalist activity that stretch across our worlds. As sociologist and geographer Deborah Cowen points out, our cities are now shaped by their roles in the three great flows of capital: production, consumption, and distribution.6 The wars that nations like the United States now fight are primarily those in protection of these flows, those of data, of goods or energy. The outsized presence of a state and corporatized (and militarized) police force in protection of the Black Snake at Mni Sose, the Missouri River, makes more sense when you understand the needs of global capital to protect ...