Climate Action with Kyle Whyte

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Podcast Introduction

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Climate Change Reality

1:00Hello and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two professors put philosophy in dialogue with everyday life. I'm David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. As always, for an extended version of this episode with community discussion and more, join Overthink's Substack. Climate change is an undeniable reality. And it is one that forces us to take a pretty hard look at our life, at our values, at our consumption habits,

1:36and change them in a pretty radical fashion if we hope to change or avoid some of the darker consequences of anthropogenic climate change. According to the United Nations, the Earth now is about 1.42 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the pre-industrial era.

Climate Anxiety

1:56And the decade lasting from 2015 to 2024 was the warmest decade in all recorded history. Yeah, and although the effects of climate change are ones that scientists have been warning us about for decades, as the years have passed, especially in just the past few years, I think, more and more of us have been experiencing these effects in more and more places all over the world firsthand. This has been part of this spike in climate anxiety. The younger generation's feelings that the world is going to be unlivable for them,

2:29which are not just like feelings coming out of nowhere, but coming as a result of scientists' warnings. And I think that leads, at least for me, to a lot of uncertainty and even despair. Just like, what do we do about this? Is anybody doing anything about this? And I know the answer to that is, yes, people are doing things about it. But there are also all kinds of people who are doing terrible things to worsen it all the time. And so I think this is a topic that just brings up a lot of fear and anxiety for so many of us.

Emotional Profile of Climate Change

3:00Yeah, and the emotional profile of living in the age of climate change is really intriguing to me because you mentioned anxiety, but there is also climate depression, climate pessimism. There is also a combination of rage and impotence that we often feel at the lack of a coherent framework for collective action. And also the sense that we as individuals can't do anything to fix a problem that is so large and planetary in scale.

3:30And yeah, last semester I taught a class on imagining alternative futures where we spent a lot of time talking about how the climate change shapes our psyches and our emotions. And so many of my students reported just feeling deeply ambivalent about whether or not there is a future for them to imagine. And that's really heartbreaking, especially when you combine it with the sense of urgency that accompanies so many discussions about the science of the changes that we're seeing in the Earth's climate.

Focus on Climate Action

4:06Lest you despair that this is going to be an episode that leans into our anxiety, fear and these other emotions, we already have an episode for that. It's called Extinction. We're actually going to be focusing on climate action in this episode because the guest that we're going to be speaking with a little bit later has spent his career thus far arguing that indigenous ways of knowing have much to contribute to climate solutions. And I think when I read Kyle White's work over the series of really wonderful articles that he's written about the topic,

4:41both in more standard academic venues like philosophy journals, but also in more public facing spaces because he does a ton of activism and organizing as well. I feel more of a sense of hope than I do when I read a lot of other things, because I think his claim is really just like, actually, we don't have to wait for people who are moving the biggest levers of power to change things. We as citizens can band together and really move the needle.

5:11And we'll talk more about how he sees that happening, especially within indigenous, local and Afro descendant communities. But I just kind of want to start by acknowledging that and and saying that we will be getting into some of his specific solutions or at least like ways of addressing this issue.

Introduction to Kyle White

5:29No, I think that's right, Ellie. And thank you for pulling me away from the abyss of despair and depression. I'm the one who went there first. Let's be real. Yeah, no, but but there are signs, right, that there are also a lot of people on the international, the international community, in the NGO community, in the United Nations who are doing whatever it is that they can precisely to change our relationship to climate change. And I'm here thinking about the COP, which is the Conference of the Parties.

6:00And it's an annual meeting of the signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So basically, that's like all the members of the UN. And they gather at this conference to assess how well the various frameworks and pledges and agreements that we have signed about climate change are going. So here you can think about the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement. And they also try to figure out what new accords and treaties we might need in order to better respond to the reality that we're facing.

6:35And the last meeting of the COP30, which happened in Belém, Brazil, this past November, was specifically designed to increase indigenous representation as a goal of the conference. And they had a lot of people of indigenous and Afro-descendant backgrounds come to the conference to such a degree that it broke a previous record. So at this year's conference, they had over 900 official indigenous participants and 3,000 total indigenous attendees.

7:06And I think the reason for this focus on indigenous participation is because we are slowly coming to the recognition that there is an intricate connection between the climate changing and the history of settler colonialism that for a long time has not been recognized.

Settler Colonialism and Climate Change

7:29That link has been ignored or disregarded. And it's not until we confront that connection and try to address both of those problems, climate change and the violent history of settler colonialism together, that we are going to be able to move forward. Yeah, although I would say it's not really a we here so much as it is a they. This is the UN that made an effort this year to bring in more indigenous participants and attendees. And so I think that's like, you know, kind of seen as a recognition among this like large and powerful body that indigenous people have been excluded from the conversation and need to be part of it.

8:09That's not to say, though, that this past year's COP30 was just like all butterflies and rainbows when it comes to indigenous participation, though, because there were also a lot of indigenous led protests around it. There were marches. There was a flotea that traveled through the Amazon over several weeks and protesters broke into the conference to demand that Brazil and the other countries represented do more on climate action and indigenous land rights because there just has really not been enough. Broadly speaking, there were two major outcomes to COP30.

8:43The first was the intergovernmental land tenure commitment, which was signed by 14 countries pledging to recognize and protect 395 million acres of indigenous land by 2030. And the signatories included Brazil, Colombia, the DRC, Indonesia and others. And, you know, that's a lot of acres. So that's a tentative success. And second, the Forest Tenure Funders Group announced a $1.8 billion pledge to support this intergovernmental land tenure committee that I just mentioned,

9:14as well as some other efforts to secure land rights for indigenous Afro-descendant and local communities.

Indigenous Climate Change Studies

9:20Well, and the guest that we have with us today, Kyle White, has a lot to say about land back, land rights and the relationship to climate change, not only in terms of what we can learn from indigenous communities about how to rehabilitate our relationship to the land on an ecological and even an ethical sense, but also about the environmental potential and value of giving back stolen land to indigenous communities as an act of climate change activism.

9:53And so, again, all these terms are interconnected in really interesting ways that we're going to explore in more detail in our conversation with him. Yeah. And before we get into that, I just want to bring in a few key interventions that he sees indigenous studies making. He's been a real pioneer of indigenous studies or the longer version of that, which he calls indigenous climate change studies. And in his article entitled Indigenous Climate Change Studies, he talks about how he, as a citizen Potawatomi scholar and activist working on issues that indigenous people face in the U.S.,

10:28sees at least three key themes that indigenous studies can offer to an inquiry about climate change. And the first is that anthropogenic climate change is an intensification of environmental change imposed by colonialism on indigenous peoples. And so the relation between climate change and colonialism is not just like accidental or secondary. It is primary to anthropogenic climate change. Second, and this speaks to that sort of note of hope that I mentioned earlier that I see running through his work.

11:03He says that renewing indigenous knowledges, such as traditional ecological knowledge, can bring together indigenous communities to strengthen their own planning for climate change. And so he's very interested in indigenous self-determination. And he says that indigenous communities can band together through renewing their ecological knowledge. And third, he thinks that imagining climate change futures for indigenous people involves recognizing that the future is deeply connected to the past and specifically to collective histories of having to adapt to environmental change.

11:38Unfortunately, the reality is that indigenous people have had to adapt to climate change for a lot longer than many other groups, maybe all other groups. And so they have resources for global strategies for resilience and flexibility in response to the current iteration of the climate crisis.

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Interview with Kyle White

14:07Kyle White is George Willis Pack professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability, University Diversity and Social Transformation professor, and professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability. An indigenous philosopher and citizen Pottawatomie activist, he is the author of key publications on environmental justice and climate change, including the articles Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice, and Indigenous Climate Change Studies, Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.

14:37Hi, Kyle. It is a pleasure to have you with us on Overthink. We have been looking forward to this conversation for weeks and weeks and weeks. We've been reading your work and talking about it off of the podcast, and so it's time that we do it on air. Welcome. Fantastic. Yeah, so great to connect with you, David and Ellie. I'm looking forward to our conversation. We really are, too. I mean, I think this is a topic that is so salient in so many of our lives, although maybe not as much as it should be. And I think, you know, when a lot of us think of the current

15:10crisis of human-made climate change, we tend to think about it as the product of industrialization through the use of fossil fuels, for instance. But one of your really important interventions is to argue for focusing on settler colonialism as environmental injustice and environmental violence, which is a slightly different focus and one that goes back a little farther than the historical period of industrialization, at least as we often think about it with, like, the rise of trains and then cars and so on. So can you explain this argument,

15:42this focus on settler colonialism in relation to the climate crisis, and why it's important to think of climate justice in terms of settler colonial domination? Yeah, absolutely, Ellie. And for me, having been involved with the study of climate change for, you know, some decades now, one of the things that always comes up is it's not just industrialization, but it's how did industrialization occur so quickly that people didn't know that they were damaging the

16:15climate system until it was too late? So where did that speed come where the industrial processes, the growth of the fossil fuel sector, they took root at a pace that was faster than people's understanding of the negative consequences? Well, the reason why is that those who are behind the mining, the fossil fuel infrastructure that puts all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they were able to get a hold of land at an extremely quick pace, like we've never seen before. And how are

16:52they able to do that? Well, settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a system of domination, where a group of people that has, you know, their own way of life, they go to a place where other groups of people live that have their own ways of life. And the first group just literally imposes its own way of life on the other group and actually seeks to eliminate and erase the original groups that were there. And so in relation to industrialization, this is kind of what happened in countries like the United States. And I say kind of loosely and with a little bit of sarcasm. The United States was at

17:28the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. And as many of the listeners probably know, is an emitter of greenhouse gases par excellence. How did they do that? Well, they were able to steal indigenous people's lands immediately because they didn't respect indigenous people as human beings and as property holders. And so that allowed them to expand railroads, mining operations, urban areas, like it was nobody's business. And if you look at specific examples of how quickly they were able to do this,

18:04it's shocking. So take, for example, the development of pesticide intensive agriculture, major contributor to climate change. Well, how were they able to do that so quickly? Well, in the 19th century, they developed the land grant universities, the agricultural universities that would study how to do that. But a famous journalist, Tristan Autone, did a study that showed that in the 19th century, those universities got established so quickly to be able to expand that form of agriculture. They did so because the U.S. just stole land from out west, gave it to those universities,

18:39and then told the universities to sell that land immediately so they could get a giant endowment right away to begin to fund that science. That's a settler colonial process because it was one society with a certain type of life way literally imposing its own life way on another group and doing so by not respecting the humanity and the property of those groups. Yeah. And the reference here that you're making to land grant universities also makes me think about the complicity of universities in the settler colonial logic, right? So for instance, I went to a

19:10university in undergrad, the University of Nevada, Reno, that was a land grant, or as people often say, a land grab university. And so there are so many facets to this settler colonial logic, even in places that we tend to think of as not directly implicated in it. But I want to ask you a question here about the relationship between indigenous communities and climate change. Because when we think about climate change, we are often encouraged to think in planetary terms, right? It's something

19:41that threatens all of humanity. It's something that threatens all species. But we now know that even though that is true, that climate change threatens all of humanity in a sense, it doesn't threaten all humans equally in the same way or to the same degree or with the same urgency. And members of historically marginalized groups usually are the ones that are disproportionately affected, both by the short and the long term effects of climate change. And so you make the argument in one of your publications

20:12that indigenous communities are impacted the most by climate change. How come that is the case? What's the connection there between climate change and some of the challenges that indigenous communities are facing? Yeah, you know, David, when I started working on advocating for indigenous people's rights in relation to climate change, a lot of people knew that indigenous people were getting hit harder by

20:42climate change. You know, for example, 20 years ago, it was indigenous people that were among the first communities that were having to permanently relocate from where they lived due to environmental issues that were made worse by climate change. Or it was indigenous people that literally were watching certain aspects of their culture disappear before their eyes because the natural resources were no longer available. And so often people would say, oh, that's just bad luck. They just live in the wrong

21:14place at the wrong time. And it's a coincidence that most indigenous people are already suffering from climate change. And that was actually a point that was very important at the time was that the members of more dominant societies and people with more economic privilege were more looking at climate change as a future issue. But indigenous people were already being harmed by it. So why was that the case? Well, it turned out after a lot of studies and a lot of practical experience that indigenous people are not

21:45in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rather, indigenous people have been put in a position against their will to experience the brunt of climate change. So, for example, consider one of the areas that's, you know, hardest hit by climate change, coastal Louisiana. There's a number of indigenous people in that area, one of which is the United Homa Nation. For years, indigenous people in that area were specialists in living in the swamp. They knew everything about the habitats, the water system,

22:21they, you know, hundreds of plants and animals they understood. And it was all based on their knowledge of the overall ecosystem. And they'd been developing that for many generations, their food system, their economy, all came from that. But then when the United States came in and took power, they completely retrofitted that area to support the fossil fuel sector. And the chemical industry, they destroyed the channels, they enlarged them for big ships, they put all this chemical infrastructure. And then for the indigenous people that lived in the

22:54area, they were not provided any type of infrastructure, which would replace the environmental infrastructure that they had depended on for their entire way of life before. And so all of these changes, they occurred so rapidly, the United States didn't understand that they were destroying the tree cover that would lessen the impact of winds. They were making it so that sea level rise would create rapid coastal erosion. And they were causing other issues in the environment that were making

23:26it so that warming trends, changes and rainfall would all become extremely expensive and damaging. And indigenous people in that area had no say whatsoever. They were never part of the decision making. But now some of those same communities are threatened by climate change, and they're having to relocate permanently. It's not their fault. And so that's why we say that they're not in the wrong place at the wrong time. What you just described really reminds me of a concept you call vicious sedimentation. This idea

24:03that due to the settler colonial logics that you described earlier, where one population is entering in and destroying the life way of another population, and the way that that's happened in the US, indigenous people have not been part of the collective decision making process around how land gets used, and therefore have been also blocked out of conversations about environmental impacts. And so I'm curious to hear what you think about, like, how does vicious sedimentation work? Maybe you could say a little bit about that in relation to what you've just been describing.

Temporality of Climate Change

24:36Yeah, you know, I now work, Ellie, with indigenous people throughout the world. And, you know, I'm seeing this as a common pattern. For example, some really great colleagues of mine are from the Malia Foundation, which is an organization of indigenous people from the Chittagong Hills tracks, which is an area within Bangladesh that has a diversity of indigenous communities. And historically, they had an ingenious rotational agriculture and forestry system, in which, you know, over long periods of

25:07time, they would cultivate areas and then leave other areas fallow. And it was over a huge area of land, and literally, they could grow all at once, you know, up to like 50 different crops. It was ingenious, like biodiversity, healthy food, exercise, knowledge of the overall ecosystem. Amazing. But when the country of Bangladesh was formed, they began to steal the land of those communities. And then for people who had their land stolen, they would push them into wage labor in commercial forestry operations,

25:39where all the profits were not going to indigenous people. And so the land base was shrunk. And when the land base was shrunk, it meant that their rotational system wasn't able to use the expanse of the territory. And hence, the fallow periods became shorter, and the land wasn't able to regenerate. And when the land wasn't able to regenerate, as climate change begins to change precipitation, and one of the big changes that occurs is that precipitation becomes much more intense, much

26:10more water, much more powerful. Those soils hadn't had the same time they would historically to be able to prepare for precipitation, and we're just getting ruined by the new influx and rainfall. And so over time, what happens is it becomes more challenging for some of the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hills tracks to continue their agricultural traditions and those healthy food traditions. And it gets worse over time. And it's a combination of the land loss, and then the changes

26:41in the ecological system, and then how climate change just keeps making it worse. Well, and I think this brings me at least to think about the temporality of climate change from the perspective of indigenous communities. Because I remember one sentence in particular from one of your articles where you say that indigenous communities don't experience climate change as something that is new and unprecedented. They experience it as going back to the future, where

27:12we've been here before. And it's almost like a new kind of displacement that is reiterating the logic and the violence of previous displacement. And you talk about three displacements, right? There is a displacement from the land. Then there are also cultural displacements, like when the children of indigenous families were torn from them, and they were sent to boarding schools. And now we have this third displacement that is justified by the urgency of climate change. Can you say more about this, about what is new and what is actually the repetition of the same,

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29:25When we think about how much of the general climate change movement focuses on the idea that climate change is a new problem that nobody ever had to reckon with, they forget that going back centuries, actually, climate change is one of the harms that gets imposed on people when they're being oppressed by another group. Whether it's eviction or displacement, whether it's destruction of the environment, all of those things change people's experience with weather, people's experience with long-term

30:00patterns in climate. You know, my tribe, for example, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, literally, we were forced in a very short period of time to move from the Great Lakes region to Oklahoma. And yeah, in a year's time or so, the climate had it changed, but we were in a different climate.

30:20What's the difference? It's human-caused, you know, anthropogenic climate change. And so I often find that one of the important contributions of Indigenous people's knowledge of climate change is actually to always remind people that when you think something's new, think again, because maybe you're missing a solution that we know is the right solution from history. So for example, when we take an issue like the wildfires, that's so ironic. The United States banned Indigenous burning. The reason why Indigenous

30:55people didn't have out-of-control wildfires going back generations is because we were actually managing the environment to avoid destructive fires and to favor fires that supported our food systems and our medicinal plants and our way of life and the beauty of the landscape. And it took non-Indigenous people so long to figure out that the restoration of fire was a solution. And so there, what's new is that all of a sudden people are embracing fire again, but it's actually a very old solution. And I think that's what we're

31:26seeing in terms of the dynamic of old and new. I think your work has so much to say about this, because I think one of the themes that I see in your publications come up over and over again is this idea that Indigenous people have a lot of potential solutions that can be used in the climate crisis. And so on the one hand, we have this focus in public discourse around the idea that world leaders and the wealthiest humans on the planet are the people who are in a position to solve climate

31:56change and how frustrating it is that they don't seem to be doing nearly enough. And I think the presumption there is that they're the only ones who can actually make a change. But I think this arguably just perpetuates settler colonial logics. And you argue that Indigenous peoples and local communities should really be supported in having a large impact at scale on climate change, and that Indigenous studies can offer what you describe as critical decolonizing approaches to how to address climate change. And these are rooted in really rich ways of understanding,

32:31including the concept of collective continuance, which you've coined, you know, rooted in Anishinaabe ways of knowing. And so I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about that collective continuance and what other kinds of, I don't know, solution sounds like maybe a little bit of a pat word there. We can go there, Ellie. I'm happy to talk about solutions. And yeah, you know, it's ironic that if you look in the literature on climate science, once the dominant society grasped the scale of

33:03climate change, a lot of people, their immediate idea was that the institutions that appeared to people to also operate at that same scale. So the nation states or the multilateral institutions like the United Nations, that they're in the best position to solve climate change. But it turns out that they're like the worst ones to be able to resolve it. I mean, they still haven't come to any significant agreements that they can implement. They're fickle, you know, dependent on elections and, you know, all sorts of economic factors that they can't control. And for too many decades,

33:38people missed the fact that Indigenous people, local communities, but also Afro-descendant people all over the world could have some of the biggest needle moving impact on reducing carbon footprint. So for example, collective continuance really refers to this idea that so many Indigenous people throughout the world are focused on long-term thinking. So what gives us joy today, what gives us fulfillment in our lives is to take actions that increase our respect and sense of responsibility

34:12for the environment and where we favor the well-being of future generations over our own well-being. But ironically, that is our well-being, is the joy that we get from doing that, from realizing that our community is not just the living, but it's our ancestors and what we learn from them, but also the future generations. We have an opportunity to pass on the basic conditions for a good life. And so Indigenous people, in most cases, don't need to be educated about this. This is part of our emotions.

34:45It's part of what we know how to do. And when you look at the topic of climate change, throughout the world, Indigenous people are living in areas that if you measure it, the forests and ecosystems are more intact, and they often outperform areas that are protected conservation areas that don't allow any humans to be in there. Like Indigenous areas with people in them are outperforming dedicated conservation areas. Indigenous people are more likely to try to use renewable energy to participate in low-carbon

35:19footprint lifestyles. And I can go on and on, but the point is that if we multiply this, there are about 500 million Indigenous people. There are about 1.5 billion local communities and Afro-descendant peoples, many of whom share some of these same values. And if we combine all of that together, that means well over a quarter of the Earth's land is governed by people that have these values and have these ethics and that strongly believe in responsibility and collective continuance. But these territories are

35:55ones that are the most threatened by the causes of dangerous climate change, the fossil fuel sector, mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture. So if we protect, all we have to do, protect the land rights of Indigenous people, we can take advantage of all of the carbon sink potential, the sustainable landscape management and forestry, all of that. We can take advantage of the energy, renewable energy, and that will have a massive impact on climate change. And it doesn't require any cultural change. Just respect people's

36:28land rights. Which apparently is too much. But I want to ask you a follow-up here about this potential, because you're talking about a philosophy of time, of past, present, and future that we find in Indigenous communities and philosophies, and also a way of relating to life, to non-human life, to plant life, to nature more broadly, that enables this worldview, that opens up new possibilities that we are not

36:59seeing precisely because we have not respected these ways of life. What I want to hear you say more about is how maybe the concept specifically of kinship informs this way of thinking, of thinking about future generations and what we owe to them, respecting past generations and what we have inherited from them, and respecting also the natural world, to which we have not only all kinds of relationships of interdependence, but also certain moral and ethical commitments.

37:32Yeah. David, I oftentimes talk to people about, imagine what it's like to have a great family. Some of us have great families. Some of us don't. But if you just imagine, what is to have a great family? Who is a great family? Well, a great family is one that when you encounter an emergency, you know that they have your back. You can trust them, that there's reciprocity, that they respect your consent, that is

38:03your freedom to make decisions for yourself. But also having a great family is in regular times, that mental health that you get from knowing that there are people that love you. And again, they trust you, you trust them. There's reciprocity, whether in financial matters or other aspects of life, there's consensuality, there's abundance. And again, it's good for your mental health. And we do whatever we can to protect our family, because we know that what they give us

38:35is not just transactional, because they give us that network effect, which saves us in emergencies, but also makes us feel our best during regular times. Now, often in the dominant society, we think of family just in terms of, you know, the family that you may have been born into or were adopted into. And so it's a pretty small circle. But Indigenous people have expanded notions of family, and this is what kinship is. So kinship, while anthropologists over many decades really butchered

39:06the concept, Indigenous people have brought it back in a way that we define it, which is a sense of relationality and these family-like bonds, but they're extended to friendships, but they're also extended to plants, to animals, even to climate, depending on the culture. And what this does when you see yourself as having kinship to an animal, for example, like for Anishinaabe people, we have a kinship relationship with wolves. What does that mean? Well, in our origin story, there was a human being once, like the first human being. And yes, the creator wanted to make a companion. And I know

39:43everybody's thinking, oh, it must have been another human. That's not what happened. The companion was a wolf. We came to understand that the wolf plays an important role in the environment. The wolf ensures that species like deer and so on are well-managed so that they don't eat too many of the plants. So the wolf is the primary driver of biodiversity so that we have enough medicines and foods, which is why actually culturally we say that the wolf names the plants and animals because it's the species that's

40:16responsible for that biodiversity. And so I could obviously go on, but we see the wolf as a kinship relationship, which is why today it's Anishinaabe people in states like Michigan, they're at the forefront of defending the preservation of the wolf because ourselves and some of the best scientists understand the positive impact of the wolf on the environment and on things like climate resilience, but also on maintaining plant biodiversity. And so this creates that environmental awareness and

40:49that motivation to do what it takes to make sure that the ecosystems we depend on are not destroyed. And so kinship provides that powerful motivation that a lot of people in the dominant society, they're trying to figure out how to get it for themselves. And they're exploring all these things. Could a technology do it? Could we fool ourselves using nudges or other approaches to get us to do the right thing? Could we provide incentives or force people through fines to do it? They're trying all these solutions, but our kinship-based solutions are ones that create the basic emotions that you need

41:26to do the right thing. Much of what you're talking about reminds me of some of the qualities of relationships and responsibilities that you talk about in your very important, I would say, instant classic article, settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice, which is also where you develop some of the things we've been talking about so far. And you talk about there how this importance of reciprocity and relationships is tied to these qualities of relationships. It's like

41:57there are, I don't know if we might want to call them values, but I would say I think we could definitely read them that way. These are things that make up collective continuance and create interdependency. And a few of the ones that you mentioned are trust, redundancy, diplomacy, consent. And I was really interested in these, I think, especially redundancy. At first, I was like, what does that mean? Redundancy is a good thing. And then as you describe it, you know, it's this quality that refers to states of affairs of having multiple options for adaptation when changes occur. And so maybe you could say a

42:31little bit more about that and how might we foster these qualities of relationships and responsibilities beyond indigenous communities. Yeah. You know, thanks for bringing that up, Ellie, because it gives me a chance to kind of update some of my thinking. Because I haven't published this yet, but I've changed the word redundancy to abundance. Oh, okay. Because people like me were like, what does that mean? Yeah. And in that way, one of the ideas about kinship that I've really been struck by,

43:09it actually started with some of my observations and experiences in relation to climate change, where I realized if you take all of the current climate change issues that we're most scared about, you know, the, the intensive temperature and rainfall and all of these shifts and changes that we're not prepared for, I actually realized that our ancestors, you know, centuries ago, wouldn't actually have had any problems with these climate change impacts. Like they wouldn't have been threatened by them. If you told them that this is going to happen, that's going to happen.

43:39They're like, oh, no problem. We would make this change, or we would move over here, or we would, you know, change the type of corn that we're going to harvest or plant. They would just have a very, like, obvious practical solution. And that was because over time, they had invested in abundance, or what I used to call redundancy. And so if you look historically, for example, at Anishinaabe people, we didn't have a centralized governance system. We had a flat governance system in which during different

44:10times of the year, there were actually different types of government that were most important. Some times of year would be the fishing camp where a whole bunch of people would gather in one location. Other times of year, it would be the sugar bush where some of the same families at the fish camp would divide up and go to different parts of the woods to engage in maple sugar harvesting. Or other times of the year, people would be out harvesting wild rice or cultivating orchards. And they were all over the region, which is why when the Europeans started creating these early maps, they would say these very strange things, like we encountered, you know, the beaver people or the maple people, that they

44:45were just encountering somebody in a location that was engaged in that form of governance at the time. And what that did was that created thousands of friendships that people had with humans and non-humans across the entire region, the whole Great Lakes region. It's shocking how mobile people were three or four hundred years ago or longer without any of the transportation or communication technologies we have today. And this is why they were able to say things like they cultivated hundreds of varieties

45:16of corn or melons or I mean, the knowledge of varieties of species that they had was incredible. And when you look at indigenous people today, like, for example, in Peru in the potato park, where they still cultivate thirteen hundred varieties of potatoes, they're dealing with climate change in that valley, but they're able to adjust which varieties of potatoes they plant based on altitude. That's a high altitude area because they know so well how each potato variety responds to different

45:51habitat conditions. And that's abundance. But if you look in the potato park, if you say, well, explain to me that abundance, they're going to talk about the spiritual relationship they have with every single one of those potatoes, the kinship relationship they have. And that's what abundance is. No different from if you have a, you know, a language that you speak that you learned from your community. If one person stops speaking the language, is threatened and is told not to speak it, the language will still continue because there's hundreds of people that speak and can help people

46:23continue to learn and speak the language. And so that's a form of kinship that creates that abundance. I like one of the definitions that you gave of kinship as relationships and commitments that enable a community to withstand crises and emergencies without throwing any of its members under the bus, essentially. And it seems to me that one of the things that is happening nowadays and has been

46:53happening if we follow this temporality of back to the future for a long time in relation to indigenous communities is that non-indigenous people keep throwing indigenous communities under the bus, especially under the logic of urgency or emergency tied to climate change. Because of course, the primary message that we receive about climate change is we must act and we must act now. There is no room for slowing down. There is no room for waiting for agreements or for building trust with

47:27communities. And you introduce this somewhat tragic, I would say, element into your discussion about indigenous climate change studies, which is that the language of urgency and of acting fast prevents us from understanding what you call the speed of consent. That in order to solve climate change and have long lasting solutions, like you talked about a few minutes ago, we need to build relationships of trust, of relationality, of reciprocity with indigenous communities that hold these ways of knowledge that can

48:03be particularly helpful. The problem is that we're moving so fast that we end up trampling all over the rights and the values of those communities. So for example, you talk about carbon sequestration technologies that have become the darling of people working in this space. And you point out that a lot of the proposals for carbon sequestration are anchored in further taking away the land of indigenous people in order to do carbon sequestration, often without even asking for the consent of these communities,

48:37or without discussing how those communities might potentially benefit from the implementation of this technology. And so there is this sense where, yeah, we sense that we have to act fast because of the reality of climate change. But then we also use that sense of urgency to once again reenact this settler for colonial violence. And what I want you to talk about more is how do we balance those two? What does it

Balancing Urgency and Consent

49:04mean to move at the speed of consent in a world in which we recognize that the environment is indeed collapsing because of human activity? David, it's really problematic in the world how consent has come to mean something that is a restriction against quick action. So it's like, you know, even in research ethics, you know, it's like, Oh, I've got to do consent, that's gonna slow me down. And what people

49:36really miss is that what indigenous people are arguing for, and consent is a human right, it's a right that's owed to indigenous people. But it's also our best shot respecting people's consent about what happens on their own lands to solving climate change as quickly as possible. And let me just explain what I mean by that. So with regard to carbon sequestration, and some of these other solutions where, you know, conservation

50:07is being used as a way to suggest that that climate change is being mitigated, you know, a lot of people in the world, they don't trust that those types of forestry strategies actually work. Because the people that are trying to put them in the place, they've done it so quickly, that it's all about the numbers. And it's all about just, you know, did this forest management technique, is it truly changing the level of carbon that's absorbed in the atmosphere? Or is it not? But but who knows? And it's very easy to distrust that. And it's all about whether the

50:42the particular technique is or is not working. And this is why these solutions, they come in vogue, then they cause uproar. And then you get some companies or governments that literally evict communities that were perfectly well managing the forests, evict them and then implement a strategy that's not even known to work. So the fact that this is how some of these quote unquote solutions to climate change are enacted, it actually slows down their potential. Whereas look at how indigenous

51:14people do things differently. You know, for example, and there's thousands of communities that we can talk about, but the Yurok tribe, for example, they are heavily involved in a number of different climate mitigation strategies. But the way that they did so started with the importance of their connection to salmon, the importance of their responsibility to the environment and the well-being of future generations. And so they moved very carefully at an appropriate pace to make sure the community,

51:45the leadership, other people, including non-indigenous people were on board. And they've been part of some of the most significant land back or land return strategies in the world. And in one case, they literally were able to secure land back that was habitat, forested habitat that protects the river and hence protects the fish that stops that forest area from being deforested and hence has the sequestration effect. But that also creates the potential for the culture and the language to continue because young people and others can learn from the land. Now, I didn't even unpack

52:22further aspects of that solution. But that's something that if people thought of carbon sequestration and they thought of it as something that's connected to food and culture and other types of environmental impacts, well, that's something that people are going to get excited about and they're going to want to move forward on that. And the Yurok were not evicted by a company to do that, or they weren't threatened by a government to do that. And it's not about is the exact sequestration of carbon,

52:55is it, well, it's moving the needle in a hundred different ways. And we see this across indigenous people everywhere in the world. So which way is faster? I actually think in a lot of ways, the consent way is faster and more likely to build speed. Yeah, I think that's such a powerful statement. And I mean, just could not be more starkly in contrast with the narrative that we're often fed as a society about just about everything, which is like, it'll be faster if you let the people at the top take care of it for you. It never is. I want to pick up on land back, which you mentioned

53:31in what you were just talking about here, because that's also, I think, such an important part of indigenous struggles for recognition in the contemporary US and something that you've written about. And so land back is a call for the return of stolen or disposed land to native stewardship and governance. But I think frequently, sometimes one will hear criticisms that characterize it as excessive or impractical or utopian. So can you explain what land back is and why those criticisms

54:02are misguided? How land back might really help us imagine a future that is less beholden to settler colonialism? Yeah, you know, Ellie, I think that that land back is just one of the most misunderstood concepts throughout the world, because the interpretation that you were characterizing. I hear people say that all the time. And in just listening to, I want to correct the record on land back. So the first thing I wanted to note is that land back has been going on for a long time.

54:36And there's a lot of things people don't know about land back. Like, for example, for Anishinaabe people, so my community, 200 years ago, when we were right in the era where a lot of our land was being stolen from us, it was actually women in our community that were the first people to engage in land back. At the point of dispossession, it was women that devised strategies to hold private property, because in our community, women held private property, they also managed our food systems, they were the main farmers. And they were the ones that began to devise and successfully so ways that

55:13our communities could retain property, even when we were being evicted. And so land back was actually something that that women, and arguably, though, obviously, people wouldn't have used this term, but women that were using feminist values and feminist leadership, you know, again, if we were to characterize it as such, they were the original people that laid the groundwork for land back. And then you go decade by decade, and all of the things that we assume to be normal today were part of land back. So, for example, in Michigan, five different tribes have a huge impact

55:48in conservation, climate, environmental, fishery decisions in an area about a third the size of Michigan. Why is that? Well, when they signed treaties, including one treaty called the Treaty of Washington in the 1830s, in that treaty, they made sure that they still had the right to continue to occupy the areas that were ceded to the United States. And in the 70s and 80s, they went to court and won over that right. That's a land back process. Because again, what were they doing? They were

56:21restoring their relationship, their kinship with the land, their ancestors were trying to protect that kinship, that connection. And so, you know, there's obviously hundreds of examples. But when you look at the history, we've been doing land back for a long time. And there's a lot of shapes and sizes of it. But when you look at contemporary examples of land back today, there's some of the most well organized processes that you can imagine. So the craftiest creative processes. So for example,

56:51in Molokai, Hawaii, that is on the verge of a 55,000-acre land back process in an area called Molokai Ranch. Molokai has about 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 people that live there. And they've maintained a subsistence way of life on that island. And I think about 2017, when that area of land came up for sale, it was one of the most expensive properties in Hawaii. They created the Molokai Heritage Trust, which was a community-based organization that actually elected people that would be considered

57:23to be the leaders of the new territory if they were to get it back. And they've developed food systems and environmental protections and how to restore their fish ponds. I mean, it's renewable energy. It's a whole planned system of how once they get the land back, how will they govern it? And to establish the Molokai Heritage Trust, they literally had something like 150 or 160 community meetings, to make sure that it was consensual. Even though there were tons of organizations working, they said, for this new land area, we need to make sure that the people in charge are trusted by everybody.

57:59So they literally reelected new people with that responsibility in mind. And so it's, you know, again, going back to these points about speed and consent, it's amazing that in a period of seven, eight years, they are actually about to get the land back and they've raised enough money for it and have convinced the seller. And then they're going to be exemplars of sustainability. And then that's going to be viral. And again, talk about scaling up. That's a powerful example. How many

58:31different communities everywhere will be motivated by that? So that's land back, whether it's indigenous women 200 years ago, working against all odds, or the genius of people in communities like Molokai or the Yurok or others that have a powerful narrative about how to do land restoration in a good way. Kyle, I think we're at the end of our time, unfortunately, but this has been a very fruitful conversation, a lot for us to think about. And we thank you enormously for your scholarship and also

59:02for your time with us today. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. All right. Thanks so much, Ellie and David. I appreciate y'all.

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