“Indigenizing Environmental Justice”

How does the indigenous perspective and history inform how we think about environmental ethics and environmental justice?  When in graduate school, our speaker, Dina Gilio-Whitaker noticed that American Indians were not reflected in environmental justice scholarship. “The frameworks and histories that formulate that literature really don’t address the histories of colonialism in this country, and tribal sovereignty and nationhood. What does environmental justice look like through the lens of settler colonialism?”  How does that go beyond the lens of environmental racism?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. At CSUSM she teaches courses on environmentalism and American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion and philosophy, Native women’s activism, American Indians and sports, and decolonization. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing.