Indigenous Ecojustice Narratives in an Era of Climate Change and Pandemics

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Abstract

The relentless progress narrative of global corporate capitalism has inundated, but not drowned out, millennia of land-based Indigenous knowings, relationalities, peoples, and practices. High-water marks of coloniality are exceeded ongoingly, but the resilience, interconnectedness, and creativity of the people of the land allow them to sidestep and out-maneuver the clichéd post-Enlightenment strategies of the settler state and their corporate bedfellows. Mainstream devaluing of organically-linked Indigenous knowings, including culturally appropriate agential responses to environmental stresses, is evidenced by accelerating climate change, global social inequities, loss of biodiversity, and emerging pandemics. This article is a call for rethinking and remapping the prevailing Eurocentric anthropocentric neoliberal narrative with respect to re-generating human/non-human/more-than-human interdependent, reciprocal, and symbiotic interrelationships toward a more just, compassionate, and ecologically sustainable world for all.