Radical Adaptation,Justice,and American Indian Nations

Abstract

Abstract

Climate adaptation strategies typically involve making adjustments to laws about planning, resource allocation, and infrastructure to ensure that the built and natural environments will continue to support human communities. The question investigated here is related but distinct. This essay interrogates the necessary conditions for indigenous communities to survive, and perhaps even thrive, while maintaining their unique cultures in the face of dramatic and/or unknowable material circumstances. In other words, rather than ask how indigenous communities will adjust to the effects of a changing climate, this article asks what the essential conditions are for indigenous communities themselves to consider the extent, scope, and terms of any and all necessary adjustments. The history of the Cherokee Nation's adaptation to their forced removal from their homelands in the Southeast to Oklahoma, explored briefly here, provides an initial set of hypotheses about the core components for successful adaptation to radically different territorial circumstances.