Indigenous Peoples’ geographies II: Indigenous environmental politics,or land matters

Abstract

This second report on Indigenous peoples’ geographies reviews recent scholarship about Indigenous environmental politics, or how land matters to Indigenous geographies. It examines environmental research led by Indigenous geographers that centers Indigenous theory—research with a focus on the workings of colonial racial capital that foregrounds Indigenous governance, self-determination and processes of decolonization. The article examines how Indigenous environmental politics are anchored in their legal orders and governance systems. It then considers how the violences of environmental matters entail the emptying of Indigenous relations from their sacred places with attention to the gendered politics of environmental (in)justices and colonial legal and regulatory regimes. The article ends with brief reflections on the relational foundations of environmental justice.

Keywords

Indigenous environmental justice Indigenous political ecologies Indigenous climate justice Indigenous water governance Indigenous geographies

Introduction

My first report about Indigenous peoples’ geographies sought to stretch notions of Indigenous peoples uniquely tied to place-based existences. It did so by examining the multi-scalar realities of Indigenous life (Daigle 2025). In this report, I seek to balance the expansiveness of Indigenous spatialities with the “belongings and accountabilities to place, to site, and cultural specificity” (Diaz 2019, (2) that shapes Indigenous geographical thought.¹ I return to the matter of land, or how land matters to Indigenous geographies. Specifically, I approach the matter of land by turning towards recent scholarship that is framed through multiple vocabularies, including political ecology, environmental politics, water governance and climate justice.

In conceiving of Indigenous political ecologies, Beth Rose Middleton Manning explains (2015) that “place is a storied landscape embodying personal and collective history and offers lessons on correct behavior: responsibilities to particular places to maintain right relations with other beings.” Drawing on Clint Carroll (2015), Middleton Manning writes that Indigenous political ecologies are generated through Indigenous cosmologies grounded in place, in addition to resource-based political economies tied to land dispossession. In this report, I draw on Middleton Manning and examine recent scholarship that’s grounded in Indigenous theory, that examines the workings of colonial racial capital, that centers Indigenous governance and self-determination, and that foregrounds processes of decolonization (Middleton 2015, 562).

The report begins by considering the growing partnerships between Indigenous peoples and academics, as well as governmental agencies and NGOs, to bridge Indigenous and Western knowledges for ecological restoration, conservation, water governance and climate change adaptations. I examine critiques of these partnerships by highlighting how Indigenous scholars anchor environmental politics in Indigenous legal orders and governance systems. I then consider how Indigenous geographies conceive of injustice and violence in environmental politics through the myriads of ways that Indigenous landscapes are emptied of the relations that shape their diplomacies. I end with brief reflections on how Indigenous scholars conceive of justice in environmental justice with an eye toward the last report that will more fully examine Indigenous resistance, decolonization and liberation amid the global conditions of colonial conquest.

Storying land matters through indigenous governance and law

In every sense of the word environment, then, the lands, waters (and ice) where these intimate interactions between people and marine life occurred over countless generations formed society, governance, and responsible relations among all present. (Million 2018, 30)

There’s been a move in Geography, and in other social science and scientific fields, to look towards Indigenous knowledge to shift dominant framings of environmental (in)justices in academic and political spaces (Druschke et al., 2024; Fisk et al., 2024, 2025; Kealiikanakaole-ohaililani et al., 2018; McGregor 2002, 2010; McGregor et al., 2023; Reed et al., 2024; Whyte et al., 2017).² This may be to do with declarations and reports generated at international and national scales such as the United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action (2015). Additionally, this change is likely informed by Indigenous-led organizing such as the Standing Rock Lakota’s protection of Mni Sose (the Missouri River) against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 (Estes 2019), in addition to the increase of Indigenous peoples in academic and political spaces, in conjunction with growing societal concerns of planetary crises such as climate change.

Aspirations to bridge Indigenous and Western knowledges may be well intended. However, Indigenous scholars continue to offer incisive critiques of this trend, including concerns on data sovereignty and intellectual property (Adams and Sarvestani, 2024; Palmer, 2024; Curley, 2018), and the ongoing dominance of non-Indigenous scholars in academic and policy-making spaces (Hunt 2014; McGregor 2005; Simpson 2004; Whyte 2017b). As Sarah De Leeuw and Sarah Hunt write, “Still, it is important to consider the limits of these aspirational practices to truly decolonize a field which is largely enacted by White scholars living off the spoils of colonialism, including White settler scholars, and in which Indigenous presence is largely facilitated by, or filtered through, non-Indigenous ‘experts’” (2018, 7). The filtering of Indigenous knowledge is readily apparent through the misconception of land, water, animal and plants relatives that are at the foundation of Indigenous diplomacies (Watts 2013), as socio-political relations are reframed as resources (Curley 2021c; McGregor et al., 2020), property (Coombes et al., 2012), ecosystem engineer (Druschke et al., 2024), Western medicine (Flood and Myhal 2022), or even environment or ecology (Million 2018).

As Kyle Powys Whyte has observed, multi-actor environmental governance efforts often mobilize supplemental approaches, where Western methods and theories dominate over Indigenous knowledge, and where Indigenous knowledge is treated as an add-on to Western science (2017, 62–63; see also McGregor 2018). Given this context, he argues that Indigenous knowledge must not be approached for what it can do for scientists and non-Indigenous peoples, but rather, “scientists need to understand how they may or may not fit into emerging Indigenous governance in terms of resurgence and collective continuance” (Whyte 2017b, 76). Whyte’s concern, which highlights the extractive pitfalls of environmental co-management, has been echoed by many conducting research on Indigenous water governance (McGregor 2014, 2020), conservation and ecological restoration partnerships (Fisk et al., 2024, 2025; Reo et al., 2017), the food justice movement (Kepkiewicz et al., 2015) and climate change policy (Deranger et al., 2022; Reed et al., 2022). Specifically, critiques call attention to how collaborative efforts have too often focused on scientific and technological fixes rather than the interlocking structures of oppression that have reproduced environmental destruction in the first place, and that continue to undermine Indigenous life.

The centrality of Indigenous governance to environmental matters is further elucidated through scholarship that attends to how Indigenous laws are learned through intimate relations with the natural world. As Deborah McGregor writes, Anishinaabe law is embedded in experiences, relationships with and observations of the natural world; she calls this natural law (McGregor 2013). She conceives of water justice through the Anishinaabe concept of zaagidowin, which can be roughly translated to love in addition to mutual respect and responsibilities to the natural world. As McGregor states, these are “not naïve ideals in Anishinaabek society,” but “obligations and relationships [that] are living examples of Anishinaabek natural law” (McGregor 2013, 71). In the context of Canada, McGregor considers how water justice entails Indigenous and treaty rights in relation to the Crown (McGregor 2014), but that it must ultimately be conceived through Indigenous laws such as zaagidowin, an Anishinaabe legal principle for achieving well-being (or the good life) by understanding water as a sentient being (McGregor 2013). As such, she asks, “What role do Indigenous legal orders play in expressions of ‘injustice’ and achieving ‘justice’ in the environmental realm” (McGregor 2018c, 11). In doing so, she highlights the diversity of Indigenous nations and legal orders, as well as the importance of unification that can be drawn through underlying ethics and practices which are made visible through environmental declarations in national and international forums (McGregor 2016; 2018a; 2018c).

The Indigenous legal foundation of environmental governance is further unpacked through Madeline Whetung’s (2019) conception of shoreline law in Nishnaabeg territory. As Whetung explains, shoreline law encompasses place-based relationships that Nishnaabeg hold with water, land and other beings with which they share territory, offering a way to rethink international relations by considering the importance of multiple relationships within the shared space of the shoreline. Whetung draws on oral history and lived experiences to understand the intricate relational political systems that shape Nishnaabeg politics, as the space of the shoreline is where beings meet, and where particular place-based relationships live, thus engendering Anishnaabe law. Whetung conceives of internationalism through shoreline law, as Nishnaabeg and other beings embody relationships with the shoreline through practices such as canoeing or harvesting manoomin (wild rice) which animates relational politics as different worlds are brought together. That is, the shoreline is a transitional space that makes many different relationships possible, “be that between water–cattails–land or water–beavers–humans–land” (Whetung 2019, 30). As Whetung explains, the relationships that are forged across species boundaries are international relationships where the wellness of all beings is interdependent which ultimately has implications for the way governance over shared territory is enacted on Nishnaabeg lands and waters.

Similarly, Myhal (2024) offers insight on Anishinaabe international diplomacies, as they are linked to ecological restoration by examining how nmé (sturgeon) place-based knowledge is reproduced as they navigate land and water fraught with colonial jurisdiction yet remain deeply embedded in Anishinaabe socio-political systems. She offers a theory of “Indigenous ecological memory” that addresses how animal and plant beings embody ancestral memories and knowledge. As such, Myhal offers a crucial reframing of ethnobotany to account for the role of animals and how Indigenous conceptions of ecology and restoration are learned from elder brothers, or animal relatives, whose survival depends on the wellbeing of plant relations. In this way, Myhal turns our attention away from a humanistic approach to environmental politics—even approaches which center human-land relations—by directing our attention to the laws and intelligence embodied through animal-plant relations.

Emptying relations from indigenous landscapes

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. (Million 2018, 20-21).

Centering relations

The relationships that form Indigenous legal orders and governance structures are at the center of how Indigenous scholars understand environmental violence. In the words of Million, the injustices or violences of environmental matters entail the emptying of Indigenous relations from their sacred places. This violence happens through resource extraction, oil and gas pipelines (Awâsis 2020; Hunsberger and Awâsis 2019; Spice 2018), hydropower dams (Gergan 2017, 2020; Randell and Curley 2023), water settlements (Curley 2021b), conservation (Coombes 2021; Jacobs et al., 2025), and the nexus of these industries (Curley 2021a), as well as the mapping technologies (Iralu 2021) and regulatory frameworks that enable extractive infrastructure (Awâsis 2020; Fabris 2023; Hunsberger and Awâsis 2019), and that inhibit Indigenous governance (Collins et al., 2017; Lister and Curley 2017; Wilson et al., 2021).

Crucially, Indigenous and anti-colonial theorists have offered vital insights on the gendered violence of environmental matters, and the relationships between bodily and land sovereignty, by grounding their analyses in feminist and queer thought (Cabnal 2010; Hunt 2015; Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network 2016; Goeman 2017; Doshi 2017; Zaragocin 2019; Mollett 2021; Vasudevan et al., 2023). In her work with coastal nations on the northwest coast in Canada, Hunt (2023) examines how gendered and racialized subjectivities are formed through discursive representations of nature and wilderness in Northwest arts and culture. Specifically, she examines discourses of emptied landscapes reproduced through Emily’s Carr’s artistic representations of the Northwest versus landscapes and ecologies managed and governed by Indigenous families on the coast. As Hunt writes, amongst Kwakwakawakw peoples, women are the holders of property and thus hold central governance roles within the nation, even though this socio-political position may not be readily apparent, and in fact erased, through archival records that are centered on stories of Indigenous men. As Hunt highlights, such governance roles are further erased through approaches to climate change and environmental sustainability that often focus on macro-scale structures such as global financing for resource extraction, as well as local activism that is often fueled by a love for nature. As she writes, such approaches reproduce an “erasure of breathing, living, labouring Indigenous bodies [that] is foundational to both regimes because they each uphold the imperialist view of the land as terra nullius, as lands void of any legitimate claimants” (Hunt 2023, 28-29). As such, Hunt prioritizes the restoration of Indigenous knowledge in storying daily life and everyday movement on the northwest coast with women and gender-diverse peoples in mind, while illuminating the coloniality occurring behind Carr’s landscapes. In doing so, she shows how Coast Salish governance and law are alive through everyday practices and work that is often out of view, but that continues to shape the caretaking of coastal lands and waters through “intimate relationships of management, governance, and decision-making” (Hunt 2023, 7).

Similarly, in addressing gendered colonial politics in Nishnaabeg territory, Whetung (2019) examines how Anishinaabe women’s labor and caretaking work of lands and waters was ruptured through infrastructural developments in Nishnaabeg territory, specifically through the construction of a canal system of locks and dams. As Whetung shows, the imposition of settler colonial gender paradigms alongside the construction of the canal system has impacted Anishinaabe gendered relationships in place, illustrating the gendered violence that is embedded within the construction of settler colonial infrastructure. She writes, “the loss of access to the sites of women’s labor [from the construction of the canal system] has contributed to a shifted perception of our value within our societies; the shorelines between us in our intimate lives have been threatened by the shoreline destruction within our landscapes” (Whetung 2019, 30). Here, she poignantly highlights how the destruction of land and water relations, and the intimate relations that exist between them and Anishinaabe women, results in the devaluation of their labor and governance roles within the nation and thus reverberates throughout Nishnaabeg political systems today. In this way, Whetung calls attention to how Nishnaabeg land and water governance is premised on an internationalism (as detailed in the previous section) that must center the enduring labors and decision-making roles that Anishinaabe women continue to embody despite the gendered violence of colonial infrastructure.

The violence of colonial law and regulatory regimes

Building on Whetung’s insights, Indigenous geographical scholarship has extensively examined the violence of colonial law and regulatory regimes in facilitating infrastructural and environmental projects that inflict harm on Indigenous relations. Working with the Piikani Nation’s resistance to the Oldman River Dam, Fabris (2023) examines the challenges Indigenous communities encounter in attempting to articulate water and land relationships through the languages and structures of Canadian colonial law. He focusses on how Piikani elders, activists and community advocates drew on Piikani and Blackfoot legal traditions, as well as treaty rights, to participate in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Review process for the construction of the dam. Specifically, he examines how regulatory regimes are unable to translate Piikani legal relationships with water into terms that are legible within their conceptual framework of environmental and socioeconomic impacts. As Fabris argues, there is a need for further research on how environmental impact assessments can address Indigenous law and rights, particularly given that legal and regulatory spaces are steeped in property regimes and the commodification of water.

Such concerns are echoed by Carol Hunsberger and Sâkotowin Awâsis’ research (2019) with the Chippewas of the Thames (Deshkan Ziibiing) and their resistance against the oil company Enbridge’s expansion of Line 9. In examining The National Energy Board’s (NEB) project-specific scope, they show how the pipeline review obstructed the pursuit of justice within and between generations in the community as the pipeline’s contributions to climate change and cumulative encroachment on Indigenous lands were excluded from the review process. The authors specifically highlight the failures of meaningful consultation and procedural fairness as the NEB review was premised on a hierarchy of knowledge, upholding Enbridge’s claims, while subsuming the community’s concerns over pollution and fossil fuel use in the context of climate change and struggles for sovereignty and health.

In dialogue with such works, Andrew Curley has conducted extensive research with Diné in the Navajo Nation to examine how they understand governance and development in an era of energy transition and climate change. An aspect of Curley’s work (2021a) focusses on how the coal–energy–water nexus has created temporal encroachments on Indigenous lands and livelihoods that augment material and political difference over time and exacerbate inequalities, establishing the conditions for future dispossession, displacement and marginalization enabling settler colonial water networks (in this case, the state of Arizona’s water network). Curley explains how national infrastructural projects serve as colonial beachheads, transforming Indigenous lands, jurisdictions and sovereignties into legal-political spaces consistent with colonial laws and governance, reproducing resource colonization. He thus argues that national infrastructures and accompanying legal regimes must be attended to as they are drivers of colonial dispossession, as they build on one another temporally to ensure spatial control while intensifying colonial power hierarchies.

In other instances, Indigenous geographical scholarship has shed light on legal approaches that ostensibly align with Indigenous ontologies such as granting legal personhood rights to nature (Coombes 2020, 2021). In examining Māori rights and sovereignty in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Coombes (2020) examines how the granting of personhood rights for nature was intended to avoid the return of ancestral lands to a local tribe to retain it for preservationist conservation. As such, he shows how personhood for nature is tied to state (mis)recognition and has contradictory impacts on Indigenous political agendas and land reclamations (Coombes 2020), despite of seemingly aligning with Indigenous ontologies of land as a living relation (Coombes 2021).

Environmental violence as colonial violence

The violences inflicted on Indigenous relations through colonial capitalist infrastructural and resource extractive developments have resulted in life altering realities for Indigenous peoples around the globe. As Whyte writes, “Had someone told our ancestors a story of what today’s times are like for Indigenous peoples, our ancestors would surely have thought they were hearing dystopian tales. For Indigenous peoples live in worlds so changed by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization that our collective self-determination and agency are compromised to a degree our ancestors would have been haunted by” (2017b, 160). In recent years, these dystopias have been termed as the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, grammars which cannot fully grasp the enormity of losses and implications to Indigenous life. These grammars, which are propositions for new ways of understanding how humans, or capitalism, have fundamentally transformed the world on a geological scale, demarcate new eras in the history of the planet. As Curley and Smith argue, such theories continue to “privilege Eurocentric narratives of human history, failing to adequately engage Black and Indigenous scholarship and theorizations on the nature and origin of environmental change” (Curley and Smith 2024a, 166). Specifically, these theories overwrite coloniality and racial capitalism as “climate change urgency tramples existing struggles for environmental sovereignty and re-centers colonial and settler scholarship in theorizing planetary history” (Curley and Smith 2024a, 181; see also Davis and Todd 2017). As such, we must be skeptical of theories that bound and fracture time and space into segments as this is a central technology in colonial conquest, particularly as these frameworks risk reproducing contemporary land grabs by affirming colonial temporalities which can inform climate policies that might capture Indigenous lands in the name of climate adaptations and mitigation (Curley and Smith 2024a; see also Curley and Smith 2024b; see also Awâsis 2020 and Alcantar 2025 for texts on Indigenous temporalities).

In McGregor’s words “Indigenous peoples understand the trajectory of contemporary ecocide as having obtained its footing over 500 years ago with the onset of global colonialism” (2020b, 416; see also Whyte 2017a; 2017b, 2018). In other words, we need to understand current ecological crises as intensified colonialism (Whyte 2017b; cited in McGregor 2020b; see also Liboiron 2021). This is particularly pertinent given that Indigenous peoples’ lives are now drastically altered and entangled with extractive politics which will have an impact on how Indigenous nations will navigate climate change mitigation and adaptation measures (Curley and Lister 2020). As such, decolonizing the Anthropocene requires attention to the more complicated landscapes of colonialism as they pertain to Indigenous peoples and nations (ibid, 260), which some have called the Colonialscene (Davis and Todd 2017). And yet, Indigenous geographies have cautioned against the over-determination of colonial violence by attending to the ways that Indigenous peoples continually create their worlds through “specific acts of regenerating and perpetuating land-based knowledge, practices, and relationships” (Myhal and Carroll 2023, 101).

In examining the racial colonial politics of ice geographies, with close attention to the Arctic of North America, Jen Rose Smith writes that climate change narratives work to reproduce glaciers “as a kind of commons, a commons of scenery and of assured environmental apocalypse for all humanity” (2025, xvi). As Smith argues, “Glaciers and ice come to narrate a story about climate change that overlooks and undermines Indigenous historical and ongoing social relationships to their homelands” (ibid). In the context of monopolizing narratives of trauma, pain and crisis, Smith tells the stories of ice geographies that are enlivened through human history and politics, including state power, processes of racialization and colonial dispossession, as well as Indigenous knowledge production of ice as a living relation. As such, Smith’s work echoes the scholarship of many Indigenous scholars who have continually showed how Indigenous peoples have sustained relationships with their non-human relatives amid the destructive impacts of colonial conquest, and in some instances, have built new relationships through their experiences of dispossession, forced relocation and displacement.

Conclusion: Imagining justice through indigenous relationalities

[I] seek to present Indigenous experience in its ability to complicate what we imagine as “justice” if we cannot imagine our relations. (Million 2018, 21).

Environmental justice entails the restoration and flourishing of Indigenous relations, particularly given that ties with the natural world are at the foundation of Indigenous governance and laws, as well as languages, intergenerational knowledge transfer (Mikraszewicz and Richmond 2019), genealogical connections (Louis 2011; Richmond et al., 2024) and overall health and wellness (Nightingale and Richmond 2021; Tobias and Richmond 2014). As McGregor once wrote, environmental justice is justice for all beings of Creation as threats to land, water, animal and plant beings are threats to human existence (McGregor 2009). As such, Indigenous geographers have cautioned against environmental theories and practices that do not account for the capaciousness and intricacy of relationships that Indigenous peoples are accountable to when we speak of water governance, climate change and environmental justice.

In conceiving of justice to environmental violences amid the long trajectory of colonial conquest, Indigenous geographies have anchored their analyses in intimate relations in place while building hemispheric and global understandings of land matters (Adams and Sarvestani 2024; Curley 2021; Leonard et al., 2023). They unravel different traditions of resistance embedded in Indigenous politics (Curley 2019a; see also Lister and Curley 2017; Curley 2019b; Curley 2023; see also Awasis 2023), including the politics of decolonization and its relationship with other anti-colonial movements such as abolition (Curley and Smith 2023), something I return to in my next and final report. Further, attention is directed to the leadership of Indigenous women, trans, queer, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse relatives, as well as youth and Elders in protecting land and water relations (Gergan and Curley 2023; Goeman 2013; Hunt 2023; Iralu 2021; McGregor 2013; Tom et al., 2023; Whetung 2019; Williams et al., 2025; Wilson and Laing 2019). This resistance work is not by chance, but a reflection of how they continually create life amid the hierarchies of racial and gendered violence, as relatives who are disproportionately discarded from modernity’s sociopolitical and legal institutions.

The relational foundations of Indigenous governance and laws provide blueprints for enacting justice in relational and accountable ways. As Million states, “We get past some kinds of ‘geographical’ differences when we foreground other relations: the relations revealed, for instance, between the necessity and desire for life and clean water in African American communities in Flint, Michigan, juxtaposed with [..] needs in Standing Rock” (Million 2018, 25). I end here by drawing on Million’s insight as it gestures towards the openings that Indigenous relational approaches can offer in working towards collective liberation. In the third and final report on Indigenous peoples’ geographies, I return to questions of justice and Indigenous resistance, decolonization and liberation amid the global conditions of colonial conquest. My aim is to build on the insights offered in the first two reports by attending to Indigenous conceptions of decolonial and relational world-building and a “desire for life” (Million 2018, 25) that is embodied by Indigenous peoples around the globe.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Michelle Daigle

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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