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3 Environmental Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Consent
Kyle Powys Whyte
PHOTO 3.1
Diego G. Diaz / Shutterstock
Indigenous peoples are living societies who continue to exercise their own political and cultural self-determination despite facing conditions of invasion, exploitation, and colonization (Anaya, 2004; Sanders, 1977). Self-determination refers to a society’s capacity to pursue freely its own plans and future in ways that support the aspirations and needs of its members. Conditions of invasion, exploitation, and colonization are caused by groups from other societies. The groups include nations and for-profit and nonprofit organizations, such as multinational corporations, local industries, and conservationist groups. In very simple terms, invasion occurs when one society (or certain groups from it) forcefully seizes the lands and waters that another society lives on and flourishes from. The latter society is the Indigenous people. Seizure is likely aimed at several goals, including exploitation and colonization. Exploitation occurs when the invaders seek to earn economic profits at the expense of harming the Indigenous peoples. Colonization occurs when the invaders seek to create strategies to undermine the Indigenous peoples’ self-determination in preventing themselves from being exploited.
Colonial strategies for denying the colonized society’s self-determination often involve military protection of people who seek to engage in industries such as mining that take resources from Indigenous lands. Indigenous peoples do not profit from these industries and are often harmed by environmental consequences, such as pollution. Or colonial strategies involve the invading society actually forcing the creation of conditions for its members to live permanently in the new lands. In North America, the United States and Canada, as well as the European nations that preceded them, invaded Indigenous peoples’ lands and continue to exploit and colonize Indigenous peoples today. Corporations, operating with the sanction of these countries, have profited from dirty environments at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ health, cultural integrity, and economic well-being. Economic exploitation, stealing of resources, and polluting the land are all strategies to stop people from pursing their own plans and aspirations, that is, the self-determination of their societies.
For example, General Motors and Reynolds Metals dumped unacceptably high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxin, and mercury in the territories of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (New York) and the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne (Ontario) (Hoover, 2017; Tarbell & Arquette, 2000). In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous studies showed Mohawk persons suffered health problems, threats to their cultural practices, and decline of their fishing economy (Hoover, 2017). Moreover, U.S. and Canadian laws and policies restricted the capacity of the Mohawks to prevent their communities from suffering harms and living with unacceptable risks. Alice Tarbell and Mary Arquette (2000), who have played critical roles in this issue, have written that the laws and policies involved “relax[ed] treatment standards and promot[ed] substandard, temporary cleanups at Superfund sites.” The governments' responses were much too slow to address “environmental problems [at Akwesasne] and [lacked] the will and support to enforce their own decisions.” In failing to “[respect] the decisions of governments like those of Akwesasne,” the U.S. and Canadian governments have been “biased toward industry and the local economy at the expense of Native peoples” (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000, p. 99).
Indigenous peoples are among the leading groups that are working to address environmental injustice. At Akwesasne, Mohawk peoples founded projects, such as the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, the Environmental Division of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, and the Mother’s Milk Project, that revived their own traditions in order to exercise self-determination in how they cleaned up the environment and protected their community members’ safety. The Mother’s Milk project, for example, led by Katsi Cook, involved creating strategies for women affected by pollution to study their own exposure and implement their own solutions (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000). The Akwesasne Task Force, among other key roles, offers alternatives that protect health, cultural integrity, and economic vitality, such as aquaculture projects. The Traditional Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs has advocated at the level of the United Nations, presenting in 1995 a document called Haudenosaunee Environmental Restoration: An Indigenous Strategy for Human Sustainability (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000).
Indigenous peoples have never consented to the pollution of their lands. That is, they have never consented to invasion, exploitation, and colonization. When
