Freedman, Ethan
11/20/24
Columbia University School for Social Work, New York
Submitted in partial fulfillment as a Midterm within the requirements for Columbia's School for Social Work program and Dr. Charlotte McCullagh's Human Behavior and the Social Environment class.
Acknowledgements:
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
Indigenous Perspectives and Environmental Injustice: Borders as Abstract Sites for Climate Harm
Environmental injustice can be described as actions or behaviors inflicted on or by individuals, communities, cultures, governments, institutions, and other agents that perpetuate damage at the level of the environment. Operationalizing the environment means many contexts are capable of being harmed, but something necessitating consideration is how environmental injustice can simultaneously obliterate communities and specific groups by impairing their wealths of knowledge and natural resources. Ford (2012) details how indigenous populations are exposed to climate change at nuancing levels including environment destruction and maladaptive health experiences, but reminders that native communities have major adaptive potential energy orients social workers and indigenous researchers doing environmental work. From Gloria AnzalĂșa's Borderlands/La Frontera, extending the conversation on climate injustice to center indigenous peoples enters territories of discourse on border sites as a unique physical and mental space where environments are in tension.
Discussions situated at the site of the environment could mean the surroundings, conditions, and contexts of an individual, community, population, or other sublevel, but centering Indigenous populations in discussions about environmental justice makes sensible the magnitude of climate injustice. Ford (2012) reviewed what was classified as "gray literature" on indigenous health and climate change in efforts to get to the crux of "indigenous conceptualizations" of mental and physical repercussions from environmental injustice (p. 1260). Through meta analytically reviewing research that struggled to categorize "systematic and systemwide determinants of vulnerability" to "examine the sufficiency of knowledge" on the politically charged topic of climate change, Ford portrays indigenous populations as irrefutable evidence of environmental injustice (2012; p. 1260). Because of generational pervasion of colonization, indigenous populations have a "unique sensitivity" as "warming temperatures" correlate with rising infectious disease rates, agricultural struggles, and exposures to harm (Ford, 2012; p. 1263). Indigenous communities were not only murdered for their land upon the inception of America, but the harm experienced continues in the present as effects of western knowledge production and praxis are majorly responsible for the destruction of the earth.
Ford (2012) positions that climate change repercussions compounding on eachother can result in "impacts occurring faster and of greater magnitude for many populations" (p. 1263). With poorer nations suffering the effects significantly, the "adaptive capacity" of indigenous populationsâthough incredibleâ is also caught up as an identity facing effects of environmental injustices (Ford, 2012; p. 1263-1264). To hinge on indigenous peoples lifting themselves out of climate adversity via perseverance and grit would be ignorant. We must recognize that land and knowledge on which native communities once thrived is currently facing erosion and destructionâthrough oppression from western values and production systems that perpetuate harm on all levels of the environment (Ford, 2012; p. 1263-124).
While Ford (2012) details effects of climate change for indigenous communities, Gloria AnzuldĂșa guides discourse towards the idea that centering native perspectives must include conversations about relationships to the border. The same mental and physical effects Ford (2012) sites are exponentially felt in the indigenous border experience as it is "not just a physical place," but a "psychological one" where dualities meet, "mestiza" or "double consciousness" is produced, and environments seperate (Anzuldua, 1987). AnzaldĂșa (1987) famously orients indigenous agents to the relationship that racially capitalist modes of production have with the border, as they are sites where infrastructure and policy guard access to safer environments. If poor communities are facing environmental changes more significantly and migration is one of the many stop caps to climate problems, the border is a site where agents and systems of power wield climate injustice by selecting who is granted access based on levels of citizenship.
Indigenous communities are facing dire straits with the amplifying effects of Colonization and climate change, something that is drastically affecting their proximity to safety and positive mental health experiences. While Ford (2012) highlights that centering indigenous perspectives in conversations of climate justice means understanding this, AnzuldĂșa (1987) narrows down the context of the environment to borders in efforts to abstract the experience and tensions faced by an indigenous agent. Borders must be considered for their capacities of harm when discussing environmental injustice as they are sites where power and oppression exist on binaries of two sidesâand climate change does not consider which side one stands.
Citations:
AnzaldĂșa, Gloria. (1987). Borderlands = La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Ford, J. D. (2012). Indigenous health and climate change. American Journal of Public Health, 102(7), 1260-1266.