Indigenous Stewardship

Historical development

Indigenous peoples governed their territories long before the states that now claim them, and their resistance to dispossession is as old as colonisation. The modern movement for environmental sovereignty grew through the twentieth century.

In the United States it grew through struggles over fishing rights, which led to the Boldt decision of 1974, through the American Indian Movement, and through the writing of Vine Deloria Jr. In Canada it grew through land claims, the Berger Inquiry (1977) and the recognition of Aboriginal title. In Latin America, Indigenous movements reshaped the constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009). In Australia came the Mabo decision (1992). Internationally, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations led, after twenty years of negotiation, to the UN Declaration in 2007.

Conservation science has lately confirmed how much land Indigenous peoples look after. A study in 2018 found that they manage or hold tenure over about a quarter of the world’s land, overlapping some 40 per cent of protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes. Scholars such as Kyle Whyte and Robin Wall Kimmerer have brought Indigenous environmental thought into academic environmental philosophy on its own terms.

Principal claims

• Indigenous peoples hold inherent rights to their territories and to govern themselves. Colonial states have violated those rights and must recognise them.
• Land and water are relatives, not resources. People owe them reciprocity.
• Indigenous knowledge of fire, harvest and water is a science of place that has sustained biodiversity for thousands of years.
• Conservation that removes Indigenous peoples from their lands continues colonial dispossession.
• Free, prior and informed consent is the minimum standard for anything that affects Indigenous territory.
• Environmental justice for Indigenous peoples needs the return of land and of jurisdiction. Consultation alone is not enough.

Policy implications

The movement calls for recognition of title and jurisdiction, and for Indigenous protected and conserved areas governed by the nations themselves. It wants co-management that carries real authority, and consent requirements for mining, drilling and infrastructure. It supports cultural burning, traditional harvest and the revival of languages. It wants land held by conservation bodies and governments returned, and funding paid directly to Indigenous governments.

Internal disagreements

Indigenous peoples disagree among themselves as any peoples do. Some nations develop their own resources on their own terms, and others refuse extraction. Some use state law and rights frameworks, while others refuse state recognition altogether, following Glen Coulthard’s critique of the “politics of recognition”. They differ on co-management as against exclusive jurisdiction, and on their relationship with non-Indigenous environmentalists, who have often been allies and often appropriated what was not theirs.

Criticisms and controversies

Governments and extractive industries have resisted consent requirements as a veto. Some conservationists have argued that sovereignty could allow harmful uses of land. Indigenous scholars warn against the stereotype of the “ecological Indian”, which casts Indigenous peoples as natural conservationists instead of as political actors. Who speaks for a nation is contested within nations, as it is everywhere.

Supporters note that the evidence on Indigenous stewardship is strong, and that the alternative, continued dispossession, has an environmental record of its own.

Relationships to other traditions

Indigenous environmental sovereignty is the ground of land back environmentalism. It is a central point of reference for decolonial ecology, environmental justice, community conservation, rights-based conservation and Buen Vivir. It stands against fortress conservation and against any planetary stewardship that would govern Indigenous lands from above. Its ethics of relationship resemble deep ecology and ecocentrism without being the same, and Indigenous scholars have often resisted being folded into them.