Abstract
Indigenous peoples have long been successful at adapting to climatic and environmental changes. However, anthropogenic climatic crisis represents an epoch of intensified colonialism which poses particular challenges to Indigenous peoples throughout the world, including those in wealthier ‘modern’ nation states. Indigenous peoples also possess worldviews and traditional knowledge systems that are critical to climate mitigation and adaptation, yet, paradoxically, these are devalued and marginalized and have yet to be recognized as essential foundations of public health. In this article, we provide an overview of how public health policy and discourse fails Indigenous peoples living in the colonial nation states of Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that addressing these systemic failures requires the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives beyond superficial understandings in public health-related climate change policy and practice, and that systems transformation of this nature will in turn require a radical revision of settler understandings of the determinants of health. Further, public health climate change responses that centre Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives as presented by Indigenous peoples themselves must underpin from local to global levels.
Highlights
As industrialized colonial nation states facing anthropogenic climate change, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) share several characteristics in common
Reflecting on our knowledge as Indigenous scholars from these two nation states, a central tenet of our paper is that anthropogenic climate change is intimately connected to the ideologies, systems and practices of colonialism and that the impacts on Indigenous peoples represent an intensification of colonialism (Whyte 2017; Jones 2019)
We are being challenged to decolonize; this necessarily must begin with a recognition that our concepts of social and ecological determinants of health framework are grounded in the values of western society (Pyett et al 2008) and not Indigenous values
Summary
As industrialized colonial nation states facing anthropogenic climate change, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) share several characteristics in common. While it is generally accepted that Indigenous knowledges (IK) hold much significance for climate change strategies, culturally dominant Eurocentric social structures, norms and conventions ensure their marginalization at broader and more influential decision-making levels (Williams et al 2018) This is the case in public health policy. A scan of the ANZ public health-related literature relating to climate change by one of the authors suggests gender-based analysis has remained remarkably absent (Office of the Minister for Climate Change 2009), with recent advocacy for inclusion of gender equality (NCWNZ 2019) in the country’s Zero Carbon Amendment Bill Indigenous women in both countries are very active in grass roots climate change action and hold considerable ecological knowledge and insights that could inform related policies, yet, their leadership is often not visible in formal institutional levels of governance. We argue that framing climate change (and ecological destruction more broadly) as being rooted in the colonial capitalist patriarchy allows for understanding and addressing gendered violence against our Mother Earth
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