Abstract
AbstractIn this concluding chapter, we bring together our earlier analyses of the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā River (Aotearoa New Zealand) to consider the theory and practice of Indigenous environmental justice. In this chapter, we return to review three key dimensions of environmental justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. We summarise the efforts of one Māori tribal group (Ngāti Maniapoto) to challenge the knowledge and authority claims of the settler-colonial-state and draw attention to the pluralistic dimensions of Indigenous environmental (in)justice. Furthermore, we highlight that since settler colonialism is not a historic moment but still a ongoing reality for Indigneous peoples living settler societies it is critically important to critically evaluate theorising about and environmental justice movements through a decolonising praxis.
Highlights
We discuss how settler-colonialism resulted in violence and the dispossession of Māori iwi from their land and awa
Colonisation in Aotearoa, like in other settler-colonial societies, involved settlers physically inscribing their values, imagined geographies, and collective continuance through unsustainable methods: deforestation, removal of endemic biodiversity, drainage of wetlands, productivist agriculture, air and water pollution, and so on. These means are underpinned on the settler-colonial narrative of a homeland (Aotearoa New Zealand as the ‘Britain of the South Seas’) and frequently concealed in plain sight by stories of Māori ‘wastelands’ and untamed wilderness that mask histories of violence and dispossession of Māori (Hursthouse 1861; Whyte 2016, 2018)
The inscriptions of the settler-colonial spaces provided the foundational conditions needed for settler collective continuance within Māori rohe, while negatively impeding the capacities of Māori to maintain their cultural continuation
Summary
Colonisation in Aotearoa, like in other settler-colonial societies, involved settlers physically inscribing their values, imagined geographies, and collective continuance through (what we realise) unsustainable methods: deforestation, removal of endemic biodiversity, drainage of wetlands, productivist agriculture, air and water pollution, and so on. These means are underpinned on the settler-colonial narrative of a homeland (Aotearoa New Zealand as the ‘Britain of the South Seas’) and frequently concealed in plain sight by stories of Māori ‘wastelands’ and untamed (unproductive) wilderness that mask histories of violence and dispossession of Māori (Hursthouse 1861; Whyte 2016, 2018). Let us briefly return to the three components of EJ discussed throughout the book as a means to tease out some of our thinking, and to emphasise the ways in which these three categories blur together and are interwoven within IEJ
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