Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism

Abstract

oiron Pollution is Colonialism Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021 ISBN: 978-1-4780-1413-3 (PB) $24.95. 214 pp. Amidst growing discussions about how to mitigate the current climate and pollution crisis, Max Liboiron presents a stunning critique of colonial practices in Western scientific research methodologies. Throughout the work Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron, founder of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) Memorial University in Newfoundland, argues three interrelated ideas. First, settler science supports violent structures of colonialism through assuming access to Indigenous land without permission and perceiving the environment as a manageable waste sink. Scientific research, even if well-intentioned, can reproduce colonial structures by working to manage, not eliminate, industrial toxicants. Second, anticolonial science is possible through specific, contextual and place-based methods which attend to scientists' obligations to their relations. Anticolonial science is community-oriented and respects Indigenous traditions, claims to the land and the local right to refuse a scientific study; the local community should own the results of research. Third, 'methodologies - whether scientific, writerly, readerly or otherwise - are always already part of Land relations and thus are a key site in which to enact good relations (sometimes called ethics)' (pp 6-7). Liboiron's work challenges management-based practices towards the environment and pollution, the colonial assumption that researchers own research, and the settler practice of conducting research in places they never were never granted permission to enter. Liboiron's demonstration of anticolonial praxis begins in the acknowledgements. These acknowledge that the text was written on the ancestral homeland of the Beothuk, that the island of Newfoundland is the ancestral homeland of the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk, and recognise 'the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut and the Innu of Nitassinan, and their ancestors, as the original people of Labrador' (p. vii). Liboiron then details personal guiding relations of family and genealogy, the ethic of gratitude and reciprocity enacted through footnotes, and those whose presence and advice made the book possible. The acknowledgements are a clear demonstration of the book's guiding ethic: knowledge is not a thing that is owned, but a relationship that is shared. What must be acknowledged is not only sources of funding and a researcher's support structure, but on whose Land the research was conducted. The first two chapters, 'Land, Nature, Resource, Property' and 'Scale, Harm, Violence, Land', generate a keyword vocabulary to describe colonial science's relationship to Indigenous Land. This review uses Liboiron's capitalisation to denote such