Native American Environmental Justice as Decolonization

Abstract

In the Pacific Northwest, control over lucrative and dwindling salmon fisheries have served as the primary source of contention between Native Americans and non-Indians for nearly 200 years. Despite the lopsided power dynamics favoring the states, and the commercial and recreational stakeholders whose interests are championed by State authority, fishing tribes have successfully infiltrated prevailing decision-making bodies and have taken a leading role in efforts to save the salmon from the perils of overfishing and habitat destruction utilizing a combination of scientific methods and traditional knowledge. This study examines the efforts of fishing tribes in Washington State to protect their customary and commercial fishing rights as a key project in a broader process of decolonizing state institutions that have historically controlled Indigenous resources as well as the entrenched ideological foundations that have historically devalued Native American culture. Examined through the lenses of racial formation, state-building and environmental justice theories, this case provides broader lessons for how scholars of social inequality can investigate the mechanisms through which racial inequality is both produced and resisted. Our findings contribute to undertheorized areas in the social inequality literature by taking history seriously, while paying particular attention to the ways that legal, political, and cultural mechanisms interact to reinforce systems of stratification or to reveal opportunities for meaningful resistance. Our analyses also foreground the role of human agency in successfully challenging long-standing legal and cultural foundations of racial inequality.