Storytelling and worldmaking climate justice futures: Indigenous climate advocacy and transnational solidarity in UN climate conferences

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes statements made by the International Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) at the United Nations Climate Change Conferences from 2017–2021 to amplify how Indigenous speakers navigate international climate negotiations and build transnational networks of solidarity through their storytelling. In looking at statements, speeches, and panels from Indigenous advocates connected with the IIPFCC, I argue Indigenous storytelling braids together temporal, place, and felt knowledges into constellations of what Tiara Na’puti calls “resilience rhetorics,” or rhetorical patterns of meaning-making across texts that rhetorically (re)iterate colonial discourses of resilience around Indigenous adaptability, relationality, and reciprocity with more-than-humans. Constellations of resilience rhetorics coalesce relational ways of knowing, connect stories through Indigenous resiliency, resist market-based, colonial solutions to climate change, and empower Indigenous international leadership in the cultivation of climate justice futures. In building on Na’puti’s work through a focus on Indigenous storytelling as worldmaking, constellations as rhetorical patterns of (re)iterated resiliency across texts, and temporal, place, and felt knowledges as relational epistemologies foregrounded in Indigenous storytelling, I argue constellations of resilience rhetorics are forms of international coalition-building that counter colonial apocalyptic temporalities, spatialities, and affectivities and center Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in climate justice solutions.