(Un)Heard Voices of Ecosystem Degradation: Stories from the Nexus of Settler-Colonialism and Slow Violence

Abstract

We examine the ecosystem degradation of the Kaipara moana as an example of the nexus of settler colonialism and slow violence. Settler colonialism is a type of domination that violently interrupts Indigenous people’s interactions and relationships with their land-, sea-, and water-scapes. Slow violence provides a conceptual framework to explore the slow and invisible erosion of ecosystems and to make visible how unseen violence inflicted upon nature (such as deforestation and sedimentation pollution) also unfolds at the intimate scale of the Indigenous body and household. Here, we present how the structural violence of settler colonialism and ecological transformations created a form of settler colonial slow violence for humans and more-than-humans which highlights the ethical and justice features of sustainability because of the link with settler-colonialism. We argue for the need to include local knowledge and lived experiences of slow violence to ensure ethical and just ensuring practices that better attend to the relationships between Indigenous peoples and their more-than-human kin (including plants, animals, rivers, mountains, and seas). We build on this argument using auto- and duo-ethnographic research to identify possibilities for making sense of and making visible those forms of harm, loss and dispossession that frequently remain intangible in public, political and academic representations of land-, sea-, and water-scapes. Situated in the Kaipara moana, Aotearoa New Zealand, narratives are rescued from invisibility and representational bias and stories of water pollution, deforestation, institutional racism, species and habitat loss form the narratives of slow violence. (Please see Glossary for translation of Māori language, terms and names.)