‘We are of One Ecology’: How Indigenous Pacific Islander Poetics Map Anthropogenic Climate Change

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT While activists, scientists and even politicians have sounded the alarm regarding anthropocentrically-fueled climate change for decades, there is still cause for hope. Indigenous peoples, particularly coastal peoples, have been engaging with the effects of climate change and working to mitigate them for decades, often using traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Kyle Powys Whyte, Zoe Todd and other Indigenous scholars working in the environmental sciences, environmental humanities and Indigenous studies more broadly have explored and documented how various Indigenous communities are refusing displacement from this latest crisis caused by colonization. This essay examines the work of several Indigenous Pacific Islander poets whose experiences as both Indigenous peoples and island dwellers provide unique and important insights into the ongoing discussions of anthropogenic climate change. Craig Santos Perez (CHamoru), No‘u Revilla (Kanaka ʻŌiwi [Hawaiian]), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshallese) and Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi [Hawaiian]), who live and write from the Pacific Islands explore climate change both as a global event and as the result of a long line of ecological violences that have exploited Indigenous peoples and their lands. Yet, their poems often highlight how kinships with one another and the environment can provide hope in this time of seeming hopelessness.