358 42 Colonialism’s miasmas Indigenous resistance and resilience Makere Stewart-Harawira In this time of unprecedented ecosystem collapse and species loss, the relevance of Indigenous environmental knowledge has gained increasing recognition. Over at least the last two decades, there have been increasing efforts from international agencies such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and others to integrate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in mitigating and adapting to, the effects of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity. What is remarkable about this is the degree to which traditional environmental knowledge has survived the 500-year onslaught on its relevance and veracity by the adherents of developmentalist ideologies and market capitalism. Ironically, however, this apparent good-news story is countered by a legacy of dispossession of land, language, and cultural heritage that in the 21st century remains a critical site of struggle. At the heart of this struggle is the apparatus of settler colonialism on one hand, and Indigenous sovereignty, including recognised rights to cultural heritage, traditional lands, languages, and customs, on the other. Straddling these two positions is the politico/economics of market capitalism and the commodification of the lifeworld in the name of ever-expanding growth, innovation, and development. Alongside calls for transition from fossil fuel energy sources, renewed acts of resistance from Indigenous communities may be read as a response to the increase in damaging fossil fuel and hydro development, the last gasps, perhaps, of an industry in crisis. Although often seen as quite distinct, notions of resistance and deep resilience are connected (Brown, 2015). As Penehira et al. (2014), citing Cohen (2001: 147), remark, ‘the term resilience, when applied to indigenous peoples has a long history that draws on multiple cultural strands’. The Indigenous reality is one of resilience, refusal to disappear; it is a reflection of the strength and beauty of peoples who have lived here since humans existed on this land, and will continue to do so, and that, furthermore, is a testimony to the refusal of indigenous peoples to accept assimilation or integration as an acceptable strategy for their ongoing survival. In this contribution, tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism contextualise Indigenous resilience in the face of systems collapse and colonialism’s constantly evolving strategies of capture and incorporation. The chapter begins with a discussion of two modes of colonialisation: imperialist and settler colonialism, twinning development and market capitalism with the ratification of states and the re-casting of sovereign Indigenous nations as populations in the international world order. Of particular importance is the relationship between ideologies of development and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003037187-51 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 358 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 359 Indigenous resistance and resilience 359 violence of settler colonialism. This section is followed by an overview of Indigenous modes and strategies of resistance and resilience and the demands for recognition of Indigenous rights within international law. Here the focus is on the struggle for recognition of Indigenous rights, including the right to full, free, prior, and informed consent to any form of development on their traditional lands, and the evolving responses of settler states. As a strategy of extinguishment, settler colonialism’s impact is not only historical; its servitude to the imperatives of market capitalism and the engulfing of the lifeworld marks the present moment with a long footprint into the future. Indigenous peoples’ resilience in the face of shape-shifting strategies by states (and industry) may be seen as a bulwark against a dimming future. The final section points towards possibilities for hope in the reframing of governance centred on the well-being of human and non-human species and interrelationships. Indigenous sovereignty and the imperial project Indigenous sovereignty has been central to Indigenous communities’ acts of resistance against colonisation ever since the late 15th century. The 1493 ‘Inter Cetera Divini’ Bull which contained references to the ‘certain remote islands and also mainlands’ discovered by Columbus included the acknowledgement crucial to the recognition of sovereignty and, indeed, humanity that ‘these nations living in the said islands and lands believe that there is one God and one Creator in the heavens’ (Stewart-Harawira, 2005: 59). Because Columbus reported the peoples occupying the newly ‘discovered’ lands as having a recognisable social order and worshipping a higher being, according to ‘natural-law’ interpretations by legal scholars Grotius and Vitorio, they should therefore be regarded as sovereign peoples. This early recognition of Indigenous sovereignty based on natural law later gave rise to treaty making in parts of the Americas and in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, at stake for Spain and Portugal was not only the ownership and control of treasures and merchandise to be found in the discovered lands but the ongoing territorial struggle between Portugal and Spain. The subsequent 50-year debate on the humanity and sovereignty of Indigenous occupants and the merits of colonisation sparked by two Papal Bulls was brought to a conclusion with the declaration of the doctrine of discovery by the Council of the Indies in 1550.The findings of the Council foreshadowed the conviction of Christian/European superiority that underpinned the establishment of world order and international law. The declaration of discovery enabled the Pope to place non-Christian peoples under the tutelage and guardianship of the first Christian nation discovering their lands provided that those peoples were reported by the discovering nation to be ‘well disposed to embracing the Christian faith’, a precursor to the proposed creation of a wardship for Indigenous peoples which would enable European states to administer their countries on their behalf. A hundred years later, a case heard in London, England, in 1622, found an Elizabethan Protestant doctrine that declared the English to be in covenant with God to bring ‘true’ Christianity to ‘heathen natives’, to have necessarily abrogated the legal and political authority of ‘heathen infidels’ when it came into contact with Christian sovereignty. Thus the doctrine of discovery and the right to win souls became the justification for the seizure of Indigenous lands and the waging of war on Indigenous peoples. By the end of the 16th century, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English imperialist policies of expansion and resource extraction for export to core countries saw the invasion 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 359 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 360 360 Makere Stewart-Harawira of many Indigenous peoples’ territories throughout the ‘known’ world accompanied by genocide of unimaginable magnitude. During this drive for the expansion of territory and resources during the 16th century, the influence of Hobbes and Locke saw an increasing disconnect between the state of nature and social organisation by giving the state of nature ‘political expression’. As Tourraine (1995), cited in Stewart-Harawira (2005: 62), points out, ‘[t]he analysis of a community and the needs of its members is replaced by an analysis of labour and property which must be protected by laws’. Thus the function of natural law was changed from protecting the common ownership of land and its produce to protection of ‘the freedom to act, trade and to own property’. Lockean distinctions between different types of Indigenous societies and a natural-law duty to till the soil became the rationale for overriding Indigenous peoples’ objections to the usurpation of their lands. It was achieved by both violent occupation and the establishment of colonial law accompanied by the subjugation of the Indigenous occupants. This was the case in territories settled by both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of colonisation (Tully, 2008). Recommended reading: Ivison et al. (2000). Imperial and settler colonialism Colonialisation—the process by which another country or nation lays claim to the territories and resources of another—is commonly categorised in two ways. External colonialisation, as defined by Tully (2008), is the process by which a colonising power imposed a colonial system of law and governance, often leaving in place people to administer on its behalf or, as in the case of territories in Africa, trained selected individuals as administrators in England before sending them home to govern on their behalf. Here the primary objective was the acquisition of wealth under mercantilism. Colonised primarily by Spain but also by Portugal and France, countries in Latin America, including for instance Mexico and Brazil, were sources of commodities such as gold and sugar, as well as coerced labour, in some cases provided by people forcibly relocated from African countries. Internal colonisation, commonly referred to as settler colonialism, is the process by which the colonising society is built on the territories of formerly free people, imposing a system of colonial law, and exclusive jurisdiction, over them and their territories with the objective of accumulation (Tully, 2008: 261). As an example of settler colonialism, the British system of colonisation was driven by ideas about systems of accumulation that would support capital accumulation through inflating the price of land to ensure both a constant supply of labour and the underwriting of the cost of human migration. This model of colonisation depended upon attracting capitalists who would have a ready supply of labour in the form of migrant labourers who eventually buy land with their savings (Stewart-Harawira, 2005). The imposition of colonial systems of land ownership, governance, and market capitalism saw these ‘settlers’ became the new populations, systematically dispossessing the diminishing Indigenous populations who were relocated to ‘reserve’ areas inadequate to sustain them. While the appropriation of land and resources of the Indigenous peoples is common to both forms of colonisation, the foundational difference is jurisdiction.Whereas in external or imperial colonisation, the imperial power and the colonies exist on different territories, settler or internal colonisation involves permanent occupation with the aim of exercising exclusive jurisdiction over lands, resources, and peoples. The incorporation of Indigenous peoples in the service of capital through 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 360 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 361 Indigenous resistance and resilience 361 ‘strategies of containment’ was integral to the goal of capitalist expansion (Adamson & Davis, 2016). The process involves strategies of extinguishment (Tully, 2008). In settler colonies, extinguishment included the appropriation of Indigenous flora and fauna for the great botanical collections of Europe and England. Documented by environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby, Geoff Parkes, and Catherine Knight, this was accompanied by the colonisation of indigenous terrains with foreign flora and fauna and intended to create the conditions for agriculture, hunting, and fishing in the image of the home countries. Developmentalism was responsible for the taming and channelling of waterways, the toxification of freshwater systems, and the degradation of lands which were the source of Indigenous communities’ collective continuance (Whyte, 2018). The weaponising of education by settler colonial states as a tool for removing ‘obstacles to development’ targeted Indigenous foundational ontological identities, languages, and cultural norms. The extinguishment of Indigenous social and political structures, relations of trade and exchange, and the means of survival have been well documented by scholars such as Judith Simons, J.S. Millloy, and Carolyn Marr. In North America, education policies aimed to ‘Kill the Indian in the child’ and ‘Save the Man’, in Aotearoa New Zealand to replace the ‘beastly communism of the pa’ with the values of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, and train Maori youth to be docile labourers, and in Australia to eradicate the Indigenous identities of stolen Australian Aborigine children, replacing them with false ethnic identities such as Italian. The wielding of colonial law as a strategy for deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of Indigenous customary lands, the eradication of existing Indigenous law, and the dispossession and reincorporation of Indigenous peoples in the service of capital and the colonial state have been documented by postcolonial scholars and experts in Indigenous law, such as James Tully, Michael Asch, and John Borrows.What also defines settler colonialism, however, is the resistance and refusal of Indigenous peoples to surrender sovereignty based on historical occupation and relational obligations to non-human entities. Recommended reading: Armitage (1995). Resilience and resistance on the global stage Throughout colonialism’s onslaught, Indigenous peoples have deployed multiple strategies to retain their sovereignty, their culture, and their rights. The politicising, counterdiscourses of Indigenous peoples and responses of international agencies sit at the intersection of evolving international human rights law, competing understandings of sovereignty, and developmentalism in service of market capitalism. Engagement in the global political arena began as early as 1923 with the attempt of both Haudenosaunee Chief Deskaheh and Maori Leader W.T. Ratana to speak to the League of Nations in Geneva to defend the right of their people to self-determination. However it was the 1970s resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ international movements that saw the deployment of a politics of indigeneity and refusal against the collective power of colonising states across national and international forums. The first global Indigenous conference which was held in British Columbia in 1975 formalised the establishment of the World Council on Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) with a Declaration which included the statement: ‘We vow to control again our own destiny and recover our complete humanity and pride in being Indigenous People’ (Lightfoot, 2016: 88). At the first meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP), comprised of representatives of states, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and Indigenous 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 361 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 362 362 Makere Stewart-Harawira people, the WCIP presented a document of Principles for Guiding the Deliberations. The document specifically invalidated all versions of the doctrine of discovery applied by states to deprive Indigenous peoples of their self-determination, lands, and natural resources, without their ‘free prior and informed consent’ and insisted that treaties made between Indigenous peoples and states be internationally protected (Lightfoot, 2016). Over 25 years of struggle and negotiation throughout which states argued that the rights requested by Indigenous peoples were already recognised in various ways within their constitutions, parallel regional and international meetings were the venues for Indigenous peoples’ reaffirmations of their rights to free, prior, and informed consent, to their cultural practices and to determine their own forms of development, and the urgency of protecting and defending nature. The resurgence of Indigenous communities in Latin America in the 1990s brought fresh impetus to Indigenous opposition to the exploitation and extractivism that threatened Indigenous lands. The Andean worldview of Pachamama, an Andean goddess who sustains life on earth, and a ‘collectivist notion of a community of all species and ecosystems’ (Humphreys, 2017), resonated with the cosmologies of Maori and Pasifika Indigenous activists as well those of North America. From international gatherings such as the historic 1992 Kari-Oca 1 meeting of 400 Indigenous peoples gathered at KariOca, Brazil, one week before the Rio de Janeiro Conference from which came the Kari-Oca 1 Declaration, came further declarations such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Earth Charter, the ‘Cochabamba Declaration’ (2010), which called for the establishment of an International Climate Justice Tribunal, and Kari-Oca II (2012). Throughout, Indigenous peoples have called attention to the impacts of destructive practices in agriculture, mining, and water management and to the need for a new global paradigm to restore harmony between nature and human beings. Of primary importance in these gatherings was the reaffirming and re-enacting of ceremony and Indigenous peoples’ responsibility to defend and protect the natural environment. In Bolivia in 2006, the inauguration of Evo Morales, the Indigenous leader whose two key planks were economic prosperity and the renationalisation of resources, also gave effect to the right of Indigenous people to control their own natural resources and to the opening of new possibilities for deepened, more inclusive forms of democracy. At the same time, this has raised questions about whether this ‘deepening of political and economic democratization, allowing the people to “live well” (vivir bien), while at the same time continuing to hoe the line of extractive capital and its global assault on nature and livelihoods’ can be successful (Veltmeyer & Bowles, 2020: 11). The passing of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) in 2006 and its ratification in 2007 were ultimately the culmination of decades of often tense negotiation between states and Indigenous peoples, particularly around the language of self-determination and ‘peoples’. En route to reaching some kind of agreeable position, states adopted a variety of tactics to avoid confirming and ratifying the draft proposal. During the lead-up to the annual negotiations in 1995, for example, the New Zealand caucus was instructed by the Cabinet Working Group to ‘appear to be in agreement but to consent to nothing outside of existing New Zealand policies,’1 a position New Zealand, along with Canada and Australia, continued to hold for many months before finally ratifying the Declaration. For these states, any acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination was seen by states as a major threat to state sovereignty and integrity. Article 3 of the Declaration declares that, ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 362 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 36 Indigenous resistance and resilience 363 their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and economic development’. The proposed requirement for ‘free, prior and informed consent’ by Indigenous peoples before any form of development be undertaken on their territories was also a major issue of contention. Article 19 requires that: ‘(s)tates shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them. This includes ‘[t]he undertaking of projects that affect indigenous peoples’ rights to land, territory and resources, including mining and other utilization or exploitation of resources’ (Article 32) and the relocation of indigenous peoples from their lands or territories (Article 10). Of particular significance is Article 26, which includes: ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired’ and ‘States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources’. Such recognition, the article adds, shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, traditions, and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned. Notably, these and other rights, such as the rights to ‘cultural expression, practice of traditions, relationships with their land and territories’ (Articles 11–13; 24–27) are carefully circumscribed. Article 46, for instance, includes that, ‘[n]othing in this Declaration may be interpreted … or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States’—addressing the contention over potential secession that states had consistently argued lay at the base of their continuing objection to any notion of Indigenous peoples’ self-determination. Nonetheless, in stark contrast to Bolivia and Ecuador, both of which enshrined the rights of nature within their constitutions in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the four settler states—Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand—initially refused to ratify the Declaration, arguing that it had no legal standing and that such rights were included in their constitutions. At issue then, as now, was states’ anxieties regarding the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own development and to refuse destructive forms of development on their traditional lands. Settler states’ responses to challenges to the legitimacy of their jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples’ customary lands and to demands for recognition of customary rights and practices are new ways to limit or redefine these rights and reincorporate Indigenous natural resources into their own economic agenda. In Canada, such strategies have included the British Columbia provincial government’s ‘reallocation’ of the timber rights in the Carrier Sekani peoples’ traditional territory to large corporate logging companies despite then ongoing treaty negotiations to settle long-standing issues surrounding Carrier Sekani land and resource rights (Anaya & Williams, 2001). When faced with the refusal of Indigenous communities to consent to destructive and unwanted forms of development on their lands, a ploy common to settler states is to bypass traditional Indigenous leadership, deploying instead coercive modes of engagement with state-appointed governance bodies, often involving the promise of jobs and benefit sharing. Hence the refusal of hereditary chiefs in British Columbia to consent to the Coastal GasLink pipeline crossing fragile ecosystems in their traditional territories saw this traditional governance 9780367478865_pi-404.indd 363 21-Jun-21 17:32:30 364 364 Makere Stewart-Harawira structure bypassed in order to garner benefit-sharing agreements and consents from elected chiefs and councils. Where controversial practices such as these are concerned, it is not uncommon for full community-wide consultation to be omitted. Where required consent from Indigenous communities fails to materialise and Indigenous communities put their bodies on the line in active resistance against the desecration of sacred lands, it is likewise not uncommon for government agencies such as militarised police to be deployed against Indigenous communities attempting to prevent pipeline construction on their lands, as on Wet’suwet’en nation’s ancestral lands in British Columbia (Dhillon, 2019). An alternative strategy recently deployed in Western Australia with state consent was to blow up the offending sacred artifacts (previously identified as being over 46,000 years old) and apologise afterwards (Wahlquist, 2020). Recommended reading: McCreary and Turner (2018). Enacting resilience in an over-heating world In challenging ongoing environmental destruction through deforestation, damming, water, and soil pollution, and fossil fuel extractivism, Indigenous demands for the recognition of rights, for environmental justice, and for the cessation of forms of destructive development on traditional lands and waters have been some of the most powerful voices against the devastating impacts of market capitalism. This includes the increasing acceptance of human–non-human relationships through legally defined personhood rights, such as the rights of rivers and sacred mountains. Co-governance arrangements which provide for shared management of waterways and forests are a clear signal of the increasing recognition of the importance of Indigenous ontologies, values, and ethics and the importance of human–non-human relationships as we look towards our fragile future. Nevertheless, as a closer examination of the Whanganui River legislation and the struggle to protect freshwater in Aotearoa New Zealand shows, there is much yet to be done to overcome the challenges posed by settler colonialism’s embrace of market-driven capital (StewartHarawira, 2020). Confronted with statistics of massive species loss, irretrievable ecosystem damage, and carbon feedback loops as yet excluded from our carbon accounting, there is an imperative to replace market-based systems with forms of governance predicated on the right of all beings to thrive. Fulfilling the terms of UNDRIP would be a positive step in that direction. We have a long way to go. Note 1 Confidential Cabinet instructions to the New Zealand Caucus for the Declaration of Indigenous Rights negotiations, 1995, in a document received by the author. References Adamson, J., & Davis, M. (eds.) (2016). Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice. 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