Environment Justice

Last week, we thought about the meaning of settler colonialism, how it persists today, and what decolonization might look like. Today, we will extend that conversation as we begin shifting into our material on environmental justice. Your material today will introduce environmental justice as a framework, and specifically engage with environmental justice in indigenous struggle, such as the struggle over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock Reservation.

To engage with this issue, you’ll be reading a chapter from the book As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight For Environmental Justice, From Colonization to Standing Rock. The book is written by Dina Gilio-Whitaker from the Coville Confederated Tribes, who teaches Indigenous Studies and American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and works as an independent consulter and educator on environmental justice and other Indigenous policy-related issues.

Reading

[Item 1] Watch the videos below to get a primer on environmental justice.

[Item 2] Please read Chapter 1 “Environmental Justice Theory and Its Limitations for Indigenous Peoples,” p. 15-33. (Note the scanned document contains more than just this chapter)

Prompt

Discuss your thoughts on the videos AND what you learned from the reading (be sure to directly engage across the reading). What is environmental justice? How does it differ from environmentalism? How do you think justice is being conceptualized in ideas of environmental justice?

Powerpoint

Cover Image: Source

Powerpoint