AnalysisFirst Nations sovereignty, Environmental Justice, and Degrowth in Northwest BC, Canada
Introduction
This paper reviews the intertwining of First Nations sovereignty struggles and environmental defense in northwest British Columbia, Canada and examines how they parallel Environmental Justice and Degrowth concerns. It focuses specifically on the Northwest Coast and Northwest Interior communities of the Haida, Wet'suwet'en, Gitxsan, Tsimshian and their neighbors, sharing an historical matrilineal feast/potlatch culture. By walking through the history, aims, and strategies of these grassroots campaigns and the traditional governance structures they promote and operate within, this paper illustrates how these struggles not only embody concerns highlighted by both Environmental Justice and Degrowth, but inextricably interweave them. The concerns of Environmental Justice and Degrowth are in these cases compatible and mutually reinforcing. Information comes from historical ethnography, current academic literature, news articles, and my own personal experience with interviews and participant observation between 2014 and 2018.
The paper proceeds as follows. The Background section reviews the history of anti-colonial First Nations struggles in the region against extractivism and cultural genocide, leading up to the current wave of direct-action-based First Nations sovereignty fights. It also reviews the development of alliances between non-indigenous environmentalists and grassroots First Nations activists. The following section reviews traditional governance structures and the fight over legitimacy. The next two sections review ways in which these struggles address Environmental Justice and Degrowth concerns. The conclusion ties together these strands and suggests how these are not just parallel concerns, but instead are inextricably interwoven.
Environmental Justice discourse is concerned with the asymmetric distribution of benefits and costs from environmental interaction (Martinez-Alier, 2015). The foundational observation is that industrial processes are usually carried out in a way that poor, women, and people of color asymmetrically experience the costs, while the benefits go to others. Often these take the form of environmental externalities – negative, non-monetized impacts of industry, which the industry is not held accountable for economically or legally and which are inflicted on others non-consensually. For example, the destruction of hunting territories via strip-mining destroys people's abilities to provide for themselves via hunting, fishing, and food-gathering and damages the fabric of their society based around these practices (Kulchyski et al., 1999). It has been argued that much of extractivist development is not a net production of wealth, but a net destruction of wealth associated with a transfer to the rich from the poor, often racialized (Bullard, 1990), or with impacts falling disproportionately on women (Krupp, 2000).
Degrowth is both a loose-knit social movement and an academic study based around the rejection of classic economic metrics like “GDP growth” as targets for social development, presenting an alternative array of criteria for wellbeing and an array of strategies for improving these measures of wellbeing that either disregard or actively decrease these traditional metrics (D'Alisa et al., 2015). Such aims and strategies include local autonomy, political and economic equity, communalism, connection to place, convivial lifeways, and voluntary simplicity. Core to Degrowth are analyses of the social and environmental effects of the dogmatic pursuit of GDP maximization, demonstrating how this has led to net decay of human welfare. In the above mining/hunting-grounds example, a net increase in GDP is associated with a net decrease in well-being, with local non-monetized decline larger than monetized profits. The mining operation is not pursued because it creates net wealth for society, but because it transfers wealth to a few. Increasing GDP is the legitimizing rhetoric of this net destruction and increase in inequity (O'Neill, 2015).
Academic discourse in the fields of Environmental Justice and Degrowth is now wrestling with the ways that these values are complimentary or potentially conflict (Gabriel and Bond, 2018). Many grassroots activists have been pursuing these goals in tandem in decolonizing struggles for decades and have at times incorporated the rhetoric of Environmental Justice and Degrowth to communicate pre-existing goals (Harter, 2004; Robinson et al., 2007). These decolonizing struggles predate the academic notions of Environmental Justice and Degrowth, but serve as examples not just of how these frames can be mutually supportive. First Nations' reassertion of consensus-based, matriarchally directed governance systems challenge racist colonial practices and seek to reverse centuries of Canadian institutionalized misogyny, paralleling Environmental Justice concerns. At the same time, they are movements toward local autonomy, communalism, voluntary simplicity, and sacred relationship to place, paralleling Degrowth aims. Moreover, these aims are intertwined, with traditional practices both socially and materially obstructing extractivism. This is the subject of this paper.
These are approximate indications of historical language boundaries and should not be taken as clear historical political boundaries.
To situate myself, between 2014 and 2018, I have intermittently engaged in participant observation research in direct action resistance campaigns in northern BC as a non-indigenous supporter, partially motivated and supported by my academic research. During this time, I also conducted interviews and video documentation in the contexts of the intersection of environmental defense and First Nations sovereignty fights. Before participation and before interviews, I would name that I was an anthropologist and using these conversations for possible formal and informal publication. This disclosure and agreement to conditions of free prior and informed consent were formally structured into protocols for participation in many settings, e.g. the Unist'ot'en Camp and Lelu Island (Lax U'u'la) occupations (Toghestiy (Wet'suwet'en), interview, May 2014,(Frost, 2015)). This ongoing research and activism has taken me through the traditional territories of the Wet'suwet'en, Haida, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haisla, Tahltan, and Heiltsuk (map in Fig. 1), and specifically to the occupations at Unist'ot'en Camp (Unist'ot'en clan, Wet'suwet'en), Madii Lii (Luutkudziiwus house, Gitxsan), and Lelu Island (Gitwilgyoots house, Tsimshian) (Frost, 2016b, Frost, 2018).
A note on nomenclature: this paper primarily uses the term “First Nations” as opposed to other terms like “indigenous”, “Native American”, etc. This emphasizes the fact that these struggles are sovereignty struggles of occupied historically self-governing people. These struggles are in large part about establishing respect in wider Canadian society toward suppressed governance institutions and establishing nation-to-nation relations. Terms like “First Nations” or “indigenous” were often used interchangeably amongst the people I interviewed, but “First Nations” was used preferentially when discussing sovereignty issues. An important distinction is that I do not use “First Nation” to refer to colonially-imposed Indian Act band councils which may have adopted this as part of their name (See discussion on governance below). Also, the spelling of names has a problematic history. I use the spellings I experienced as most commonly used by those I interviewed, but other spellings exist.
This paper does not aim to characterize indigenous peoples and their struggles generally. The scope of this paper is limited to the above named peoples and allied communities in northern BC. In addition, while there is tremendous support for grassroots First Nations activists within their communities, indigenous people in BC do not maintain a perfect consensus represented by grassroots views. Such would be surprising given the intense pressures from industry to coopt individuals (Frost, 2016a; Jang, 2017a). I aim to describe specifically some of the commonalities of history amongst grassroots First Nations activists in northern British Colombia as presented to me in interviews and participant observation, supplemented with academic literature and press.
While there are legitimate critiques of non-indigenous scholars engaging in research on indigenous communities (Smith, 2013), my experience in all of my interviews in these communities was of a priority to get their stories out in a wide variety of venues to challenge the misrepresentation of their governance and perspectives via extractivist industries (Frost, 2016a; Jang, 2017a). These strategic misrepresentations have catastrophic environmental and social impacts.
Section snippets
Historical background
The devastating history of colonialism and genocide in BC is well documented in early ethnographies (Suttles, 1978). Until the mid-1800s, the First Nations of what is now BC were (despite Canadian claims) functionally independent nations with their own trade networks and their own military forces to defend them. Before the deliberate suppression of cultural identity and language and the decimation of First Nations by European diseases, there were in what is now British Columbia over 45
Governance: feasts and matriarchy
Northwest Coast and Interior First Nations, while diverse, share matrilineality and governance structure. Legal proceedings are traditionally carried out in feasts (sometimes referred to as potlatches) (Mills, 1994). A frequent refrain is that “The feast house is the court house.” Taking the Haida feast system as an example, when a house or clan has business that they need to conduct, they discuss within the house or clan. Once consensus is reached, they hold a feast, inviting guests from other
Environmental Justice
First Nations de-colonizing efforts in BC, while not limited to environmental justice concerns, are straightforwardly inclusive of them. Problems they face parallel those that have elsewhere been labelled ‘environmental racism’ (Martinez-Alier, 2015). Social and environmental costs of extraction of resources have been disproportionately inflicted on indigenous communities through damage to their land and sea resources, while profits disproportionately flow to non-indigenous industry owners and
Degrowth
Grassroots First Nations fights parallel those in the Degrowth movement. These include Degrowth calls for voluntary simplicity, local autonomy, communalism, conviviality, and sacred relationship to place, as well as shared explicit challenging of capitalist growth ideology (D'Alisa et al., 2015; Kallis, 2011).
First Nations sovereignty is a fight for local autonomy. Western academics have only recently come to accept (via Eleanor Ostrom and others) that local control over resources is beneficial
Conclusion and synthesis
First Nations sovereignty fights demonstrate how aims of Degrowth and Environmental Justice not only can run comfortably parallel to each other but can support each other. In northwest BC, First Nations grassroots activists work toward cultural resurgence. Traditional practices, undermined in the course of nearly two centuries of colonial extractivism, directly obstruct environmentally and socially destructive extraction. In the act of pursuing lifeways directed by values and traditions to
Declarations of interest
None.
Acknowledgements
This research was pursued during a Novus Domus Erasmus Mundus postdoctoral fellowship at Institut de Ciencia i Tecnologia Ambeintals, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. The original research was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Revisions were completed while at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture.
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