Video: Environmental Justice in Indian Country

A virtual talk with Dina Gilio-Whitaker

October 5, 2021

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos and an independent educator in American Indian environmental policy and other issues. She is the author of two books, including the award-winning As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock

This talk is the second in the Racial Justice Initiative’s fall 2021 speaker series, moderated by Pitzer Professor and Associate Dean Adrian Pantoja.

  • Transcript

    Professor Adrian Pantoja: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our second lecture of the Racial Justice Initiative speaker series. The Racial Justice Initiative was established by President Oliver in the wake of the George Floyd murder and the ongoing racial violence experienced by African Americans. One of the things that we know from the speakers we’ve been inviting to campus, what we see in the news, FBI statistics, is that racialized violence is not only directed at African Americans, but other communities of color; other marginalized groups are also facing racialized violence. We’re talking about Latinos, Muslim Americans, Asian Americans, and of course, Native people.

    It is my pleasure to welcome Dina Gilio-Whitaker to our panel today. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, of the Colville Confederated Tribes, is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at Cal State San Marcos. She is an independent educator in American Indian environmental policy and other issues. Gilio-Whitaker is the author of two books, including the award-winning book As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. She is an educator, a scholar, a public intellectual, and an activist.

    Welcome, Dina. The webinar is scheduled for one hour. I will turn it over to you and then we will open it up to Q&A.

    01:30
    Dina Gilio-Whitaker: That sounds great. Thank you so much, Adrian. [Indigenous language] Dina Gilio-Whitaker and I am coming to you from the traditional and unceded homelands of the Acjachemen Nation in what’s currently called Orange County in Southern California. And as Professor Pantoja says, I am a descendant of the Colville Confederated Tribes, I am related through a long line of families on the reservation. But I come to be… I was born and raised in Los Angeles, so I have never lived in my tribal community. I am that first generation of Native people who were impacted by the federal government’s termination policy in the 1950s and 60s. And so that’s how I come to be born and raised in LA during that time period.

    I have a PowerPoint to share with you, and I’m going to go ahead and share my screen with you now and dive in.

    So I would like to talk to you about what indigenous, indigenizing environmental justice looks like and decolonizing, and these are two different things. They sometimes are used interchangeably, but I’m just using that as a framework to talk about this larger project that has resulted in this book, As Long as Grass Grows. When I started this project, it really began when I was a student, an undergrad student, probably like many of you in the audience right now. I was in American Indian Studies getting a bachelor’s and I had come to school as a non-traditional student, older student. And I was very passionate about, not just as a Native person, about studying, going into American Indian Studies, but also I was very motivated and driven by environmentalism going back decades, at least to the 80s for me, and caring about the environment and learning about it, and just wanting to know more at that time.

    We started talking about, we started hearing about, what we at the time called global warming. We didn’t really call it climate change at the time, but this is what really got my attention. And so I started, I just kept on learning about those topics. And when I got into school, and I was taking as many (this American Indian Studies program with the University of New Mexico), and then I was taking courses on environmentalism too, but within the American Indian Studies Department. There was a course that I took called Environmental Justice, and at that time, I didn’t know what environmental justice was, but I learned about it from within the Native American Studies perspective. And at that time, which was about 2007, I guess, it was still kind of an emerging conversation for Native people. It had been, I didn’t know about it, and I could tell by the way that the course was put together, there was not very much material that I was studying that was written by Native scholars. There was only a handful, and we were reading kind of peripherally-related material. And so I had the sense then that this was a pretty emergent discourse in Native Studies. And so, then I got into grad school; I was on the same campus in American Studies. And I took another course they offered in that program, a course on environmental justice, but of course, it was a grad-level course. And I noticed in that class, we read no Native scholars at all. There was virtually no perspective on American Indians and what we call environmental justice.

    And I learned that by then, by that time, that this thing that we call environmental justice had been around since the early 1980s. So it was a pretty well-established, certainly discourse, but also a theory and academic field of study, and law and policy. And so, I was learning about all of that stuff. But I also brought with me my perspective, from American Indian Studies, which really hinges on our theoretical foundation of colonialism. And none of that, that was not part of what I was learning about environmental justice in this program. What I learned about in that program was that Environmental Justice or EJ, hinges on a concept that’s called environmental racism. And environmental racism says that people of color are targeted in various ways, by industry that exposes them to greater risk and harm and illness. And because of toxic, mostly toxic industry, so that’s really what it kind of boiled down to, and it begins in the south, early 1980s, 1982, 1983, where Black communities are being targeted for toxic waste dumps, and they believe that they’re being intentionally targeted because they’re poor and they’re relatively powerless. That gives birth to this entire topic we call environmental justice. And so, they start by holding community studies, creating their own studies in their communities, to find out and test this hypothesis of whether or not environmental racism is really a thing.

    So I would like to talk to you about what indigenous, indigenizing environmental justice looks like and decolonizing, and these are two different things. They sometimes are used interchangeably, but I’m just using that as a framework to talk about this larger project that has resulted in this book, As Long as Grass Grows. When I started this project, it really began when I was a student, an undergrad student, probably like many of you in the audience right now. I was in American Indian Studies getting a bachelor’s and I had come to school as a non-traditional student, older student. And I was very passionate about, not just as a Native person, about studying, going into American Indian Studies, but also I was very motivated and driven by environmentalism going back decades, at least to the 80s for me, and caring about the environment and learning about it, and just wanting to know more at that time.

    We started talking about, we started hearing about, what we at the time called global warming. We didn’t really call it climate change at the time, but this is what really got my attention. And so I started, I just kept on learning about those topics. And when I got into school, and I was taking as many (this American Indian Studies program with the University of New Mexico), and then I was taking courses on environmentalism too, but within the American Indian Studies Department. There was a course that I took called Environmental Justice, and at that time, I didn’t know what environmental justice was, but I learned about it from within the Native American Studies perspective. And at that time, which was about 2007, I guess, it was still kind of an emerging conversation for Native people. It had been, I didn’t know about it, and I could tell by the way that the course was put together, there was not very much material that I was studying that was written by Native scholars. There was only a handful, and we were reading kind of peripherally-related material. And so I had the sense then that this was a pretty emergent discourse in Native Studies. And so, then I got into grad school; I was on the same campus in American Studies. And I took another course they offered in that program, a course on environmental justice, but of course, it was a grad-level course. And I noticed in that class, we read no Native scholars at all. There was virtually no perspective on American Indians and what we call environmental justice.

    And I learned that by then, by that time, that this thing that we call environmental justice had been around since the early 1980s. So it was a pretty well-established, certainly discourse, but also a theory and academic field of study, and law and policy. And so, I was learning about all of that stuff. But I also brought with me my perspective, from American Indian Studies, which really hinges on our theoretical foundation of colonialism. And none of that, that was not part of what I was learning about environmental justice in this program. What I learned about in that program was that Environmental Justice or EJ, hinges on a concept that’s called environmental racism. And environmental racism says that people of color are targeted in various ways, by industry that exposes them to greater risk and harm and illness. And because of toxic, mostly toxic industry, so that’s really what it kind of boiled down to, and it begins in the south, early 1980s, 1982, 1983, where Black communities are being targeted for toxic waste dumps, and they believe that they’re being intentionally targeted because they’re poor and they’re relatively powerless. That gives birth to this entire topic we call environmental justice. And so, they start by holding community studies, creating their own studies in their communities, to find out and test this hypothesis of whether or not environmental racism is really a thing.

    11:35
    So eventually, this chapter, or the master’s thesis, turned into what became the seed for this book, because after I got out of grad school, I kept writing all throughout grad school. I was writing about what environmental justice was, all of that became foundational to the work that I kept doing as a journalist, and as a scholar working in a nonprofit, an indigenous nonprofit policy research center. So I just kept doing that research for all those years after grad school. And then Standing Rock happened in 2016. By then, I had already written my first book co-authored with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and then the publisher, Beacon Press, had come to me and said, with Standing Rock in the news, they had said, what does environmental justice look like for Native people? And of course, Standing Rock was the perfect example, and so it was just the convergence of all these circumstances that became the perfect moment to write this book. So that’s how the book comes together.

    So kind of unpacking all of that, how to bring some kind of highlight the main points of this way of theorizing an indigenized environmental justice framework, I really like to use the example of this painting because I think this painting is something that’s so familiar to most, if not all of us, we’ve all seen this painting at some time in our lives. And it really is… it’s John Gast’s 1872 painting called “American Progress.” And it serves as such a great point of analysis. And because we can deconstruct the image to get to the root message of it, and it’s all explicit in the image, which is captured by the central figure here who has a name, and her name is Columbia. Gee, I wonder where that came from? We all know. But we are tempted to think in this image that Columbia is an angel, right? She is sort of angelic appearing, she is in white robes, usually that’s sort of like an angel, an angel outfit. And the flowing robes sort of implies wings, but they’re not really wings. They’re just, but its hints, it leans in that direction. She’s very fair skinned, she’s obviously racially white. She holds a book in her hand, and we’re tempted to think that maybe that’s a Bible, but it’s not. It actually says on there “Education.” So these religious undertones here are pretty glaring. But she also has on her arm a roll of wire, and you can see the wire connecting what we presume to be a telegraph line, and if we look at the larger picture, over in the east, to the right part of the image, is the rising sun. We know that’s the east; the sun rises in the east, we see urbanization, we see technology, we see boats and we see a bridge, and we see a built environment, and we also see railroads on the ground and, of course, the telegraph lines. We see she appears to be bringing the light with her as she heads to the east and the message here is she’s bringing with her technology and technology is represented by light as she heads toward the west, seeming to chase out the darkness and we see coming with her a new people. These are people with modern farming implements, they are farmers, they are gold miners, they are people in covered wagons, they’re the intrepid pioneers. And they are, they seem to be chasing out the old, the populations, the Indians, the wild animals, the buffalo and the bear and the wolf are all there, and they seem to be, the Indians are looking back, seeming to be in fear of this. So the message is really clear that these older societies are being moved out. This is Western expansion; this is made manifest in this image. This is manifest destiny and settler colonialism in action. And the message of this image is what has turned into a structure that we call settler colonialism. We say that settler colonialism is about the elimination of the Native in order to replace, so settler populations come eliminate Native populations in order to replace them on the land. And the way that this has been done historically, through historical narratives, and even in the creation of the legal system, is that it happens, it’s justified, it’s profoundly violent, you don’t get that sense in this image; it all seems pretty benign and pretty nice. But it’s a profoundly violent process and in order to justify that violence on Indigenous people and nations, must be constructed as inferior in order to rationalize and legitimize this taking of the land.

    And all of that, the legalized, the legitimization of that through the legal system, happens beginning in 1823, with the first Supreme Court case ever argued about American Indians, which had to do with establishing clear land titles. Not surprisingly, the new country needed to figure out how to basically cover its tracks and have clear land titles in the European model. And so that gives birth to something called the Doctrine of Discovery which is still the foundation of federal Indian law in which Native people have no rights to the land, and literally we do not own titles to our own lands that we reserved in treaties. And so, this gave birth to an entire complicated legal system that the federal government uses to govern all of our lands and all of our lives. And so, it’s very paternalistic, it’s this hegemonic relationship, and it’s fundamentally genocidal because if we say settler colonialism is about eliminating the Native population, then it’s always already ongoingly genocidal for Native people in a huge variety of subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways.

    So, how do we, how might we talk about that, like the genocidal nature of this history? I mean, we know of certainly the flat-out killing of people, of Native peoples, has been genocidal toward American Indian populations, but one of the ways that was carried out was through the remaking of the landscape. As Europeans marched westward and pushed the original inhabitants out of the way because, of course, Native people were seen as obstacles, this is all about progress, right? Western expansion is all about progress, about narrating a superior, a supreme society who are supreme and superior because of their technology, and also because of their race. And so, this Industrial Revolution, as it sweeps its way westward across the continent, remakes the landscape in some very particular cultural ways. So we can talk about this in terms of cultural landscapes. And the ways that technology was put to use in ways that was designed to benefit the settler population, but ultimately, is genocidal to Indigenous populations. And we talk about these processes of ecocide. So, this is about modernity, about Europeans bringing their technology to build this new society. And what it does is it produces these ecocidal impacts on the land. And because Native people are so connected to the land, these ecocidal processes are genocidal for them, while in other words, while it’s bringing life or the conditions of life for settler populations, it’s bringing the conditions of death for Native people.

    The images that I have here are really clear examples. There are countless examples that we can name about this in 400 or 500 years of colonialism. But all of these examples exist within the 20th century and are particularly poignant for the stories that they tell. In the image on the left, we see the Missouri River watershed. What happens in the Missouri River, on the Missouri River, spanning North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, is… the Missouri River is a massive river, a huge watershed in the Midwest in this part of the Northern Plains. And it’s the homeland to what used to be called the Great Sioux Nation. The federal government made treaties with the Great Sioux Nation and the initial treaty in 1851, was a land set aside. So, reservations are, they emerge from treaties in which tribal nations make treaties with the federal government and they reserve tracts of lands to themselves as they cede lands to the federal government, whether it’s by choice or not. And generally, it’s not by choice, these are usually forced arrangements. And they force, ideally, they want to establish relationships, friendship, but they also forced these land cessions, Native people to give up their lands, while they retain lands for themselves. That’s where we get the word “reservation.” So, in 1851, most of this landmass is reserved as the Great Sioux Nation, but through time and the dirty dealings of the federal government, it gets whittled away. And by the 20th century, mid-20th century, what we have are these small reservations here; there’s seven of them. Standing Rock is right here — it straddles North and South Dakota. But what happens in about 1940, in the 1940s, the US is coming out of the Great Depression, federal policy is about infrastructure building a new economy through these massive infrastructure projects like dams. So, the Pick-Sloan Act gets passed in 1944 to build five dams on the land, and it’s in theory to control flooding, and also to create these large reservoirs for irrigation for farmland. But what happens is when you build dams that create those reservoirs and lakes, it floods; it floods land, and it displaces people. And that’s exactly what happened with these dams. These dams altogether displaced, over 900 families, according to Nick Estes, over 900 families. So that’s 1000s of people that the flooding, of the building of dams and the flooding displaces them, forcing them out, having to move to other places, drowning village sites, drowning food resources, drowning timber resources, burials, all kinds of places that are important, cultural places for the Lakota people of the Great Sioux Nation. So, this has massively devastating impacts for the people in the mid-20th century, so this, the massive displacement of these populations.

    Well, in the Columbia River watershed, on the other hand, something similar but very different, actually happens. And this is the area where my ancestors are from, up on the northern Columbia plateau, which is this region up here. The Colville Indian reservation is right here, spans over a million acres, and this is the northern Columbia plateau, and down here we see the southern Columbia plateau. There was a massive salmon fishery down here called Celilo Falls, that was a very important fishing site and the center of culture for all… In this part of the country, the salmon were the most important food cultural resource that we had in this entire area, so we consider ourselves salmon people. So in the early 1940s, the building of the Dalles Dam resulted in the flooding of Celilo Falls. And then, but just a few years earlier than that, was the building of Grand Coulee Dam, which happened on our reservation without our consent, with promises to pay royalties of hydroelectricity that the dam was to provide or was to generate. Well, none of that ever happened until we sued them in 1997 to live up to their promise. But what happened in the meantime, was the building of this dam on our land, created this massive reservoir and it floods our major fishing ground. We had a fishing ground like Celilo Falls that we called Kettle Falls and it was the center of the culture for thousands of people from this region in the northern Columbia plateau and up into British Columbia. And then what happened, so we lose our fishing grounds; it’s like ripping the heart out of our cultures. No more salmon. And then what happens is, they keep building dams on the main stem of the Columbia and its tributaries. There are over 60 dams built on the Columbia River watershed. And the net impact of all that dam building has resulted in the blockage of salmon runs, which means, which has led to the collapse of salmon populations. Salmon populations, or salmon, is a keystone species. And that means that when you endanger a species that’s a keystone species or when it becomes extinct, it leads to a cascading effect of other extinctions, and it impacts huge ecosystems and environments. And so that’s, what’s happened. So, we see two very different effects of dam building happening here in the West.

    On the other hand, we have something else going on here, and this image here has nothing to do with dams or fish. But it has to do with uranium mining and how the uranium, the history of uranium mining in the West in the 20th century, has left massive environmental contamination in largely areas of Native reservations, especially in the Four Corners region, which is down here in this, intensification of… all these black dots are uranium mines. Most of them are completely spent, but none of them cleaned up. There are over a thousand of them just in the Four Corners area alone. And those, only a handful of them have ever been cleaned up, and so those areas are basically toxic waste dumps that are exposed to the elements. Radioactive materials, it seeps into the groundwater, it flies into the air because of the wind, and it’s in the ground. So, this is an ongoing environmental contamination of tribal communities.

    30:33
    So, when we talk about these incredible ecological impacts, it’s very difficult to; there’s no literature in the environmental justice literature talking about it. In these ways, understanding these, it’s not that the environmental justice literature doesn’t cover these, it’s that it doesn’t understand these as very particular aspects of environmental injustice for Native people. And so, this is about challenging the narratives about modernity progress, and how they have contributed to indigenous death and indigenous cultural genocide through the 20th century and before.

    So I also in the book, one of the things I tried to do in the book and wanted to do in the book was something I had wanted to do for a long time, was to talk about the history of the environmental movement, because nobody had really done that, had written an extensive history of the environmental movement relative to Native peoples, especially with what we call second wave environmentalism, which emerges in the 1970s. We know that the conservation movement is sort of the precursor to the environmental movement. And as I wrote about in the book, the conservation movement is really built on narratives of the virgin wilderness, or the so-called pristine myth, which understands wilderness as something that says that humans are not part of, and that it comes as a result of rampant urbanization in the east, and people having all this anxiety about losing the environment and poisoning the environment, and the need to set aside these areas of wilderness to protect environment. And so, we have people early on, like Henry David Thoreau, and later John Muir, who becomes sort of the godfathers of these discourses and these ideas. But what’s not, what hasn’t been really highlighted in the literature, except by a handful of people are, is how this history of conservation and preservation, to preserve the natural world, are built on indigenous dispossession and erasure. And that’s particularly applicable to the establishment of the National Park Service. And yet, the national parks, these big monuments that we have that set aside this land for public use; well, first, if we look at the first, especially the first three examples, begins with the establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1872. And that coincides or it parallels this time of profound violence of the federal government, the Calvary running, rounding Native people up and forcibly pushing them on these reservations, which cuts them off from some of their traditional places in places like the land that gets set aside in Yellowstone. That was all land that Native people lived on, they inhabited, they used. And now it gets set aside for wilderness and as it marked, David Spence has so clearly stated, he said, when they did that, when they set aside these wilderness areas, he said they first, wilderness had to first be created. So, in other words, it really never was wilderness. It was always land that people used and now we’re going to reimagine them, as unpeopled landscapes.

    So, all of this is at the root of what becomes second wave environmentalism; it’s white supremacy; white race, white supremacy and settler supremacy as the foundation for these conservation narratives, and all of that gets built into state structures, into the National Park Service, the National Forest Service and dozens of environmental organizations in the early 20th century. And then by the time, but it’s so normalized, that by the time the counterculture happens in the 70s, it’s so deeply embedded in American minds that it’s really hard to see it. But something else happens. Native people: it’s the civil rights movement and Native people are fighting for civil rights, too, and there’s a new attention to these ethnic nationalist movements, and there’s kind of a new respect of what happens for Native people. Native people are starting to be seen and this environmental sensibility starts taking hold, we passed the Environmental Protection Act in 1970 I think it was, ’69, right around there after the Santa Barbara oil spill. And then the Keep America Beautiful campaign creates this crying Indian commercial. And if I had time, I would show that to you. But I don’t think I have time to do that. But most of us, I imagine have seen it, and the crying Indian commercial gives rise to this new stereotype.

    And this new stereotype is just a regurgitation of the old stereotype of the savage Indian, only it’s repackaged now, it’s the new noble savage stereotype about the ecological Indian. So, the ecological Indian becomes the model that people are striving for in young people and the hippie movement. And so, the hippies are looking to the Indians, they want to learn Indian wisdom, they start dressing like the Indians, they grow their hair long, they have beads and feathers, and they have headbands, and they live in teepees. And, they are, it’s like this weird cultural appropriation that’s happening that doesn’t really have a name yet; we don’t even have a word, a term for that at the time, but it’s really a fetishization of Native people. It’s well-intended. But ultimately, this fetishism results in a type of cultural appropriation, which is nothing more than an ongoing form of erasure of actual Native people as white counterculture. People come to imagine themselves as knowing what true Native culture really is supposed to be about. So it’s all very, very complicated, but well-intended, but still kind of kind of twisted and kind of confusing and we need to have a conversation about that.

    38:19
    So, out of this process of erasure, this new environmentalism, indigenous ecological environmentalism, this stereotyped version of it, it ignores the actual indigenous knowledge systems that Native people have lived with for, since time immemorial, and it has the impact of contributing to the ongoing erasure of that which is already institutionalized. But these knowledge systems are, just to break it down for just a minute, these knowledge systems are systems-based, they emerge out of very particular relationships to very particular ecological systems, you know, ecosystems. So, indigenous knowledge is based on landscapes that they inhabit, and the knowledge that they know through the relationships with those landscapes. So, because those are very particular, that means that there is no one monolithic indigenous knowledge system. It does mean that there are multiple kinds of indigenous knowledges, and they are based on very particular cultural epistemologies, which is just a way of saying, ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing. And traditional ecological knowledge is one type of TEK [traditional ecological knowledge] and we say that TEK is not just theoretical, it’s actually applied knowledge based on indigenous land management practices. I have a little video that I usually like to show, but I don’t think I’ve got time to show that, so I’m going to need to go past that so that we can talk a little bit more about decolonizing environmental justice.

    So, this cultural appropriation and this ongoing erasure of Indigenous people from the landscape and the killing of, here’s another word I’ll lay on you, the killing of their knowledge systems, sometimes referred, we referred to as epistemicide, and epistemicide refers to, well, just the killing of knowledge systems, because that’s what happened through the history of the federal government, colonizing Native people and doing things like sending them to boarding schools where their languages were taken away. And when you take away a language of a people, you take away the window, you take away that which narrates these ideas, and so it leads to the chipping away of these knowledge systems. So, the reverse of all of those is decolonizing; decolonizing these historical processes, and in decolonizing, this thing that we call environmental justice. And how do we do that? It’s obviously a really complicated question, involving very complicated issues. But if we follow the logic, it means that we, that environmental justice, activism theory, and law and policy has to recognize that the US has this history and ongoing structure of colonialism, which is specific to Native people. And again, beyond this concept of race or racializing those populations, and it’s got to recognize that Indigenous peoples, American Indian populations, have very different relationships to land based on these knowledge systems. It’s not about private property, it’s not about a logic that puts the land to service in extractive ways like extracting minerals and extracting oil. Even though that stuff does happen on indigenous lands, that our knowledge systems are not based on that; it’s based on the values of relationality, reciprocity, responsibility and respect. That’s the difference in these worldviews between indigenous worldviews and mainstream Eurocentric dominant worldviews. This is why Indigenous peoples have been sustainable, have lived sustainably for thousands of years, because they knew how to live in right relationship with the land. So that all has to be taken into consideration, these different epistemologies, worldviews, and that means the recognition of indigenous knowledge systems has to be taken into account as well.

    Other examples include the respect for the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, which enshrines several important rights for Native… for Indigenous peoples, including self-determination, and the right to free prior and informed consent on their lands. This is sometimes called FPIC, F, P, I, C, which goes beyond simple consultation. So really pushing for consent over consultation because consent means what it says; Native people have to agree. What would have happened if Standing Rock, if the Standing Rock Sioux people actually had the right of consent, as the US says that it endorses in the declaration? So, this is a hypocrisy of the US. They endorse this document in this right to free prior and informed consent, but they don’t apply it. And the fact that they didn’t apply it is why Standing Rock happened in that pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, actually got built.

    And then finally, land back, this thing that we call land back, that’s gaining steam as a movement, which means being able to speak that justice means giving land back, the land that was taken, give it back. And there’s different ways that this can happen; it can happen through different kinds of title transfers from fee-simple to trust status; making it reservation land can happen through land trusts, land conservations and conservation easements, and also collaborative management, regimes, and co-management, relationships between entities of all kinds including tribes and federal and state government agencies, and other kinds of municipal… so government, upholding that government to government relationship in this way that returns jurisdiction to tribal nations.

    And so, I just came across this painting the other day, and I think it is just a perfect way to close this talk by showing the visual representation of what happens when we reverse that process of settler colonialism like, this is something that it might look like: a Native woman, I’m kind of bringing her spirit, bringing the spirit of Native people back, going west to east where now we can see what the modern world has really literally brought us. It’s brought us all this environmental degradation, all this pollution, all these horrible industrial processes that have poisoned the land. And so, this represents the returning of indigenous knowledge to the land, and bringing it back across the continent in the way that heals the land and heals the people at the same time.

    So that’s how I’m thinking about this book, I’m going to go ahead and stop the share. I don’t want to get too much into what I’m thinking about in the next book, because I am writing another book following up on this project. But I would rather stop sharing the screen and start opening to discussion. So, this is your opportunity to ask questions.

    47:42
    Adrian Pantoja: Great, Dina. Wonderful talk and presentation. So, people can submit questions in the chat box. I have lots of questions, but I’ll let others ask away. We already have one. I’ll read this to you. It says, can you expand on how the US legal system was created in order to justify settler colonialism?

    It’s multiple questions here. How successful can environmental law and community lawyering be in this, with this limitation? Given the abundance of privilege in the crowd, how do you suggest privilege can be utilized to further decolonization, if possible? So, there’s three questions there.

    Dina Gilio-Whitaker: It is a big one. And it’s what’s one of the many million-dollar questions in my opinion. So federal, the system of federal Indian law, was, as I said, created to justify settler colonialism and to justify the ongoing taking of land and to legitimize it. And it did this through the creation of Supreme Court decisions that established things like the Doctrine of Discovery, which is the foundation of the system that tells us that because Indigenous people are inferior, they don’t have superior knowledge like Europeans, and by virtue of being non-Christian, by the way, this is not about race; it’s about Christianity. That the bestowing of Christianity on Indigenous peoples, the language used in this decision, Johnson v. McIntosh, that affords an apology and gives, even though it’s a pretense of the conquests because they even admit it’s really not about conquest. So, the Doctrine of Discovery, which is now that central doctrine, the doctrine of domestic dependent nations which says that Native people are, it’s an imagined thing that somehow Native people agreed to become dependent on the US, which was not the case. And that there’s dozens of other decisions and pieces of legislation that whittled down Native power and decision making and jurisdiction over their own lands. And so, this is one of the big elephants in the living room of the colonial state. We talk, we think that justice, that law, is a system of justice. But for Native people, it’s really been a system of injustice. It’s not to say that there aren’t times that some of the law can work in our favor, because it can, but overall, it’s a system of domination that keeps Native people disempowered and subsumed to the US state. We have to be willing to call that out, even lawyers, people practicing Indian law, let’s be real about what’s really going on here. And there has to, at some point, on some level, be a willingness to repudiate some of these very hegemonic, legal structures and frameworks and doctrines. So that’s kind of long-term strategy in my mind, like ultimately, if you’re going to decolonize it’s got to happen in the legal system. But there’s very little of that going on. Why? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that lawyers take oaths of allegiance to the Constitution. I see that as a problem. So, there’s a huge conversation about this, but that’s kind of how I think about it. It’s really the structure that’s the problem. And problematic doctrines like Stare Decisis, let the precedent stand. Why can’t we overturn precedents like the Doctrine of Discovery or domestic dependent nationhood? Why is it that that cannot be overturned? It’s based on 19th-century racist logic. Why can’t we overturn that?

    52:34
    Adrian Pantoja: Well, the chats blowing up, let me go on to the next question. How do you envision decolonization in terms of land returns, or in other forms in urban spaces where settler societies and infrastructures exists, i.e. American cities and towns?

    52:52
    Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Well, there’s examples of that. An example that I can, I mean on a very micro scales, let’s put it that way. In San Francisco, we have the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust on this very tiny piece of property, it’s a quarter of an acre in Oakland. And that began as somebody owning property and returning it, wanting to return it to Native people. But because there is no federally recognized tribe in that area, that can receive the land in trust, and make it a reservation, it had to be organized in this alternative way as a land trust and organized as a 501 C3, because it’s not technically a tribe. So that’s one example of these different kinds of alternative structures that Native people are using to get land returned. In other spaces, you know, there’s no reason why that model can’t be replicated in other places in urban spaces. And there’s probably other examples that I’m blanking on, not thinking of right now. But that is a perfect example of how in urban spaces, this act of decolonization this type of act of decolonization can happen.

    End of recording