Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse Feminist Philosophy Quarterly Volume 10 | Issue 1/2 Article 7 Recommended Citation Meissner, Shelbi Nahwilet, and Andrew Frederick Smith. 2024. “Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1/2). Article 7. 2024 Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner University of Maryland snmeiss@umd.edu Andrew Frederick Smith Drexel University afs52@drexel.edu Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 1 Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Andrew Frederick Smith Abstract It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than- human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change. Keywords: climate change, environmental philosophy, kinship, Indigenous feminisms, relationality Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 2 “What must be understood then is that the Aboriginal request to have our sovereignty respected is really a request to be responsible. I do not know of anywhere else in history where a group of people have to fight so hard just to be responsible.” —Patricia Monture-Angus (1999) “How do we relate well in this place without that inherently eliminatory dreaming?” —Kim TallBear (2019) 1. Introduction Both in scholarly and public environmental discourse, climate change is typically cast as a newly emergent, anomalous enemy. For the sake of advanced civilization and cherished modern institutions, each of us must join the ranks of those mobilizing against it. Exemption is not an option, for all of us are bound to be adversely affected by potentially catastrophic conditions. But what if climate change is no enemy? Imagine instead, as Zoe Todd does with respect to fossil fuels, that even damaging climatological events “are a paradoxical kind of kin” (2017, 104).1 Imagine that these events are the expected and deeply tragic outcome of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against Indigenous lands and lives. Imagine, finally, that the crisis climate change embodies is widely misrepresented by what we call the default climate crisis motif. Extended more-than-human kinship arrangements—sustained by richly interweaving networks of life-enhancing and life-affirming responsibilities that promote trust, respect, and reciprocity—are not peripheral. Their disruption is at its root. Climate crisis is relational crisis. It is a consequence of the abdication among colonizers of these responsibilities and ongoing colonial attempts to eliminate and debilitate Indigenous communities devoted to living responsibly. This is our central claim. To develop our argument in support of this claim, we first clarify what we mean when we refer to the default climate crisis motif. The default motif currently dominates scholarly research on and public discussion of climate change. Ultimately, we will see, it perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that reinforce accelerating climate change and attending 1 Ancient peat bogs form the basis for coal. Oil and natural gas come from ancient phytoplankton. Todd notes that “these oily materials are not, in and of themselves, violent or dangerous. Rather, the ways that they are weaponised through petro- capitalist extraction and production turn them into settler-colonial-industrial- capitalist contaminants and pollutants” (2017, 107). This also is the case for climactic phenomena. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 3 injustices. It supports neither just nor practicable survival strategies, not only for those most harmed by climate change but for anyone. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, the deeply and radically relational roots of climate crisis emerge into sharp view, as do transformative visions for the resurgence of Indigenized networks of responsibilities. These visions draw attention to the critical need to dismantle what Esme Murdock calls the terrortories that embody and enable colonialism, particularly settler colonialism. Terrortories are destructive of the “lands, bodies, and psyches” of Indigenous peoples (Murdock 2022b, 123), but they do not and cannot spare colonizers either. Indeed, as a matter of both justice and prudence, colonizers do well, in Julia Gibson’s words, to “give way” (2020, 216) in scholarship and beyond to discursive infrastructures that foreground caregiving and responsible relations among human and other-than- human relatives. That which proponents of the default motif too often see as beside the point for addressing climate crisis is instead essential. 2. The Default Climate Crisis Motif Surveying recent publications and popular media coverage of contemporary climate issues, we have developed the following synopsis of the default motif. This synopsis reflects the common threads we see in English-language public discourse regarding climate issues. Taxonomically, the default motif specifies four distinct but overlapping threats, four core characteristics that span these threats, and three noteworthy interventions to address the core characteristics and thereby minimize the threats. 2.1. The Four Threats The four threats infrequently appear within the scope of any single text. They instead are better regarded as specifiable tiles of a singular mosaic comprising the default motif. Broadly construed, the most prominent threat is elemental in orientation. Typically, those who explicate and defend the elemental threat attend primarily to the damaging socioecological effects of carbon dioxide emissions. Namely, economic actors the world over are quickly depleting the “global carbon budget” (Friedlingstein et al. 2022) that serves as the ultimate baseline for determining the juncture at which time has run out to avert the worst effects of climate change. This is often specified as the juncture at which a global increase of 2°C beyond preindustrial temperature levels is expected to be reached. As we proceed inexorably toward this limit, we face a stark “emissions gap” (UNEP 2021) between current global carbon outputs and the reduction in and sequestration of outputs, perhaps as much as a gigaton (Flannery 2015), required to effectively mitigate the “compounding and cascading disasters, from wildfires to floods to uncontrolled migrations, droughts and the spread of more deadly diseases. One Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 4 mega-crisis is difficult enough, but serial crises on this scale will challenge the coping abilities of even the wealthiest and most resilient societies,” states Bryan Williston (2021, 3). Add the accelerating rate of habitat destruction; massive biodiversity loss and the impending collapse of marine and terrestrial food webs; widespread soil salinization and erosion; the global dependence on nonrenewable fuels; the loss of fresh, potable water; toxic chemical proliferation; and the devastation of ecosystems by invasive species and the situation appears dire indeed. Each phenomenon represents a ticking time bomb all its own, but they all are occurring at once with climate change representing a dangerous threat multiplier. “These crises are not ‘possible’ or ‘impending’—they are well underway and will continue to worsen,” Aric McBay emphasizes. “The only uncertainty is how fast, and thus how long our window for action is” (2011, 49). The second threat highlighted within the default motif addresses the loss of the specifiable form of socioeconomic organization commonly referred to as civilization. Ross Gelbspan forecasts that the magnitude of the disruptions resulting from climate crisis “would mean that everything our civilization has accomplished to this point would become basically meaningless” (1998, 173). Williston contends that the vast expansion of the human population, emergence of hierarchically organized social structures, rise of complex religions and governmental institutions, and “exponential growth” of agricultural and military technologies were all possible “because by and large humanity could, finally, forget about the damn weather!” (2021, 55). All are now at risk. Addressing climate crisis is hereby indispensable to “rescue our civilization,” Al Gore declares (2009, 15; see also Biden 2021). Thom Hartmann (2021) adds that “even fossil fuel billionaires and their paid shills can no longer deny” that the prevailing questions we now face are how bad “our current climate emergency” will become and “whether we’ll let modern human civilization as we know it continue or disintegrate.” Naomi Klein laments in turn that “we are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism” (quoted in Hanman 2019). “All of us need to act on the climate emergency,” she proclaims (quoted in Atherton 2021). The supposed storms of our grandchildren or our children are occurring now, which surely does affect both current and future options for establishing socioeconomic (and political) conditions favorable to adaptation and mitigation. Third is the existential threat. Related to the expectation of loss of conditions we hold dear, climate crisis generates crippling melancholy, disorientation, anxiety, grief, and despair (Filocamo 2020; Ojala et al. 2021). We are losing the only home we have ever known, Earth of the Holocene epoch (McKibben 2010). We are bewildered by “the mess we have made” (Williston 2021, 7). Even the threat of human extirpation looms as we enter a sixth mass extinction event. Things cannot and must not continue Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 5 as they are, but we nevertheless struggle to grasp the new realities climate crisis has introduced. The final threat of the default motif is moral in character. Material, socioeconomic, and existential qualities of climate crisis are accompanied by a crisis of values. For Williston (2021, 58), the prospects for ongoing moral progress are at stake. Extreme resource scarcity, for example, is bound to strain to the breaking point “broadly liberal-democratic” norms, including toleration, compassion, justice, and open-mindedness. Paul Hawken (2021, 23) specifies that while multiple forms of extractivism—taking, damming, enslaving, fracking, drilling, poisoning, burning, cutting, killing—are the proximate causes of the climate crisis, its ultimate cause is social injustice that ongoing extractivism will only exacerbate. Sally Weintrobe (2021, 1) portends a disruption of a “rigid psychological mindset” that underlies an ethos of human exceptionalism reinforced by the Great Acceleration. Weintrobe (2021, 4) is adamant that this mindset must go, but she doubts its loss heralds better times ahead as climate change is well and truly taking hold. 2.2. The Core Characteristics The four threats share an underlying set of core characteristics. Although the conceptual lineage of the default motif dates back much further, these characteristics coalesced after World War II as environmental discourses were reshaped within Western scholarship by the risk of nuclear aggression and increasing worries of global social collapse resulting from exponential population growth, resource exhaustion, and ecological overshoot (Cassegård and Thörn 2018). But it is not until quite recently that the language of climate change morphed definitively into that of climate crisis. Linguistic experts suggest that coinciding journalistic terminological choices are at least partially the result of formerly failing to accurately convey the magnitude of the threat humanity faces with respect to climactic disruptions (Visram 2021). From this vantage point, the default motif is intended to be both epistemically and strategically potent. According to its proponents, both scholarly and journalistic, it gets right what we are experiencing. It also galvanizes people’s attention and triggers swifter shifts in both policy and practice (Carrington 2019; Zak 2019). Both scholars and journalists thus intend to help their audiences to recognize and normalize the four most prominent characteristics of climate crisis: the unprecedentedness of the global threat and the demand for urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that limit or even erase the future of all humankind. Each of these characteristics has received sustained scholarly attention. The material we highlight here is intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive. Global climate change is regarded as a wholly new sort of crisis facing humanity, one with almost unimaginably dire consequences of unprecedented scale and scope. “We are living in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic change,” states Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 6 Benjamin Lowe. “Never before has a single species wielded so much power to shape the world and affect all forms of life” (2019, 479).2 Having hit anthrohistorically extreme atmospheric carbon and methane concentrations that threaten to raise global temperatures beyond what large mammals and many other life forms can sustain (Spratt and Dunlop 2018), we have arrived at a point “unlike any other in all of human history,” Gore (2009, 16) declares. With both airborne and marine oxygen levels in steep decline, Williston (2021, 28) insists that not a single “generation has ever had to deal with anything like it.” Witnessing precipitating levels of biodepletion and crop yield decline, both of which herald the imminent collapse of both marine and terrestrial food webs, we have reached “the end of our tether, and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break,” James Lovelock (2006, 146) concludes. Ted Stolze delineates what he calls the Urgency Argument as follows: One should urgently act to halt any grave threat posing serious harm to others. Crossing any of nine large-scale planetary tipping points would be a grave threat posing serious harm to others.3 Dangerous climate change will result from crossing at least one of the nine planetary boundaries. Since dangerous climate change is caused by releasing excessive greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere ( 350 ppm CO2), humanity should urgently act decisively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere to a safe target (<350 ppm CO2) (Stolze 2014, 137–38). The already narrow window of opportunity to adhere to the Urgency Argument is quickly growing narrower (Gillespie 2019, 4). The fact that climate crisis is unfolding faster than most high-profile scientific projections has only “added shrillness to pleas of urgency,” notes Eileen Crist (2007, 31). “The evidence coming in from the watchers around the world brings news of an imminent shift in climate towards one that can easily be described as Hell,” Lovelock (2006, 147) warns, “so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.” This is apocalyptic thinking in perhaps its most crystalized form. Crist (2007, 47) indicates that such thinking combines three nested narratives pertaining to the timing, nature, and consequences of the unabated continuation of carbon dioxide emissions: (1) a global-level near- to medium-term 2 This claim is false on its face. We can thank the work of cyanobacteria beginning some 2.5 billion years ago for triggering the development of the oxygen-rich atmosphere that sustains each of us and billions of fellow organisms today. 3 The nine planetary tipping points include (1) destruction of the Amazon rainforest; (2) loss of Arctic sea ice and related albedo; (3) slowing of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation; (4) decline of boreal forests; (5) coral reef die-off; (6) thawing permafrost; and the erosion of the (7) Greenland ice sheet, (8) West Antarctic ice sheet, and (9) Wilkes Basin ice in East Antarctica. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 7 catastrophe (2) involving interconnected socioecological breakdowns that are bound adversely to affect everyone (3) with an increasing chance of untold and unequaled death and suffering (see also Methmann and Rothe 2012; Cafaro and Primack 2014). Audra Mitchell (2016) makes note of accumulating references to the proposition that climate crisis may well lead to human extinction within a matter of generations. These ideas have filtered not just throughout academic scholarship but also into mainstream media coverage and consciousness (Jamail 2013). Strategically, these considerations underscore the importance for all humanity together to prioritize pulling back from the brink—avoiding, or at least averting the worst effects of, apocalypse. But apocalyptic thinking also tends to coincide with doomism, or emotional and political disengagement resulting from the presumed strong possibility of the planet’s near- to medium-term demise as a Goldilocks zone for humans and countless fellow species (Wallace-Wells 2017). Some doomists perpetuate the notion that apocalypse portends an end to the future of all humankind. Others hint that all is not inevitably lost, even if we must acknowledge how little we have done to address the magnitude of the risk humanity faces—particularly given the continued pursuit of economic growth through unbridled extractivism and fossil fuel burning. “Our negligence has catapulted climate change from an existential challenge to the dire crisis it is now,” Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac (2020, xvii) proclaim. Being in a position not merely to shape our future but to have a future demands “a maturation of humanity” (2020, xxi). We are very late to the game, but that does not excuse our continued inaction (Flannery 2015). All of us are, and must be, in this together. Williston acknowledges concerns with the widespread use of the universal we. Yet he focuses solely on arguments by critics who worry that proponents of Anthropocene discourses, which overlap substantially with the default motif, seemingly assign equal blame across all humanity for the climate crisis. This is not so, Williston contends. He adds that the universal we has the benefit of focusing our collective attention “on the challenges of the species as a whole.” This highlights that “nobody will be able to sidestep the issue altogether. . . . Most people generally appreciate both the generality of the threat and the pressures it will put on our most important values” (2021, 66). We, all of us, compose “Homo crisis” (2021, 52–57) and it is high time we recognize and counteract this. 2.3. The Default Interventions Williston’s preferred response to climate crisis, or at least the prerequisite he identifies for effectively responding to it, is to embrace bewilderment. Particularly if evoked on a large scale, such an approach can facilitate “a form of existential therapy and a path to moral clarity” (2021, 15) that can jolt us out of our collective lethargy. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 8 Climate crisis thus offers an opportunity to unseat ingrained thought patterns and institutional rigidities (Gillespie 2019, 20). A more commonly proposed intervention is to engage in emergency management. Proponents of this approach focus on the overwhelming importance of protecting a safe climate space within which humans (and other beings, notably including our sources of food) can continue securely and comfortably to live (Rockström et al. 2009; Kummu et al. 2021). Julia Gibson (2021) highlights in a critique that this entails striving not merely to pull back from the brink but actively to reinstate environmental conditions that roughly mirror those of the past. Most immediately, this requires an all-hands-on-deck effort to prevent surpassing the critical threshold of 2°C average global heating (Steffen et al. 2018). Over the longer term, it necessitates strict political and economic proscription of extractivist and consumerist activities that push against the nine planetary boundaries. Sustainable development, or what is perhaps more fittingly called sustainable industrialism, has a key role to play if we are to “construct a Holocene-like world—minus the fossil fuels, of course— even as the sun sets on that epoch,” states Williston. “Such furious and conscientious building guarantees us nothing, but, as far as I can see, there is no more morally defensible way forward” (2021, 59). Yet if there can be no return to past environmental conditions, if climate crisis calls for prioritizing adaptation along with mitigation, it is critical to mobilize for resilience. For proponents of this response, we already are imperceptibly in end times (Kareiva and Marvier 2012; Vogel 2015). Surpassing 2°C average global warming is all but inevitable, so we must deemphasize restoration in favor pursuing functional integrity of socioecological systems under increasingly harsh environmental conditions (Light 2012; Sandler 2012). Beyond bewilderment, this entails embracing uncertainty in a weirding world (Chandler 2019). It also requires prioritizing adaptation within vulnerable regions worldwide—in part by moving away from an institutionally centralized response to climate crisis and toward prioritizing local knowledges, notably including Indigenous ecological knowledges (IPCC 2022). Such a move is optimal for resilience given that Indigenous peoples have a demonstrated track records for resourcefulness and ecological sensitivity (Chandler and Reid 2018; Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen 2018). 3. Indigenous Feminist Critiques of the Default Motif: The Role of Responsibility Properly contextualized, each intervention offered within the default motif has some merit. We are not dismissing them out of hand. Wittingly or not, though, the default motif frames climate crisis within a selective history that disregards the experiences and futurities of Indigenous peoples. Climate crisis is treated almost exclusively in terms of emerging threats to colonizers—and those who have benefitted from legacies of colonization—that long ago were forced on Indigenous Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 9 peoples (Davis and Todd 2017; Fishel and Wilcox 2017; Rothe 2020).4 Indigenous scholars and activists stress instead that climate change and ecological devastation are directly linked to colonialism and its socioeconomic reverberations, including the emergence of the settler-colonial state, capitalism, and industrialism (Agathangelou 2017; Vergès 2017; Pulido 2018). Framed as such, climate crisis as it is experienced by Indigenous communities today is a manifestation of what Kyle Whyte calls “intensified colonialism” (2017a, 154; see also Watt-Cloutier 2015). It is déjà vu: the repetition, if nevertheless accentuated in global scope and scale, of what Indigenous communities long have endured. This includes drastic relocation-based climate disruptions, economic collapse, loss of relatives both human and other-than-human, and cultural disintegration (Whyte 2018, 226). 3.1. Criticisms of the Core Characteristics Recall that, as framed within the default motif, the core characteristics of climate crisis constitute the unprecedented character of the threat, which calls for urgent action to avert or at least lessen the effects of apocalyptic conditions that will limit or altogether erase the future of all humankind. Carl Cassegård and Håkan Thörn (2017) assert that COP 15 in 2009 marked something of a watershed among Indigenous scholars and activists in their responses to unprecedentedness. Indigenous peoples worldwide, allied with communities from across the Global South, mobilized against the colonial and North-centric focus of climate crisis. With climate-related disasters already routinely occurring throughout the Global South and with Indigenous communities worldwide experiencing these very disasters beginning centuries ago, Indigenous scholars and activists became increasingly vocal in their demands for justice for already unfolding catastrophes that they had been resisting since the dawn of colonialism. It was high time to end the commonplace, single- minded fixation on fears regarding emerging disasters within the Global North—with considerations of responsibility focusing principally on maintaining North-centric material infrastructures and economies (Pulido 2012; Chatterton, Featherstone, and Routledge 2013; Swyngedouw 2013). These considerations dovetail with Whyte’s concerns about how urgency is framed within the default motif. For while harmful consequences to the lives and lifeways of those who already are sacrificed may be viewed as unfortunate, these 4 The 2022 IPCC report may seem at first glance to be a notable exception, given its call to prioritize local knowledges. But even here colonization is treated as an afterthought, mentioned as a driver of vulnerability to climate change—rather than a driver of climate change—only in passing in a single footnote. As such, it too risks being read as suggesting that the central importance of local knowledges is their use by colonizers to promote their own survival of evolving environmental conditions. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 10 consequences nevertheless routinely are treated as acceptable. Urgency hereby is leveraged to advance colonial power, even as those who benefit claim to act with the best of intentions. As with unprecedentedness, appeals to urgency mask the role of colonial power in the very creation and perpetuation of climate crisis. Stressing urgency sanctions methods for addressing climate crisis that suspend or ignore concerns about climate justice, including “devastating impacts on Indigenous peoples across ancestral, living, and emerging generations” (Whyte 2021a, 52). It “serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice,” states Tema Okun (2022). Even as they voice concerns about equity and inclusion, it is not uncommon for renewable energy firms and the state actors that support them to silence Indigenous communities by failing to garner or even seek free, prior, and informed consent (Howe 2019; Callison 2021; Barragan-Contreras 2022). Urgency so construed thus underpins indexing responsibility foremost to protecting colonizers’ bottom line, once again at the expense of extended more-than-human kinship arrangements and the Indigenous communities that fight to sustain and protect them. It serves as a red herring that obscures the root causes of climate injustice. With respect to apocalypse, Indigenous critiques of the default motif accentuate that climate crisis is a historical phenomenon that continues to unfold. It is neither an impending event nor an event that only recently has been underway. There is no pulling Indigenous worlds back from the brink (Gibson and Whyte 2022; see also Gross 2002, 2014). It is too late. None has escaped profound disruptions compared to how Indigenous ancestors lived prior to colonization. Through determined resistance and resurgence, existing Indigenous communities may be surviving catastrophe. But Whyte (2017b, 2018) aptly describes current conditions as nothing less than an ancestral dystopia, underscoring that Indigenous peoples today endure postapocalyptic colonial realities dating back to the arrival of Columbus (see also Dillon 2012; Baldy 2014; Todd 2016). Settler colonialism in particular is apocalyptic insofar as it attempts to supplant and permanently destroy Indigenous worlds by colonizing Indigenous lands and bodies (Murdock 2022b, 106). Robin Kimmerer describes the displacement of her Potawatomi ancestors from the Great Lakes region in the 1830s itself as constitutive of climate crisis. Being severed from numerous long-standing relationships with species and ecosystems and having to build them anew in unfamiliar climate zones, first in Kansas and then in Oklahoma, placed her ancestors “in a situation of forced climate change adaptation” (Kimmerer 2014; see also Maldonado et al. 2013). Such experiences are routinely written out of existence within colonizer culture (O’Brien 2010; Rifkin 2017). This frame disrupts the eschatological arc of what April Anson (2017) calls “settler apocalypticism.” The adverse effects of climate change do not begin—and they do not gain world-historical significance—only when they affect colonizers. Within a racialized framework, apocalypticism is the expression of white dread of Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 11 facing that which Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already routinely experience: dispossession, displacement, compromised security, world collapse. Wittingly or not, apocalypticism likewise conceals that whiteness as a racial designation embodies entitlement to pillage (or to benefit from the pillage of) others’ lives and lands. Particularly if climate crisis is “the great equalizer” (Gibson 2020, 211; see also Hsu and Yazell 2019), if we are all in this together, it would not do to dwell on the ways in which the privileged are culpable for and continue to benefit from structures of domination. Conveniently for colonizers, this serves to wipe the moral slate clean, to abdicate any responsibility for climate injustice (Gergan, Smith, and Vasudevan 2020). These experiences, and the default motif more generally, are thus products of a logic of erasure. This logic is reflected in countless institutions that support a sort of “collective amnesia” (Sullivan and Tuana 2007, 4) among colonizers, which promotes obliviousness to the worlds of Indigenous communities—and to structures that (sometimes) subtly but (always) substantively privilege colonizers’ lives and lifeways. The outsized vulnerability of many Indigenous communities to climate threats itself is the result of colonizers’ intent to eliminate these communities’ living legacies of resistance and resilience (Whyte, Talley, and Gibson 2019; Whyte 2021a). The worlds that already have unraveled, the brinks that already have been transgressed, and the ancestral dystopias that persist are erased: each is supplanted in turn by means of a logic associated with the doctrine of discovery, which legitimizes treating colonizers’ narratives alone as authoritative and as accurate depictions of reality. This is yet another instance of colonizers’ dread becoming emblematic of the human experience. Unacknowledged is that the antecedents for these experiences are better understood as “reverberations” among colonizers of the “seismic shockwave” resulting from the colonial violence unleashed by their own ancestors (Davis and Todd 2017, 774). Again, current climatological phenomena are nothing other than an expected outcome, a rebound effect, of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against Indigenous lands and lives. We return, lastly, to the problems of scope that arise from the presumption of a universal human temporality. If the claims made by proponents of the default motif are to be believed, conditions humanity writ large faced in the past were sufficiently stable to try our best to sustain or recover. They also were sufficiently just, or at least harbored structural bases to support the pursuit of justice in response to past environmental harms (Coulthard 2014; Murdock 2022a). This narrative exemplifies what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) describe as the settler move to innocence. It also is a function, states Gibson (2021, 6), of “the limited histories and futurities” around which the default motif is oriented. To characterize climate crisis in this manner “overlooks the reality that the current state of affairs is not, in fact, a temporal punctuation outside of the norm” (Gibson 2021, 13). Understanding climate Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 12 change instead as intensified colonialism highlights that the default motif “succeeds in collapsing time, humanity, and the environment in ways that many have argued underlie and further colonial lifeways” (Gibson 2021, 12; see also Yusoff 2018).5 “When humanity wears a problematically narrow range of faces, so too do the denizens of future worlds,” assert Gibson and Whyte (2022, 480). The same applies to the denizens of worlds present and past. What we are responsible for sustaining and protecting is assumed, not discussed. What we must transform, let alone jettison, gets scant attention except to the extent that it supports stepping back from an impending brink, preventing an imminent temporal rupture from which there can be no turning back. 3.2. Relationality, Responsibility, and the Default Motif’s Four Threats Still, climate crisis is unfolding, even if at root it is not of the character proponents of the default motif portray. For many Indigenous peoples, climate crisis is principally relational. With respect to the four threats, what colonizers identify as elemental, associated with unchecked carbon dioxide emissions, more basically reflects a multidimensional breakdown of both genealogical and emergent kinship arrangements typified by trust, respect, and reciprocity. It is these arrangements that permit communities ably to respond and adapt to constant, ongoing change—both expected and unexpected. Those concerned for the fate of civilization fail to recognize that the concept today serves as a referent for the colonial structures and institutions that drive climate change and attending injustices. Murdock (2022b, 113) observes, for example, that Native “populations” traditionally have been equated by purported civilizers with flora and fauna and “ordered in the same way the natural world is.” All are to be subject to rigorous “civilizing improvement” with scant contemplation of “the apocalypse of life/lives it wreaks” (2022b,113). Those who give voice to the existential threat also often focus less on addressing and rectifying climate injustice than on amplifying forms of racialized climate anxiety that are “just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get ‘back to normal,’ to the comforts of their privilege,” states Sarah Jaquette Ray (2021). As a result, proponents of the default motif fail morally to countenance the innumerable “relational tipping points” (Whyte 2020) with respect to lands and lives, both human and other-than-human, that long ago were passed. 5 Delf Rothe (2020) observes that the presumption that we together are at the brink of catastrophe also indicates that this universal temporality is linear. It offers a shared anthropogenic eschatological orientation, overlooking that Indigenous communities often conceptualize time quite differently—often privileging circularity rather than linearity (Fixico 2003). Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 13 These adumbrations of the four threats—unacknowledged and conveniently unseen forms of colonial erasure or discounting of Indigenous experiences—help to reveal a key conceptual prerequisite for the default motif. Making this prerequisite explicit helps to motivate reframing climate crisis as relational crisis. Environmental degradation, ecological devastation, species extinction, biodiversity loss, even climate change: each term in its own way represents a sterilized ontology. Each decontextualizes what Deborah McGregor (2021) identifies as the genocide of relatives across the planet. Each fails to appreciate, let alone acknowledge, Indigenous people’s living histories of witnessing the disruption and destruction of kinship arrangements under colonization (Mitchell 2016). Indigenous cosmopolitical regimes, with their expansive temporalities, geographies, and narrative histories, disappear “within a colonizing universal ontology” (Gibson 2021, 13) that effectively channels all attention to a very narrow slice of human experience. Consider this illuminating example. Colleen Fox and colleagues (Fox et al. 2017) observe that while scientists and the media acknowledge that Indigenous communities routinely play a leading role in river restoration, the sociocultural and spiritual dimensions of restoration are dramatically underreported. They cite the work of Māori and Anishinaabe communities, for whom rivers are simultaneously living relatives and very old ancestors. Community members note time and again that rivers have intrinsic moral standing, which can serve as a basis for being rights-bearing entities (Venne 1998). More so, rivers are relatives with deep cross-cultural interdependencies, and these interdependencies are the basis for intricate systems of responsibilities. Human responsibilities involve supporting long-standing relations of care (Whyte and Cuomo 2016). Upholding these responsibilities to rivers is necessary for them to fulfill responsibilities of their own, both within and across communities as they intermingle with a global network of waterways (McGregor 2014). Viewed as such, river restoration has the potential to become a transformative project (Salmond, Tadaki, and Gregory 2014, 50). It facilitates the repair of human relationships with rivers and with fellow human and other-than-human users of rivers. Furthermore, it supports coresistance to colonizing dynamics that ruptured human–river relations in the first place (Sepulveda 2018). Restoration has its technical and policy-oriented components. At least as important, though, are its sociocultural and spiritual dimensions, for they give meaning and context to restorative practices. They make these practices quite literally a responsibility-laden family affair, which highlights how critical it is locally and globally to center not just Indigenous feminist environmental discourses but also corresponding modes of action—from activism to ceremony to hands-on dirt time. Indigenous feminist ontologies are hereby actively (re)vitalizing, including of connections to traditional lifeways and ancestral lands. Again, kinship is key. To be kin Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 14 is to be interdependent with respect to an assemblage of beings, to have lives that intertwine. More pointedly, kin are beings who compose one’s ecology. Within this context, ecologies are organizations of humans, other-than-human beings, spiritual and abiotic entities, and landscapes who together share a network of responsibilities based on both care and what Daniel Wildcat calls “multigenerational deep spatial knowledges” (2009, 16; see also Watts 2013; Whyte, Caldwell, and Schaefer 2018; Styres 2019). Neither are these responsibilities confined strictly to human relationships, nor does how they are exhibited necessarily center on the human (Todd 2017). Kinship arrangements are continually shifting and reconfiguring, including with members relocating and with the arrival of newborns and ancestors walking on. But multigenerational spatial knowledge—which embodies an abiding sense of the material, embodied connectedness to both ancestors and those to whom one will be an ancestor—supports spatiotemporally extended collective memories (TallBear 2019, 25ff.). As a result, the network of responsibilities that sustain kinship arrangements is continually reshaped yet nevertheless enduring. So long as relatives can remain responsive to changes in a manner that prioritizes mutual safety, agency, and well-being, kinship ably serves adaptability. Under such conditions, ecologies are tolerant of and resilient in response to both acute and chronic forms of adversity. Emotionally and physically, they are sources of continuing support in an ever- changing world. To the extent that kinship arrangements are reflected in social and political infrastructures, they are among the critical bases of societal longevity (Whyte 2021b). These considerations help to clarify what makes climate crisis, at root, relational. Seen through a long lens like that offered by Indigenous communities’ collective memories, climate change as intensified colonialism is a byproduct of military aggression by colonizers, corporate exploitation of resources, anti-Indigenous territorial dominance by settler-industrial nation-states, and widespread degradation of landscapes. Each of these phenomena is designed to destroy ecologies via both containment of mobility traditions, including seasonal rounds, and attacks on kinship arrangements. The erosion of ecologies, of extended kinship arrangements, has increased Indigenous communities’ susceptibility to climate-related dangers. Colonizers’ histories of aggression and irresponsibility—centuries of violations of trust, respect, and reciprocity—greatly inhibit mitigation and adaptation efforts both within and across communities. More fundamentally, climate disruptions arguably are kinship disruptions, invidious disturbances to life-enhancing and life-affirming networks of responsibilities to human and more-than-human others. In line with Todd’s considerations regarding fossil fuels noted in the introduction, Thomas Norton-Smith (2010, 77) observes that it is not uncommon among Indigenous peoples for the Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 15 elements and physical forces (and the cardinal directions and celestial entities) to be regarded as relatives. The increased weirding of ecologies—altering abruptly, palpably becoming more fragile, losing predictable forms of cohesiveness, damaging spheres of responsibility—just is climate change in its most immediate experiential form. The destruction of mobility traditions plays its own role. Ecologies are disassembled as their members are torn even further apart, in Crist’s words, by cities, suburbs, rural settlements, agro-industrial landscapes, fences, highways and roads, airports, malls, and other constructed environments. As species attempt to track needed climate regimes by moving—the trend scientists are seeing today—there are fewer places for them to go and no shortage of obstacles on their paths. Such is the synergy of climate change in a world of converted and fragmented landscapes. (Crist 2007, 41–42) The ongoing injustices of the containment and relocation of Indigenous communities are now multiplied as kin become climate refugees whose pathways to refuge are deeply compromised. 4. Spider’s Web of Relations: Rerelating and Cocreating Just Futures At the heart of the default motif lies a tragic irony. To the extent that its proponents remain fixated on pulling back from the brink to maintain the cultural and material conditions that undergird colonialism, they commit not to avoiding apocalypse but to continuing it. They refuse, assert Gibson and Whyte (2022, 481), “to contemplate a world in which the communities, values, technologies, and lifeways responsible for the cataclysm do not survive unchanged or at all.” It is unclear that such an eventuality is even recognized as a possibility, except in the vague sense of disquiet reflected in worries over the loss of civilizing institutions, the very existence of which depends on erasing Indigenous worlds, lands, and lives. Responding to climate crisis as relational crisis requires emphasizing that, properly understood, pulling back from the brink is neither a just nor a practicable survival strategy—not for anyone. The world to be saved by the default motif is a world that must be left behind, which requires new strategies for assessing and taking up responsibility for rerelating and cocreating just futures. To borrow and slightly modify an image from Kim TallBear (2018, 2019), the “spider’s web of relations” is a good representation of the networks of responsibilities depicted by Indigenous feminists across Turtle Island. “A relational web as spatial metaphor requires us to pay attention to our relations and obligations here and now. It is a narrative that can help us resist those dreams of progress toward a never- Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 16 arriving future of tolerance and good that paradoxically requires ongoing genocidal and anti-Black violence, as well as violence toward many de-animated bodies” (TallBear 2019, 25). These webs are woven, maintained, and cared for by Indigenous peoples. Although colonizers rarely recognize or accept their own embeddedness in these webs, they nonetheless exist within and wreak havoc upon them. Colonizers are well trained to conceive of responsibility not as a web at all but rather as a funnel whereby the whole of Earth must be channeled into perpetuating and normalizing colonialism—particularly to serve the interests of those materially at the pinnacle of the funnel. 4.1. Dismantling Terrortories The scaffolding of colonialism, its basic structure, is fashioned from “the murdered worlds of the colonized,” Esme Murdock (2022b, 106) declares. Settler colonialism in particular then “forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories” (2022b, 106). These landscapes have been terraformed (or terrorformed) to wage unending war on Indigenous bodies, psyches, and ecologies. For terrortories destroy Indigenous lives and lifeways, pathologize resistance, naturalize resulting trauma, and create structures and institutions that make a virtue of or simply deny the murder—the ecocide—carried out for the sake of colonization. “Terrortory captures both the normalization of rampant violence and the almost totalizing effect of that violence in the terror and lack of consent imposed upon and experienced by Indigenous peoples and communities by settler colonial powers,” Murdock (2022b, 109) states. The systematic foreclosure of “the possibility of experiencing or narrating the world differently” is never not there (2022b, 116). Evidence of apocalypse “is everywhere, all the time,” Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019, 129) confirms. But because the murderous bases of colonization are either justified or disappeared, resulting trauma among the colonized is itself weaponized by colonizers (Tuck 2009; Meissner 2018). Indigenous peoples and persons are depicted as constitutionally wounded and in need of “humanitarian management,” Dian Million quips, or what amounts to “group death that poses as care” (2020, 393). Notwithstanding the earnest interest humanitarian agencies may express in Indigenous well-being, Million observes that they routinely fail to appreciate the extent to which it is tied to sovereignty and self-determination. Indigenous well- being—that is, the manner in which well-being is broadly described within Indigenous discourses—requires ecological well-being. It is coextensive with vital ecologies, with robust kinship arrangements, with precisely the conditions required for adaptability and responsiveness to an ever-changing world. And the role of place, and responsibility to and from place, is key, Million (2020, 394) contends: “Place is of paramount importance if we talk about ‘health’ in an Indigenous sense. ‘Land’ is not Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 17 ‘territory’ or ‘property’ as in an object; instead, place denotes dense, reciprocal, life- affirming relations that peoples form and have formed over millennia.” Terrortories are incompatible with ecological well-being. They also are directly at odds with the renewal of social and political conditions that facilitate adaptability and responsiveness, hence the capacity to address climate crisis. Drawing on Fanon, Murdock contends that this endangers everyone, not just the colonized. It accentuates the vital importance of dismantling terrortories (Murdock 2022b, 114; see also Jaffee and John 2018; Opperman 2019). Yet recovery from the damage induced by terrortories may begin prior to the demise of settler colonialism. Bringing together Fanon’s research on psychiatry and politics, Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce (2017, 238) assert that recovery is initiated through “the development of political consciousness and the assumption of moral responsibility.” Among other steps, this entails acknowledging that concerns voiced by Indigenous communities are not concerns only about Indigenous communities. Even demands for tribal sovereignty have wider societal implications. Engaging in ceremonies designed for ecological renewal, resistance, and resurgence are not only timely but long past due. So is building robust cross-cultural coalitions that go well beyond current calls for reconciliation. Particularly when led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already well versed in exercising political consciousness and moral responsibility, coalitions serve to demystify the pathology of overtly anticolonial practices. They also challenge the foreclosure of the possibility of experiencing or narrating the world differently, notably including understanding climate crisis as relational crisis. To treat climate crisis as relational crisis hereby entails that the form of rerelating and cocreating to address climate change must be both radical and deep. Radical relationality, state Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy (2018), foregrounds intersectional and collective responsibilities premised on collectivist, interdependent, reciprocal political coordination. Deep relationality, proposes Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (2022), accounts forthrightly for the fact that the trauma of settler colonialism endures within the bodies and communities of colonized human and other-than-human relatives. Anticolonial actions thus require sensitivity to and care for how this trauma inevitably persists, specifically as networks of responsibilities are mended and trust, respect, and reciprocity are rebuilt—including those animated by Indigenous–non-Indigenous coalitions.6 6 Such coalitions are rarely free of incommensurable interests and points of focus (Dotson 2018). But coalitions among members of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities—embodied, for example, by ongoing solidarity between the Movement for Black Lives and Standing Rock water protectors and also by developers of the Red, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 18 4.2. Giving Way But for Indigenous futurities to flourish, colonizers themselves must not merely forego the usual reassurances that colonial forms of life should persist. They must “give way,” Julia Gibson (2020, 216) maintains. Gibson has in mind here centering Indigenous environmental discourses not just within the scholarly and fictional work on which her research focuses but also beyond the page. The sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous communities are not a so-called “Native problem” (Keefer 2010). They foreground a common need for responsible relations, both radical and deep, among human and other-than-human relatives on a “thoroughly devastated” planet (Red Nation 2021, 8). Combatting extractivism matters. So does justly converting to renewable energy sources. Indigenous communities are heavily engaged in both activities (LaDuke 2020). But embedding these activities within a multidimensional relational context is essential. The prospect of giving way thus flips the script. It adumbrates the pathology of colonial cultural and material conditions, which are not merely world destroying but carceral, including for most colonizers. To get by, colonizers are compelled by countless formal and informal structures to engage in behaviors that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to themselves personally (Smith 2022). This is part and parcel of life within what Riane Eisler (2007, 97) calls domination systems, which naturalize rigid top-down control, stark socioeconomic inequality, high levels of abuse and violence, and the supremacy of heteropatriarchy. Within domination systems, trust, respect, and reciprocity are scarce. Domination systems also are hostile to autonomy, community, and humanity, observes Bruce Levine (2001). No wonder he maintains that institutionalization, or the proliferation of “large, bland, standardized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, authoritarian, coercive, manipulative, expansionistic, and impersonal entities,” is their standard fare (2001, 6). “In many ways,” states Murdock (2022b, 117) with respect to Indigenous communities, “sanity is understood in settler colonial contexts as resignation to and compliance with the foreverness of settler occupation.” Levine makes the same case, if obliquely, with respect to colonizer communities. Indeed, he contends, colonizers already widely reject their carcerality in deed if not in word. For just as in Indigenous communities, anxiety, depression, addiction, and other such conditions are widespread. And just as in Indigenous communities, among colonizers they are not best understood as illnesses or diseases or disorders. Rather, they are neurocorporeal forms of rebellion, refusals to resign oneself to and comply with subjection to institutionalization. They are, at least in part, rejections of systemic cultural and material deformities. Black, and Green New Deal—have considerable potential to build constellations of coresistance (Simpson 2017, 228). Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 19 Fanon insists that colonialism and settler colonialism must give way, Murdock (2022b, 124) notes, because “they are the source, cause, and foundation of so many ills of our collective existence.” The terrortories they create are destructive of Indigenous and non-Indigenous lands, bodies, and psyches alike—albeit not in the same way or to the same degree, respectively. “As long as we inhabit, move through, and normalize the veritable apocalypses and assaults on all life coloniality creates, we will just be modifying and adjusting to a more palatable apocalypse,” Murdock (2022b, 124) concludes.7 This is a fitting byline for the default motif. 5. Conclusion Within a relational framework, among the central strategies to address climate change is to foster ecologies. Ecologies “have high standards of responsibility, with special attention to relationships of care, reciprocity, and consent, among others,” Whyte maintains (2021a, 59; see also Whyte 2020). Given the extent of their disruption within Indigenous communities and more so between Indigenous and non- Indigenous communities, the rerelations and cocreations needed to form ecologies embody a long-term enterprise. It can be expected to take numerous generations. There are no quick fixes, no shortcuts, no tradeoffs that may satisfy the urge to grasp for a technological or political deus ex machina, and certainly no guarantees of sufficient relational repair to forestall exceeding any number of key planetary boundaries. It cannot be otherwise, of course, if climatological phenomena themselves are components of extended more-than-human kinship arrangements. And the matter is complicated further by expected socioeconomic strains resulting from increasing resource scarcity as the pace and severity of climate change accelerate (Wallace, Struthers, and Bauman 2010). It would be naïve to expect or even hope for a sustained, broad-based geopolitical initiative on behalf of relational repair to emerge anytime soon. Questions may remain regarding the commitment to such an enterprise even by recovering colonizers (as we may call them) who seek partnerships in struggle with Indigenous communities. Albert Memmi (1965, 40ff.) makes note of the great and perhaps unsurpassable imaginative chasm between what recovering colonizers can envision about the end of their world and their capacity fully to digest how it would affect their own situation. For “Kinless Conquerors,” as Brian Burkhart (2018, 47) aptly calls colonizers, this may be akin to visualizing their own death, despite the beneficial 7 In the same vein, Kim TallBear (2019, 38) calls for “settler ontocide,” which “does not, of course, mean literal killing. It means ridding ourselves of the category of the settler along with its discourse of white supremacy and assertions of an inherent right to these lands and waters.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 20 prospects associated with being reborn beyond carcerality. Such worries make recovering colonizers “dangerously deceptive,” Memmi (1965, 41) concludes. Learning in solidarity surely is possible. Reframing climate crisis as relational crisis and treating it as the common threat it is to safety, agency, and well-being is possible too. Still, we conclude with fitting considerations from Ta-Nehisi Coates offered in Between the World and Me, a long-form letter to his son Samori. “We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America” (2015, 146): the Dreamers, those who believe themselves to be white, who need to be white, who cling with such desperation to domination systems that will be “the deathbed of us all” (151). Actors in Black, Brown, and Indigenous liberation movements may strive to awaken the Dreamers, but Coates implores Samori not to arrange his life around “the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home” (146–47). “I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle,” Coates (2015, 151) continues. Because the struggle itself has meaning. And because, like his son’s namesake Samori Touré, Coates and his son may die in captivity, “but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp” (68). References Agathangelou, Anna M. 2017. “Real Leaps in the Times of the Anthropocene: Failure and Denial and ‘Global Thought.’” ProtoSociology 33: 58–92. https://doi.org /10.5840/protosociology2016334. Anson, April. 2017. “American Apocalypse: The Whitewashing Genre of Settler Colonialism.” Paper presented at unidentified conference. https://www.acad emia.edu/34949190/American_Apocalypse_The_Whitewashing_Genre_of_S ettler_Colonialism. Atherton, Lori. 2021. “Wege Lecturer Naomi Klein: ‘All of Us Need to Act on the Climate Emergency.’” UMSEAS News, March 11. https://seas.umich.edu/news /wege-lecturer-naomi-klein-all-us-need-act-climate-emergency. Baldy, Cutcha Risling. 2014. “Why I Teach ‘The Walking Dead’ in My Native Studies Classes.” The Nerds of Color (blog), April 24. https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014 /04/24/why-i-teach-the-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 21 Barragan-Contreras, Sandra Jazmin. 2022. “Procedural Injustices in Large-Scale Solar Energy: A Case Study in the Mayan Region of Yucatan, Mexico.” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 24 (4): 375–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/152 3908X.2021.2000378. Biden, Joe. 2021. “Remarks by President Biden on the Administration's Response to Hurricane Ida.” The Whitehouse (website), September 7. https://www.white house.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/09/07/remarks-by- president-biden-on-the-administrations-response-to-hurricane-ida-2/. Burkhart, Brian. 2018. “On the Mysterious 1831 Cherokee Manuscript or Jisdu Fixes John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government.” Transmotion 4 (1): 40–76. https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.372. Cafaro, Philip, and Richard Primack. 2014. “Species Extinction Is a Great Moral Wrong.” Biological Conservation 170 (February): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.biocon.2013.12.022. Callison, Candis. 2021. “Refusing More Empire: Utility, Colonialism, and Indigenous Knowing.” Climatic Change 167, no. 3–4 (August): Article 58. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10584-021-03188-9. Carrington, Damian. 2019. “Why the Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.” Guardian, May 17. https://www.theguardian.com/environ ment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses- about-the-environment. Cassegård, Carl, and Håkan Thörn. 2017. Climate Justice, Equity and Movement Mobilization.” In Climate Action in a Globalizing World: Comparative Perspectives on Environmental Movements in the Global North, edited by Carl Cassegård, Linda Soneryd, Håkan Thörn, and Åsa Wettergren, 33–56. New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. “Toward a Postapocalyptic Environmentalism? Responses to Loss and Visions of the Future in Climate Activism.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 4 (December) 561–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486187 93331. Chandler, David. 2019. “The Death of Hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene.” Globalizations 16 (5): 695–706. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1534 466. Chandler, David, and Julian. Reid. 2018. “‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity.” European Legacy 23 (3): 251–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/108 48770.2017.1420284. Chatterton Paul, David Featherstone, and Paul Routledge. 2013. “Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the Commons, and Solidarity.” Antipode 45, no, 3 (June): 602–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01025.x. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 22 Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crist, Eileen. 2007. “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse.” Telos 141 (Winter): 29–55. Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (4): 761–80. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1539. Dillon, Grace L. 2012. “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms.” In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, 1–12. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Dotson, Kristie. 2018. “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re- introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics.” AlterNative 14, no. 3 (Sept- ember): 190–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118783301. Eisler, Riane. 2007. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Figueres, Christiana, and Tom Rivett-Carnac. 2020. The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Filocamo, Kevin P. 2020. “Coping with Ecological Crises from a Queer Ecological Theory Perspective: Eros and Melancholy.” Ecopsychology 12, no. 4 (Decem- ber): 285–91. Fishel, Stefanie, and Lauren Wilcox. 2017. “Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (June): 335–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817712819. Fixico, Donald. 2003. The American Indian Mind in a Linear World. New York: Routledge. Flannery, Tim. 2015. Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis. New York: Grove Atlantic Monthly Press. Friedlingstein, Pierre, Matthew W. Jones, Michael O'Sullivan, Robbie M. Andrew, Dorothee C. E. Bakker, Judith Hauck, Corinne Le Quéré et al. 2022. “Global Carbon Budget 2021.” Earth System Science Data 14 (4): 1917–2005. https:// doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022. Fox, Coleen A., Nicholas James Reo, Dale A. Turner, JoAnne Cook, Frank Dituri, Brett Fessell, James Jenkins et al. 2017. “‘The River Is Us; the River Is in Our Veins’: Re-defining River Restoration in Three Indigenous Communities.” Sustainability Science 12, no. 4 (July): 521–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625 -016-0421-1. Gelbspan, Ross. 1998. The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 23 Gergan, Mabel, Sara Smith, and Pavithra Vasudevan. 2020. “Earth Beyond Repair: Race and Apocalypse in Collective Imagination.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38, no. 1 (February): 91–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263 775818756079. Gibson, Julia D. 2020. “Stories We Tell about the End of the World: (Post) Apocalyptic Climate Fiction Working towards Climate Justice.” In “Climate Fictions,” edited by Alison Sperling, Paradoxa, no. 31: 205–30. ———. 2021. “Climate Justice for the Dead and the Dying: When Past-Oriented Environmentalism Isn’t Enough.” Environmental Philosophy 18, no. 1 Spring): 5–39. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2021315103. Gibson, Julia D., and Kyle Whyte. 2022. “Science Fiction Futures and (Re)visions of the Anthropocene.” In Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Shannon Vallor, 473–95. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Nigel C., and Roberto Beneduce. 2017. Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press. Gillespie, Sally. 2019. Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining Our World and Ourselves. New York: Routledge. Gore, Al. 2009. Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury. Gross, Lawrence William. 2002. “The Comic Vision of Anishinaabe Culture and Religion.” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Summer): 436–59. https://doi.org/10.1353/aiq.2003.0038. ———. 2014. Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being. New York: Routledge. Hanman, Natalie. 2019. “Naomi Klein: ‘We Are Seeing the Beginnings of the Era of Climate Barbarism.’” Guardian, September 14. https://www.theguardian.com /books/2019/sep/14/naomi-klein-we-are-seeing-the-beginnings-of-the-era- of-climate-barbarism. Hartmann, Thom. 2021. “Civilization-Ending Climate Change Is Knocking on the Door—Unless We Act Now. Salon, August 5. https://www.salon.com/2021/08 /05/civilization-ending-climate-change-is-knocking-on-the-door--unless-we- act-now_partner/. Hawken, Paul. 2021. Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. New York: Penguin. Howe Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hsu, Hsuan L., and Bryan Yazell. 2019. “Post-apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation.” In The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 24 Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi, 347– 56. New York: Routledge. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Geneva: IPCC. https://www.ipcc.ch/re port/ar6/wg2/. Jaffee, Laura, and Kelsey John. 2018. “Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism.” Disability and the Global South 5 (2): 1407–29. Jamail, Dahr. 2013. “‘The Great Dying’ Redux? Shocking Parallels between Ancient Mass Extinction and Climate Change.” Salon, December 17. https://www.salo n.com/2013/12/17/the_great_dying_redux_shocking_parallels_between_an cient_mass_extinction_and_climate_change_partner/. Kareiva, Peter, and Michelle Marvier. 2012. “What Is Conservation Science?” BioScience 62, no. 11 (November): 962–69. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012 .62.11.5. Keefer, Tom. 2010. “Contradictions of Canadian Colonialism: Non-Native Responses to the Six Nations Reclamation of Caledonia.” In Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous–Non-Indigenous Relationships, edited by Lynne Davis, 77–90. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kimmerer, Robin W. 2014. “Climate Change and Indigenous Knowledge.” Presentation at the Center for Aboriginal Initiatives, University of Toronto, March 18. Kummu, Matti, Matias Heino, Maija Taka, Olli Varis, and Daniel Viviroli. 2021. “Climate Change Risks Pushing One-Third of Global Food Production outside the Safe Climactic Space. One Earth 4, no. 5 (May 21): 720–29. https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.oneear.2021.04.017. LaDuke, Winona. 2020. To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. Halifax: Fernwood. Levine, Bruce E. 2001. Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society. New York: Continuum. Light, Andrew. 2012. “The Death of Restoration?” In Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, edited by Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, 105–22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lindroth, Marjo, and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen. 2018. Global Politics and Its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Lovelock, James. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin. Lowe, Benjamin S. 2019. “Ethics in the Anthropocene: Moral Responses to the Climate Crisis.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32, no. 3 (June): 479– 85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09786-z. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 25 Maldonado, Julie Koppel, Christine Shearer, Robin Bronen, Kristina Peterson, and Heather Lazrus. 2013. “The Impact of Climate Change on Tribal Communities in the US: Displacement, Relocation, and Human Rights.” Climatic Change 120, no. 3 (October): 601–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0746-z. McBay, Aric. 2011. “Civilization and Other Hazards.” In Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, edited by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, 31–59. New York: Seven Stories Press. McGregor, Deborah. 2014: “Traditional Knowledge and Water Governance: The Ethic of Responsibility.” AlterNative 10, no. 5 (November): 493–507. https://doi.org /10.1177/117718011401000505. ———. 2021. “Indigenous Environmental Justice: Towards an Ethical and Sustainable Future.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, 405–19. New York: Routledge. McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Henry Holt. Meissner, Shelbi Nahwilet. 2018. “The Moral Fabric of Linguicide: Un-weaving Trauma Narratives and Dependency Relationships in Indigenous Language Reclamation.” Journal of Global Ethics 14 (2): 266–76. https://doi.org/10.1080 /17449626.2018.1516691. ———. 2022. “Teaching Reciprocity: Gifting and Land-Based Ethics in Indigenous Philosophy.” Teaching Ethics 22, no. 1 (Spring): 17–37. https://doi.org/10.584 0/tej2022221118. Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Press. Methmann, Chris and Delf Rothe. 2012. “Politics for the Day after Tomorrow: The Logic of Apocalypse in Global Climate Politics.” Security Dialogue 43, no. 4 (August): 323–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010612450746. Million, Dian. 2021. “Resurgent Kinships: Indigenous Relations of Well-Being vs. Humanitarian Health Economies.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, 392–404. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Audra. 2016. “Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction.” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (September): 23–42. https://doi.org/10.11 77/0263276415619219. Monture-Angus, Patricia. 1999. Journeying Forward: Dreaming First Nations’ Independence. Halifax: Fernwood. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 26 Murdock, Esme G. 2022a. “Indigenous Governance Now: Settler Colonial Injustice Is Not Historically Past.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 25 (3): 411–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2039543. ———. 2022b. “Terrortories: Colonialism’s Built Environments as Structural Disablement.” Critical Philosophy of Race 10, no. 1 (January): 106–27. https:// doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.10.1.0106. Norton-Smith, Thomas M. 2010. The Dance of Person and Place: One Interpretation of American Indian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. O’Brien Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ojala, Maria, Ashlee Cunsolo, Charles A. Ogunbode, and Jacqueline Middleton. 2021. “Anxiety, Worry, and Grief in a Time of Environmental and Climate Crisis: A Narrative Review.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46 (October): 35–58. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-022716. Okun, Tema. 2022. “Sense of Urgency.” In White Supremacy Culture. https://www.wh itesupremacyculture.info/urgency.html. Opperman, Romy. 2019. “A Permanent Struggle against an Omnipresent Death: Revisiting Environmental Racism with Frantz Fanon.” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (January): 57–80. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0057. Pulido, Laura. 2012. “The Future Is Now: Climate Change and Environmental Justice.” Social Text: Periscope, January 27. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_art icle/the_future_is_now_climate_change_and_environmental_justice/. ———. 2018. Racism and the Anthropocene. In Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, 116–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ray, Sarah Jacquette. 2021. “Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenom- enon.” Scientific American, March 21. https://www.scientificamerican.com /article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/. Red Nation, The. 2021. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions Press. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self- Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton et al. 2009. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Nature 461, no. 7263 (September 24): 472–75. https://doi.org/10 .1038/461472a. Rothe, Delf. 2020. “Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, no. 2 (Jan.): 143–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819889138. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 27 Salmond Anne, Marc Tadaki, and Tim Gregory. 2014. “Enacting New Freshwater Geographies: Te Awaroa and the Transformative Imagination.” New Zealand Geographer 70, no. 1 (April): 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/nzg.12039. Sandler, Ronald. 2012. “Global Warming and Virtues of Ecological Restoration.” In Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, edited by Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, 63–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sepulveda, Charles. 2018. “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7 (1): 40–58. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30384. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Andrew Frederick. 2022. The Threefold Struggle: Pursuing Ecological, Social, and Personal Wellbeing in the Spirit of Daniel Quinn. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spratt, David, and Ian Dunlop. 2018. What Lies Beneath: The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk. Melbourne: Breakthrough–National Centre for Climate Restoration. Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes et al. 2018. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (33): 8252–59. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115. Stolze, Ted. 2014. “Climate Crisis, Ideology, and Collective Action.” Crisis & Critique 1 (1): 137–52. Styres, Sandra. 2019. “Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature.” In Indigenizing and Decolonizing Studies in Education, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, 24–37. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, 2007. Introduction to Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 1–10. Albany: State University of New York Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2013. “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24 (1): 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752 .2012.759252. TallBear, Kim. 2018. “Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family.” In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, 145–64. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ———. 2019. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou 6, no. 1 (Spring): 24–41. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 28 Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124. ———. 2017. “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43, no. 1 (Spring/Summer): 102–7. https://doi.org/10.10 86/692559. Tuck, Eve. 2009. "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (Fall): 409–28. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. https://jps.library .utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630. UNEP (UN Environment Programme). 2021. Emissions Gap Report 2021: The Heat Is On. Nairobi: UN Environment Programme. Venne, Sharon Helen. 1998. Our Elders Understand Our Rights: Evolving International Law Regarding Indigenous Peoples. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books. Vergès, Françoise. 2017. “Racial Capitalocene.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 72–82. New York: Verso Books. Visram, Talib. 2021. “The Language of Climate Is Evolving, from ‘Change’ to ‘Catastrophe.’” Fast Company, June 12. https://www.fastcompany.com/9070 2024/the-language-of-climate-is-evolving-from-change-to-catastrophe. Vogel, Steven. 2015. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wallace, Rick, Marilyn Struthers, and Rick Cober Bauman. 2010. “Winning Fishing Rights: The Successes and Challenges of Building Grassroots Relations between the Chippewas of Nawash and Their Allies.” In Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous–Non-Indigenous Relationships, edited by Lynne Davis, 91–113. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wallace-Wells, David. 2017. “Scientist Michael Mann on ‘Low-Probability but Catastrophic’ Climate Scenarios.” Intelligencer, New York Magazine, July 11. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-michael-mann-on- climate-scenarios.html. Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. 2015. The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet. Toronto: Allen Lane. Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1): 20–34. https://jps.libra ry.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19145. Weintrobe, Sally. 2021. Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. New York: Bloomsbury. Meissner and Smith – Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 29 Whyte, Kyle P. 2017a. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55, no. 1–2 (Fall): 153–62. ———. 2017b. “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now. Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, 206–15. New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (March–June): 224–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/251484 8618777621. ———. 2020. “Too Late for Indigenous Climate Change Justice: Ecological and Relational Tipping Points.” WIREs Climate Change 11, no. 1 (Jan./Feb.): e603. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.603. ———. 2021a. “Against Crisis Epistemology.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, 52–64. New York: Routledge. ———. 2021b. “An Ethic of Kinship.” In Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 5: Practice, edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer, 30–38. Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature. Whyte, Kyle P., Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer. 2018. “Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for “All Humanity.” In Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, edited by Julie Sze, 149–79. New York: NYU Press. Whyte, Kyle P., and Chris J. Cuomo. 2016. “Ethics of Caring in Environmental Ethics: Indigenous and Feminist Philosophies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, edited by Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson, 234–47. New York: Oxford University Press. Whyte, Kyle P., Jared L. Talley, and Julia D. Gibson. 2019. “Indigenous Mobility Traditions, Colonialism, and the Anthropocene.” Mobilities 14 (3): 319–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1611015. Wildcat, Daniel R. 2009. Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Williston, Byron. 2021. Philosophy and the Climate Crisis: How the Past Can Save the Present. New York: Routledge. Yazzie, Melanie K., and Cutcha Risling Baldy. 2018. “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7 (1): 1–18. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30378. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2024, Vol.10, Iss. 1/2, Article 7 Published by Scholarship@Western, 2024 30 Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. One Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zak, Dan. 2019. “How Should We Talk about What’s Happening to Our Planet?” Washington Post, August 27. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/sty le/how-should-we-talk-about-whats-happening-to-our-planet/2019/08/26 /d28c4bcc-b213-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html. SHELBI NAHWILET MEISSNER (Luiseño & Cupeño; she/her) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher who researches, teaches, and consults on Indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. Shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. Shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and is of both Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kupangaxwichem) descent. She is an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland, College Park and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous feminist research and evaluation. ANDREW FREDERICK SMITH (he/him) is head of the Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science Department and professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Drexel University. His recent work is at the intersection of environmental philosophy and Indigenous philosophy. His latest book is The Threefold Struggle (SUNY Press, 2022). Recent articles have appeared in Environmental Ethics, Journal of Philosophy of Disability, Environmental Philosophy, Hypatia, APA Studies on Native American and Indigenous Philosophy, and Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. 101207 Meissner & Smith title page 101207 Meissner & Smith final format