Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to a practical purpose: to open up an area of discursive space by analyzing and exposing a set of practices that serve to police certain boundaries of knowledge. The arena is indigenous people's claims to a tradition of environmental knowledge and ethics that have pertinent contributions to make to current debates about environmental crisis. Policing practices are fueled by a concept of waste. The proposition that the natives are wasteful stands as a mighty 22 and almost invariably unjustified barrier in excluding indigenous people from discourses of ecological knowledge, ethics, and sustainability; in some instances, this barrier even works to exclude them from shared land and resource management