Indigenous theory as epistemic ground for environmental scholarship and practice

Abstract

Environmental sciences increasingly call for the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges. Yet this inclusion is frequently reduced to datasets, management tools or cultural insight, while systematically disavowing the sovereignty, law and epistemological authority that underpins Indigenous knowledge systems. Such extractive framings maintain the disciplinary coherence of science and secure its possessive claims to objectivity, even as they acknowledge pluralism. Indigenous scholars working within these constrained terrains are drawing on bodies of Indigenous theory such as Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) to reconfigure the terms of knowledge production. This paper traces some of those reconfigurations. Guided by methodological commitments resonant with Indigenous Process Method, I conducted a review of 21 Indigenous-authored environmental research papers. Rather than analysing their content, I followed the theoretical lineages they cited (68 foundational CIS texts) to illuminate conceptual forces shaping Indigenous environmental scholarship, and then returned to these initial papers to show how such commitments reverberate in environmental science practice. Five constellations emerged: Refusal and Resurgence; Indigenous Law and Governance; Relationality and Kincentric Ethics; Decolonial Environmental Futures and Justice; and Indigenous Methodologies. These constellations trouble hegemonic environmental science and expose its racialised epistemic architecture to assert that Indigenous knowledges cannot be adequately known by the logics of hegemonic science. What emerges is a challenge for environmental science disciplines to resist assimilation and refuse containment of Indigenous knowledges. If environmental sciences are to move beyond rhetorical inclusion, they must be willing to relinquish authority and relate otherwise. This review provokes that Indigenous knowledges do not need to be let in to science but they are here already and refuse to perform for institutional legitimacy. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.