Subjects of Intergenerational Justice

Indigenous Philosophy, the Environment and Relationships

Christine J. Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book challenges mainstream Western IEJ (intergenerational environmental justice) in a manner that privileges indigenous philosophies and highlights the value these philosophies have for solving global environmental problems.

Divided into three parts, the book begins by examining the framing of Western liberal environmental, intergenerational and indigenous justice theory and reviews decolonial theory. Using contemporary case studies drawn from the courts, film, biography and protests actions, the second part explores contemporary M?ori and Aboriginal experiences of values-conflict in encounters with politics and law. It demonstrates the deep ontological rifts between the philosophies that inform M?ori and Aboriginal intergenerational justice (IJ) and those of the West that underpin the politics and law of these two settler states. Existing Western IEJ theories, across distributional, communitarian, human rights based and the capabilities approach to IJ, are tested against obligations and duties of specific M?ori and Aboriginal iwi and clans. Finally, in the third part, it explores the ways we relate to time and across generations to create regenerative IJ. Challenging the previous understanding of the conceptualization of time, it posits that it is in how we relate—human to human, human to nonhuman, nonhuman to human—that robust conceptualization of IEJ emerges. This volume presents an imagining of IEJ which accounts for indigenous norms on indigenous terms and explores how this might be applied in national and international responses to climate change and environmental degradation.

Demonstrating how assumptions in mainstream justice theory continue to colonise indigenous people and render indigenous knowledge invisible, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental and intergenerational philosophy, political theory, indigenous studies and decolonial studies, and environmental humanities more broadly.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097457-1

You know, I have a culture. I am a cultured person.

[Speaks language.]

I am not something that fell out of the sky, for the pleasure of somebody putting another culture into this cultured being. I am not ‘an Aboriginal’ or indeed ‘Indigenous’. I am Arrente-Alyawarra First Nations person. A sovereign person from this country.

[Speaks language.]

I didn’t come here from overseas. I came from here. My language. In spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists I am alive. I am here, and I speak my language. I practice the cultural essence of me.

Don’t try to suppress me. And don’t call me a problem. I am not a problem. I have never left my country, nor have I ceded any part of it. Nobody has entered into a treaty, or talked to me about who I am.

I am: Arrente-Alyawarra; Female; Elder; From this country.

Please remember I am not the problem.

(Kunoth-Monk, 2014)

This book challenges orthodoxy. It suggests that, despite best intentions, there are some underlying assumptions within Western justice theories that undermine their universality. Furthermore, in making universalist claims they perpetuate the colonial project—a project designed, among other things, to suppress and destroy Indigenous Peoples. This may seem a distant problem. The colonial project has succeeded in keeping Indigenous Peoples and the Indigenous ‘problem’ to which Rosalie Kunoth-Monk refers above, so far to the margins that well-meaning people are not immediately cognisant of potential transgressions of justice in their own theory.¹ Furthermore, and constructively, I propose that by relinquishing the myth of universality and seeking input from Indigenous ontologies, it is possible to fashion more robust imaginings of justice from which to respond to the crises facing the globe.² Makere Stewart-Harawira argues, ‘[t]o date … outside of Indigenous scholarship itself, within academic circles little serious attention has been paid to examining the possibilities inherent in Indigenous ontologies’ to address global problems (Stewart-Harawira, 2005: 34). My purpose is to address aspects of that lacuna by establishing the content and context of an intergenerational justice (IJ) that will accommodate the needs of the Indigenous people in the settler states.

Narrowing to (slightly) more manageable proportions, my focus is more specifically on intergenerational environmental justice (IEJ). Finally, IEJ is viewed through a decolonial lens. For liberal theorists of environmental philosophy, environmental ethics and political philosophy it identifies underlying assumptions that make their formulations of IEJ unworkable in some contexts, that is, for some Peoples. For liberal philosophers I hope to provide a bridge between Western, Māori and Aboriginal philosophy. For Indigenous Peoples, and Māori and Aboriginal particularly, and Indigenous Studies scholars this book identifies with some specificity why we—Māori and Pākehā, Aboriginal and white Australians—continue to ‘talk past each other’. I’m offering a metaphilosophical account of the incompatibilities of the epistemological and ontological foundations of liberal, Māori and Aboriginal philosophy and theories of IJ particularly. And a validation of philosophic traditions outside the Western canon.

I approach the IEJ canon from a perspective of deficit—a deficit which resides in Western thought and ontology. I draw on Māori, Aboriginal and North American First Nations works to expose this deficit in IEJ. I say ‘deficit’ deliberately provocatively. The thinkers and theorists who inform the work are members of the cultures displaced by colonialism in the settler states. Aotearoa New Zealand,³ Australia, Canada and the USA, four states settled by colonial Britain, are settler states by virtue of the colonial imperative to not only extract resources and hence wealth from the colony, but also settle the land permanently with their own people and to govern with structures and laws derived from the UK and Europe.⁴ The lands of the existing population (the Indigenous Peoples) were forcibly taken, the original inhabitants and their descendants subject to genocide and systematic degradation. Indigenous populations are now minorities forced to operate within the (coercive) dominant political, legal and social paradigms. Within these states, Indigenous Peoples suffer ongoing oppression and disadvantage. A not insignificant part of the colonial project was/is the denigration and repudiation of Indigenous philosophy, political structures, epistemologies and ontologies.⁵

However, despite centuries of effort to eliminate Indigenous life ways, knowing, culture and the languages in which these philosophies, political structures, epistemologies and ontologies are embedded, they live on and resonate for Indigenous citizenry of the settler states.⁶ Furthermore, for those whom Indigenous philosophy is the core way of being, thinking and constructing the good life, liberal philosophy and political philosophy are poor surrogates, they are unable to support their definitions of the good life. And to some members of the settler states it is this cultural tenacity that is the ‘Indigenous problem’. There remains a strong spoken and unspoken belief that Indigenous Peoples and their compatriots will be better off once everyone is aligned with Western values. Here I take a contrary view—suggesting in matters of IEJ all members of these societies can benefit from embracing aspects of Indigenous philosophy and values,⁷ because Western orthodoxy is unable to contend with the lived experience and needs of the settlers of the settler states in the context of IEJ. I seek a path within IEJ to that end.

Divided into three parts, this book begins with a background examination of the framing of Western liberal environmental, intergenerational and Indigenous justice theory and second reviews decolonial theory.⁸ The second part of three chapters looks at Māori and Aboriginal experiences of values- conflict with politics, law and IJ theories. Existing Western IEJ theory is tested against the extant life ways and IEJ obligations and duties of specific Māori iwi and Aboriginal clans. The structure of these first two parts is deliberately mechanistic and dichotomised to draw attention to the structure of Western epistemology. The dichotomies are collapsed in the final part which, drawing heavily from Māori philosophy and referencing Aboriginal philosophy, challenges a crucial conceptual disjuncture between Western IEJ and Indigenous IEJ—the understanding of time—before moving to the conclusion. The goal is to establish a reimagined and inclusive IEJ from within the Human Rights and Capabilities Approaches to justice. To do this the structure takes a narrative style. The purpose is to explore an imagining of IEJ which accounts for Indigenous norms on Indigenous terms, and how they might be applied in national and international responses to climate change and environmental degradation. The emphasis throughout is that these are lived experiences: neither the author nor the Peoples referenced are suggesting cultures are set in stone. On the contrary, it is the very dynamic nature of culture and philosophy that legitimises the propositions within.

The remainder of this introduction is focused on the philosophic and cosmological cleavages between Western and Indigenous worldviews. It establishes the cleavages as dichotomous. But that oversimplifies the complex continua of ways of being. The reality is that worldviews are fuzzy not dichotomised, they overlap and bleed into one another constantly. Highlighting cleavages, however, establishes the context for and nature of my claim that existing IEJ is hegemonic.

Western liberal worldview

The settler states are liberal democracies.⁹ Individuals elect representatives to govern the state, and each individual has rights against the state—rights to due legal process; freedom of expression, action and movement; equality and respect; freedom of religion and ideology. The settler states value and claim to uphold the principles of Human Rights, human equality and human dignity. These principles have evolved within a distinctive Western liberal worldview and are integral to liberal justice theory. While expressed as universals, these principles are generated within a prescribed universe which imposes limitations on IJ, environmental justice (EJ) and Indigenous justice.

Many conceptions of IJ arising from European worldviews struggle to account for the scale of threats posed by the outcomes of industrialisation and ‘development’—climate change,¹⁰ resources extraction¹¹ and environmental degradation,¹² that is, threats to environmental sustainability—to temporally distant others. European worldviews are characterised by Bosselmann as ‘dualism (of nature and humans), anthropocentrism, materialism, atomism, greed (individualism gone mad) and economism (the myth of no boundaries and limitless opportunities)’ (Bosselmann, 2011: 205). It is grounded in a dichotomous relationship between human and the environment, reinforced by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment empiricism and the scientific quest to delve deeply into the smallest component parts of the whole (Barad, 2003). Within this view, nature is seen as primarily of instrumental value, a resource for human advancement with no, or little, or unquantifiable intrinsic value.¹³ ‘Every Man’, said John Locke, ‘[has] a right to the Creatures … [and] if anyone had … made himself a Property in any particular thing … [to pass it to] his Children, and they [have] a right to succeed it, and possess it’ (Locke, 1997: Treatise 1, Chapter IX, §87). Once ‘possessed’ nature is property with value. Value is understood to lie in the economic benefits that nature provides—and ownership of nature or at least elements of nature is the foundation of the economy.¹⁴ It is frequently portrayed as wild and savage, to be dominated and tamed by man, particularly in the Christian tradition from which this worldview grew (Rahner, 1993). Fundamentally the world has been divided into the unquantifiable undeveloped environment and the quantifiable economy (Purdy, 2015). It seems that for many there is a fundamental disconnect and a wilful blindness to the entanglement of economy, environment and human well-being. Put another way, the elements of the Western tradition foster ignorance of entangled human and nonhuman.

John Stuart Mill (2004: 19) identifies, with an almost breathless incredulity, how,

…it is to be remarked that some objects exist or grow up spontaneously, of a kind suited to the supply of human wants. There are caves and hollow trees capable of affording shelter; fruits, roots, wild honey, and other natural products, on which human life can be supported.

He proceeds to describe the power nature provides—the ‘active energies’ (ibid: 20)—which can supplement and supplant human labour to produce goods. He even suggests, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Interviewees
• List of figures
• Glossary
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1 Framings
• PART 2 Living at the intersection: barriers to realising IEJ in settler states
• PART 3 How do we relate?
• Index