DEFINING EARTHWORK

By earthwork, I mean the direct, “hands on” work of caring for the earth done by Indigenous peoples. Earthwork is contextual and specific to places. I aim specifically to capture the highly intimate and granular place-based knowledge and labor that aims to allow the co-existence and flourishing of the living world, including human, non-human animals, plants, physical entities with emergent properties (rivers, mountains, forests), and ecosystems (Powys Whyte Reference Powys Whyte2017b, 160; Trosper Reference Trosper2002). Such practices also enable the interdependent flourishing of the earth as a whole subject that emerges out of these nested mutually supportive interactions across communities or ecosystems (Cochran et al. Reference Cochran, Huntington, Pungowiyi, Tom, Stuart Chapin, Huntington and Maynard2013).Footnote ³ In general, practitioners become skilled at earthwork by learning the conditions of survival and flourishing of those other beings across generations (Cochran et al. Reference Cochran, Huntington, Pungowiyi, Tom, Stuart Chapin, Huntington and Maynard2013). Within place-based knowledge systems (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 13), these practices require fostering ethical qualities proper to the maintenance and adjustment of enduring reciprocity-infused relationships as part of the social and cultural fabric of everyday lives, ceremony, and political governance (Powys Whyte Reference Powys Whyte2018). Indigenous societies carry out place-based duties embedded in locally sensitive human-nature nexuses (Espejo Reference Espejo2020).

Of course, not all Indigenous activities are earthwork.Footnote ⁴ Yet across many contexts, it is true that earthwork—as embedded in systems of community caretaking—has very practical, well-studied effects. In the Anishinaabe context of the present-day Great Lakes region, for example, governance has historically been attuned to making these systems of reciprocity flexible and dynamic. Seasonal rounds have been implemented to adjust to seasonal needs and other forms of environmental variability (Powys Whyte Reference Powys Whyte2018, 130; Witgen Reference Witgen2012). Across other contexts globally, diverse Indigenous practices include controlled burning that induces regrowth of particular plant populations and heads off catastrophic wildfires (Hart-Fredeluces, Ticktin, and Lake Reference Hart-Fredeluces, Ticktin and Lake2021; Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2015), culling and harvesting practices that likewise induce restorative growth (Anderson Reference Anderson2013; Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer, Shilling and Nelson2018), and regenerative agricultural practices that link food sovereignty to biodiversity preservation (Perfecto and Vandermeer Reference Perfecto, Vandermeer and Wright.2009). Moreover, I interpret projects of defending the earth against militarized forms of extractive accumulation (Menton and Billon Reference Menton and Le Billon2021)—including in transition to renewable energy (Riofrancos Reference Riofrancos2023)—themselves as efforts to sustain the conditions for earthwork. Under conditions of colonial domination or the constant threat thereof, the community self-defense and advocacy of self-described “protectors, not protestors” shelters this more everyday work of Indigenous sustainability (Ka’ōpua Reference Ka’ōpua2017).

For now, two additional features of the concept of earthwork should be noted. First, because many Indigenous political ecologies do not generally think of humans as above and/or outside of the living world, earthwork is not separate from human flourishing. Deloria (Reference Deloria1973) argues that places themselves exert a “pull” or “force” on the shape of human commitments, and vice versa. In some Indigenous conceptions, such as the Lakota-Dakota covenant with the buffalo nation (Estes Reference Estes2019b), collective self-determination and well-being hinge on the fulfillment of right relations with these particular non-human kin.

Some thinkers describe this as the “kincentric” organization of social life and ethical consciousness, which prioritizes attunement to the intelligence and gifts of other beings in ways that reject “dominion” over the earth (Salmon Reference Salmon2000; Vásquez-Fernández and pii tai poo taa Reference Vásquez-Fernández and pii tai poo taa2020). More prosaically, “place-based societies” have positively intervened in and benefit from ecosystems as “a key functional player” (Bird and Nimmo Reference Bird and Nimmo2018; Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer, Egan, Hjerpe and Abrams2011). The continued influence of dominant colonial models of environmental conservation since the late nineteenth century has meant that the reality of these convivial relations is still often disavowed. Colonial models, sometimes called “fortress conservation” (Dawson, Longo, and Survival International Reference Dawson and Longo2023), incorrectly equate ecological health with a reified non-human nature protected entirely from human disturbance (Buscher and Fletcher Reference Buscher and Fletcher2020; Hessami, Bowles, and Popp Reference Hessami, Bowles, Popp and Ford.2021).

Second, many Indigenous thinkers have articulated Indigenous sovereignty itself as a set of responsibilities to a specific territory, such as Monture-Angus’ (Reference Monture-Angus2000, 36) translation of the Mohawk term for “sovereignty” as “my right to be responsible.” Following this interpretation, Indigenous sovereignty itself often philosophically encompasses a set of capacities and powers conducive to earthwork. As Kiera Ladner argues, the Blackfoot Confederacy developed governance institutions and philosophies “out of people’s experiences with and knowledge of the local ecosystems.” (Powys Whyte Reference Powys Whyte2017a, 165) describes how the creation of right ecological conditions through “complex relationships to place” is an activity constitutive of self-rule. It is itself “the substance of Indigenous governance systems.” In this holistic picture, the Indigenous avowal of human responsibilities creates the conditions for plant and animal beings themselves to fulfill their responsibilities towards humans and the rest of the living world (McGregor Reference McGregor, Agyeman, Cole, Haluza-DeLay and O’Riley2010). In short, Indigenous sovereignty can be understood, in alignment with caring labor, as a system of practices of earthwork guided through relationship-based responsibilities.

In making this case, I build on ecofeminists (Merchant Reference Merchant1990; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen Reference Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen1999; Plumwood Reference Plumwood1993), Marxist feminist theorists of social reproduction (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2017; Federici Reference Federici2020; James Reference James2012),Footnote ⁵ and care theorists (Tronto Reference Tronto1993; Reference Tronto2013) who have variously theorized the modern assault on and subjugation of the direct embodied activities of ecological maintenance and restoration in relation to gender domination. For example, as Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher argue, care is “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto and Fisher Reference Tronto, Fisher, Abel and Nelson1990, 40). Like an array of other related caring activities (e.g., childcare, elder care, housework, food preparation), earthwork is necessary to ensure the continuance and repair of the web of life within mutually sustaining socioecological formations. In sum, the work of sustaining that which we call nature is itself a form of demanding, caring labor (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2017; Reference Battistoni, Calhoun and Fong2022). My focus on Indigenous sovereignty as/for earthwork, then, aims to bolster a robust account of anticolonial climate justice, one that extends to transnational hierarchies of power.

In the case of earthwork, the pretense to govern “nature” as a pre-existing reality, independent of these caretaking relations, emerges out of historical practices of gendered and colonial environmental domination (Salleh Reference Salleh and Salleh2009). The ongoing tendency in environmental governance to reify nature in this manner still serves as an ideological strategy (or unreflective commitment) that makes earthwork practices invisible and devalues those doing them. As I argue in the next section, what is often represented as pristine nature untouched by human society in western political thought and in new international systems tallying “ecosystem services” is frequently the ideologically obscured product of this unrecognized community labor. It is, therefore, an important first step simply to name earthwork and illustrate its disavowed centrality to the task of establishing healthier relations between people and the planet. Wages for earthwork as a model of climate justice encourages both backward and forward-looking efforts to re-equip some of the earth’s most important human caretakers with the practical tools and macro-structural conditions necessary to do the work of care—and to do it under less violent, constrained, and unfair conditions.

More than merely positing an abstract moral duty to repair injustice, at stake here is the need to reconfigure prevailing global power relations. All humankind benefits from Indigenous earthwork, but as with other forms of care work (Tronto Reference Tronto1993; Reference Tronto2013), the most powerful live parasitically off the benefits of these practices in ways we do not realize or have a vested interest in disavowing. Persons disproportionately performing earthwork are endemically devalued, which is part-and-parcel of the way that such indispensable work is made invisible and rendered valueless. This division of “who [must] care” and who has affordances not to do care work reflects and reproduces forms of subjugation endemic to patriarchal, white supremacist, and colonial-capitalist social relations that have taken shape most recently as neoliberal globalization (Glenn Reference Glenn2012; Parrenas Reference Parrenas2001). It is by virtue of this deeply hierarchical structural picture, which carries forward the structural effects of past injustice, that these benefits and burdens should be redistributed in far more egalitarian ways.

Systems of settler colonialism, in particular, make earthwork into a burdened, frequently disrupted, and consistently devalued form of labor. Earthwork is also gendered in two ways. First, Indigenous women bear the brunt of particular forms of gender and sexual violence that accompany the colonial denial of Indigenous jurisdiction and more specifically the introduction of extractive economies (Deer Reference Deer2015; Estes Reference Estes2019b). More broadly stated, settler-states, especially working with religious institutions, have carried out the structured dispossession of Indigenous societies by annihilating and coercively reshaping gender systems integral to land tenure and other “governing institutions in which Indigenous women held power alongside men” (Maracle Reference Maracle and Kamboureli2015, 132, 151; Meissner and Whyte Reference Meissner, Whyte, Taylor, Alcoff and Anderson2017). Second, Indigenous women also take on leadership and responsibility and often hold specific forms of knowledge in ways that extend and/or reinterpret their historical places in governance and kinship networks (Vinyeta, Whyte, and Lynn Reference Vinyeta, Whyte and Lynn2015). These practices shape both day-to-day activities of earthwork and political movements in defense of the earth (Hernandez Reference Hernandez2022).

At the extreme, earthwork puts protectors of the earth at significant risk of violence from the security forces of states and multinational corporations. Indigenous communities face oppressive conditions in defending their ecologies (often) as part of the defense of their very material livelihoods and responsibilities. According to a large-n analysis of environmental conflicts involving those in bottom-up struggles seeking to defend their local ecosystems: “defenders face globally also high rates of criminalization (20% of cases), physical violence (18%), and assassinations (13%), which significantly increase when Indigenous people are involved” (Scheidel et al. Reference Scheidel2020). That is, in addition to the ecological degradation and coercive violation of their rights and dignity against which such communities fight, such self-defense constitutes a dangerous form of work done to secure and fulfill their responsibilities to the earth.

Theorizing Indigenous sovereignty via earthwork in this way properly recontextualizes Indigenous governance as an indispensable vehicle of subjugated yet exploited caring labor. Battistoni (Reference Battistoni, Calhoun and Fong2022) and Walia (Reference Walia2015) have argued that the more traditional sectors of the northern left (e.g., unions) need to radically rethink what and whose labor is called to mind in notions like “green jobs” and the “green economy.” Moving away from an industrial imaginary and social base that reinscribes the predominance of a white male working class, Battistoni contends that it is necessary to revalue the work of people doing ecological and social reproduction as part of a “Green New Deal for care” for an age of deindustrialization in the global north. Altogether, Indigenous peoples around the globe already work “green jobs” (Estes Reference Estes2019a).

EARTHWORK VERSUS ALTERNATIVES

There is a flourishing research agenda on “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK) as a distinctive way of knowing that stems from specific Indigenous peoples’ place-based practices in relation to western science (Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer, Egan, Hjerpe and Abrams2011; Nelson and Shilling Reference Nelson and Shilling2018; Panci et al. Reference Panci, Montano, Shultz, Bartnick and Stone2018). While appreciative of this focus, I use the term earthwork to comprehend Indigenous sovereignty as a structurally devalued form of labor and a practice-oriented system of responsibilities. In doing so, I seek to call attention to the material conditions needed to implement these practical relations in place, through and in which TEK is fostered and applied.

Specifically, I use the notion of earthwork rather than “TEK” to emphasize the material character of the colonial injustice to be remediated in three ways. First, not all forms of knowledge learned and deployed in earthwork are “traditional” in the sense sometimes used in this literature. For example, Indigenous peoples in the US engage in practices that have a traditional basis, and they also pursue relatively novel planning practices updated to contemporary conditions. Both of these, “persisting” and “emergent” responsibilities, contribute to what Powys Whyte (Reference Powys Whyte2018) calls “collective continuance.” Second, I underscore earthwork in order to call attention to how settler colonialism strips away the material bases of these practices. For example, the Colville Tribes lost capacities of expanded social resilience and access to salmon as a “cultural keystone” species when the US removed them from their ecosystems and subsequently erected the Grand Coulee dam on the Columbia River (Lynn et al. Reference Lynn, Daigle, Hoffman, Lake, Michelle, Ranco and Viles2013, 550). Third, earthwork is caring labor. Its laborious character must be acknowledged. Earthwork provides a counterweight to environmental degradation that Indigenous peoples have actively asserted as their responsibility. Yet it is important not to romanticize these ethically powerful assertions of responsibility because colonial structural conditions, including the rapid pace of climate change itself, ensure a completely unjust distribution of benefits and burdens stemming from Indigenous societies’ labor and knowledge systems. What is more, earthwork’s value is typically realized in exploitative ways that erase or perpetuate the subjugation of the people doing it. Specifically, earthwork typically only becomes seen as valuable to outsiders once land and natural resources that Indigenous peoples have adequately cared for are subject to primitive accumulation or to militarized conservation carried out in the name of all humanity. In this way, the independently beneficial values of earthwork in the form of resulting local ecosystem health are either inserted into circuits of production through capital’s expropriation or are made the target of international NGOs’ and some states’ top-down conservation efforts (Dawson, Longo, and Survival International Reference Dawson and Longo2023; Igoe Reference Igoe2003).

Attention to earthwork initiates a critical standard and more deeply informed historical perspective from which to judge current political-economic framings of nature in environmental governance.Footnote ⁶ For some economists, the basic problem is that markets do not fully internalize the value of nature. Their conclusion is that by adopting alternative accounting models, “we” could more holistically attribute a proper value to nature (Dasgupta Reference Dasgupta2021). In this way, by commodifying nature to make its price reflect its “value” as a bundle of saleable capital assets (McAfee Reference McAfee1999), nature is properly valued in accordance with its necessity to capitalist production itself. For some, this means agreeing to qualify nature as a “natural asset,” which paradoxically means using market logic to “price the priceless” to incentivize investments in renewable energy, or in (empirically failed) efforts to offset non-renewable emissions through carbon markets (Greenfield Reference Greenfield2023). These ideas are embedded in internationally accepted frameworks of national accounting dating to 2003 (Prasad Reference Prasad2019, 42), which budget in a steeper price of nature as a scarce commodity so as to incentivize corporations to refrain from damaging the natural world (DiPerna Reference DiPerna2023).

In a related paradigm, ecological economists have built up a research program constructing nature as providing quantifiable services to humanity, or “payment for ecosystem services” (PES) (Costanza et al. Reference Costanza, d’Arge, de Groot, Farber, Grasso, Hannon and Limburg1997; Reference Costanza, de Groot, Braat, Kubiszewski, Fioramonti, Sutton and Farber2017; Daily and Matson Reference Daily and Matson2008). While some ecosystem services scholars recommend more contextual and power-sensitive approaches to appreciating nature’s value (Norström et al. Reference Norström2020), syntheses of this field indicate broad convergence on economistic definitions of value that “obfuscate the situated cultural and political histories (i.e., ‘views from somewhere’) that define entire landscapes and ecologies” (Kolinjivadi, Hecken, and Merlet Reference Kolinjivadi, Hecken and Merlet2023, 11).

Here, I narrow in on two central problems with attributing services or work to a wild “nature” so as to establish its exchange-value. The first of these is an empirical counterpoint: earthwork is part of a much wider array of human activities—including the specific environmental transformations that Indigenous peoples have wrought (Cronon Reference Cronon2003)—that have created or, at minimum, influenced the features of what we refer to as nature. Instructively studying this layered human influence on almost all (98%) of the environment, the ecologists Ellis and Ramankutty (Reference Ellis and Ramankutty2008) have argued for a shift to studying human-shaped ecosystems they call “anthrobiomes” instead of natural biomes. Other historians and ecologists have likewise begun to study this longer history of unevenly applied and socially differentiated human activities across societies, biota, and geologies (Abrams Reference Abrams2020; Garnett et al. Reference Garnett, Burgess, Fa, Fernández-Llamazares, Molnár, Robinson and Watson2018; Morrison Reference Morrison, Cederlöf and Rangarajan2018). From this vantage point, “nature” is really layers upon layers of socio-natures (cf. Cederlöf and Rangarajan Reference Cederlöf and Rangarajan2019). Of course, not all of these varied human-induced changes have been environmentally positive; earthwork is. The second of the problems with PES as a framework is that it will never make sense to attribute value to the natural world by negating the practices and political epistemologies that enable specifically regenerative contributions to local ecosystems.

With these objections in mind, my turn to earthwork further specifies a critical standard assessing two ways that PES and related approaches are misguided: The first is the mistaken idea that it is possible to correct market externalities by merely tweaking prices of nature. As to the latter, political ecology scholars such as Moore (Reference Moore2015) argue that capitalism is a form of “world ecology” structurally premised on predatory extraction through the artificial cheapening of extra-human natures. I agree with much of Moore’s analysis, but I focus more on the disavowal of human caretaking. Second, and more specific to my argument, is my critique of the claim that a sui generis “nature” is the entity creating such unaccounted-for value. PES and natural capital frameworks substitute nature for earthwork, thereby erasing the political-ecological relations and community caretaking that generate the commodifiable value these frameworks attribute post hoc to the ecosystems in question. In doing so, they elide the pluralistic and localized use-values of Indigenous societies (Prasad Reference Prasad2019, 42). The latter systems rest on unremitting “hybrid labor” (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2017) that ensures positive sustainability and biodiversity outcomes. By contrast, PES ignores collective agency and “complex relational processes.” Proponents can only quantify narrow “epistemologically reductive” outputs as the services of a subject-less nature (Salleh Reference Salleh and Salleh2009, 3).

Like other forms of unwaged or poorly compensated care work, Indigenous earthwork provides a coerced subsidy to dominant actors by furnishing desired spaces for extraction or aesthetic appreciation that global northern political and cultural institutions mistakenly and ideologically identify as pure wild “nature” or wilderness (Cronon Reference Cronon1996). Such claims to act on behalf of a universal humanity or nature license the dispossession of people engaged in eco-sufficiency-based practices (Suell Reference Suell2022). For example, “there is not a single country where Protected Area laws recognize community land ownership” (Dawson, Longo, and Survival International Reference Dawson and Longo2023, 5). Moreover, in the vast majority of cases in which Indigenous populations lack state-recognized collective property rights, international standards grant states credit for their “non-use” of resources (Rakotonarivo et al. Reference Rakotonarivo, Rakotoarisoa, Manoa Rajaonarivelo, Raharijaona, Jones and Hockley2023). As Prasad (Reference Prasad2019, 42) observes of the Indian case: “if the state is the legal owner of the forest, but the biodiversity is maintained because of the frugal use patterns of the local forest-dependent people, the PES does not recognise the labour that goes into this maintenance. In other words, the use values produced by the environmental producer are ignored in such a system.” As Ybarra (Reference Ybarra2017, 5) points out with respect to the Quixpur in Guatemala, credit for earthwork accrues to the very states that render Indigenous peoples’ lived conditions more precarious by dispossessing them as criminal trespassers and/or refusing to recognize their land tenure. Ironically, international systems credit states when, in fact, states owe an accumulated ecological debt to Indigenous peoples.

SETTLER COLONIALISM AS SOCIOECOLOGICAL DOMINATION

Frameworks like natural capital and PES are more recent responses to the environmental crisis. It is important to demonstrate, however, that their deep philosophical assumptions are far from arbitrary. Rather, these assumptions emanate from historically longstanding imperial and settler-colonial practices and ideologies. In this section, I turn to these underpinnings to show how they arose as ideologies out of constitutive contexts of justifying the Euro-american colonization and dispossession of Indigenous societies (cf. Gilio-Whitaker Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019).

In studying these contexts, scholars of settler-colonial studies have interpreted colonial invasion as premised upon the structured dispossession and occupation of Indigenous peoples’ lands (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014; Nichols Reference Nichols2020). I supplement this focus on the dispossession of land by showing how settler-colonization is likewise a form of socioecological domination predicated on the material erasure and ideological disavowal of earthwork. Namely, settler dispossession of land is a form of colonial ecological violence (Bacon Reference Bacon2018), insofar as such practices destroy and replace the material ecological labor and caretaking relations that many Indigenous peoples articulate as reciprocal responsibilities. By more precisely attending to this form of colonial domination stipulated in key threads of Indigenous anticolonial thought in this section, the next two sections will then reconsider frameworks of anticolonial climate justice that encompass the resurgence of Indigenous sovereignties as expressions of earthwork.

My argument here first requires a shift in definition so as to foreground how settler colonialism has always functioned as a way of usurping Indigenous modes of earthwork as both responsibilities and coercively devalued/unwaged work. Kyle Powys Whyte has provided the most apt starting point for discussing settler colonialism from this angle, by focusing on these socioecological dimensions:

Powys Whyte’s definition accordingly pins down the ecological erasure effected through settler-colonial invasion. For my purposes, it is important that this account centers more on how established social and ecological relations generate the more formal (and generally human-centered) notions of land rights, self-determination, or sovereignty as “power over” a particular space.

Scholarship on settler colonialism has tended to proceed on more generic terms than this, on the idea that colonial invasion primarily rests on the theft of land. Usually, it is now taken for granted that the aim of such invasion is to inaugurate and consolidate the foundations of a new settler economy, society, and state. In one canonical formulation, “settler colonialism destroys to replace” existing Indigenous societies (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006, 388). While this definition is still useful, it is missing the more positive normative content (Piccolo Reference Piccolo2023) and material capacities for earthwork that have informed Indigenous accounts of the experience of dispossession. To this point, many Indigenous societies conceive of (settler-)colonial invasion itself as a form of structural domination or servitude over both Indigenous peoples’ political and individual bodies and the earth itself (Maracle Reference Maracle and Kamboureli2015, 143). Settler colonialism has ideologically required the erasure or redefinition of those relations between people and place that Indigenous societies have generated. Accordingly, settler colonialism involves the intentional and/or structural eradication of the existing modes of socioecological and political caretaking that pertain between Indigenous societies and their territories (Bacon Reference Bacon2018). In short, the specificity of this coupled material erasure and ideological disavowal cannot be fully captured by focusing solely on the colonial theft of territory as a harm that (anthropocentrically) concerns Indigenous peoples as dominated human collectivities.

Even critical accounts fail to attend sufficiently to how colonization violates earthwork as a set of positive Indigenous ecological agencies. Accordingly, I supplement such frameworks by addressing how settler-colonization as the recursive dispossession of land (Nichols Reference Nichols2020) also entails the recursive disruption of relations or systems of embodied labor with land (Simpson Reference Simpson2017) and of the views of human interdependence with the natural world that suffuse these material practices (Ghosh Reference Ghosh2021, 187–90; Merchant Reference Merchant1990).

To put forward only one among other possible implications of this argument, scholars of settler-colonization have importantly focused on how Indigenous dispossession, especially in the US southeast, paved the way for the exploitation of Black [enslaved] labor on occupied Native land (Leroy Reference Leroy2016). Yet the role of Indigenous labor in the North American context remains peripheral to these discussions. One reason for this is that settler-societies recode the very relations Indigenous peoples already established between “culture” and “nature” prior to colonization as a raw state of nature (Tully Reference Tully1994) or terra nullius (Pateman Reference Pateman2007) so as to vindicate the colonial dispossession of Indigenous societies. Colonial ideologies adopted to sustain such practices recast complex histories of Indigenous and (more generally) non-western transformations by reinterpreting land as a virgin, de-humanized nature freely available for colonial expropriation (Gill Reference Gill2021a; Reference Gill2021b). This colonial reinterpretation set the stage for the subject-less nature of more recent natural capital and PES approaches. In earthwork’s stead, colonial practices posit a desocialized and empty nature. Such raw nature then calls for the civilizational presence of settler institutions—inclusive of environmental governance itself—to render it socially and politically valuable.

In sum, I understand settler-colonization as a series of projects of socioecological domination aimed at replacing and attenuating “socio-natures” that have distinctively conjoined land and labor through earthwork. Appreciating this historical backdrop is important because these processes have generated the deep underpinnings for environmental governance frameworks that seek to measure the value of nature. For example, contemporary conservation practices inherit the ahistorical assumption that nature can somehow be removed from human sociality and socioecological labor (Bird and Nimmo Reference Bird and Nimmo2018). Such a stipulation only becomes plausible when assuming a colonial baseline, one which erases the fact that invasion materially and epistemically obliterates Indigenous societies’ extant relational and distributed forms of human and non-human agency and labor. Settler-societies stifled and replaced those practices and landscape-effects of earthwork by figuring a divisible virgin nature, which can then serve either as a repository of extractable natural resources or of ecosystem services. Alongside capital accumulation, militarized “fortress” conservation on this model has justified the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Brockington Reference Brockington2002). In so doing, such colonial practices of nature conservation ideologically disavow the Indigenous earthwork that has empirically shaped deeply desirable features of spaces, such as those with iconic connections to settler-national heritages like US national parks (Abrams Reference Abrams2020; Anderson Reference Anderson2013).

THE CURRENCIES OF ANTICOLONIAL CLIMATE JUSTICE

In the prior section, I conceptualized settler colonialism as a form of socioecological domination that sutures the dispossession of Indigenous lands to the material and epistemic erasure of Indigenous peoples’ systems of community caretaking. If this is one key axis of colonial violence in need of repair, then any program of climate justice calling itself anticolonial ought to foreground projects of remediating earthwork. Specifically, I argue that earthwork should be (re)materialized through the recovery of Indigenous governance capacities and through the transformation of broader colonial structural conditions—that is, not only discursively and imaginatively but materially. This modality of the colonial and anticolonial lends specific contours to the substantive meaning(s) of decolonizing climate justice.

In general, climate justice requires attention to power, agency, and self-determination, that is, to who materially participates in creating the hegemonic meanings and institutions codifying what counts as environmental justice. More specifically, settler colonialism’s mode of socioecological domination preconditions the ideological disavowal of earthwork in/as Indigenous sovereignty in the very framing of environmental governance practices. From the outset, this erasure writes off the very rights and capacities of Indigenous peoples, and sometimes even acknowledgment of their presence at all. In turn, they are excluded and erased from shaping what counts as justice and self-determination for both their communities and the earth (often conceived as inseparable) on their terms. The repair and restoration of earthwork as core to Indigenous sovereignties must become central to defining the substance of the “anticolonial” in anticolonial forms of climate justice.

As to the philosophical dimensions of this mode of anticolonial climate justice, I argue that the framework of wages for earthwork demands a shift in thinking about the very currency of justice. To show why, it will be helpful to juxtapose my framework with some of the ways that other scholars have developed climate justice frameworks. For example, some philosophers of environmental and global justice think of questions of ecological harm and debt through the lens of unjustified and unfair hierarchies of vulnerability (Shue Reference Shue2014). In a more specific anticolonial key, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has argued that reparations for global racial empire must focus not only on remediating the past as such, but also on remediating the structural conditions inherited from the past. As a result, reparations must be “worldmaking” (Getachew Reference Getachew2019); today, that means creating just climate futures.

Like Táíwò, my framework also emphasizes links between anticolonial self-determination and egalitarian redistribution so as to refashion the structural roots of systems of racial hierarchy and dispossession. Also akin to Táíwò’s reparations, my account of wages for earthwork is not exclusively backward-looking, and therefore, avoids objections that are often brought up to counter the more prevalent claims for climate debt and reparations as backward-looking “historical injustice” in general (Pickering and Barry Reference Pickering and Barry2012; Young Reference Young2011). Indeed, my argument aims to be forward-looking in the sense that my focus on earthwork as a critique of current colonial environmental governance frameworks results in more constructively commending a green transition that prioritizes the resurgence of Indigenous sovereignties and land tenure. These resurgences of earthwork are both important pathways through which to transform extant hierarchical social relations, and they are in themselves constitutively more just states of affairs.

Where I diverge from Táíwò is that I reject the notion that distribution should be the primary currency of anticolonial climate justice (cf. Sultana Reference Sultana2022). To be sure, wages for earthwork should include monetary transfers if this is appropriate to repairing systemic harm, since the theft of land and labor also entails intergenerationally stolen wealth (Yellowhead Institute 2021). In this sense, the massive ecological debts that many states have incurred to Indigenous communities demand remediation in the form of monetary transfers to those communities. Yet, other highly pluralistic dimensions of value come into play, precisely because earthwork is labor that is also embedded in non-fungible concrete place-based social relations. Specific forms of structural transformation can lighten the burdens of earthwork, but earthwork itself does not admit of exchange or redistribution in the same manner as resources. In a Māori context, Watane (Reference Watene and Brooks2020) has used the example of Kaupapa Māori research methodologies to show how Indigenous philosophies, when articulated on their own terms, may transform the content of global justice. For Watane, the notion of restoring sovereignty and Indigenous governance makes room for locally specific conceptions of value materialized through earthwork. Put otherwise, compensation must be compensation not only for damages, but also efforts to restore dynamic but colonially damaged relationship-based practices—some erased, some actually-existing, some emergent—that produce contextually appropriate forms of eco-sufficiency in projects of political-ecological self-determination.

Likewise positing an alternative to distributive justice alone, other theorists have attempted to articulate Indigenous societies’ practices and political critique in a more expansive currency of “community capabilities.” Such an approach dovetails with my focus on self-determination in grassroots environmental and climate justice movements (Schlosberg and Carruthers Reference Schlosberg and Carruthers2010). While clearly overlapping, it seems to me that subsuming what I call earthwork into the notion of community capabilities, basic functioning, and participation, or even prioritizing sustainability as a “meta-capability” (Holland Reference Holland2008), may undersell the role of place-based duties in the articulation of specific Indigenous philosophies in defining the substance of justice (Watene Reference Watene and Brooks2020). Instead, this specifically anticolonial mode of egalitarian social and political transformation includes the restoration of place-based duties both as instrumental to human well-being and as constitutive of collective practices of living well. In this sense, the order of priority capabilities scholars presume may well be the reverse: community capabilities might be just as aptly couched as preparatory to fulfilling duties of earthwork. In this account, the typically more universal slate of anthropocentric “capabilities” is itself aimed at fulfilling place-based duties based on eco-system caretaking. As a result, fulfilling such duties requires direct material support for Indigenous peoples’ rights of self-determination and the restitution of the otherwise burdened forms of earthwork as the very substance of Indigenous self-rule. That is, wages for earthwork complements but is not reducible to other models of anticolonial systemic transformation through radically redistributive politics.

THE POLITICS OF ANTICOLONIAL CLIMATE JUSTICE

Beyond philosophical vocabularies of justification, I also raise some political considerations as a response to the profound institutional inertia and resistance inherent to asymmetric systems of colonial power. As a first step to remediate socioecological erasure, Indigenous communities require sufficient pluralistic legal protections, collective rights to self-determination, and governance capacities to exercise autonomy over their lands and waters. Creating secure foundations for autonomy would enable Indigenous societies to materially defend and practice their concrete conceptions of environmental value through earthwork.

Such an orientation commends significant material restitution, specifically the return of land and sovereignty. Policies along these lines should include both remedial and forward-looking financial resources insofar as they are required to restore Indigenous political economies (Yellowhead Institute 2021). Proposals for a global care income (James Reference James2021) or a conservation basic income (de Lange et al. Reference de Lange, Sze, Allan, Atkinson, Booth, Fletcher and Khanyari2023) likewise have appeal here, since they aim to equip the earth’s caretakers with the significant resources to support this work, and to render earthwork’s value for sustainability visible (alongside other forms of care work) under far more egalitarian structural arrangements.

Importantly, anticolonial repair in this mode cannot just work by appealing to the abstract ideals (or justice-based currency) of autonomy and/or sovereignty. Even putting these principles on secure footing requires a massive rebalancing of deeply asymmetric transnational power relations. This rebalancing stretches far beyond formal rights guarantees. Anticolonial climate justice in this mode prioritizes the adoption of binding packages of Indigenous collective and individual rights in national and international law, with teeth that extend beyond current frameworks on Indigenous “consultation.” These forms of enforceable collective power should also extend to constitutional veto power over (colonially constructed) majoritarian institutions (Vergara Reference Vergara, Holm and Deese2023, 219).

Such a model differs from proposals for “co-management” arrangements between states and Indigenous peoples (Anderson Reference Anderson2013, xviii). The problem with co-management proposals is that they do not address why such projects should not already begin with or lead to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination over their own lands. In other words, there is still a paternalistic, colonial sense that some higher authority guides how Indigenous peoples configure their land relations and self-determination. This tendency is amply discussed among scholars of conservation, who point out that conservation NGOs and their donors consistently cite benefits to local communities with little binding participatory inputs—let alone giving the land back (Matarrita-Cascante, Sene-Harper, and Ruyle Reference Matarrita-Cascante, Sene-Harper and Ruyle2019). Altogether, wages for earthwork would aim to limit significantly—and even structurally negate—the powers of states, multinational corporations, and multinational conservation NGOs to determine the fate of Indigenous territories rather than Indigenous peoples themselves.

Since “nature conservation is foundational to capitalism and nested in the racialized colonial order” that criminalizes Indigenous earthwork (Sène Reference Sène2023, 2), top-down conservation that rejects Indigenous land tenure and food sovereignty in favor of biodiversity should be rejected. “Indigenous-led” models of conservation that prioritize Indigenous self-determination are both more (or as) effective and do not perpetuate colonial socioecological domination (Artelle et al. Reference Artelle, Zurba, Bhattacharyya, Chan, Brown, Housty and Moola2019; Moosa and Roth Reference Moosa and Roth2019). Writing in The Atlantic, Ojibwe scholar Treuer (Reference Treuer2021) has proposed that the US government should give the national parks back to Indigenous peoples and that an inter-tribal consortium should take over stewardship of the parks. This kind of model prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty, by refusing to treat Indigenous peoples as just one voice or “stakeholder” that is ultimately subordinated to settler-sovereignty. Likewise, many political ecologists now argue that the most practically effective way to protect biodiversity is to “support resurgent Indigenous-led governance” (Artelle et al. Reference Artelle, Zurba, Bhattacharyya, Chan, Brown, Housty and Moola2019; Garnett et al. Reference Garnett, Burgess, Fa, Fernández-Llamazares, Molnár, Robinson and Watson2018) and to secure binding community-based forms of land tenure appropriately attuned to local contexts (Rakotonarivo et al. Reference Rakotonarivo, Rakotoarisoa, Manoa Rajaonarivelo, Raharijaona, Jones and Hockley2023).

Shifting massive imbalances of power built into green transitions will depend upon building counter-hegemonic power in solidarity with Indigenous projects of decolonization, as the Indigenous activist collective the Red Nation (2021) has argued in their manifesto for a “Red Deal.” Such solidarities are material, not abstract. To wit, one of the core principles for green transition in the global north political economies should be that social forms of transition minimize the invasiveness and intensity of extracting minerals like lithium, precisely because such practices will have dramatically negative effects on the well-being of Indigenous peoples and other local communities impacted on the other end of the global supply chain. Often reminiscent of past colonial invasions, this “decarbonization by dispossession” (Andreucci et al. Reference Andreucci, García López, Radhuber, Conde, Voskoboynik, Farrugia and Zografos2023) tears at the capacities of communities to retain and further enrich their own practices of earthwork. By contrast, a focus on green public transportation would prove far less reliant on intensive extraction than the current US policy path of making lithium-dependent electric vehicle batteries (Battistoni and Riofrancos Reference Battistoni and Riofrancos2023; Surma Reference Surma2023).

This kind of solidaristic self-transformation of the global north’s “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen Reference Brand and Wissen2021) along the supply chain also extends to the work of social movements (McKean Reference McKean2020). Climate justice movements in the global north ought to prioritize Indigenous peoples’ leadership and sovereignty, especially those on the frontlines doing the dangerous work of land defense against extractive colonial invasion. Support for blockades (Chua and Bosworth Reference Chua and Bosworth2023) and other actions against extractive infrastructures are anticolonial practices of transnational solidarity. Materializing such solidarity is also one step in repaying Indigenous peoples for ecological debts resulting from Indigenous earthwork’s usurped and disavowed contributions to sustainability.

With respect to Indigenous struggles in the global south, restitution for the global north’s (neo)colonial practices of environmental degradation is indispensable. In fact, among the best reasons for climate reparations from north to south is to reduce the pressures on global south governments to pursue extractive “resource nationalism” or colonial conservation on Indigenous territories to raise revenue for social programs and alleviate imperial domination and dependency (Riofrancos Reference Riofrancos2020). In this way, reparations for international imperial hierarchy and for future lost income for petro-states in keeping fossil fuels in the ground can both bolster decarbonization (Robinson Reference Robinson2023) and emerge as a complement to Indigenous decolonization as wages for earthwork.