For roughly five hundred years, Indigenous peoples have been struggling against the dominant institutions of society, against imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, impoverishment, segregation, racism, and genocide. The struggle continues today under the present world social order and against the dominant institutions of ‘neoliberalism’ and globalization: the state, corporations, financial institutions and international organizations. Indigenous communities continue to struggle to preserve their cultural identities, languages, histories, and the continuing theft and exploitation of their land. Indigenous resistance against environmental degradation and resource extraction represents the most direct source of resistance against a global environmental crisis which threatens to lead the species to extinction. It is here that many in the scientific community have also taken up the cause of resistance against the destruction of the global environment. While Indigenous and scientific activism share similar objectives in relation to environmental issues, there is a serious lack of convergence between the two groups in terms of sharing knowledge, organizing, and activism.

1. Environmental Degradation, Indigenous
Resistance, and a Place for the Sciences |
Dissident Voice - salehmomani soup.io
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Indigenous-Resistance-and-a-Place-for-the-
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2. For roughly five hundred years, Indigenous peoples have been
struggling against the dominant institutions of society, against
imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, impoverishment, segregation,
racism, and genocide. The struggle continues today under the present
world social order and against the dominant institutions of
‘neoliberalism’ and globalization: the state, corporations, financial
institutions and international organizations. Indigenous communities
continue to struggle to preserve their cultural identities, languages,
histories, and the continuing theft and exploitation of their land.
Indigenous resistance against environmental degradation and resource
extraction represents the most direct source of resistance against a
global environmental crisis which threatens to lead the species to
extinction. It is here that many in the scientific community have also
taken up the cause of resistance against the destruction of the global
environment. While Indigenous and scientific activism share similar
objectives in relation to environmental issues, there is a serious lack of
convergence between the two groups in terms of sharing knowledge,
organizing, and activism.

3. Indigenous groups are often on the front lines of the global
environmental crisis – at the point of interaction (or extraction) – they
resist against the immediate process of resource extraction and the
environmental devastation is causes to their communities and
society as a whole. The continued repression, exploitation and
discrimination against Indigenous peoples have made the struggle –
and the potential consequences of failure – significantly more
problematic. This struggle has been ongoing for centuries, and as
the species heads toward extinction – as it is along our current
trajectory – Indigenous peoples will be on the front lines of that
process. Many in the scientific community have been struggling for
decades to address major environmental issues. Here, the focus is
largely on the issue of climate change, and the approach has
largely been to work through institutions in order to create enough
pressure to reform. Yet, after decades of organizing through
academic and environmental organizations, lobbying governments,
corporations and international organizations, progress has been slow
and often ineffectual, with major international conferences being
hyped up but with little concrete results. Indigenous peoples
continue to struggle against the dominant institutions while many in
the scientific community continue to struggle within the dominant
institutions, though their objectives remain similar.

4. A major problem and disparity becomes clear: Indigenous
peoples – among the most repressed and exploited in the world
– are left to struggle directly against the most powerful institutions
in the world (states and transnational corporations), while many
in the sciences – an area of knowledge which has and continues
to hold enormous potential to advance the species – attempt to
convince those powerful institutions to profit less at exactly the
point in history when they have never profited more. Indigenous
communities remain largely impoverished, and the scientific
community remains largely dependent for funding upon the very
institutions which are destroying the environment: states,
corporations and international organizations. Major barriers to
scientific inquiry and research can thus be established if the
institutions feel threatened, if they choose to steer the sciences
into areas exclusively designed to produce ‘profitable’ forms of
knowledge and technology. As humanity enters a critical stage –
perhaps the most critical we have ever faced as a species – it is
important to begin to acknowledge, question, and change the
institutional contradictions and constraints of our society.

5. It seems only logical that a convergence between
Indigenous and scientific activism, organization, and the
sharing of knowledge should be encouraged and
facilitated. Indeed, the future of the species may depend
upon it. This paper aims to encourage such a convergence
by applying an anarchistic analysis of the social order as it
relates to environmental degradation, specifically at the
point of interaction with the environment (the source of
extraction). In classifying this as an anarchistic analysis, I
simply mean that it employs a highly critical perspective of
hierarchically organized institutions. This paper does not
intend to discuss in any detail the issue of climate change,
since that issue is largely a symptom of the problem, which
at its source is how the human social order interacts directly
with the environment: extraction, pollution, degradation,
exploitation and destruction at the point of interaction.

6. This analysis will seek to critically assess the actions and functions of states,
corporations, international organizations, financial institutions, trade
agreements and markets in how they affect the environment, primarily at
the point of interaction. It is also at this point where Indigenous peoples are
taking up the struggle against environ- mental degradation and human
extinction. Through an anarchistic analysis of Indigenous repression and
resistance at the point of interaction between the modern social order and
the environment (focusing primarily on examples from Canada), this paper
hopes to provide encouragement to those in the scientific community
seeking to address environmental issues to increase their efforts in working
with and for the direct benefit of Indigenous peoples. There exists an
historical injustice which can and must be rectified: the most oppressed and
exploited peoples over the past five hundred years of a Western-dominated
world are on the front lines of struggling for the survival of the species as a
whole. Modern science – which has done so much to advance Western
‘civilization’ – can and should make Indigenous issues a priority, not only for
their sake, but for the species as a whole. Indeed, it is a matter of survival for
the sciences themselves, for they will perish with the species. An anarchistic
analysis of the social order hopes to encourage a convergence between
Indigenous and scientific knowledge and activism as it relates to resolving
the global environmental crisis we now face.
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