Indigenous Resilience

With rising coronavirus numbers across the globe, Native Americans are disproportionately affected owing to high mortality rate, pre-existing medical conditions (Diabetes, cardiovascular diseases), lack of early warning system, resource allocation, delayed response relief and inadequate health and social services system. In addition to it, there is significant gap in data projections of Indigenous infections. The research paper firstly, addresses this invisibility and probes reasons for high mortality rate and worst health outcomes within the community. It looks at how the fight against COVID-19 for the indigenous communities of North America is much more layered and complex and why the burden of epidemics/pandemics lie heavily on Native Americans. The paper also highlights how the present-day pandemic exacerbates historical vulnerabilities for American Indian. A deeper analysis into history of Native Americans in conjunction with diseases reveal how five hundred centuries old Colonialism is at the heart of social, thus health inequities. The paper elicits how structural violence and systemic racism cripples Native Nations in their responses to disease. It elucidates how the Coronavirus when read in conjunction with Native American history reveals the story of Settler Colonialism and that of Indigenous resilience. Finally, the paper looks at how Indigenous health is not a marginal subject, instead shapes culture in fundamental ways.

With rising coronavirus numbers across the globe, Native Americans are disproportionately af ected owing to high mortality rate, pre-existing medical conditions (Diabetes, cardiovascular diseases), lack of early warning system, resource allocation, delayed response relief and inadequate health and social services system. In addition to it, there is significant gap in data projections of Indigenous infections. The research paper firstly, addresses this invisibility and probes reasons for high mortality rate and worst health outcomes within the community. It looks at how the fight against COVID-19 for the indigenous communities of North America is much more layered and complex and why the burden of epidemics/pandemics lie heavily on Native Americans. The paper also highlights how the present-day pandemic exacerbates historical vulnerabilities for American Indian. A deeper analysis into history of Native Americans in conjunction with diseases reveal how five hundred centuries old Colonialism is at the heart of social, thus health inequities. The paper elicits how structural violence and systemic racism cripples Native Nations in their responses to disease. It elucidates how the Coronavirus when read in conjunction with Native American history reveals the story of Settler Colonialism and that of Indigenous resilience. Finally, the paper looks at how Indigenous health is not a marginal subject, instead shapes culture in fundamental ways

In this study, the project team systematically analyzed publicly-available reports, media coverage, and academic commentary on the Canadian Rangers as well as broader Government of Canada and CAF Arctic priorities. It also drew significant insights from focus group conversations and community-based interviews with a diverse group of Rangers from across 1 CRPG. In general, our research confirms that metrics of Canadian Ranger success must measure not only the organization’s contributions to DND/CAF priorities but also contributions to collective and individual resilience that benefit communities, help to meet broader government objectives (at federal, territorial, hamlet, and Indigenous government levels), and promote Crown-Indigenous reconciliation. Applying various concepts of resilience to frame the Rangers’ myriad contributions, we propose metrics and indicators of success that embrace the Canadian Rangers’ distinct forms and terms of CAF service as relevant members of the Defence Team with extensive experience operating in austere conditions who are willing to share their local and traditional knowledge about lands and waters, whilst providing practical support for activities in what many Southern Canadians consider to be “extreme environments.” As members of their local communities, the Rangers also provide a robust and immediate response to the broad spectrum of security and safety issues facing isolated communities.

The report blends descriptive, explanatory narrative (with extensive first-hand quotes providing the insights of Canadian Rangers in their own words) with specific, measurable outcomes. The concluding chapter provides suggestions for proposed next steps.

The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists widely label resilience. It is a capacity that peoples inhabiting the Arctic are especially renown for, and one that is attributed in particular to indigenous peoples living here. Indeed policy makers, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies designed to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples of the Arctic on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent disaster. The ability to adapt to disastrous events is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi people, which inhabits Arctic Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be a living testimony of their strength. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilised to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable the Sámi to do so. As such the Sámi are held to be a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Rather than join in with the chorus of celebration concerning Sámi resilience in the Arctic, this chapter will critique the strategic and colonial rationalities shaping it. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of the Sámi, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of their indigeneity, rather than being simply a deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the Sámi, as well as every other target population in the Arctic, by proponents of resilience, forces them into accepting the necessity of a future laden by disastrous events. As such this chapter urges critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics in the Arctic to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples living here. It argues for the necessity of examining resilience as an element within a narrative strategy for the scripting of the Arctic and the life-worlds of indigenous peoples inhabiting it, rather than an expression of the agency of indigenous peoples as such.

In this time of unprecedented ecosystem collapse and species loss, the relevance of Indigenous environmental knowledge has gained increasing recognition. Over at least the last two decades, there have been increasing efforts from international agencies such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and others to integrate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in mitigating and adapting to, the effects of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity.What is remarkable about this is the degree to which traditional environmental knowledge has survived the 500-year onslaught on its relevance and veracity by the adherents of developmentalist ideologies and market capitalism. Ironically, however, this apparent good-news story is countered by a legacy of dispossession of land, language, and cultural heritage that in the 21st century remains a critical site of struggle. At the heart of this struggle is the apparatus of settler colonialism on one hand, and Indigenous sovereignty, including recognised rights to cul- tural heritage, traditional lands, languages, and customs, on the other. Straddling these two positions is the politico/economics of market capitalism and the commodification of the lifeworld in the name of ever-expanding growth, innovation, and development.
Alongside calls for transition from fossil fuel energy sources, renewed acts of resistance from Indigenous communities may be read as a response to the increase in damaging fossil fuel and hydro development, the last gasps, perhaps, of an industry in crisis.Although often seen as quite distinct, notions of resistance and deep resilience are connected (Brown, 2015). As Penehira et al. (2014), citing Cohen (2001: 147), remark, ‘the term resilience, when applied to indigenous peoples has a long history that draws on multiple cultural strands’.
The Indigenous reality is one of resilience, refusal to disappear; it is a reflection of the strength and beauty of peoples who have lived here since humans existed on this land, and will continue to do so, and that, furthermore, is a testimony to the refusal of indigenous peoples to accept assimilation or integration as an acceptable strategy for their ongoing survival.
In this contribution, tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism contextualise Indigenous resilience in the face of systems collapse and colonialism’s constantly evolving strategies of capture and incorporation.The chapter begins with a discussion of two modes of colonialisation: imperialist and settler colonialism, twinning development and market capitalism with the ratification of states and the re-casting of sovereign Indigenous nations as populations in the international world order. Of par- ticular importance is the relationship between ideologies of development and the
violence of settler colonialism.This section is followed by an overview of Indigenous modes and strategies of resistance and resilience and the demands for recognition of Indigenous rights within international law. Here the focus is on the struggle for recogni- tion of Indigenous rights, including the right to full, free, prior, and informed consent to any form of development on their traditional lands, and the evolving responses of settler states.As a strategy of extinguishment, settler colonialism’s impact is not only historical; its servitude to the imperatives of market capitalism and the engulfing of the lifeworld marks the present moment with a long footprint into the future. Indigenous peoples’ resilience in the face of shape-shifting strategies by states (and industry) may be seen as a bulwark against a dimming future.The final section points towards possibilities for hope in the reframing of governance centred on the well-being of human and non-human species and interrelationships.

The objective of this briefing paper is to highlight the values, potential and needs as well as concerns and threats to the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and local communities and their contributions to addressing the impacts of climate change and to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG targets 2.4, 13.1 and 15.2. The deliberations and exchange of experiences during a workshop on ‘Cultures of Resilience’ held in October 2017 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Centre for Rural Development (SLE), Germany, are reflected be-low. The paper does not claim to capture all of the complex realities of indigenous peoples and local communities practicing, developing and struggling to maintain their traditional livelihoods in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. Rather it focuses on what research and development partners should pay attention to while discovering cultures of resilience.