Episode 125: Environmental Justice and Indigenous History

This is 15 minute history, a podcast for educators, students and anyone interested in history featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas at Austin.

Welcome to 15 minute history. I’m Alina Scott, doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. And after a year, we are back to our regularly scheduled podcast. So today we are talking about environmental justice and indigenous history with Professor Dina Gilio Whittaker. Professor Gilio Whitaker is a citizen of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent consultant and educator in the environmental justice and policy planning at csusm. She teaches courses on environmentalism and American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion and philosophy, native women’s activism, American Indians and sports and decolonization. She works within the field of critical Sports Studies examining the intersections of indigeneity, and the sport of surfing. She has contributed to numerous online outlets and authored several books, her latest book, as long as grass grows, the indigenous fight for environmental justice from colonization to Standing Rock, was published in 2019. Professor Gilio Whittaker, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 1:38
Thanks, Alina, it’s good to be here with you.

Alina I Scott 1:41
I’m super excited for this conversation. Because I’m fascinated by your work, I loved your book. So I kind of want to start out by talking about your incredible career and all of the things that you have done. So you’ve been a journalist, a public intellectual, a scholar, and educator. And so I wonder how you chose this path? Or if this path chose you?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 2:04
I don’t know. That’s a good question. I, you know, maybe the path chose me. And maybe it’s a combination of both, I’m not sure. And that’s only my life in the last 15 years. Because when I came to this work, I came to this work fairly late in life, like when I was in my 40s, and I’m in my 60s now. And before that I was an artist, I’d been in the Indian art world for 1015 years. And then there was a whole other previous life before that. So it’s all you know, like the building blocks of my life, I guess you could say, but I went back to school late in life at the age of 47. That’s when I got really clear about what I wanted out of college. And so I went into American Indian Studies, and then American studies for grad school. And my life kind of got a change in direction while I was in grad school in at the University of New Mexico. And I ended up coming back to Southern California where I was born and raised. And landing here in San Clemente, which is the epicenter of the surf world in California, and also the home of the village of Pon hay, which is traditional unceded territory of the Harshman nation, one a new band of mission Indians. And so all of these things converge in these very interesting ways and unpredictable ways that I really couldn’t have foreseen taking the direction that it did. But what it meant was I decided not to stay in school for a PhD, that was the plan. But I decided not to because of a variety of different reasons. And so after I finished my master’s program, here, I was living in the surf town with this education in a place that didn’t have there was no market for somebody like me. So I had to, I had to forge a path in ways that would be workable for me. And so I had already been a writer and I had actually gone back to school, because I’ve been sort of like what we used to, in those days, call a citizen journalist or grassroots journalist. And so I went back to school to get some credentials as a writer. And so now I’m at a school with a couple of degrees. And I go back into wanting to resume my writing career. And so by now everything is it’s everything’s online. And so I had to learn how to write in an online environment. And so I did that in a whole bunch of different ways. I just I wrote for content Mills, I wrote for everything I possibly could to get my foot in the door. And at the same time, I was working for an organization called the Center for World Indigenous Studies as a research assistant and then later the policy director. So I did that for six years. So I was like literally cobbling together a path for myself or Career for myself in these very sort of creative ways. And it was because of that in my online journalism writing for Indian country today that Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz had contacted me and asked me to co write the myths book with her. And so getting a foot in the door of the publishing world, that way was like, like, manna from heaven, like was like an incredible gift to be asked to co write a book with somebody of her stature was like, pretty unusual. So that just opened up all kinds of other doors for me. And then I was recruited by Julie profit at Cal State San Marcos, where I’m teaching now to come teach as a lecturer. So which was what I wanted to do all along, I just wanted to teach, and right so it all came together, but I had to really make it happen and start at the bottom, you know, had to start at the very bottom and just make something that was workable for me and, and it’s sort of paying off in the long run, it’s paying off because I get to do it all I get to teach I get to write and get paid to write, and, and now have, you know, a public platform where I have the possibility to influence what’s going on in various different worlds around native activism and policy and all that stuff. So you know, I guess it’s a lesson in stick with it, and just work really hard and, you know, stick with your vision, but you have to have that vision, first of what you want. Wow. Um,

Alina I Scott 6:37
I mean, that’s an incredible journey. And I definitely should add “artist” to the your bio that we’re gonna have on the website. So I was really fascinated by your most recent book, As Long As Grass Grows. In your book, it is a history of indigenous resistance and activism as it relates to environmental justice. So to kind of start off the conversation for our listeners, how would you define environmental justice and environmental justice as it directly relates to Indigenous people?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 7:03
Environmental justice is sort of an umbrella term that describes a range of things like it’s a discourse, that also includes, you know, activism, policy, law and theory in the academic realm. And it describes processes of risk and harm to communities that are disproportionately exposed to risk and harm through environmental processes. So it generally relates to ethnic minority communities, and also low income communities. But what I discovered when I was in school, studying environmental justice, I discovered that, which is why I wrote the book, I discovered that all of the way that environmental justice is approached relative to American Indians was really, it wasn’t responsive and appropriate for American Indian people, people who were colonized people, and who have been on the land here for 1000s of years and had a very different relationship to the land, and also had a very different political relationship to the state, meaning the United States. And so none of that stuff gets factored in into the law and policy realms of environmental justice. So when you look at it through the lens of settler colonialism and indigeneity, then it has to turn into a completely different conversation. And that’s what isn’t in place in the American system. And so I felt like I had to write the book, to make all that really obvious and visible.

Alina I Scott 8:38
So kind of on that topic, your book starts with this vivid description of maybe the most well known protest by indigenous people in recent years Standing Rock and the no DAPL movement. While it’s not the only example of indigenous resistance, it was incredibly significant. So can you talk about the significance of that movement specifically, and how it might be connected to other movements in indigenous history?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 9:03
Yeah, and and the really good point about that is that it is connected to these prior movements. And I think that you’re right, that it is the most significant movement, if we can call it that. I don’t know if we can call it a movement. I actually had this conversation with Madonna thunderhawk, while I was at Standing Rock, that time was the first time I’d ever met her. And we were talking about this. And she actually said to me, she said, I don’t think this is really a movement. She said, I would call it a happening or an event, but not so much a movement. And this is somebody who’s been in you know, she was, you know, an original person in the red power movement. So, now we think about the red power era. And that really being a movement, you know, because it comes out of this, this era of civil rights, activism of ethnic nationalists for liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. So that we can identify those Actual social movements. But Standing Rock was really more of an event that is perhaps part of a larger movement for indigenous justice, really, you know, and we can use the term liberation even to describe that. But Standing Rock comes on the heels of the idle, no more movement, right. So I don’t know, more happens in 2012, starting in Canada, and then spreading to the US, of course, that came right after on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Occupy Wall Street movement was native people broke with that movement, because the problems of you know, using the term occupying, you know, occupying lands, and the question came up, like, well, whose lands are you occupying? Right? I mean, isn’t this already occupied land, you know, from an indigenous perspective, and when native people brought up those conversations in some of these occupied spaces, especially in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, they didn’t get it, like the communications broke down. And then it was like, just the split happens. So it was pretty much of a failure, from a native perspective, like these people don’t get like settler colonialism and the US as a site of ongoing, you know, occupation of indigenous lands. And so, so, you know, the the early 20th century, so far is really an interesting period to look at that this continuum of activism for Native people. But that continuum really goes back. I mean, we could take it back to a century. And that’s the way that I write about it in the book. So we can connect it, you know, in recent history, to the red power movement, with the American Indian Movement, and the activism of late 60s, you know, beginning with, you know, we can look at the Alcatraz Island occupation from 1969 to 1971, as being you know, one of these watershed moments where native people are coming together and fighting and coming visible for the first time really, in history. That’s what’s so unusual about it, you know, Native people had been so completely invisible alized, the half century prior to that, and all the time before that, even but this is the first time in history, that native people are getting media attention. And it’s on the evening news every night. It’s this Flashpoint, and people are like, wow, you know, I have no idea the Indians are even still alive and and look what they’re doing. They’re, you know, occupying this land, and, you know, saying they want their rights and their treaties honored. And so that starts this period of activism in the early 1970s, that, that we can, you know, look at other other actions that happened. There’s the trail of broken treaties, which is a caravan that begins from the west, and they drive all the way across the country to Washington, DC, and hundreds of young native people take over the big building and occupy the building for a week. And that’s another thing that gets all this media attention. Then, you know, the following year, it’s the Wounded Knee standoff, a 71 day armed standoff with the FBI. And they’re here we have it again, it’s another, you know, very high profile event, like, wow, the Indians are, you know, like, they’ve taken up arms and they’re fighting and they’re shooting at, you know, they’re shooting back and forth with the FBI. So that’s sort of like that, that period of activism. But then we can look back, even to the early, early 20th century, to when native people start officially organizing as made as people in this organization called the Society for American Indians, and or Si, and si is the first advocacy or native rights organization for native rights by Native people. There had been other organizations prior to that, like being sort of friends of the Indian organizations. But this is the first one that’s actually run by Native people. And so that lasts from 1911 to 1923. And they’re organizing around things like fighting for what this is during a time it’s still the Dawes Act. It’s still assimilation policy, boarding schools, kids are still being sent off to these government run church run boarding schools, and their lands are being taken away its allotment, it’s the allotment nears native lands are being allotted through these, this privatization program, private property ownership and all these lands, these reservation lands are being deemed surplus lands. And, you know, in these years, like 90 million acres of reserved treaty lands get legally stolen by the federal government in this scheme. And so they’re fighting against that. And they’re, and at the same time, their religions have been banned at the 1980 1883, religious, Indian religious crimes code is passed, and Native people are going to jail for practicing their religions were the only people in the United States not to have freedom of religion. This is huge. So, so all of that’s going on. And not only that, but we’ve had World War One, Native people are going off to fight in World War One, and they don’t even have citizenship. So they’re fighting for this country they’re not citizens of and not that they thought that being a citizen was like the height of rights or anything that wasn’t about that. But there were some who believed that having citizenship would give them more power to fight for their rights as native people. Not everybody agreed with that, especially the Iroquois and putting the Shoshone people, especially the women, because women in hood nashoni, cultures had far more rights than American white American women did. And so they looked and they were like, this is before white women had the right to vote. And so Iroquois women are looking like why why would we want that? This is going to be a downgrade for us in our power as women in our own societies. Why do we want to join a society that doesn’t even allow us the right to have a say in the political system? So it was an interesting time. But you know, it was all part of this very convoluted and confusing, kind of struggle for survival and struggle to to exist as people with governments. So yeah, if we look at the 20th century, like or the last century, as this continuum of Native people fighting for the right to exist, that’s, that’s really the appropriate way to look at it.

Alina I Scott 17:03
And I do think that it has continued since Standing Rock, it’s not like, you know, when people left the camp, it kind of ended, I think, it’s become a lot more visible to a lot of people since Standing Rock. But there’s also these movements or these happenings in you know, indigenous communities in Canada, in South America, and I think it’s easier for a lot of people now at least to see them as connected somehow. Absolutely. But they’re definitely not isolated.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 17:32
Oh, no, no, no, no, especially when you contextualize it within the facts. The fact that, as the United Nations has, has acknowledged, what does that fact about the, you know, biodiversity and the 80% of all the lands that are still biodiverse on on the planet are indigenous territory, something like that? This link between cultural diversity and biodiversity is super important. And it’s not lost on indigenous people like, indigenous knowledge. This is what it comes down to indigenous knowledge, the knowledge that indigenous people have, which is about sustainably living on the planet. This is why indigenous peoples continues to survive, because they fundamentally, fundamentally built into their cultures are principles that are sustainable. And so that’s the knowledge that the world needs right now. And they know that, and they have been organizing that organizing around this, you know, even before we had this term sustainability, and this international organizing, you know, of transnational, indigenous people coming together in the international arena has been going on since at least the 1970s.

Alina I Scott 18:51
I’m also interested in this question of environmental justice as it relates to indigenous people being linked to both, you know, biodiversity, but also sovereignty, because I feel like sovereignty comes up every time we have these conversations about, where a pipeline is gonna go and who has the rights to, you know, talk about those things. But the issue of sovereignty seems, you know, being like we’re talking about it more and more often as well.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 19:17
Yeah, for sure. And that’s something that’s really particular to the US situation. And probably Canada too, because indigenous nations with treaties between the nation states that we are within whose you know, now boundaries we are within, not through our own choice, but having treaties is pretty unusual for indigenous peoples in the world. So, in New Zealand, there is one treaty at the Treaty of Waitangi. That’s one treaty that the Maori have with with the government of New Zealand and certainly here we have treaties and that, that that’s an unusual situation. And because we have treaties that creates that legal relationship, it’s the treaties are the mutual recognition, the recognition of mutual sovereignty. And so even though in the US it is a diminished form of sovereignty that comes as a result of the controlling or we use this fancy term hegemonic, the hegemonic relationship between the US or we could say paternalistic relationship, that treaties when our ancestors negotiated these treaties, they did not agree to give up their sovereignty to a supreme, a higher sovereign, that wasn’t part of the deal. But because of preme, court actions, beginning in 1823, and then a whole cacophony of legislation and other legal trappings, you know, our sovereignty gets diminished to what they call, you know, nowadays, quasi sovereignty or limited sovereignty. But so we’re still always fighting to protect even that, like even whatever limited sovereignty we have, even though it’s not the sovereignty that we negotiated for. Like we’re still always trying to protect that. So. So yeah, you know, when you’re talking about, like, with Standing Rock, well, one of the reasons it was such an issue is because it came the pipeline came so close to the boundary of the reservation, but it was well within the original treaty boundaries, and that meant that they had to be consulted by law, they had to consult with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Well, so it turns out that that didn’t happen. They knew it. Everybody knew that, that that was the case, if they didn’t actually adequately consult the tribe, and, and yet, Energy Transfer Partners, along with the Army Corps of Engineers go ahead and grant these, this incremental permitting technique, which allows them to evade a complete environmental assessment, which is why they did it that way. So. So yeah, in the end, it came down to the reality that there was no meaningful consultation with the tribe, as required by law.

Alina I Scott 22:23
So this might be kind of off topic, or right where we need to be. But I’m really interested in your study of critical Sports Studies, and how that might connect to indigenous history. So yeah, how does critical Sports Studies connect to environmental justice and indigenous history?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 22:43
Well, it connects in a really in a pretty direct way. And it’s really because of my move to San Clemente that I was talking about earlier. And this this master’s thesis research project that I was doing, which was very placed based because I was living in San Clemente. In the interest of doing place based research, I got wind of this thing that had just happened like just a few years before this long battle to prevent the building of a toll road in the town in San Clemente. If it was going to be built the its trajectory was going to run through this ecosystem. That is a watershed that’s considered the most pristine watershed left in Southern California. This watershed is a creek called the San Mateo Creek and San Mateo Creek runs out, It empties out into the ocean at this place called trestles. One of the most important coveted surf sites in the world, right, not just even in California, but in the world. And people come from all over the world to surf this brake. And the building of this toll road was likely going to ruin the wave quality according to the environmental impact studies. And so coincidentally, that land this watershed that it was running through is it is the site of an in ancient a Harshman village and now a sacred site, but it’s located on what is now a military base, Camp Pendleton, also land that is leased by the state parks. And so it’s a campground. So it’s this very complicated tangle of jurisdictions, which made it a very interesting site to study, especially given the fact that the tribe is not federally recognized. They have very almost no legal rights. And so in their in the interest of fighting to protect the sacred site, which there’s also burials out there. They had to be strategic about how they fought to protect To the site in what it meant was fighting in coalition with other stakeholders, meaning the surf community, and the environmental community. So all of these, these very diverse interests came together. And that’s what was so interesting to me. And so that’s what I studied. As somebody who was already a surfer. And as a native person, it was just so, so unusual. And, and it’s also part of a personal ethic that I have about being responsible to the native community, within whose land I’ve lived in. So that was, that was a huge piece of it for me, but But yeah, and so it that opened the door to doing research around surfing, because I had started surfing, like in 1980, a long time ago, I always identified it as a surfer, especially since I grew up in Southern California. I stopped surfing after sometime in the 80s after I moved to Northern California, and the waters really cold there. And I was like, not interested. So I didn’t serve for like 25 years. And then I came back to Southern California, when I moved to San Clemente and I started surfing again. And so like all these like really seemingly like disparate, really diverse kind of interests were all converging for me at one time. And I just, I saw in the 25 years that I was out of the surf world, how, how extreme Li dramatic, it had changed, it had really undergone massive changes since since I was in it. That the same time what was happening was that there was this emerging scholarship that was being called critical surf studies. And people were doing like really serious research and scholarship, helping to reframe that, for one thing, reframe the historical narratives about surfing and how it comes to be. Because Surfing is an indigenous sport, surfing comes out of native Hawaii. And there’s this whole very interesting history, but the history was written mostly by white men, beginning a century ago. And it turns out that the way that they wrote it was extremely skewed, it was incorrect, it was really biased. And it was really white supremacists. And so part of the part of the project for these critical surf scholars is to correct the histories, and then to contextualize them within other social processes. So, so that was fascinating to me. And, and I mean, there’s, you know, you know, like correcting the surf histories, because one of the things that that happened with it was that it was initially, the first surfed surf historians were white male journalists in Hawaii. We’re talking about Alexander Hume Ford and jack London, the famous, you know, literary icon. They narrated this history of surfing as a dying sport that the Hawaiians neglected. But they completely did not even consider like the historical context of what was happening in Hawaii at the time, with the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government and the decline of the Native Hawaiian population due to foreign diseases. So what they did was they narrated a sport that they saved from its certain demise, a white men save the sport of surfing from Native Hawaiians who neglected it. That’s literally how jack London wrote about it. And so, so that has to get corrected. And so the scholar scholarship is, you know, corrected that history, fortunately. But then there’s the whole matter of like, what happens when surfing gets imported to California. And so something really similar happens. And the way that it’s been written by these young white males, journalists, is, you know, completely decontextualized from what is actually happened in California, especially since the importation of surfing in 1907 happens on the heels of this profoundly violent genocide, which becomes the foregrounding and the condition of possibility for surfing to even become implanted in the land here. So this is what I’m interested in contextualizing how it is here. And then that opened up to a whole other world of things of ways to write about it and I’m finding all these native people that are surfers all these American Indian People, there’s an organization called intertribal youth and native like water. That’s a youth program that takes Native youth culturally based program that’s with a focus on wellness. And it’s a residential program that starts as a 11 day program at the University of California, San Diego. And one of the things that they do is they teach Native youth how to serve, while they’re connecting to their culture, because a lot of these are kimia kids who are indigenous to the coastline in San Diego So, so so much interesting stuff and going on and was just like, Oh, we need to keep talking about this. And, you know, keep keep doing the scholarship. And now it’s just growing so much. In fact, I just this morning, I was working on this chapter for a new book, there’s this new book coming out of University of Washington press on surfing and indigeneity. So it’s like an American Indian, or a whole book on American Indian perspectives on surfing, like whoever I never in my wildest dreams that I ever have thought, something like that could happen.

Alina I Scott 31:18
I’m also really fascinated by, you know, the intersection of Sports Studies, critical Sports Studies, or leisure. And, you know, conversations about public land, much of which was confiscated illegally from indigenous communities, you know, whether that sport is surfing, or skiing, or hiking trails, there is this interesting intersection. And I’m, I’m really fascinated by that, you know, in the direction that that sort of work is going.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 31:45
Yeah, so that it’s actually been coming up a lot and be this, this conversation about public lands is really super, like, it’s just so visible right now, I keep being asked about this. And yeah, and it’s true, you know, public lands are 48% of all the public of all the land in the western United States is, you know, quote, unquote, public land, that’s almost half. So half of the land on the continent in the western 11 states is public land, owned by the federal government. That land was all taken from indigenous people, you know, and certainly illegitimately and most of it illegally, going to this history of the Dawes Act, and the allotment policies where they did this 90 million acre, land grab of treaty reserve lands. So you know, that’s a big conversation there. And, and now come to find out that, you know, so they take all this land, you know, open it up and make public, like national forests and national parks, and they impose this new kind of Land Management regime on it. That involved you know, allowing the forests to grow wild, and not tending the land and the ways that native people have attended it. And so now that the lands not being tended, what we have are all these forests that have grown wild, no more cultural burning, leading up to this, these conditions that we have now, especially in California, but not just in California, Washington all you know, lots of other places to where these wildfires are out of control now, because indigenous land management practices have become illegal. Now they’re starting to figure it out. And they’re starting to reintegrate indigenous, you know, prescribed burns in various places with native people doing it. So you know, that that raises questions about how these public lands are being managed, and by who, and then in the context of the land back movement, that’s another whole conversation.

Alina I Scott 34:17
So to conclude, I have noticed that these conversations about land back what to do with public lands, indigenous sovereignty, the relationships between state, federal governments with indigenous governments seem to be happening more frequently, at least, you know, more people are aware of them. But we’re nowhere near like, where we need to be. So, and at least in my own work, I’ve seen that, you know, a huge part of protest movements is, you know, our past and our present, but also how we imagine our futures to be and what we expect from our future. So, I guess that’s where this question is coming from. What do you hope to see in the future as it relates to indigenous environmental justice and indigenous peoples generally.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker 34:58
You know, there’s there’s a lot of ways to answer that question for sure what has to happen? For one thing is, you know, we have to reframe environmental justice, policy and law regimes, to incorporate these larger histories, to incorporate the political difference of Native people. And they’re very different relationships to land. And to actually, you know, stand by this concept of free prior and informed consent, like go beyond consultation. So, we already talked about Standing Rock happened because there wasn’t adequate consultation, but even if there had been adequate consultation, however, we define that the outcome would have been the same Standing Rock would have said no, they would have said absolutely in no uncertain terms. “We don’t agree to this pipeline,” but there would be absolutely no legal recourse for them. The pipeline wouldn’t, you know, we could speculate about what would have happened, but just having them say their opinion about it wouldn’t have guaranteed anything and so. But on the other hand, we have this thing called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples that the United States signed on to in 2010, which enshrines the right to free prior and informed consent. But there doesn’t seem to be any real serious commitment to actually abiding by that. So that’s something that we need to keep holding the federal government to. And that’s one of the things I think we’ll be seeing more and more of, is the demand to actually really abide by this concept. So there’s that, and then there’s the matter of land back and, you know, justice, and what does justice mean? And if we’re looking at it through a lens of decolonization, ultimately, it’s got it, it can mean a lot of different ways. But it ultimately will mean restoring lands to native peoples in all these various ways that we can imagine that, whether it be through, you know, land Trust’s through conservation easements through co management agreements, and just giving the land back. So in the last two years, we’ve seen to my calculations, and it could be even more, there’s been 40,000 acres of public lands, given back to tribes since 2018. So 32,000 acres was given back to the tribes in Oregon. And then just last month, another 19,000 acres of the national bison range were returned to the control of the Cockney Salish Sea KST in in Montana, that’s really interesting. And I know that there are other instances of private lands being returned to native people, too. So this is something that I have called the colonial unspeakable like, it’s, you know, when you talk about justice for Native people, like it’s been unthinkable and unspeakable to say, give the land back. But now we’re saying and that that has to be on the table for, for justice for Native people among a whole host of other things. But that’s, that’s a huge piece of it. So that’s, that’s what I’m how I’m thinking about. That’s how native people are talking about it these days. Like not just not mincing any words about what we mean when we say justice.

Alina I Scott 38:36
Well, thank you so much for being here. I’ve really appreciated this conversation, and I’m sure our listeners will as well. And thank you all so much for listening. If you’d like to hear more from Professor guilia Whitaker, we will have links to resources on our website, and you can also catch her at the Institute for historical studies this week. If you haven’t already, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at 15 minute history and like and review us on Apple podcasts. That’s it.Thank you again for joining us. 15 minute history is produced at the University of Texas at Austin in partnership with not even past and hemispheres and the College of Liberal Arts. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media, and visit our website for more information and resources. See y’all next week.