Speaker: Jaskiran Dhillon, The New School
Title: Indigenous Resistance, Planetary Dystopia, and the Politics of Environmental Justice
Abstract: This presentation examines the critical interplay among settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and the politics of climate justice. In the wake of a planet-wide movement riddled with idioms about "saving our home," where the ground is fast-shifting and the fate of humanity's collective future is at stake, there has been a tidal wave of interest in Indigenous knowledge(s) about the land, water, and sky--a desire to "capture and store" the intergenerational wisdom that speaks to the unpredictable path lying ahead. Still, limited attempts have been made to theorize how conquest and persistent settler colonial violence necessarily factor into debates over the environmental crisis--this, despite the creation of territories of material and psychic abandonment largely fueled by settlers and "settlement." Critical questions need to be asked: How are Indigenous political demands for decolonization taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia? How might "environmental justice" work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests? This paper is informed by recent, preliminary fieldwork in Standing Rock, North Dakota where I've begun documenting these mounting tensions, Ultimately, I ague that an anti-colonial indictment of environmental justice compels us to (re)imagine tactical strategies for decolonial praxis around environmental crisis, Indigenous futurity, and challenges to settler sovereignty.
Short Bio: Jaskiran Dhillon is a first generation anti-colonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Committed to the tenets of public intellectualism, Jaskiran's scholarship is intimately connected to, and informed by, on-the-ground advocacy and direct action. Her work spans the fields of settler colonialism, anthropology of the state, anti-racist and Indigenous feminism, youth studies, colonial violence, political ecology, and critical Indigenous studies and has been published in The Guardian, Cultural Anthropology, Truthout, Public Seminar, Feminist Formations, Environment and Society, Social Texts, and Decolonization among other venues. Her first book, Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017), provides a critical, ethnographic account of state interventions in the lives of urban Indigenous youth. Her new research focuses on developing an anti-colonial critique of the environmental justice movement by examining Indigenous political movements working against extractivism, including the resistance at Standing Rock. She is guest editor of a special issue of Environment and Society (2018) that foregrounds Indigenous resistance to, and theorizing of, climate change and is co-editor, along with Nick Estes, of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (2019). Jaskiran is an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School and a member of the New York City Stands with Standing Rock Collective.
