From Healing the Divide to Taking a Side

All Steve Lyons

In their search to define the root cause of the climate crisis, many on the environmentalist left are zeroing in on a peculiar target: not the economic division between haves and have-nots, nor the geopolitical division between the nation and the world, but the conceptual division between society and nature—as though dissolving this conceptual division provides a kind of miracle cure to the ecological ills of fossil capitalism.[1] For this camp, the most urgent political task of our era is to heal the divide between humans and nonhumans, to make kin with nonhuman others, to imagine and create a kind of multispecies unity that, as the logic goes, should bring about a more harmonious, and thus more sustainable system of relations between people, animals, and the land.

This common sense has underwritten curatorial initiatives across the fields of contemporary art and architecture, from the Venice Biennale’s 2021 architecture exhibition How will we live together? to the Curatorial Design workshop on “Designing for Cohabitation” at the Canadian Center for Architecture, where I presented the first draft of this text. The workshop proposed to investigate “the issue of architectural design for humans and non-humans,” with a focus on the Montréal Insectarium, a brand-new institution co-designed by Wilfried Kuehn, a core member of the Curatorial Design team. The Insectarium is an architectural experiment in “biophilic design,” based on the hypothesis that humans have a primitive desire to connect with other living organisms, which can be reawakened with the assistance of immersive design.[2] Underlying this principle of “biophilia” is the idea that by rekindling affections between humans and nonhumans, a new ethical paradigm will come into being, and from this new ethical paradigm, a more liveable future for all. From this vantage, museums and science centers are understood as apparatuses that can not only help visitors break free from their dualist habits of thought, but also promote a multispecies consciousness from which a radically new environmental politics can begin to take root. The question is whether this new environmental politics is the politics we need.

For Not An Alternative, the answer is no. To put it very briefly, we argue that this project of “healing the divide” does not rearrange human-nonhuman relations, but more accurately, reframes them. In the process, it also frames out, or obscures, the fundamental antagonisms that structure relations between and among humans, animals, and lands. When we start with the question of how to design for cohabitation, or how to mend the gap between humans and nonhumans, we take a shortcut. Instead of grappling with the material and economic structures that are dealing death to so many for the benefit of a few, we incorporate them, naturalize them, or otherwise take them for granted.

We can see the effects of this framework at Montréal’s science museum complex Space for Life, which, in addition to the Insectarium, includes the Montréal Biodome, the Montréal Botanical Gardens, and the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium. The complex hosts a whole range of microclimates and ecosystems designed to inspire visitors to “rethink and cultivate a new way of living.”[3] But this “rethinking” takes place within a complex that is sponsored by Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining corporation. Space for Life’s constructed lifeworlds survive off the surplus capital produced out of Rio Tinto’s world-destroying practices, while Rio Tinto, in desperate need for what Mel Evans calls a “social license to operate,” survives off the positive public relations provided by eco-conscious institutions like Space for Life.[4] With the unrestricted call to “cohabit,” we’re invited to figure out how to live together in plural harmony, without figuring out what we cannot live with.

What is the principle of unity implicit in this frame—a frame that invites us to heal the divide between humans and nonhumans without naming, let alone doing away with, the forces that are set up to extract life and deal death in the short and long term? What if our first question is not “how do we design for cohabitation,” but “who are we, and what, if we are to live together, needs to be done?” What would it mean to build a Space for Life premised on the elimination of Rio Tinto and its world?[5] To pursue this line of thought, I will outline three different principles of unity that have structured museum practice, and our interpretation of it, at various times and in various places, and which have reinforced specific relations between humans and nonhumans, civilization and its Other. We can provisionally name these principles fascist unity, liberal unity, and communist unity.

Fascist Unity

We can begin with fascist unity. Fascist unity is the unity of the nation or “master race,” conceived as one bounded collective against all others. The unifying horizon of fascism is premised on the eradication of everything beyond its self-imposed and rigorously guarded borders. As Nazi Germany made crystal clear, fascism’s dream of unity is realized by means of extermination and eugenics. It’s no wonder that the large natural history museums of London, Paris, and New York, among others, were major supporters of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century.[6]

Not An Alternative, *Exhibiting the Gaze*, 2014. Light box photograph exhibited at the Grand Opening of The Natural History Museum at the Queens Museum, NY, from a series of sixteen images documenting current exhibitions at natural history museums in the US. Photo courtesy of Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

As outgrowths of the imperialist campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries, such museums were put to use in the building of fascist unity. They served this function by collecting and displaying as “natural history” everything that was deemed to be outside the domain of civilization. We can see how this underlying logic naturalized weird combinations—making human zoos, prehistoric megafauna, rocks, exotic animals, insects, and Indigenous cultures appear at home under a single roof. By putting human and nonhuman others on display, the large natural history museums of the major imperial powers helped to produce the unity of their nations, training their visitors to develop a distinct racial consciousness—a sense of collectivity based on the difference between viewer and viewed. This sense of collectivity cut across classes, working for capitalism precisely by obscuring antagonisms between workers and bosses who were of the same nation and/or race. Museums of this kind trained citizens to distinguish themselves from nonhuman others, cultivating the fetishization, hatred, and subordination of the nonhuman—including oppressed groups (from slaves to dispossessed Indigenous Nations) whose asserted inhumanity was a precondition for capital accumulation in the colonies.

Liberal Unity

If fascist unity is the unity of one nation against the rest, liberal unity is the unity of the whole world holding hands, where there are no divisions, where “all lives matter.” By integrating all things within a conceptual unity, liberalism obfuscates essential differences and undermines the basis for political struggle. Liberal unity is liberal because it rests on a notion of equality founded on universal inclusion—all positions can be harmonized and managed within the social whole. It is the project of mending divisions between “us” (inferred as white and middle-class people) and historical Others (from Black people to animals and mushrooms) by assimilating, including, or recognizing them within an already-existing social structure that presupposes that all relations are relations between self-possessed individuals. In this assimilative process, collective modes of relating to life and land are outlawed or pushed underground.[7] Where fascism fights class struggle by fostering a patriotism that cuts across class lines, liberal unity undermines the basis for class struggle by denying the fundamental antagonisms that distinguish us from them.[8]

Where fascist unity is most clearly invoked and produced by the great natural history museums of the 19th and early 20th centuries—the museums that continue to be subject to the most sustained protest and anticolonial critique—liberal unity finds form in the Montréal Insectarium’s “biophilic design,” which itself builds upon a tradition of ecological design developed during the mid-to-late 20th century. Consider the famous Penguin Pool at the London Zoo, designed by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton Group in 1934. As Peder Anker among others have shown, the Penguin Pool stood as a revolutionary innovation in environmental design because it broke from the longstanding “naturalistic” method of zoo design—the attempt to “reproduce the natural habitat” of the animal—in favor of what he calls a ‘geometric’ method, which attempts to present animals in unnatural settings, more closely resembling the built environment.[9] As Anker argues, this method of design was an effort to model a principle of “healthy coexistence,” which presupposed that “[a]ll species could prosper if they were given the opportunity to live in a healthy and peaceful environment.”[10]Again, the injunction to “co-exist” shifts our attention away from the structures and forces that threaten existence, leading to the kinds of ideological distortions that enable us to imagine an ethical way of designing animal cages for human entertainment.

If the Penguin Pool offers a model of hybridizing human and nonhuman environments, gesturing toward a unity that transcends the assumed difference between humans and nonhuman others (we can all thrive in reinforced concrete environments!), the Paris Museum of Mankind, renovated in 2015, underscores how liberal unity is established through the incorporation and assimilation of sites, species, and cultures that point to a world beyond the capitalist world. Here, visitors are confronted with a massive collection of cultural objects from around the world, where Nike sneakers are positioned next to Indigenous moccasins, peacefully coexisting within the same display cases. Radically upending the drama of the traditional natural history museum, where the fundamental antagonism between civilization and its Others is cast in the harsh light of day, this antagonism is swallowed up at the Museum of Mankind, incorporated but left unresolved.

Here, capitalist culture is subjected to the same ethnographic gaze as the “primitive cultures” whose objects were collected and preserved as spoils of imperial conquest, training us to see a sameness that transcends the fundamental differences that made so-called primitive non-capitalist societies Other to modern capitalist civilization in the first place. We leave the museum less equipped to understand why some cultures, ways of life, and economic systems have been targeted for extinction, less equipped to recognize the noncapitalist world these cultures represent, and less equipped to see the threat they pose to the capitalist state.

Communist Unity

So, what of the third principle of unity, what I’m calling communist unity? To start, I should clarify that what I want to develop is not a definition of the unity produced by the Communist Internationals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but a principle of unity that precedes communism’s organized form, which late nineteenth-century elites like Gustav Le Bon and Andrew Carnegie derided as “primitive communism.”[11] Primitive communism does not name the organized form of communism, but the abject other to capitalist civilization. As a name, it holds together the communists, anarchists, agitators, Indigenous peoples, heretics, witches, and their nonhuman comrades, all those who have, throughout history, threatened and exceeded the perspective of the capitalist state, which places at its center the white, male, propertied individual. Unlike both fascist unity and liberal unity, communist unity is not premised on the annihilation of the Other, but on a fidelity to it. It is a project of building the outside as a world apart—a world in common that capitalism cannot accommodate or enclose. Communist unity, thus, can be defined as the open, unbounded unity of a collective that comes together in the struggle to make a world according to principles of non-exploitation and non-domination. The “we” it calls into being is not fully formed. It is spectral, existing in the nightmares of the capitalists, and it is embodied, at different times and places, in the world-building practices of the oppressed.

It may be clear by now what the museum of natural history that is aligned with this principle of unity ought to do. In short, it ought to train us to take the perspective of the Other. This natural history museum does not presuppose civilized visitors who define themselves against the objects it contains. Rather, it invites its visitors to take the side of the Other, a side occupied by every being—human and other-than-human—whose subordination has been necessary for the making of the capitalist world. The museum of natural history that is built on communist unity does seek to heal the divide between humans and nonhumans or between “us” and “them.” Instead, it fosters the consciousness of the Other that fascism is determined to destroy. Communist unity is, in other words, fascist unity’s combative antithesis.

Producing a unity of the oppressed and excluded—this is the historical project of communism, and, as Geo Maher makes clear in his recent book Anticolonial Eruptions, it is the project of revolutionary decolonization as well.[12] Massimiliano Tomba theorizes the “insurgent universality” that has guided the emancipatory struggles of proletarians, slaves, women, and Indigenous peoples, who asserted themselves as “the excess of the term ‘man’ with respect to the law and to every essentialist definition of the human.”[13] This insurgent universality does not necessarily exclude nonhuman beings. As Oxana Timofeeva argues in “Communism with a Nonhuman Face,” communist unity necessarily extends beyond the realm of the “human” into the animal realm. Quoting from a poem by Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, she underscores the relation between humans and nonhumans that her expansive idea of communism invokes: “You send sailors / To the sinking cruiser / there / where a forgotten kitten was mewing.”[14] As Timofeeva explains:

There is something absurd and irrational in the excessive generosity of the revolutionary gesture depicted by Mayakovsky – imagine how crazy an army commander would have to be to send a battalion of sailors, adult armed men, to risk their lives for the sake of some forgotten, tiny, politically insignificant creature. And yet, that’s precisely how the drama of revolutionary desire should be performed.[15]

This drama is not set into motion by the communist’s empathy for the plight of the kitten, but a full identification with it. It is not a struggle for dignity, inclusion, or recognition, but a struggle of and for the undignified and unrecognized. The communist and the kitten are on the same side.

The natural history museum that is aligned with this project supports the development of a unity between comrades, whether they are living or dead, human or nonhuman. It asserts that those who enter it are entering the domain of the other and invites them to cross over to the other world.

The Museum of the Other World

Since 2014, Not An Alternative has been running The Natural History Museum (NHM)—an experiment in modeling this kind of museum—a museum that contributes to the production of collectivity between and among oppressed groups in their common struggle against fossil capitalism and the extractive industries. A “museum for the movement,” NHM works with scientists, museum workers, Indigenous water protectors and land defenders, and community-led environmental justice organizations to build infrastructure for environmental struggle. After spending our first few years campaigning to get fossil fuel oligarchs and climate deniers like David H. Koch removed from the boards of some of the country’s largest natural history museums, we have spent the past seven years developing campaigns, exhibitions, and public programs with communities that have been cast as civilization’s Other, including Indigenous Nations struggling to protect sacred places from fossil fuel extraction and transport, as well as other communities on the frontlines of environmental injustice, whose lives are treated as disposable by corporations and the state.[16]

Much of our recent work has been developed in close collaboration with the House of Tears Carvers, a group of carvers and community leaders from the Lummi Nation, an Indigenous Nation in the Pacific Northwest. For more than a decade, the House of Tears Carvers has been carving totem poles, putting them on flatbed trailers, and bringing them to communities across North America to build alliances in the struggle to protect the land and water. The “totem pole journeys” visit Indigenous communities, farmers and ranchers, scientists, and faith-based communities, engaging groups in ceremonies led by Lummi elders. Connecting communities on the frontlines of environmental struggle, these journeys seek to build, through ceremony, a collective that did not previously exist. Our most recent collaboration with the House of Tears Carvers, the Red Road to DC (2021), was a cross-country totem pole journey that aimed to support local communities’ efforts to protect sacred places threatened by dams, mining, and oil and gas extraction. Stopping for ceremony at ten key sacred sites, including Bears Ears National Monument and Standing Rock, before arriving at the national capital in Washington DC for a cross-community gathering, the project was designed to both symbolize and strengthen bonds of solidarity between communities whose local campaigns to protect sacred places combined into one collective force. The Red Road also elaborated our vision for a museum that does not seek to protect the most treasured cultural objects from external threats, but to mobilize them as threats to extractive capitalism.

Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum, Native Organizers Alliance, and the House of Tears Carvers (Lummi), *The Red Road to DC: A Totem Pole Journey for the Protection of Sacred Places*, 2021. Members of the Lummi Nation lead a ceremony outside the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, 2021. Photo courtesy of Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

For our latest project, We Refuse to Die (2023), we are working with fence-line environmental justice communities across the US to advance a visual language that represents and holds together a coalition of the dispossessed and excluded as a powerful threat to capital.[17] From coastal Texas to Louisiana, rural Appalachia and where I grew up near Sarnia, Ontario, communities living in close proximity to refineries, pipelines, fracking sites, and other polluting infrastructure are forced to breathe toxic concoctions of benzene, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde, and other harmful pollutants, which even at low levels, produce deadly impacts for those who ingest them.[18] In Port Arthur and Freeport, Texas, St. James Parish, Louisiana, and Clairton, Pennsylvania, among other places, communities living near petrochemical refineries, fracking pads, and coal processing plants are experiencing horrifying rates of cancers, leukemia, birth defects, reproductive disorders, asthma, and heart disease, among other diseases. Forced to live in unlivable conditions, they are cast as the living dead—written off as “externalities” on an economic ledger. Responding to this situation, we are working with communities in Appalachia, the Gulf South, and the Pacific Northwest, to reclaim the “living dead”—and the numerous popular incarnations of this figure—as protagonists and partners in our shared struggle for a world beyond extraction.

At the center of this initiative is a series of sculptures we call Externalities, representing various figures of the living dead—both humans and other animals. Hand-carved from trees killed in Pacific Northwest wildfires near where some of Not An Alternative’s members live (and where recent wildfire smoke caused the worst air quality in the world), the Externalities are being planted in the yards of Appalachia and Gulf South residents during community rituals, facing the petrochemical and fossil fuel infrastructures that contaminate local water supplies and pollute the air. As components within a multi-year, multi-city initiative, which includes the staging of public events, “toxic tours,” and community gatherings, these carvings bring together people from dispersed sites and struggles to perform a common ritual dedicated to metabolizing grief into collective strength and community power.

Not An Alternative, The Externalities (Clairton, PA), 2023. One of a series sculptures, hand carved from logs salvaged from wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, installed facing US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works in Clairton, Pennsylvania. Environmental justice activist Melanie Mead stands opposite the sculpture, wearing a handmade silicone mask. Photo courtesy of Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

This project marks the beginning of the latest phase of our work, which is focused on seeding a visual language that can communicate, from a position of collective power, a relation between all those who have been cast as surplus—humans and nonhumans, living and dead. It does not seek to awaken fellow feeling between humans and nonhumans, but to awaken the desire for a communist world that the capitalist class has spent centuries pushing underground. It thus advances the project beneath the NHM: to model a museum that does not heal the divide but take a side, the side of the oppressed, excluded, and unhuman, who refuse to die but who refuse to live in the capitalist world.

Notes

[1] Donna Haraway, for example, argues that dissolving boundaries between human and nonhuman, nature and society, “cracks the matrices of domination.” See Haraway, Manifestly (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 53. For a longer critique of this “dissolutionist” tendency in ecological thought, see Andreas Malm’s chapter “On the Use of Opposites,” in The Progress of This Storm (Verso, 2016), 177-196.

[2] Biophilia and biophilic design were outlined as core design criteria in the Space for Life’s call for architectural proposals, which prompted Keuhn Malvezzi’s winning proposal. See: “Montréal Space For Life Architecture Competition” (Bureau du design Montréal, 2014): 16-17: https://designmontreal.com/sites/designmontreal.com/files/ftp-uploads/planches/espvie/PDF/Programme_et_annexes_EN.pdf

[3] Karine Jalbert, quoted in “Space for Life: New way to view nature,” National Post (online, May 7, 2012): https://nationalpost.com/uncategorized/space-for-life-new-way-to-view-nature.

[4] Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (Pluto Press, 2015), 70. Understanding this reciprocity, it’s easier to understand why in 2020, Space for Life did not join in publicly denouncing Rio Tinto’s role in destroying a 46,000-year old Aboriginal sacred site in Western Australia that “provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners.” See Calla Wahlquist, “Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine,” The Guardian (online, May 26, 2020): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-tinto-blasts-46000-year-old-aboriginal-site-to-expand-iron-ore-mine.

[5] This turn of phrase is indebted to Jay Jordan and Isabelle Fremeux, who describe the historic struggle against “the airport and its world” at the ZAD in Notre-Dames-des-Landes, where a regional airport was slated for development. See Jordan and Fremeux, We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism, and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press, 2021), 56.

[6] Rob DeSalle, “The Eugenics Movement in Retrospect,” Natural History (Online, December 2021-January 2022): https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/093896/the-eugenics-movement-in-retrospect.

[7] See Steve Lyons and Jason Jones for Not An Alternative, “Towards a Theory of Red Natural History,” Society & Space (May 11, 2022): https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/towards-a-theory-of-red-natural-history.

[8] Alberto Toscano theorizes this “logic of pacification” in “Powers of Pacification: State and Empire in Gabriel Tarde,” Economy and Society, vol. 36, no. 4 (November 2007): p. 601.

[9] Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 19.

[10] Ibid., 22.

[11] From Gustav Le Bon to Andrew Carnegie, conservative elites at the end of the nineteenth century routinely described the desire for commonality simmering under the fabric of capitalist society as “primitive communism.” See Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, (The Century Co., 1900), 6. See also Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, second edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897), xvi.

[12] Geo Maher, Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California Press, 2022).

[13] Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2019), 14-15.

[14] Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Ode to Revolution,” quoted in Oxana Timofeeva, “Communism with a Nonhuman Face,” e-flux journal #48 (October 2013): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/48/60030/communism-with-a-nonhuman-face/.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Laura Pulido emphasizes the role of the state in reinforcing environmental racism in “Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence,” Progress in Human Geography (2016): 1-10.

[17] For more on this project, visit werefusetodie.org.

[18] Dayna Nadine Scott, “Confronting Chronic Pollution: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Risk and Precaution,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal vol. 46, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 293-343.

Steve Lyons is a core member of Not An Alternative, an art collective with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. The collective’s ongoing project The Natural History Museum (2014-) began as a performative intervention in the museum sector. It has evolved into an infrastructure for place-based environmental justice struggles, with a focus on building and strengthening solidarity across geographies and between generations past, present, and future.

“From Healing the Divide to Taking a Side” was originally published in Curatorial Design. A Place Between, edited by Wilfried Kuehn and Dubravka Sekulić (Milan: Lenz Press, 2025).

Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis) is an environmental historian and traditional ecological knowledge practitioner. In addition to her role as Professor of Environmental History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she works with Saokio Heritage, a community-based organization on the Blackfeet Reservation that is working to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge and practices, as well as to revitalize the Indigenous languages that are embedded in and with traditional knowledge. In this interview with The Natural History Museum’s Steve Lyons, LaPier discusses the lasting impacts of the US government’s century-long effort to exterminate the culture, language, and religion of her ancestors, as well as the role that she and other Indigenous knowledge keepers are playing in response.

Steve Lyons (SL) You just published a powerful essay on the history of Native boarding schools in response to President Biden’s official apology for the atrocities committed in these institutions. What are the problems with, limitations of, or even dangers of accepting this kind of symbolic gesture, which reflects what Glen Sean Coulthard calls the “politics of recognition,” a political project that manifests in different countries as truth and reconciliation, land acknowledgments, and so on?

Rosalyn LaPier (RL) In the Fall of 2024, President Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland offered an apology to Native American tribes and Native American communities for the atrocities that occurred as part of the Native American boarding school policies. When Haaland was appointed as Secretary of the Interior, she set out to investigate her own agency, the Department of Interior, and to pressure it to acknowledge the harm it has caused. As part of this inquiry, she asked the President for a formal apology.

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland speaks at the final stop of the *Red Road to DC*, a Totem Pole Journey for the Protection of Sacred Places, organized by the Se’Si’Le (Lummi Nation), Native Organizers Alliance, and The Natural History Museum, Washington, DC, 2021. Photo: Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

Biden’s recent apology addressed the abuses that occurred in Indian boarding schools—physical abuse, mental abuse, sexual abuse. He said that this was one of the horrific chapters in American history. But while this was a historic gesture (in fact, acting Presidents have only apologized for policies towards Native Americans a few times), it was striking to me that neither the President, nor Secretary Haaland used the word “genocide” to describe the boarding school policies. By removing children from their families without consent and taking them to institutions designed to erase their traditional cultural practices, languages, and religions, the US government committed genocide. Numerous historians and other scholars have demonstrated that these schools did not exist to educate children. They existed to erase Indigenousness out of people. This is the definition of genocide.

SL If President Biden was to include the language of genocide in his apology, would this expose the United States to scrutiny, either from the international courts or from Native communities? Would it leave the government more vulnerable to demands for action? And if the US government was to act, what kinds of action would you like to see?

RL One of the reasons that the United States government does not use the word genocide to describe what happened at the Indian boarding schools is this would set the government up for legal action against it, both internally within the United States, and internationally, where it could be taken to international court. Politicians stay clear of that kind of language because they know that certain words can lead to legal action.

Having said this, what would I like to see out of Biden’s apology? We could start with funding. Oftentimes, when tribes ask the government for funding, they are offered competitive grant funding. What this means is that in order to get funding for revitalizing Indigenous languages, for example, Native Nations will find themselves competing against each other, against NGOs, and against universities. I think that to begin to apologize for its genocidal policies, the United States government should start by providing noncompetitive funding to any tribe that wants funding to revitalize the languages that the boarding schools aimed to exterminate.

The United States government also needs to address the cultural practices that were lost while children were at Indian boarding schools. Beyond language revitalization, I believe the United States should provide noncompetitive funding to support everything from food sovereignty to religious practice to daily life, where a variety of customs and ways of interacting with family and community were lost.

The other thing that needs to be addressed is what people are calling “intergenerational loss.” There are a lot of socioeconomic issues that exist within tribal communities because of the impact of Indian boarding schools—issues that stem from children not knowing how to parent their own children, children who grew up in physical violence now acting out with physical violence, children who grew up with sexual violence now acting out with sexual violence in their own communities.

SL At the same time as we can criticize Biden’s half-measure, there is something really important in, at the very least, not forgetting. In your work, you emphasize the importance of intergenerational knowledge for the survival and resurgence of Indigenous cultures that have undergone centuries of extermination and assimilation campaigns, all designed to break the generational links that tie Indigenous people to the ways and worldviews of their ancestors. Why does maintaining intergenerational knowledge matter? Perhaps we can discuss this in reference to the teachings in ethnobotany that were passed down to you. Why was it important for you to learn about Native plants and ethnobotany, and does the knowledge you now possess oblige you to pass it on to the next generation?

RL Multiple generations of my own family attended Indian boarding schools, but despite this, my family was very fortunate. This is because my grandparents grew up in communities and in families where our Native language, the Blackfeet language, was their first language. They came from families that participated and practiced Blackfeet religion. And they also were from families that were what we’d call today “knowledge keepers.” For example, my grandmother was trained to be a “doctor” within our own community. Because of this, I grew up in a family with a lot of knowledge, a lot of religious knowledge and a lot of language. Because we had that foundation, my family was able to continue to share its knowledge of Blackfeet language, religion, and plants with the next generations, even though they were impacted by the legacy of Indian boarding schools. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized that this was definitely not true for a lot of people.

Women elders gathering medicines on the Blackfeet reservation. Photo: Saokio Heritage.

I was fortunate to be able to apprentice with my grandmother and my oldest aunt to learn about ethnobotany and the traditional ecological knowledge of the Blackfeet. So I’m able to now share these teachings with other younger generations. Over the years, as I have done workshops in the community and taught young adults at university, I have found that at some point in young Indigenous people’s self-awareness, they realize that they were born into a colonial system. They realize that they are colonized people, inheriting a long history of land annexation, land removal, and deportation. They learn that the reason they don’t speak their own language is because their language was removed from their family at the boarding schools. They realize that they don’t know about the cosmology or the religion of their own community because of a colonial loss that occurred over time. They also begin to realize that they’re part of a capitalist society. When these things come together, young people wake up and are literally like, “what the heck?” How did this happen? Why was I born into this system of colonization and genocide? This comes as a shock to many young people, who become really angry when they realize what has happened to themselves, their parents, and their families. They are not only angry—they want to push back.

Increasingly, I’m beginning to see the emergence of a revolutionary mindset among young people, who are not just interested in learning about plants, but learning about plants to figure out how we can separate ourselves from the United States. There are young people who think that we should not be part of the United States. Understanding themselves as a colonized people, they start to see similarities between themselves and other Indigenous people around the world, who are also occupied, whose land is also being annexed, and who are experiencing the same kinds of historic atrocities that happened to their own people. They recognize that they need to do something, they need to change the world that they’re in, and they need to take a step towards revitalizing a lot of things in their own community so that they can be future leaders as our situation evolves in the United States.

Members of Pueblo Action Alliance hold a banner in front of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian at the the final stop of the Red Road to DC, 2021.

SL It is amazing to hear about what this kind of teaching can do to unleash this revolutionary consciousness among young people. For Indigenous people in North America to be able to see themselves in the Palestinian people who are under siege right now, and to see the echoes of the extermination campaigns that their ancestors went through in the ongoing extermination campaign being waged on Gaza is precisely what can make solidarity possible.

Your essay for our Red Natural History essay series engages the experiences of Indigenous scholars and communities whose practices of recovery and knowledge regeneration either rely on or can be enriched by documents and objects that are held in archives and museums of natural history. I’m wondering if you could shed light on how these collections came to be. Under what terms did museums and archives come to “acquire” so many important and sacred cultural objects from Indigenous Nations across the continent (and the world)? And what did these acquisitions seek to accomplish?

RL As I was on my own personal journey to learn more about my own community, I was working for a Native language revitalization organization on the Blackfeet Reservation. One of the founders of that organization encouraged me to learn everything I could about my own Tribe. This struck a chord with me. I thought, he’s right—we should be learning everything about our own Tribe, instead of relying on outside scholars as the “experts” about our own communities. As I mentioned earlier, because I was blessed to have come from a family that already had a lot of knowledge, I had a foundation. But then I decided to look at what had been collected in the past—stories, songs, religious knowledge. I wanted to understand how this information had been collected and by whom. This led me to natural history museums, where such collections tend to exist. I went to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (SNMNH) in Washington, D.C.

I should start by saying that there is a really interesting mixture of objects and information in natural history museums. There are stories, songs, and material objects that indigenous people intentionally left behind, and things that were literally stolen by collectors. All of this was written down because most natural history museums are very good at documenting what they have. They have ledger books that list everything that came in and how much they paid, down to the nickel.

A recording session with Blackfeet leader Mountain Chief led by ethnologist Frances Densmore for the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1916. Photo: Harris & Ewing / Public Domain.

As I explored the collections of the AMNH and SNMNH, I was interested in the question of agency, in what Indigenous people chose to leave behind. When the early ethnographers and collectors came to Tribal communities to collect information, they would ask the questions, but this did not mean that their so-called “informants” had to answer. At least for my own Tribe, the people who were interviewed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries overwhelmingly wanted to talk about religion and religious practice. They wanted to discuss how we think about the world that we live in, how we think about the universe and our relationship to the natural world.

They could have talked about genocide, massacres, and land annexation. And they did talk about those things with the policymakers in Washington, D.C. But when they were being recorded for natural history by ethnologists, they overwhelmingly left behind testimony about their relationship with the universe. They thought that these stories were extremely important to share for future generations.

The flip side of this story of Indigenous agency is much darker. We know that at the same time as they were collecting information about tribes, many natural history museums were also illegally digging up human remains and the funerary objects buried with them. When you’re doing research in a natural history museum, you never know what’s going to be on the next page or in the next folder. On one page you will be reading a story that your grandparents had voluntarily told. On the next, you will be confronted with information about stolen human remains. As a community member, but also as a scholar, you have to prepare yourself for this kind of shock.

SL Your latest book engages with the way of seeing and understanding the world that oriented your Blackfeet ancestors before and during the early years of colonization. You specify that in the Blackfeet cosmology, “humans did not have any supernatural power of and by themselves. Instead they needed to seek out supernatural power from those beings who had it. The Blackfeet believed that humans had to create alliances with the supernatural to live life to the fullest.” Can you tell us what kind of message, obligations, or ethical relationship to the land, water, and air follow from the cosmology you unpack in the book?

RL As part of their cosmology, as part of their worldview and as part of their religion, the Blackfeet believed that humans did not themselves have any supernatural ability. But there were deities, monsters, animals, plants, and other entities out there in the world with supernatural powers that we could tap into. Within the Blackfeet worldview, there was a certain sense of individuality. People did not have to be religious if they didn’t want to be. People did not have to create alliances with the supernatural realm if they didn’t want to. But if you were a human, you would have a fuller and richer life if you created relationships not just with other humans, but with other entities that existed within our universe. Because of that, it was extremely important in the Blackfeet worldview to create as many good relationships as you possibly could—not just with humans, not just with your family, not just with your community, but also with the supernatural realm. And you had to maintain those relationships.

We might think about the way we think of friendship today. Many of us try our best to have good relationships with our friends and family, so we do things to maintain those relationships. We take people out to coffee. We go to dinner. We go together to the museum or the movies. Now think about supernatural entities. Native people had to create relationships with a lot of different supernatural entities over the course of their lifetimes and to maintain their relationships with all of those entities. In the same way that humans maintain relationships with other humans, the Blackfeet maintained relationships with supernatural entities who could help us when we needed help in the same way that humans help us when we need help.

For the most part, the Blackfeet believed that they did not have to “suffer” what was occurring in the natural world. If the wind was too windy, you could stop the wind from blowing. If there was too much rain, you could stop the rain from raining. If there was too much snow, you could stop the snow. If you wanted more sunlight, you could get more sunlight. They believed that you could change everything by having a relationship with a supernatural entity who could help you change it.

I am really fascinated by the confidence that the Blackfeet had—this idea that they could literally walk out their door and change it all because they maintained good relationships with the supernatural realm. And there are many stories from the past, even within my own family, of people who could control the natural world to benefit their family, their community, and to live a whole and rich life.

SL One of the things I’ve noticed is how when you speak about the Blackfeet, you’re speaking in the past tense. This makes me think of a quote from L.P. Hartley that I’ve seen you refer to in several different texts: “the past is a foreign country.” What does it mean in your work to engage the past as a foreign country? And do you think engaging with the foreignness of the past can teach us things about our present?

RL When I started going to libraries, archives and natural history museums, I was really interested in understanding the world that my grandparents grew up in, as well as the world they were born into. My grandmother was born in 1914. My grandfather was born in 1911. My question was: what did the world of the Blackfeet look like in 1910? When I looked back at that time, it was a foreign country to me. Everybody spoke the Blackfeet language. Everybody practiced the Blackfeet religion, even though they had been on the reservation now for 25 years—an entire generation. It was a completely different place to the reservation I know. In a sense, it was like traveling across the world and going to a completely different country where everybody spoke a different language, practiced different cultural practices, had a different religion, and ate different food than on the reservation that I was literally standing in. The opposite would be true for my grandparents if they were to return today.

My grandmother lived to be 97, so she did live into the twenty-first century, and by the end of her life, she felt as dislocated in our world as I would have felt in hers. We spoke a different language. We had different cultural practices. Most of us were either not practicing any kind of religion or were Christians. And we ate completely different food. Our present was a foreign country to her.

Sometimes people try to think of Tribal communities as static and unchanging, but this is not true at all. The world that we live in is a world that has been colonized and profoundly impacted by land annexation, land removal, deportation, and genocide. The world my grandparents grew up in was actively being colonized, but it still retained many of the attributes of their own Blackfeet life, world and culture. This difference matters. It is important to allow a place to be its own place, and to resist the temptation to superimpose our 21st century ideas or our own personal experience in our tribal communities back onto earlier times.

SL It occurs to me that if we understand the past as a foreign country, learning how people saw the world in the past might help us see the present as a foreign country–and thus to denaturalize habits of thought that make capitalist relations between people, and between people and their environments, seem totally natural. This is, in a sense, one of the gambits of what we have been calling “red natural history.” We’re bringing together people who are fashioning tools or drawing on resources that can train us to see the world beyond and beneath the world as it has been ordered by imperialism. You have been involved with this project for a couple of years now, so I wanted to ask: What is “red natural history” to you, and what might it offer us in the present?

RL I want to start with the key word in “red natural history”—”red.” For the Blackfeet people, as well as for other Indigenous tribes, red is often thought of as a sacred color. For us, the color red is attached to a deity called Natosi, one of the three main kinds of deities that exist in our Blackfeet cosmology. Natosi lives in the sky realm. When Blackfeet people participate in religion and religious practices, they often paint their face or hands red, or they wear red clothing, or they put red on their moccasins to represent this deity. For me, the “red” of “red natural history” is filled with this reference.

Red natural history presents an opportunity for us to reclaim and revitalize a lot of things—from the word “natural history” to the institutions that support the study of the natural world. From time immemorial, Indigenous people have developed relationships with the natural world, as well as scientific knowledge about the natural world—the kinds of observations and insights that natural history museums were built to collect, but that were never taken seriously alongside the observations and insights of Western science.

I don’t want “natural history” to be a term that only Western science can use. I want Indigenous people to be able to claim it as their own, and I want Indigenous people to claim it as something that we’ve been doing for a very long time. To me, the project of “red natural history” enables us to bring our own Indigenous science to the table, to define and debate what it means for us, but also what it means for the entire world. As we go through the crises we’re facing today, including the global climate crisis, Indigenous science has insights that should not only be shared, but also implemented by people around the world.

Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis) is an award winning writer, ethnobotanist, environmental activist and Professor of History at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She/they work within Indigenous communities to revitalize Indigenous & traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), to address environmental justice & the climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages. The author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (2017), she/they are a 2023-2025 Red Natural History Fellow. Rosalyn is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker is an Okanagan descendant of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now teaches American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos. As a writer, educator, and one of The Natural History Museum’s inaugural Red Natural History Fellows, she is developing a Native perspective on environmentalism and environmental justice, responding not only to the specific experience of dispossession, genocide, and assimilation experienced by Native Nations in the so-called United States, but also to the current reality of peoples who continue to be subjugated by the settler state. In this edited conversation with The Natural History Museum’s Steve Lyons, Gilio-Whitaker explores the challenge of mapping the dominant understanding of “environmental justice” onto the experiences of Native Nations, offering a clear-eyed vision for an Indigenized environmental justice, which has traditional knowledge and Tribal sovereignty at its heart.

Steve Lyons (SL) In your most recent book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, you note that “of the United States’ 1,322 Superfund sites, 532 of them were located on Indian lands — an astoundingly disproportionate figure considering how little of the US land base is Indian trust land.” Could we start by talking about how this came to be?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker This is a pretty astounding figure, considering that less than 5% of land in the U.S. remains to be tribally held. So how do we understand that this disproportionate amount of land of Superfund sites is on tribal lands? I think the best answer to that question is that in a settler colonial system like the US, Native lands and Native people are considered disposable. Settler-colonialism dehumanizes Indigenous populations in order to justify the systematic dispossession of Native land.

Within this dehumanizing structure, Native people and Native lands enter a process that Traci Brynne Voyles describes as “wastelanding.” In Wastelanding, Voyles helps us understand how, especially in the Southwest, Native reservation lands became reservation lands because they were considered wastelands — places that settler populations did not consider valuable. But after the reservation system was established, the whole nuclear industry began, and geologists discovered that materials like uranium were abundant in these lands that had already been written off, kickstarting another wave of extraction, this time on or near the reservations.

Map of Abandoned Uranium Mines on or near the Navajo Nation. Map: EPA Region 9 GIS Center.

We’re now in a new “clean energy” era, where lithium is poised to become the new uranium, and lithium mining is every bit as extractive and contaminating as uranium mining. If this cycle of dispossession continues, we’ll have the same issues all over again.

SL In addition to this process of despoiling, you chronicle ways in which colonizers and settlers re-engineered the landscape to starve Indigenous communities into submission, a process of “environmental deprivation” that fundamentally transformed the environments in which people are capable of sustaining their cultural traditions and ways of life. In the NHM’s vocabulary, we describe this as a process of “making natural history.” How has settler colonialism left its mark on the natural history of the planet — if we understand natural history, broadly, as the history of the environments that sustain collective life? And what incommensurate practices, modes of life, and ways of understanding the environment did this process extinguish?

DGW If we start by thinking about the US conservation movement, which arguably began with the founding of the National Parks system in the late-nineteenth century, we can see how the effort to preserve and conserve “wilderness” could be part of a process of settler-colonial domination. In the dominant conservationist tradition, the idea of wilderness is conceived in a very Eurocentric way, which in the nineteenth century was based on the settler-colonial fantasy that the natural world was a place without people that needed to be protected from people. Of course, this mythology of an unpeopled landscape perpetuated European ideas that justified the invasion of Native lands as if they were uninhabited. There were millions of people on the land when Europeans arrived in the Americas, but from the settler-colonial vantage point, these original inhabitants were not considered people with pre-existing rights to land.

View of Babyfoot Lake in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon’s Southern Coast, 2015. Photo: US Forest Service.

The landscapes the Europeans encountered as they made their way across the continent looked to them like “pristine” environments, untouched by human hands. This was a misconception, of course. Indigenous peoples had, in fact, been managing all kinds of ecosystems, including forests and grassy plains. Across this continent, Native peoples were maintaining or altering landscapes in ways that benefited themselves, but also benefited the environment. But when the Europeans invaded these landscapes and moved the Indigenous populations off the lands they stewarded, they also removed the longstanding practices and processes that Native people were using to maintain them, from cultural burning to harvesting particular crops in ways that would nourish the soil and perpetuate the greater growth of that food source. The same was true for the harvesting of salmon in the Columbia plateau. The salmon were abundant, but the Native people who harvested them did so in a way that ensured that abundance.

As they made their way across the continent, the Europeans remade the land in a very Eurocentric way—not by managing the land in ways that ensured the abundance of natural resources, but in ways that exploited and used them up.

We could look at the building of dams, which was a significant settler-colonial project into the twentieth century. Settler states built dams in order to facilitate water storage, which was part of a broader project of facilitating large-scale agriculture. But when you build dams and create these water storage systems, you also create lakes where they didn’t previously exist. You alter ecosystems in multiple ways: not only by pushing Native people off their traditional lands and into places that have less food resources, but also by making it impossible for these ecosystems to regenerate themselves in the ways they were used to.

Remaking the landscape in a Eurocentric way always brings life to settler populations, but brings death to Indigenous populations. This is part of the cycle of ecocide and genocide we call settler-colonialism.

SL In As Long as Grass Grows, you argue that the way we’ve come to understand “environmental justice” in the US doesn’t map onto the environmental injustices faced by Indigenous peoples. Can you outline the problem you see with the dominant conception of “environmental justice” and what it looks like to center environmental justice on the experiences of Indigenous Nations?

Surrounded by petrochemical refineries of the world’s largest petrochemical complex, the primarily Latinx people living in Houston’s Manchester neighborhood are subjected to environmental racism, disproportionately exposed to health harms. Photo: Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum

DGW The concept of “environmental justice” was not conceived until the early 1980s, growing out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We all know the civil rights movement did not solve all the problems. Racism did not magically go away, and it took many forms. Looking at Black communities in the Deep South in the ’80s, people began to see a new articulation of racism that had this very particular environmental quality to it.

In this context, communities were coming to understand that they were being unfairly targeted as sites for toxic waste dumps and other harmful infrastructure because they were Black, poor and powerless. They called this environmental racism. And sure enough, the concept stuck, because not only was it happening in Black communities in the South, but also in other communities of color. For example, Chicano and migrant farmworker communities in California were working with pesticides that turned out to cause disproportionate incidence of health problems.

With numerous community-based studies proving this dynamic, people came to define environmental injustice and environmental racism as the disproportionate risk of negative health impacts faced by ethnic minority communities. This is a very specific definition. While it is irrefutable that racism plays a key role in the distribution of risk, the concept does not help us understand other historical processes that are specific to the experiences of Indigenous peoples: the experience of invasion, land theft, and environmental deprivation, which were intended to eliminate them .

We can look at intentional starvation as an example of environmental injustice that environmental racism does not help to explain. Take the case of the extermination of the buffalo, which was a means by which the settler state could dominate Native people, literally by starving them into submission. This was a form of environmental deprivation that was not primarily stemming from a process of racialization and racism that, by consequence, exposed Native people to risk and harm. It stemmed from a deliberate genocidal project waged by the United States, which targeted the environmental health of Native populations in order to take their land.

Photograph of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer, circa 1870s.

If we understand settler colonialism as a process of dispossessing Native people in order to take land, it offers a much larger framework for understanding injustice than either racism or the exposure to risk and harm. And it is a very specific kind of injustice that Native people experience, which cannot be mapped onto the experiences of other ethnic minority populations. This is why I argue that we have to understand environmental justice for Native people not through a lens of environmental racism, but through a lens that centered on these colonial processes that are fundamentally about taking land and replacing Indigenous populations with settler populations.

We have to think beyond racialization when we think about the process of settler colonialism. It’s not just about racial discrimination. It’s always about the land. Environmental injustice for Native people is inseparable from the taking of land.

SL If environmental justice for Native peoples needs to center the question of land, what does this look like in practice? What does an “Indigenized” environmental justice look like?

DGW We have to begin by recognizing that Indigenous people have lived on the continent for untold generations in ways that were sustainable. They understood the limits of ecosystems. I think that we need to learn from them. We have built societies based on unchecked technological development, and very short term thinking. Indigenous Nations lived sustainably for generations because they thought long term. Yes, they altered their environments. But when they did, they asked how their interventions would impact the environment for the next seven generations. Virtually all Indigenous societies in North America thought in this way. They had different ways of characterizing it, but they were always thinking into the future. If we are to survive, I think this is something that modern society needs to learn.

This is the question for me: can we live in a technologically intensive society in a way that’s sustainable? And I don’t think this question is being adequately addressed.

SL As I was reading your work, I was struck by a consistent emphasis on the power of knowledge, pedagogy, and learning in producing conditions for transformative social change. Can you describe your theory of change — how we get from a colonized capitalist world to a better world?

DGW For me, Indigenous knowledge is important because it centers the core values of kinship and reciprocity. When you center these values, you live with respect and responsibility on the land. These are not the values that Eurocentric societies are grounded in. By contrast, Eurocentric societies are based on the endless exploitation of the natural world, and it doesn’t take a PhD to understand that this is not sustainable. But it’s not like the values of long term thinking and relational thinking are only limited to Indigenous populations. Every human society has some kind of understanding of kinship and reciprocity. The question is how can we take those kinds of values and center them in our modern ways of living?

Water Protectors at the Red Road to DC, 2021.

SL In our past conversations, you’ve raised the ways in which Indigenous ways of knowing, traditions, and identities have been appropriated by white settlers — like in the Back to the Land movement — underscoring what these appropriations got wrong. But you have also been clear that settlers have a lot to learn from Indigenous people, traditions, and relations to the land and water. Can you elaborate on this problem of Indigenous identity: how might we parse the distinction between an Indigenous practice and an appropriative practice? Or, to look at it from another angle, when Indigenous practices are appropriated in problematic ways, what central features, ideas, agencies or values are being stripped from them? And where do you see a path beyond the violent assimilation of Indigenous identities into the settler-capitalist frame? Is it possible for settlers to learn from Indigenous practices without recapitulating the Back to the Land problem?

DGW When I talk about the problem of cultural appropriation with the Back to the Land movement and in second-wave environmentalism, I always say that those hippie folks were well-meaning. For a long time there was a lot of stigma about being Native. Native people were constructed as inferior, uncivilized and primitive. But with the growing anxiety about what industrialization and rampant extraction were doing to the environment—with the contamination of rivers like the Cuyahoga River, which famously caught on fire many times, and with the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969—young people began to show some respect to Indian country, recognizing that Native people had lived in harmony with the land since time immemorial, and seeing in Indian country an example for settler society to follow.

At the same time that the counterculture adopted a new respect for Native people, they showed this respect in a way that was suffused with what I call “settler supremacy”: an entitlement to the land that lays at the foundation of settler society. One way that settler supremacy manifested in the hippy counterculture was in their sense of entitlement to taking on cultures and identities that were not their own. You see this emulation in the adoption of a Native aesthetic: growing long hair and wearing headbands, fringed leather, beadwork and feathers. There is a clear appropriation of culture going on. Hippies were going to the reservations to learn from the medicine people, which then led to a growing rise of fake identities — people pretending to be medicine men and Indians themselves.

Today, as new environmental problems are ramping up, there is a renewed recognition that Indigenous knowledge might be really important for how we, as societies, will negotiate our way into the future. People now understand that traditional Indigenous knowledge can offer a framework for asking how we can better manage the lands, how we can negotiate our way through troubled times. While there is always a risk of misappropriation, as there was in the 1960s, I think that we’re in a different phase, where we can call this appropriation out when we see it.

More than the misappropriation of Indigenous knowledge, I think the bigger problem right now is that Western science continues to set itself up in competition with Indigenous knowledge — reflecting another version of the “settler supremacy” problem. Settler supremacy is built into Western science systems, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The question is how can we braid knowledge systems, combining the best Western science with the best of Indigenous knowledge in ways that don’t replicate those hierarchies of knowledge.

SL In your “Red Natural History” essay, you talk about something called “the Shift,” which may well be occurring as we speak. How are you defining “Red Natural History,” where have you seen it alive in the past and where do you see it alive today; and why might Red Natural History, as you define it, be important to the “shift”?

DGW I understand red natural history as the bringing together of the past into the present, into the future in a way that centers Indigenous knowledge — in other words, a perspective that is defined by a different kind of value system, rooted in relationality, reciprocity, respect and responsibility for the ecosystems that we all inhabit. Red natural history centers these values in ways that can allow society to shift away from the endless exploitation of the natural environment, and toward a use of the environment that is beneficial for everyone.

This is the paradigm shift that I’m working towards, along with other Native scholars who see TEK or traditional ecological knowledge as a vehicle for guiding our societies into the future. This shift is not only about the protection of Native knowledge, but also the protection of the political existence of Tribes. And this shift is in process. I know because I’m part of it. The question is to what extent it will be mainstreamed, taken seriously on a national and international scale. If we are going to see a survivable future for everyone, Indigenous knowledge will need to be incorporated into the education system at all levels, from K through 12 and higher education, into our research spaces, and into our policy spaces.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a Lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos and an independent educator in American Indian environmental policy and other issues. 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 also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of Indigeneity and the sport of surfing. Dina is the author of two books, most recently the award-winning As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock.

Ashley Dawson is a professor of Postcolonial Studies at the City University of New York, who has spent two decades developing a cogent diagnosis of the contemporary climate, environmental, and biodiversity crisis. His research and public writing charts how European colonialism has decimated people all around the planet over the last 500 years, as well as how people have worked together to fight back. In this interview with The Natural History Museum’s Steve Lyons, Dawson unravels the tangled histories of colonialism and fossil capitalism, considering how corporations, states, and conservation organizations have worked together to re-colonize the formerly colonized world, supercharging the rapid loss of biodiversity in the Global South. He also explores some of the traditions of resistance from which non-capitalist modes of life have been and can be built, arguing that Indigenous sovereignty and #landback must be at the center of our collective response to converging crises of our era.

Steve Lyons Several of your most recent works, including both Decolonize Conservation and Environmentalism from Below, raise the problem of what you and others call “fortress conservation,” which can be seen in so-called “nature-based solutions” to climate change. Could you explain how nature-based solutions like the “30×30” campaign pitch themselves as positive responses to the climate crisis—but also, what do they promise to do from the perspective of people living in the Global South? What is new about these proposals, and what have we seen a million times before?

Ashley Dawson To take a step back, we need to understand that although the lion’s share of attention around environmental issues today falls on the climate crisis and increasing carbon emissions, this is not simply a climate crisis. We’re facing what I call an intersectional crisis that has many different facets that are unfolding alongside one another. One of the other crucial elements is a crisis in biodiversity.

In 2016, I published a book called Extinction: A Radical History, which shows how the capitalist system and its colonial pre-history are linked to a massive extinction of species around the planet. This extinction event has been happening for hundreds of years, but it’s been gathering pace over the last 50 years, where we’ve seen a huge die-off that has been linked to habitat destruction around the world.

This is the context out of which many of the big conservation organizations, almost all of which are headquartered in the US, have started talking about “nature-based solutions” to the crisis of the environment. When conservation organizations bring up nature-based solutions, they’re talking about this kind of intersectional crisis that we’re seeing happen right now: on the one hand, the increasing rate of extinction (not just of specific species, but whole ecosystems), and on the other hand, the climate crisis.

On its surface, “nature-based solutions” is an attractive idea. The idea is that if we start factoring in the contribution that nature makes to human survival and prosperity, we will see how nature can provide a solution to the environmental crises of the current moment. In practice, a toxic system has been created under the banner of “nature-based solutions,” which allows polluting corporations to pay the governments of countries that have abundant forests and other natural ecosystems that could theoretically absorb the carbon that these companies continue to emit. This is the idea of carbon offsetting.

If you have a system of carbon offsets, you can value those offsets, and then you can trade them like commodities, bonds, or any other capitalist financial instrument. This is what is happening now: corporations that continue to pollute the planet are figuring out ways to keep polluting, all the while convincing the international community that they’re “carbon neutral.” A “carbon neutral” company is simply one whose continued emissions are offset by its purchases of these carbon offsets.

Out of this situation, over the last ten years or so, big conservation organizations based in the wealthy, core capitalist countries have discovered that they can make a lot of money by setting aside land in different parts of the world in order to generate carbon offsets. Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund are working to get in on the aggressive financialization of nature that was ushered in by carbon offsetting.

As you suggested, there’s a problem with all of this, even though it sounds like a win-win solution for everyone: you make polluting corporations pay, and they help people by paying for ecosystems to remain in place. The problem is that in most cases, it turns out these areas that are being set aside as sites of offsetting don’t absorb very much carbon. There was a recent report that said that 90% of the officially accredited carbon offsetting schemes in the world’s rainforests aren’t doing anything other than generating a lot of capital for conservation organizations and financial speculators in green capitalism. The climate crisis is actually intensifying. The biodiversity crisis is intensifying. And Indigenous peoples around the world who live in these new “protected areas” are being dispossessed of their lands.

How is this even possible? Many Indigenous communities around the world have customary title to land, but do not have the kinds of property agreements and contracts that Western legal systems recognize. This means that when corrupt government officials decide to designate an area as a “protected area,” they can just kick out the Indigenous Peoples who have been stewarding that land for thousands and thousands of years. Once the Indigenous Peoples are dispossessed of their land, there is nobody left to defend that land and to protect it from extractive industries. So, when a protected area is set up in a Global South country, you will often find that the country will also grant concessions to European or North American timber companies, mining operations or fossil fuel corporations, which will immediately come in and start extraction on that land.

So, the problem with “nature-based” schemes is not even simply that they are bad at reducing carbon emissions. They’re also fueling more carbon pollution in the Global North and more extractivism and carbon pollution in the Global South, thus accelerating biodiversity loss. They are also deluding the public into thinking that we’re solving the environmental crisis.

We need to organize against this. This means helping Indigenous people on the ground who are fighting these kinds of “protected area” designations. It also means getting the word out, in core capitalist countries like the US, about what is happening under the veil of “nature-based solutions” and carbon offsets.

SL Your recent co-edited book Decolonize Conservation is not only unveiling the problems you’re raising here. It is also exploring alternatives. What does conservation look like when it’s being decolonized? What might it look like when, for example, the big green conservation groups have been abolished and there’s a completely different understanding of what it means to protect the world we share in common?

AD The point of the Decolonize Conservation collection is to focus people’s understanding on the way that the big conservation organizations are using “protected area” designations to dispossess and displace people, and to historically situate this colonial dynamic within conservation. With the establishment of National Parks in the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States is famous for introducing what we call the “fortress conservation” paradigm of wilderness conservation. In the process of establishing the Parks system, Indigenous peoples were forcibly displaced from their homelands, and areas of land were enclosed and protected as examples of untouched wilderness. But just beyond their borders, the spoliation continued unabated. This “fortress” model of conservation was an experiment in creating a kind of vacuum-sealed natural space that would supposedly remain completely pristine without any human intervention.

Environmental science has shown that this approach to conservation doesn’t work. When you attempt to seal off a relatively small space—even one as large as a National Park, biodiversity will gradually become impoverished. Without the external inputs you get in a healthily-functioning ecosystem, the ecosystem will begin to wind down. Fortress conservation is not viable in human terms, because it’s dependent on genocide. But it is also not viable in ecological terms.

With Decolonize Conservation, I worked with comrades at Survival International to circulate a series of talks and reports given by Indigenous activists and allies from around the world, which together make a case for how the new ideas of “nature-based solutions” are simply a fresh way of packaging the project of fortress conservation, which has been in place for the last 100 years or so, but with much higher stakes, because as we know, the planet is in immense crisis.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, among others, has been proposing that 30% of the planet’s surface should be designated as Protected Areas by 2030. Right now, about 17% of the planet is set aside. Some of the new Protected Areas will be coastal ocean areas that are not inhabited in a regular way by human beings, but even these areas are used by fisherfolk, whose livelihoods are going to be threatened as a consequence. More consequentially, a significant portion of the new Protected Areas will be on land occupied by Indigenous peoples. This is why we argue that 30×30 is massive neo-colonial land grab.

What would an alternative look like? What my collaborators at Survival International and I argue is that the alternative to fortress conservation is indigenous sovereignty—land back. Scientists have shown that even though Indigenous Peoples comprise only about 5% of the world’s population, they are stewards on their remaining lands of 80% of the world’s biodiversity. We need to recognize Indigenous sovereignty in places where it’s not recognized, which unfortunately is most of the planet, including the formally designated “Protected Areas” where Indigenous Peoples have traditionally lived.

Underlying all of this, we also need to shut down polluting industries in the Global North, because this whole system of conservation and nature-based solutions is totally unsustainable. You can’t set aside 30% of the planet or even 70% of the planet, if the other 70% or 30% is a site of rampant capitalist exploitation and pollution. Even on a commonsense level, it’s ridiculous to assume that you can kind of put up fences and protect some part of the planet against the rampant extractivism and destruction happening everywhere else. We need to have respect for Indigenous sovereignty. We need to fight for land back. And we also need to shut down the rampantly extractive capitalist system that dominates the planet right now.

SL In your newest book, you argue that “environmentalism from below” is “animated by struggles for collective control of the environment and social commons in the face of global environmental degradation and dispossession carried out by neocolonial extractivist capitalism.” I’m interested in probing this question of collective control, which in the context of Indigenous struggle in the United States, often rides on the question of Tribal sovereignty, which you’ve already raised. How should we think through the potential contradictions between, on the one hand, the urgent political necessity to respect the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations and, on the other hand, a normative environmentalist vision for how the world—from the land to the atmosphere—ought to be respected as a world in common. As we know, these things are not necessarily aligned. We could think of Bolivia’s investments in fossil fuels or the Navajo Nation’s commitment to coal, as Andrew Curley discusses in his new book Carbon Sovereignty. How should we think through, navigate, and politically engage these contradictions when they emerge?

AD This is a hugely important question. Among white environmentalists, there is often a kind of unvarnished, uncomplicated celebration of Native environmentalism, eliding the fissures and complexities within Indigenous cultures and homogenizing incredibly heterogeneous cultures all around the planet. Having acknowledged that there’s not only heterogeneity within Indigenous cultures, but also political fissures and conflicts between and among them, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that there are traditions of resistance to the dominant colonialist capitalist framework, traditions which help us reconsider how humans are in relationship with the natural world.

In his Two Treatises of Government, the English philosopher John Locke famously argues that God wants the world to be turned into a garden and flourish, which meant that the settler-colonial Europeans were doing God’s work when they occupied land, brought their agricultural techniques to bear on it, and dispossessed Indigenous people who were supposedly leaving it undeveloped. Locke’s argument was that by mixing their labor with the land, settlers had a right to the land. It was a case in which, as Robert Nichols has recently argued, theft became property.

The Indigenous cultures the settler-colonists displaced often had completely different attitudes towards the land—understandings of mutual reciprocity and responsibility between human cultures and the rest of the natural world, as well as collective forms of governance that enshrined these reciprocal relations to the land. These non-capitalist ways of relating to the land haven’t disappeared. In my work around the climate crisis and environmental crisis over the past fifteen years, I have been inspired by groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, which has been making arguments about the importance of Indigenous worldviews in resisting all of the forms of dispossession that we are talking about, including those pursued in the name of carbon offsets.

At the moment, in one of my classes I am teaching the testimonial of Rigoberta Menchu, a Mayan woman from Guatemala, who was part of the Indigenous resistance to the US-backed genocidal regime in Guatemala in the 1980s. Menchu talks about how the government sent troops into Mayan villages to violently take their land and crush their resistance. Many of these troops were Indigenous. The government found ways to recruit Indigenous people out of their communities, train them and turn them into foot-soldiers for its genocidal project against Indigenous people, which was also an effort to take Indigenous land away and occupy it for cotton or coffee plantations.

How do we relate to those kinds of bloody histories? For me, it’s important to listen to people on the ground to understand their struggles and to figure out how, as someone with a settler history, I can meaningfully build solidarity with people who are trying to defend their claims to the land and to resist extractivism in all its forms. While Indigenous People may have taken the lead in fighting fake fixes like carbon offsetting, all of us have a stake in this struggle for our collective future.

SL In your new book, you write that we can learn from the oppressed people of the world who are “most vulnerable to—but also least responsible for—the climate crisis,” but who “also happen to be people who have not been wholly divorced by the capitalist system from sustainable ways of living and worldviews that makes such balanced lives possible.” Where do we see this non-capitalist alternative in the world today? What does it look like to organize around it? Why is it important to see practices and worldviews that have not been entirely captured by capitalism? And how can we do so without resorting to a kind of “primitivist” imaginary—locating the future in the past.

AD What I’m trying to emphasize in my book is that capitalism operates on a set of moving, roving frontiers, and some of the key frontiers for global extraction and destruction are in former colonized countries in the global South, which happens to be where the climate and environmental crisis is manifesting itself, both earliest and most severely. However, this constantly expanding colonial capitalist frontier is also a site where practices of resistance to extraction and dispossession are constantly being developed.

I think you’re right to resist the kind of “salvage” orientation that has characterized anthropology and ethnography in relation to Indigenous Peoples. For most of the 20th century, anthropologists would go into communities in the non-Western world with the assumption that the lifeways of the people they encountered were on the brink of extinction, believing that they needed to record as much as possible about these people’s lives, customs, and cultural traits before they were mowed down by modernity and development. Resistance to this epistemological orientation towards Indigenous cultures is important because, as many Indigenous people point out, despite centuries and centuries of genocide, Indigenous people are still here, resisting and fighting back at the forefront of movements resisting colonialism and capitalism. People at the cutting edge of exploitation and extractivism are constantly finding ways to connect with the cultures that their ancestors created and passed down, recreating them in novel situations.

There is an immense diversity of forms of struggle to protect the global environmental commons, particularly in the Global South. We need to support those forms in all of their heterogeneous variety, because, frankly, we’re not currently winning the fight against the environmental crisis. And even if we could stop carbon emissions today, there is so much locked in already. A lot of what we take for granted as “civilized people” in the Western world and in much of the rest of the planet since the Neolithic Revolution, when a certain form of agriculture and cities and civilization was created, will transform within our own lifetime because of the carbon already in the atmosphere. We need to be thinking about forms of environmentalism from below that are going to be able to carry humanity through these coming massive convulsions and transformations.

SL You’ve joined us as a Red Natural History Fellow to think with us about “red natural history.” In my mind, “ren natural history” names the alternative to the colonial tradition of natural history, which you’ve raised several times in this conversation. What is red natural history, for you. What does it make possible, either as a concept or as a name for a cluster of practices ? What does it demand of our institutions of natural history? Where are you seeing it active in the world? And lastly, how can red natural history contribute to your vision for Ecological Reconstruction, which, as you point out in Environmentalism from Below, must be anti-capitalist, feminist and decolonial?

AD I’ve talked at length now about how important respecting Indigenous sovereignty is to maintaining biodiversity. On one level, I would say if we want to talk about what red natural history is, we need to look into traditions of Indigenous ecological stewardship in more detail. There is some good recent work in this vein: for example, Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling’s essay collection Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows, as well as more popular accounts of Indigenous knowledge and ecological practices like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Jessica Hernandez’s Fresh Banana Leaves. But overall I would say that there’s a lot more work to do to understand what we’re here calling Red Natural History.

This is not entirely surprising, because there are relatively few places on the planet where Indigenous people actually have sovereignty over their land. Exploring concepts like Buen Vivir, which comes out of Indigenous movements in the Pink Tide countries of Latin America, and seriously engaging the philosophies and practices that undergird these concepts, ought to be a key element of red natural history as it develops.

In addition, though, I think it’s important to see that there have always been contestations to the dominant tradition of natural history. In my Social Text essay on “red natural history,” I discuss the challenge to Darwinian thought that was articulated by Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist and a geographer. Darwin famously argued that evolution happens through a process of natural selection—in other words, competition, not just between species, but between individuals in a species—essentially taking the 19th century English capitalist world that he inhabited and exporting it to his analysis of evolutionary biology. By contrast, Kropotkin drew on his observations of natural ecosystems and species in the rugged conditions of Siberia to argue that, when one looks at the natural world within species boundaries, we don’t see competition as much as what Kropotkin famously calls “mutual aid.”

We need to recuperate dissenting radical traditions within natural history, which, like Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, can offer counter-histories to the imperial discourses of natural history. If we can crack open the history and the discourses, hopefully we can also open up the dominant institutions and mobilize them within our struggles. Institutions like natural history museums can be sites for dissenting traditions, whether these traditions come from scientific observers and curators within the museum or from environmental movements outside the museum.

I think that we need to have movements that cultivate dual power—movements that build power both through institutions and beyond them. Natural history’s institutions have serious structural constraints, and the project of working inside and outside at the same time is not an easy one. Working inside the institutions can drain power away from efforts to create autonomous alternative forms of environmentalism from below. But at the same time, we cannot simply walk away from important sites of public power and public culture, like natural history museums. We need to try to break them, transform them, and refashion them as movement resources.

Ashley Dawson is professor of postcolonial studies in the English department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Haymarket, 2024), Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common (Common Notions, 2023), People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the Public Power Observatory, he is a long-time climate justice activist.

Kai Bosworth is geographer at Virginia Commonwealth University and a 2023-25 Red Natural History Fellow. In this edited conversation with The NHM’s Steve Lyons, Bosworth discusses the key divisions forming under the banner of “environmentalism” today, challenging us to rethink and recompose the “we” of our collective struggles against extractive capitalism.

Steve Lyons (SL) What brought you to your current work as a researcher and activist working on fossil fuel infrastructure in the US?

Kai Bosworth (KB) I’m interested in understanding opposition to oil pipelines in the United States, in part because I am also opposed to oil pipelines in the United States. Since getting involved in the youth climate movement in the early 2000, I’ve spent almost 20 years trying to understand how to produce radical and transformative climate justice here in North America. My interest in oil pipelines also stems from having grown up in western South Dakota and attempting to understand the history of resource extraction in that region, as well as how that history was tied to colonialism and to the outright colonial theft and poisoning of much of the Black Hills where I grew up. I have been trying to think about how, over the last century, movements in this region have tried to create a radical response to these kinds of rapacious effects.

Out of this context, my academic and political work tries to help us see environmentalism as an umbrella for a variety of political positions, not all of them acting in concert or with the same goals or strategies in mind. In my academic work, I try to single out and think through one environmentalist tendency, which I think of as “populist environmentalism.” Most basically, populist environmentalism takes appealing to “the people” as a strategy for producing climate action. But in the process, it tends to shy away from radical or transformative demands that may not appeal to the broad imaginary of democratic politics in the United States. My work unpacks the difference between populist environmentalism and the radical and transformative leadership of Native Nations in opposing pipelines—a distinction that allows us to see why the former tends to reproduce forms of whiteness and fealty to liberalism, both factors that hamper its capacity to build alliances with more radical tendencies within the movement, which see environmental action and action against oil infrastructure as only one part of a broader movement for decolonization or a reclamation of sovereignty.

Right now, I’m continuing to think about movements against oil and gas infrastructure, including pipelines, but also active and abandoned oil wells, refineries, and the sorts of waste that are also associated with oil and gas production. This current work is examining how a variety of movements and organizations across North America are trying to highlight the impacts of oil and gas infrastructure on subsurface spaces.

Oil wells, pipelines, the injection of wastewater from hydrofracking and new forms of carbon dioxide sequestration are disturbing underground aquifers, caves, salt domes, and the geologic stability of the land underneath our feet. But in order to demonstrate this, activist groups have to use scientific data and their imaginations to try to make these subsurface spaces worthy of our attention, because most of the time we don’t really experience or think about what’s under the ground on which we stand. The sorts of groups I’m engaging with now are facing a classical political problem: how to represent and thus extend the meaning of what they cherish, and what they oppose. In this way, they’re trying to demonstrate why we have to understand and care for both the subsurface and the surface world.

Mapping Imperial Geography

SL I’ve been familiar with your work for a long time, but as I was rereading some of your work, I started to narrow in on two central problems that you’ve been dealing with. The first, which you engage directly in your contribution to our recent Red Natural History essay series, is the problem of liberating the discipline of geography from its imperialist baggage—of rethinking the discipline’s priors and priorities so it can effectively participate in anti-capitalist, anti-colonial movements. And the second, which I think is related, is the problem of building a revolutionary collective within the current conjuncture—where what you call “pipeline populism” has come to substitute for the durable forms of collectivity we need. In both senses, you’re helping us think through the challenges of finding alignment between constituencies and projects that are not necessarily on the same side, but could be.

I thought we’d start with the first problem. What is the imperialist tradition of geography? How did it evolve into the twentieth century? And what does this historic connection between geography and imperialist expansion, militarism, and imperialist rule teach us about how practices of research can be part of a transformative political project—in this case, the political project of imperialism?

KB Like a lot of Western modes of knowledge, geography has a long and intimate history with the imperial project. Paramount to the project of building empires was the process of knowing lands from a distance, understanding what peoples, resources and non-human animals populated these lands, and understanding how to move those people or resources in ways that maximize profits and produce value for the imperial core. As it emerged as a discipline, geography was crucial to this project, especially in North and South America, as well as later and in different ways in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia.

In the Americas, we can think about the history of the discipline through a figure like Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled all through the Americas to engage in early mapping projects, before bringing maps back to the imperial core to develop the methods of communicating spatial knowledge about the sorts of resources available to exploit in colonies, why and how wars could be fought, and so on. Obviously this form of knowledge collection is relatively easy to critique. And yet, as geography transformed into the twentieth century, its disciplinary knowledge continued to be used to advance new forms of imperial exploitation as well.

Alexander von Humboldt, diagram of a cross-section of the earth’s crust, 1841. From Heinrich Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1852).

Out of this history, a whole theory in geography emerged that was consistent with nineteenth century racial science, which sought to categorize people based on their climate, and from that, to derive a moral understanding of their character, their value, and their intellectual type, and then to arrange it in a hierarchy, where the Europeans were at the top, and then below them, a variety of other peoples who were allegedly shaped by their climate to be better workers than thinkers, or who were believed to have certain kinds of feeble personalities. Populations deemed less civilized were thus also deemed incompetent to govern themselves, which meant they needed to be shepherded by the imperial powers. The racial and racist hierarchies of what we call “environmental determinism” eventually came to shape these justifications in rather direct ways. They were extended in the German Nazi understanding of the world, and in the wake of the disaster of the Holocaust during World War Two, as well as the influence of decolonization movements around the world, these forms of outright racism in geography were challenged more heavily.

This internal reckoning opened up a space within the discipline for a more radical reevaluation of how we should think about space, place, and people. By putting capital and capital accumulation and imperialism onto the map, geographers started to take those tools that were originally developed in and for imperial power and to use them toward another end. The idea was that by mapping the concentrations of power, wealth, and capital, geographers might understand how these structures could be transformed, fought against, and so on. The tradition of “radical geography” that began in the 1960s and 70s reshaped our discipline in a lot of important ways, not only by challenging imperialism and capital accumulation, but also by opening up space to cross-pollinate feminist, queer, anti-racist and other forms of spatial knowledge.

At the same time, geography continues to be shaped by our history. This has sometimes created a kind of excessive self-criticism, where it can seem as if geography can only ever be an inheritor of its imperial history. Against this tendency, I think about geography as a discipline that has been split at its foundations. On the one hand, we have these imperial projects, but on the other hand, we have long histories of radical understandings of space and place, alternate concepts that might help us challenge the imperial mode of geography and its particular concepts of space and place. If we wanted to not only describe the imperial project but also intervene against it, we could draw on the knowledge of Red Power and many other past movements, for example, which developed their own modes of spatial knowledge in order to expose strategic weak points in the financial system, the arms industry, the resource extraction and transportation industries.

Thinking the “Unthought”

SL Thinking about the difference between this critical mapping of capitalist relations, and, quoting Glen Coulthard, the project of drawing on this place-based knowledge to “guide forms of resistance to power relations that threaten to erase or destroy our senses of place,” it seems important to delve into the uneasy relationship between the kinds of scholarly or analytical modes that we use in our research and the forms of resistance we seek to participate in or contribute to. What are the challenges of conjoining research and activism? What does it look like to be a good scholar and a good comrade at the same time? Is it about asking the right questions? Is it about research ethics, where you pour your research and time into, or who you give your findings to?

KB The demands of any given social movement trying to achieve change are oftentimes a little bit different than the demands of academic research, which for me involves zooming out and reflecting on the broader landscapes in which a given struggle is situated. When we were trying to stop the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the upper Midwest, we had a very practical problem to solve. We had to try to understand where the pipeline would actually get built. This knowledge was not available to us because it was deemed a security risk, because pipeline firms often invoke the threat that terrorists might blow up pipelines if their precise routes are made public. Within this context, we had the very pragmatic task of actually mapping out where the pipeline was going to be with a moderate degree of detail so that we could try to build a political coalition of people on whose land the pipeline crossed. Those could be potential choke points, where the oil infrastructure itself could be challenged.

#NoDAPL signs in front of Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock, November 25, 2016. Photo: Becker1999 (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic).

What makes a good political thinker is the ability to participate in that kind of pragmatic research while also situating its importance within a broader tapestry of changes that are taking place broadly within the capitalist political economy and the ecological system. Sometimes what that means is trying to participate in movements with an eye towards understanding what their unthought is: what is the thing that isn’t necessarily being considered? Is there a way that you can articulate what that unthought is, not necessarily to intervene in this particular moment, but in order to help prepare for the next movement or the next cycle in the cycle of struggles? That was particularly important for me in the movement against the pipelines. And it remains a problem for our movements to think through insofar as our opponents are constantly adapting to what we are doing as well. Our opponents are trying to anticipate and figure out what the unthought of our movements are and try to stave it off. We have to be constantly adapting and updating our knowledge because they are as well. Beyond our ability to have time to wash dishes on the blockade and other sort of pragmatic things, political thinkers can offer movements a capacity to traffic between the day-to-day pragmatic needs of the movement and its broader context, where we can begin to see and understand what it is taking for granted. Of course, none of this is to say that I don’t have an “unthought” of my own!

Dividing the Environmentalist “We”

SL Much of your research explores the unstable, contingent “alliances” that form in the midst of pipeline struggles. You wrote an important book on this phenomenon, where I think you offer an important lesson about the risks of banking on immediate material interests and/or what we’re against as a basis for political struggle. Can you expand on what you think the “unthought” of populist environmentalism is? Where did it come from, where do we see it today, and what does it produce in terms of a politics of “strategic alliance”? What did your work on the Dakota Access Pipeline struggle teach you about the limits of the populist frame and the demand for a more granular understanding of these alignments?

KB Populist environmentalism is a way of understanding one particular tendency within the broader ideological field of environmental politics. If you think about environmentalism as a field of competing ideologies, on one side of the spectrum, we have the traditional Big Green organizations that are composed of elite individuals and boards and funders and the like, and thus take on strategies and tactics in alignment with elite interests. For them, environmentalism is a project of protection—conservation, protection fences, borders and so on. On the other side, we have the varieties of green anarchism and eco-socialism, which seek to confront what they see as the root causes of environmental damage in our social, economic, and political systems. And of course, we can think of all kinds of tendencies in between. Populist environmentalism, in my mind, is one way of naming a reaction against both the elite Big Greens and the kind of technocratic environmentalism which sees the management of environmental damage as a job for politicians, business leaders and these elite Big Green organizations. In both of these visions of environmental politics, regular people are nowhere to be seen.

In the 2010s, governments and elite interests were proposing all sorts of supposedly “pragmatic” solutions to the urgent global problem of climate and ecological crisis, but at the same time, the United States continued producing more and more oil and gas, becoming the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Populist environmentalism was one critical answer to the ways that elites seemed to influence our political process—both the way that they had consolidated power through the oil and gas industry as well as within the Big Green organizations.

Populist environmentalism’s story about the world is seductive to me in a lot of ways. And in places like South Dakota, where there isn’t a lot of transformative political radicalism, populism has been an important way of taking the grievances of regular people and elevating them. I don’t begrudge this form of politics or its aspirations by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, at the same time, what my research showed was that forms of populism in the movement against the pipelines also became hamstrung by its simplistic narrative about who was responsible for the crisis and how it should have been addressed. If you understand the problem of oil and gas infrastructure as the result of a small number of oil and gas firms that have only recently captured or corrupted the American political system, then some sort of restoration of democracy is imaginable. And if you understand “We the people” as the authors of our political existence, you can leave out or obscure some of the real problems that American democracy has enacted at the expense of Indigenous Nations, which makes it difficult to think about what repair may be necessary.

Populist environmentalism at the 2017 Climate March in Washington, DC. Photo: Mark Dixon (CC BY 2.0 DEED Attribution 2.0 Generic).

Rather than posit the people as an abstract entity that will save us if we only get rid of the corrupt politicians, I think it is necessary to compose the kinds of alignments and organizations that can produce an enduring political struggle capable of revising our relationship to politics and the environment. And this alternative requires a lot more work and takes a lot more time than the populist environmentalists hoped would be true. But it can also produce much stronger and less parochial relationships among Indigenous activists, the inchoate parts of the left, and in places as far flung as rural South Dakota, farmers and ranchers who are not just facing incursions on their private property, but are now subject to the whims of a global commodities market. These conditions produce grievances as well as feelings of despair, hopelessness, anger and indignation. But we have to tell different stories about our social relationships with others in order to begin to organize and build durable and lasting institutions that are going to be capable of growing at the same time as they confront a radically transformed world.

SL You’ve described the book as a “something of a tragic analysis,” sharing with Mike Davis an interest in understanding the “lack of mass socialist participation in a coherent, avowedly anti-colonial movement in the US.” What do you think has hampered that socialist participation within the Indigenous land and water struggles of the past decade? And where do you see, if not “hope,” possible movement in the right direction?

KB There are a lot of different ways that we could think about the missed connections between Indigenous radical movements and movements of working class leftists and organizations across North America and across the world. Perhaps one of the things that has contributed to that missed connection is an inability on the part of non-Indigenous workers or settlers to understand the ways in which their social position was being used by the state and capital as a wedge against Indigenous nations. When you are part of a class that is itself being exploited, it can be difficult to understand that your exploitation is rendering others even more dispossessed or more exploited at the same time. But alignments can and could grow around an injunction against exploitation and dispossession at the same time—against the ravaging of ecologies, environments and landscapes in the process of capital accumulation, a process that has also produced ruin for proletarian people around the world. We need to be constantly thinking about how we can listen and learn from the stories and histories of others who might be substantially different than us.

Capitalism is itself productive of competition, and that means that it has fragments and cracks within it, both at the level of competitive firms and the way that that these firms struggle over the political sphere, over nation state governments, between governments around the world, in global institutions, whether the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, World Health Organization, global Green groups and the like. In order to respond to ongoing crises and instability, they need to act in concert. And so do we.

Part of what this entails is narrating the crises that we face and understanding them as part of not just their individual landscapes, but part of this world system that is predicated on exploitation and dispossession. I found this recent statement that the Colombian president Gustavo Petro made about the ongoing war against Gaza conducted by the State of Israel and its allies to be particularly interesting in this regard. Petro is trying to think about how this immense, concerted violence against a confined people is what the climate crisis is becoming for the world at large. He writes that “the political right in the West sees the solution to the climate crisis as a ‘final solution’,” a genocidal action of the “rich and Aryan peoples of the West and our Latin American oligarchies who do not see another world where we live, other than that of the malls of Florida or Madrid.” He continues:

“We are all going to barbarism if we do not change power. The life of humanity, and especially of the people of the South, depends on the ways in which humanity chooses a path to overcome the climate crisis produced by the wealth of the North. Gaza is just the first experiment in considering all of us disposable.”

In part, this is a negative diagnosis of what we are up against. But it is also an attempt to produce a common sense of what we are all facing. When we understand our disposability for capital accumulation, for the preservation of this system of wealth and extraction, we can see struggles that might otherwise appear as drastically different to be part of a shared movement for a world that would actually make us indisposable.

Drawing the Red Line

SL Petro’s statement is exposing this dynamic that has, throughout the history of capitalism, played out at different levels and scales, and which is in a sense expanding to the world scale under climate change. We’re at a good place in this conversation to shift into the question of “red natural history,” which as The Natural History Museum proposes, is about the stories, narratives and ways of doing research that allow us to see the world that capitalism needs to consume, a world that is larger and more powerful than the capitalist world—but which is invisible from a capitalist point of view.

To return to where we started, if we see natural history as a constellation of practices and modes of inquiry that are never far from the actual praxis of transforming lifeways and landscapes, we can immediately start to see how natural history could either aid and abet capitalism or work towards its abolition. When we started the “Red Natural History” project, our hypothesis was that while it’s easy to see how the imperialist mode of natural history has a material force in the world, it’s much harder to see how practices of natural history that resist imperialism do too. For us, “red natural history” offered a name for this countervailing tradition of natural history—an internally diverse tradition, composed of practices that stand in the way of capitalism’s unceasing need to enclose, extract, exploit, and dispose.

You’ve been involved with The Natural History Museum for many years and have been thinking with us about red natural history for a while now. How do you understand this term? If, following Raymond Williams, we define tradition as “the selection and reselection of ancestors,” how might you describe the ancestral line of red natural history? What ought red natural history fight for? And where might we see its outlines in the world today?

KB At first blush, “red natural history” marks a division. On one side, you have traditional natural history–let’s call it “gray” natural history, a tradition of natural history made up of processes and institutions that have driven all of our climate and ecological crises, as well as the kinds of social violence and misery faced by working people around the world. On the other side, you have movements of Indigenous Nations, workers, socialists, and communists, who have spent centuries fighting to repair and transform the world so that present and future generations of people and non-human species can flourish. We can see this divide within different social groups, classes, and institutions, and certainly within disciplines like geography, geology, environmental science and natural history.

Red natural history helps us challenge two seemingly distinct reactions to the climate crisis that are particularly unhelpful. First, red natural history pushes against the technological or market optimists, who would suggest that there is no divide, that we’re all in it together, that politics is too disruptive, and that we should simply be neutral. I think that this position is clearly bankrupt. We know that capitalist firms, the oil and gas industry chief among them, are doing anything and everything in their power to prevent any sort of social and environmental action. We’re not all in this together. We’re on different sides. At the same time, red natural history also pushes against the melancholic or nihilistic position, which imagines that the damage is already done. Everything turned bad hundreds of years ago, with the beginning of capitalism or colonization or Western science, or even with the invention of agriculture, and thus there’s nothing that we can do, salvage or fight for.

In contrast to these positions, which are two sides of the same coin, red natural history invigorates us by showing the degree of organization and commitment that our ancestors have had in fighting against slavery, exploitation and colonization. Some of these ancestors have worked within academic disciplines and within universities, but others have worked beyond and against these institutions. And these ancestors didn’t give up when things were bad or when the odds were stacked against them. If they didn’t give up, why would we? The point is to begin to resuscitate the courage, will, organizational structures, and maybe even the humor of those who struggled before us, as well as the forms of knowledge that have been accumulated in and passed down to us from these long-term struggles.

Delegates from Indigenous Nations march in downtown Pittsburgh, PA, on the occasion of the Shale Insight Conference in October 2019. Photo: Mark Dixon.

We can learn, for example, from the anti-colonial struggles of the mid-20th century, both their successes in producing forms of sovereignty and independence as well as their challenges in facing new forms of neocolonialism and exploitation. In learning from their struggles, we can understand that there’s no “flip of the switch” that will instantly solve all our problems. And indeed, we shouldn’t expect that our struggles will be won overnight. We inherit the struggles of our ancestors and we will be passing down these struggles to people after us, who will learn from our mistakes. By giving us an inventory of the histories and ongoing struggles for human and non-human flourishing, red natural history can provide a lens for us to see the possibility for flourishing elsewhere and in each other, so that we can continue to grow and popularize the desire and necessity for a radical transformation of our politics and economy.

Kai Bosworth is a geographer and assistant professor of international studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century. He is a 2023-25 Red Natural History Fellow.