Native Ecologies: A Deep History of Climate Change
Native Ecologies: A Deep History of Climate Change
Funder: British Academy, Global Professorship Programme
People: Professor Gregory Smithers
Native Ecologies explores how threats to our well-being posed by climate change can be addressed by drawing upon Indigenous knowledges rooted in the deep past. The project compares two ecologically important regions transformed by colonialism: the homelands of the Cherokee in the Appalachians of the United States, and those of the Ngarigo and Walgal peoples of the Great Dividing Range in Australia.
Using settler and Indigenous sources, it maps a ‘genealogy’ of Indigenous ecologies in order to construct the first deep history of a set of Indigenous responses to fluctuations in climate. Follow Native Ecologies research as it unfolds on Instagram and learn more about Professor Smithers’ research from his website.
A sample of work related to Native Ecologies includes:
“Native Ecologies: Environmental Lessons from Indigenous Histories,” The History Teacher 52, no. 2 (February 2019): 265-90
“Renewing Sacred Fires: The Cherokee People and the Shifting Frontiers of Settler Colonialism,” Journal of the West 56, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 36-47
“Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America,” Environmental History 20, no. 1 (January 2015): 83-111
Case Study featured by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (2022)
Research Programmes
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Diplomacy and Treaties
International collaboration revealing globally significant cultures of diplomacy between the Crown, the Haudenosaunee and their neighbours in North America.
Digital Storytelling
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Resource Use and Environmental Futures
Water Cultures in Conflict at Pebble Mine, Bristol Bay, Alaska
Political Ecologies
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Completed Projects
Timely interventions that examine the power relations between Indigenous actors and the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.