Disrupting the Climate Emergency through Indigiqueer Futurities

Abstract

The climate emergency poses particular challenges for gender and sexually diverse members of Indigenous communities, rooted both in the historical legacies of colonization and its ongoing forms. To date, there is a dearth of research documenting the climate change experiences of Indigiqueer people. Existing research demonstrates clear pathways between access to the social and Indigenous determinants of health and vulnerability to climatic shifts and extreme weather events of Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities independently of each other. People at the intersection of these identities – those who are both Indigenous and have gender or sexual diverse identities – will inevitably encounter heightened challenges relative to each population. Furthermore, lived experience of climate impacts and saturation in “climate-vulnerability” discourse has prompted Indigenous and LGBTQ+ advocacy and action regarding the particular capabilities they can contribute to climate change science and strategy. However, within both Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities, the unique challenges and potential contributions that Indigiqueer peoples might make to climate adaptation and mitigation strategies – and more broadly to Indigenous futurities and planetary well-being – are vastly under-researched and overlooked. Yet many Indigiqueer peoples are actually on the frontlines of climate justice movements, embodying unique cultural-ecological resurgent agencies that arise from intersecting identities and contributing to the epistemic diversity (multiple ways of knowing) of queer climate justice. Accordingly, this commentary by two Indigiqueer scholar-practitioners and one queer racialized scholar argues that Indigiqueer peoples have unique agencies with which to respond to the climate emergency. Just as significantly, we argue that these agencies, which are sometimes overlooked within Indigenous environmental justice frameworks, have broader relevance for the cultural-ecological restoration work which is so urgently needed for planetary health and wellbeing today.