Stoking the Imagination: Learning Climate Care from Indigenous Women

By Aarushi Aggarwal

 In his book The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh argues that the climate crisis is a crisis of culture and imagination. He roots this argument in the explanation that the development of the carbon economy during the Industrial Revolution hinged on the very absence of its development in British colonies, where raw materials to sustain this revolution were procured. Therefore, the carbon economy was nurtured by the strategic and deliberate exclusion of those people from their share of the benefits of carbon-based economic growth. In his 2021 book A Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh presents one example of how colonisers were able to exploit natural resources in lands where people had lived for millennia. In 1621, under false pretexts, officials of the Dutch East Indies Company perpetrated massacres and forced relocation of the Bandanese people from Selamon, a small village located on one of the Banda islands in the eastern Indian Ocean, in present day Indonesia. On these islands, the Dutch had found the commercially viable nutmeg which they couldn’t trade freely with local presence and control over the island.

 This harrowing account provides a lens into the origins of western capitalism, fueled by colonial exploitation. The age of European exploration (and exploitation) also enabled the emergence of a new intellectual stream that placed primacy on human reason, its ability to explain the universe, and improve human conditions. The era of Enlightenment empowered society to replace religion with ‘scientific thinking’ as the central social modality. Of course, much of this thought was predicated on the increasingly unshaken belief that human innovation could triumph over nature, that nature could be tamed, controlled. Recent events—expansion of coal, invention of the railways, and the explosion of wealth in Europe—could perhaps be held up as evidence of this human dominance. The false perception of a chasm between humans and nature that Enlightenment encouraged persists even today such that the paradigm of human-nature relationship is one of eternal conflict: humans in, nature out.

 In their colonies, European military dominance allowed them to impose an intellectual superiority that drew strength from principles espoused in Enlightenment thought. Within this intellectual framework there existed no room for the conceptualisation of human-nature relationship that many societies—including the Bandanese people—cultivated and preserved. Ghosh, for instance, talks about how the Bandanese people considered the volcano—in whose shadow their nutmeg thrived—as makers of history and teller of stories. The Javanese people, too, share a devout relationship with volcanoes on their island. Indeed, Ghosh elaborates, the oldest living human story is linked to an Australian volcano Budj Bim which was considered a founding ancestor by the Gunditjmara, the Indigenous people of the region. Such associations are not limited to this region. For centuries, the Arhuaco tribe of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada have kept ‘other’ people away from the mountains. They call the mountains ‘Mother’ and believe “when the world was created, they emerged from this very spot."

 Such anthropomorphic associations with nature were actively shunned by emergent intellectual framing. However, it was these attributions that fostered among indigenous communities a kinship with nature. In promoting ‘rational science’ and creating neat disciplinary boundaries to explain the world, the Enlightenment facilitated the loss of knowledge systems that transcended these boundaries, and preserved a unique understanding of nature. It forced humanity into a transactional relationship with the ecology around us, one that is incapable of envisioning a non-exploitative relationship with nature—hence Ghosh’s ‘crisis of imagination.’ The loss of these knowledge systems is most acutely experienced by indigenous women. As Lola Cabnal, the Director of Guatemala based Environmental Advocacy for Ak’Tenamit, remarked at COP27 in Sharm el Sheik, “Indigenous women possess ancestral knowledge and practices that for centuries have been adopted from generations of grandmothers and mothers.” She added, “[they] play a very important role in climate change action.”

 This is perhaps the greatest irony of the fight against climate change. In indiscriminately destroying knowledge structures that preserved nature and how to cohabit with it, hegemonic carbon-dependent growth has brought the globe to an unknown precipice, the way back from which is through channeling those very shunned and booted knowledge systems.

 The indispensable need for indigenous women’s leadership cannot be emphasised enough. These women are the vessels of practices and knowledge systems that have best served human-nature coexistence for millennia. The Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region, for instance, share a special relationship with water. Their culture emphasises both the responsibility of the water to the People and the People’s responsibility to water. The Anishinaabe women, however, have special and specific duties in this relationship. They bear the “responsibilities to attend to the quality of water, responsibilities to develop and pass on knowledge of water and its stewardship to younger generations. They also have responsibilities to take action to protect water when its quality is compromised.”

 Thanks to such knowledge preservation, Indigenous peoples, though only 6.2 per cent of the global population, protect 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. This fact is made all the more striking as numbers are revealed: though they steward an estimated third of the world’s most important ecosystems for climate mitigation and biodiversity protection, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities receive only 17 per cent of the climate funds intended for them. Unsurprisingly, Indigenous women get left behind, receiving only 5 per cent of intended funding.

 At the same time, Indigenous women—not unlike women in general—disproportionately experience the impacts of climate change. Indigenous self-imagination—from livelihoods to culture—is deeply intertwined with natural resources. Responsible for gathering variety of subsistence items, including food, firewood, fodder, and herbs, Indigenous women are at the forefront of witnessing the changes in their ecological surrounding. For instance, a matriarch from Indonesia’s Orang Rimba tribe adversely impacted by the unabated expansion of palm oil plantations remarked that earlier “women could find many types of food. Some wove mats from leaves and baskets. We made lamps from gum resin. Now we cannot find materials to make these.” The Orang women are being forced to migrate from forests they have called home for generations in search of food and livelihood. This poverty and forced migration brings its own gender-based challenges, with instances of violence found aplenty. As climate change fundamentally alters the landscape in which Indigenous women root their self-imagination and from which they derive their identities, their position and responsibilities in society are also undergoing change, the nature of which remains unclear. 

 Numerous Indigenous women-led groups have been at the forefront of raising awareness and bringing attention to the unique climate change related challenges experienced by their communities. Alongside Lola Cabnal, women leaders like Veronica Inmunda, a Kichwa Kichwa woman from the Ecuadoran Amazon; Rukka Sombolinggi, a Torajan woman from Sulawesi highlands; Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a Mbororo Indigenous pastoralist woman from Chad; and Grace Balawag, a Kankaney-Igorot Indigenous woman from the Philippines, to name a few are spearheading community-based organisations involving women and youth. While their share of international climate stage is growing, a case can be made for far greater representation for them and other Indigenous women. For one, these women hold the knowledge that the world desperately needs to know, adapt, and scale to meet climate change adaptation needs. Enabling positions of prominence—and leadership—for these women will provide much needed avenues for the transference of this knowledge. Second, Indigenous women in positions of decision making are leaders not only of their respective communities, but global leaders who are best poised to take on climate challenges of today and tomorrow. The adversities within which they have led their efforts equips them to lead global climate efforts. Besides, as custodians of most of Earth’s biodiversity, they deserve a place of prominence no less than the small percentage of men who hold most of the world’s money.

Aarushi Aggarwal is a first year MALD candidate at The Fletcher School.