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Opinion

The resilience doctrine: Indigenous nations understand disaster resilience


Bangladeshpost
Published : 03 Feb 2021 09:34 PM | Updated : 04 Feb 2021 12:29 AM

Zoltán Grossman

From the perspectives of Indigenous nations, the crises of 2020 have not been something entirely new, or even a significant historical departure from “normal.” Having previously experienced the ravages of violent colonialism, pandemics, environmental catastrophe, and forced assimilation, the current era has long been a dystopia for Native peoples. The Dakota scholar Kim TallBear described 2020 not as an unprecedented apocalypse, or an exception to normalized “progress” in the settler colonial empire, but rather as “a sharpening of the already present.”

Ann Marie Chischilly, the Diné executive director of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, pointed to previous Indigenous experience with environmental disruptions and pandemics when she said “Resilience is in our DNA.” This meeting of history and present-day realities enables Indigenous peoples to have deeper perspectives on existential crises, and to envision and create innovative paths out of these crises.

Pacific Northwest Native nations face the climate crisis

In the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous nations are among the most proactive and prepared communities in emergency planning and climate change adaptation, providing models for non-Native communities to follow. The region is facing drastic changes in seasonal weather patterns. No single weather event can be linked to climate change, as any climate scientist will point out, but the process is intensifying extremes. In the winter months, strong windstorms have knocked out power for days, floods have cut the interstate and rail connections between major cities, and rare blizzards and ice storms have become more intense and commonplace.

In the spring months, heavy rains have caused landslides, such as the 2014 Oso mudslide disaster. In the summer, the drier region east of the Cascade Range has seen some of the largest wildfires in recorded history, choking the region with smoke, and fires are even ravaging parts of the coastal rainforest. The massive West Coast wildfires of 2020 could be tied directly to warmer temperatures and prolonged dry conditions. Autumn rains are sometimes not enough to compensate for summer droughts, adversely affecting the life cycle of salmon, the region’s keystone species.

The Pacific Northwest coast is particularly vulnerable to rising seas. Tribal and local governments need to build and retain wave barriers, prevent shoreline erosion, and build new homes and infrastructure above the floodplains. Several Washington tribes have gained federal support to relocate their coastal housing and service centers out of coastal lowlands to higher ground. Washington coastal tribes are also conducting evacuation drills that have been more efficient than in relatively unprepared non-Native communities.

Part of the reason is the threat of a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami that would devastate coastal communities, and another part is climate change-linked sea-level rise that makes the effects of tsunamis, storm surges, or coastal flooding much worse. Displacement and relocation of coastal Native communities impacted by climate change has already occurred in Alaska and Louisiana. Climate-related resettlement is also underway in countries such as varied as China, Vietnam, Mozambique, and Papua New Guinea.

The tiny Quileute Reservation is moving tribal structures and a school in La Push to higher ground, out of the path of tsunamis, like the ones that struck the West Coast in 1964 and 2011. Congress passed a 2012 bill to allow the transfer of land from the Olympic National Park to Quileute, enabling the tribe to begin to build new housing and a school on higher ground. The Hoh tribe has also acquired higher land from neighboring governments to move housing and government offices, through a 2010 congressional bill. The Quinault village of Taholah has seen its seawall breached during major storms, flooding its lower village, so is in the process of planning to construct an entirely new upper village. (Our Catastrophe class visited both Quinault and Quileute.) The Makah and Lower Elwha Klallam tribes are similarly planning to shift new housing to higher ground.

Disaster resilience can cut across cultural divides, with the crisis forcing Native and non-Native neighbors to acknowledge their mutual humanity and dependency.

Māori disaster resilience and hospitality traditions in Aotearoa New Zealand

The Māori, or the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, prepare for and respond to disasters through cultural structures of manākitanga, or the tradition of hospitality. The pivot is the marae community, through which tangata whenua [people of the local land] host and care for others, including neighboring Māori, Pākehā (European settlers), Tauiwi (recent immigrants), and foreign visitors.

Marae communities care for neighbors and visitors in wharenui (sacred meeting houses) and wharekai (dining halls), hosting large events such as funerals, and have proven to be a particularly useful system in times of disaster. As Ahipara lawyer Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn told me, “Whenever there’s an emergency, our first thought is, ‘Let’s all go to the marae!’” New Zealand’s National Disaster Resilience Strategy draft document includes a section on manākitanga and other Māori cultural values, and commits to the Crown obligations to Māori embedded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi).

After the 2011 Christchurch earthquake on the South Island, which killed 185 people, the homeless community accessed abandoned downtown luxury apartments and, in their words, began “living like kings.” Māori iwi (tribes) and hapū (subtribes) took a leading role in the response and recovery. The quake most deeply affected the Eastern Suburbs, with a large Māori population.

The Ngāi Tahu iwi, led by Sir Mark Solomon, led the relief efforts, based on the theme “Aroha nui ki te tangata” (love to all people), regardless of ethnicity. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, Ngāi Tahu representatives went door-to-door for eight days, asking about power, water, and food. 

Chairman Solomon told me in an interview, “Christchurch has always been known as the redneck center of the country. But there is a dramatic attitude change since that earthquake…. The farmers arrived in droves … And they spent the first fortnight digging [liquefaction] mud… it’s just opened so many doors, knocked down so many barriers.” At the same time, the Red Cross and Civil Defence came under his withering criticism for their slower, more bureaucratic responses, for example sending too many clothes, bedding, and perishable food, or not documenting which families were evacuating.

Stories of Indigenous resilience flip the common depiction of Indigenous communities as the first and most deeply affected victims of disasters. Drawing from traumatic histories, Indigenous nations are also developing innovative models of preparing for and responding to emergencies. Leading Pākehā voices have acknowledged that Māori grieving rituals, such as those after the eruption of Whakaari (White Island) volcano in 2019, are “leading us through loss.” These stories also flip the “Native-peoples-as-dysfunctional” script, when clearly Māori responding to disasters have been far more functional than government or NGO agencies, and even local white Pākehā see their own safety and security are better protected by Indigenous authority.

Mike Smith, spokesperson of the Iwi Chairs Forum’s Climate Change Leaders Group, contrasted Indigenous models of disaster cooperation to the western “assumption that it’s every man for himself. So you stock up on food, build a bunker, arm yourself …Then …wait for the zombie apocalypse and smoke anybody who crosses your perimeter. That…speaks to the history of the pioneers… man against nature [and] Indigenous people… Everything’s a threat, you’re on your own.” But as Smith observed, most iwi have few resources: “We’re not silver bullets to those problems…. we shouldn’t overestimate our people’s capacity…[W]here indigenous people have an added advantage is that we do have a fully-woven social fabric… Get the weavers out to weave that web again.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, the Iwi Chairs Forum has played a leading role in preparing marae and urban Māori communities. Much like Pacific Northwest tribes, some iwi and hapū closed off their marae and territories to protect elders’ health. The Ministry of Health recalled the impacts of the 1918 and 2009 flu pandemics on Māori: “It is evident from previous pandemic responses that the business-as-usual model previously used preferentially benefited non-Māori and failed to protect whānau, hapū, iwi and Māori communities from the worst outcomes. It is critical that the specific needs of Māori, particularly equity and active protection, are integral to the health and disability response to COVID-19…. The principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi…provide the framework for how we will meet our obligations. These principles are applicable to the wider health and disability system, including the response to COVID-19.”


Zoltán Grossman is a Member of the Faculty in Geography and Native American and Indigenous Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Source: CountetPunch