How an Apocalypse Can Save the World:
Indigenous knowledges are transforming the future
“By the time the apocalypse began
The world had already ended.” ~Franny Choi.
The fear of apocalypse due to climate change needs context, which Indigenous education tools can address. Is the world really ending? Franny Choi in the poem “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On,” contextualizes this fear. Many people’s worlds end every day: when a loved one dies, or when a system of power crushes dissent. When we feel anxious about climate change becoming irreversible, what world are we afraid is ending?
If we focus less on preserving Western dominance and consumption, and perhaps more on revitalizing relationality, the conversation may take a dramatic shift. Storytelling is consistently a key part of many Indigenous peoples’ knowledge building. Stó:lō and Xaxli’p First Nations scholar Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem elucidates how, “Indigenous knowledges and stories often have a holistic nature where they contribute to human spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual development.” Franny Choi’s mode of discussion — a poem — beautifully exemplifies how stories encourage human development by presenting a shift in the conversation about apocalypse.
Who am I to say?
Born and raised on Dakota land in Minnesota, I am a descendant of Germanic settlers, continually relearning the ways my family and I have built and perpetuated colonial systems of harm. As such, my education has danced around the Western typical, leading to a graduate research assistantship with the Mellon Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Imitative. I am deeply grateful for the Welcome Water Protector Center, Migizi Will Fly, Red Lake Treaty Camp, Shell River Alliance, and Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute communities for inviting me and many others into their space as allies and fellow Water Protectors during Line 3 pipeline resistance and afterward. I owe my learning to these Indigenous communities, where my time tends to pass around fires, listening to stories. I am still in a place of listening, and I share this piece as a learner reflecting on these lessons. Anishinaabe environmentalist Winona La Duke reminds settler allies: “our collective future is tied upon this return to consciousness.”
“By the time the apocalypse began”: Climate anxiety unraveled
Jonathan Franzen of The New Yorker describes the climate apocalypse as “increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray.”
That sounds terrifying.
Climate anxiety is considered a normal response to the imminent danger of climate change. Young people are experiencing climate anxiety in numbers that reflect the severity of the situation. According to The Lancet, 59% of youth ages 16–25 are very or extremely worried about climate change, a worry which negatively impacted the daily lives of many respondents. Climate anxiety stems from the inability to have any control over the future due to stubborn systems of power.
Apocalypse “prepping” has become a trend amid the steady increase in climate disasters. Prepping can be anything from stocking up on food to learning to garden to memorizing escape routes. Prepping tends to focus on individualized plans of action, regaining a small sense of control.
What if we prepped in a different way?
Part of the reason climate anxiety is so intense is what people are afraid of losing. Climate apocalypse entails a complete shift in the dominant culture and industry of a globalized, Westernized, capitalist world. Different cultures consider knowledge and how we develop knowledge in different ways. In Western culture, our knowledge is derived from “proof” through scientific procedures, and relies on the idea that there is only one truth. The way we know things is called “epistemology”. Western epistemology has justified the genocide, land left, and enslavement towards capitalistic gain of Black, Indigenous and people of color domestically and globally, resulting in mass devastation, a.k.a. the climate crisis. To mitigate climate anxiety, and to prepare for a world wholly different than what many of us have known all our lives, is to prepare for epistemological apocalypse.
“The world had already ended”: Indigenous knowledges prevail
Change has begun. Rising tides and raging wildfires scream that the world is at a breaking point. There also appears to be general consensus that it is humans’ fault. However, it’s not all humans who are at fault, or who are most at risk of disaster.
Indigenous peoples across the world are simultaneously those most impacted by climate change and those least responsible. As Europeans have sought to colonize globally and spread conceptualizations of capitalism and extractivism, environmental degradation has proliferated. “Human supremacy” and Eurocentricity treats everything in the world as expendable resources for [White] human profit. The scramble to buy electric cars is extremely telling of the Western fight to mitigate climate anxiety. While appearing to reduce carbon emissions, electric cars are unaffordable, cause immense energy to build, and create recycling issues that ensure the climate burden remains on the Global South and Inidgenous communities. It is Western epistemology that has created this crisis; it is not Western epistemology that will solve it.
Cultural, linguistic, and biodiversity all peak across the lands Indigenous peoples steward. “[R]ather than subscribe to crisis narratives,” some apocalypse preppers seek to “expand our understanding of Indigenous knowledges.” Though infinitely diverse, Indigenous knowledges create “a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related,” and provide the directions for mitigating climate change. However, directions are useless without a language for understanding them. Indigenous ways of knowing, or epistemologies, provide a framework for cultivating improved relationships with the land and reinforcing cultures of reciprocity rather than domination.
Recognizing that we are related to everyone around us is the change needed to prevent disaster. Western epistemological apocalypse will lead to the apocalypse of fossil fuel industry, and perhaps the apocalypse of anxiety when we understand that we do have control over how we know the future.
A Beginning of the Epistemological Apocalypse
Inside the Academy
The humanities lab is a course model that has emerged in recent years in several prominent institutions that intends to bring the hands-on learning typically found in science labs into the humanities. Through humanities tools such as critical thinking and creative problem solving, students from a more diverse pool of disciplines can collaborate to develop creative solutions to problems such as climate change.
The Indigenous-led Mellon Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative has engaged the humanities lab as a critical entry point for Indigenous epistemologies into higher education. Students work in interdisciplinary lab groups to use humanities tools such as text data mining, literary zines, and podcasting, to address pressing issues for Indigenous communities. Toward environmental stewardship, students ground their learning in place and relationship by reading and listening to stories of the Indigenous peoples on whose land they are learning, as well as sharing their own stories. While these labs are still in development, they represent a framework from which scholars may approach shifting epistemologies in academia for a future beyond apocalypse.
Learning Beyond Academia
While higher education is one tool, there are many other pathways to transformation. The Welcome Water Protector Center (WWPC) in Northern Minnesota, originally a Line 3 resistance camp, has begun hosting Culture Camps over the past year.
While Line 3 tragically went into operation in October 2021, many Water Protectors have framed this movement within a historical context of Indigenous resistance, lending to hope. Enbridge built their pipeline, yet Water Protectors built resilient communities, and many of the old camps remain active sites of community organizing. The WWPC now uses their space to create opportunities for learning how to protect the water and the land through traditional Anishinaabe ways of living well.
By engaging with these ways of being and knowing that have been proven over thousands of years of practice to allow people to live in right relationship to the land, preppers can deconstruct the apocalypse narrative. Not by appropriating the practices, but by sharing in the ethics, ways of being, and reciprocal relational generosity of Anishinaabe harvesting and food storing, we can survive in community — apocalypse or not. If we start with these understandings, what is there to be afraid of?
What next?
There are many ways to center Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing in everyday life. Listening to stories, deepening relationships between one another, to place, and to other-than-human relatives, and consistently returning to Indigenous leadership will help ensure a shift from climate anxiety to community preparedness. Q’um Q’um Xiiem emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in learning, which “becomes a circular action of receiving knowledge through respectful, responsible, and reverential approaches and ‘giving back’ to the people or community with whom one has worked so that Indigenous knowledges are sustained in ways that are beneficial to the Indigenous people and their communities”. With reciprocity in relationality, the world that is ending is no longer one we are afraid to lose. Epistemological apocalypse may save the world, so that “By the time the [climate] apocalypse began, the [Western extractive] world had already ended.”
This is all that I know today. Please check out Native Land Digital mapping of Indigenous territories, and the Shut Down Line 5 current pipeline resistance project to continue learning and supporting Indigenous leaders in climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty however you can.
