For example, General Motors and Reynolds Metals dumped unacceptably high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxin, and mercury in the territories of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (New York) and the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne (Ontario) (Hoover, 2017; Tarbell & Arquette, 2000). In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous studies showed Mohawk persons suffered health problems, threats to their cultural practices, and decline of their fishing economy (Hoover, 2017). Moreover, U.S. and Canadian laws and policies restricted the capacity of the Mohawks to prevent their communities from suffering harms and living with unacceptable risks. Alice Tarbell and Mary Arquette (2000), who have played critical roles in this issue, have written that the laws and policies involved “relax[ed] treatment standards and promot[ed] substandard, temporary cleanups at Superfund sites.” The governments' responses were much too slow to address “environmental problems [at Akwesasne] and [lacked] the will and support to enforce their own decisions.” In failing to “[respect] the decisions of governments like those of Akwesasne,” the U.S. and Canadian governments have been “biased toward industry and the local economy at the expense of Native peoples” (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000, p. 99).
Indigenous peoples are among the leading groups that are working to address environmental injustice. At Akwesasne, Mohawk peoples founded projects, such as the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, the Environmental Division of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, and the Mother’s Milk Project, that revived their own traditions in order to exercise self-determination in how they cleaned up the environment and protected their community members’ safety. The Mother’s Milk project, for example, led by Katsi Cook, involved creating strategies for women affected by pollution to study their own exposure and implement their own solutions (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000). The Akwesasne Task Force, among other key roles, offers alternatives that protect health, cultural integrity, and economic vitality, such as aquaculture projects. The Traditional Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs has advocated at the level of the United Nations, presenting in 1995 a document called Haudenosaunee Environmental Restoration: An Indigenous Strategy for Human Sustainability (Tarbell & Arquette, 2000).
Indigenous peoples have never consented to the pollution of their lands. That is, they have never consented to invasion, exploitation, and colonization. When someone consents to an action by someone else that affects them, it means they have willingly accepted that action. An action can be acceptable when those affected by it understand and are “okay” with the risks, see the action as having impacts that are in their best interests, and are secure in knowing that they have the chance to influence and monitor how the action is carried out and completed. When someone dissents to an action, it means they neither understand the risks sufficiently (to consent confidently) nor wish to shoulder them, do not see any converging interests, and have reason to believe they will have no role in influencing or monitoring how the action is carried out. For the people of Akwesasne, they clearly did not consent to the presence of and pollution caused by the dirty industries in their region. The U.S. and Canada, and the corporations and communities benefiting from the industries, exploited the health, cultural integrity, and economic vitality of Mohawk peoples. They colonized Mohawk peoples by limiting Indigenous self-determination to prevent these harms and risks.
Denial of consent is one important factor causing environmental injustice across a number of cases. Broadly, environmental injustice refers to the problem that there are some groups or societies who suffer more harms and shoulder greater risks, such as the health problems of pollution. What really makes a particular situation an injustice is when the prevalence of harm or risk is a product of another group’s or society’s seeking their own benefits by taking advantage of others. Hence, the Mohawks, because they are Indigenous, suffered more harms and shouldered greater risks for the benefit of corporations, communities, and individuals of U.S. and Canadian societies. Colonialism, then, is an environmental injustice since it undermines self-determination through land dispossession, pollution, and other environmental threats. A key strategy of colonialism is the denial of consent, which can produce environmental injustice. Nations and corporations often consider groups of people, such as Indigenous peoples, as not worthy of consent.
This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it, I seek to show why environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples are problems of consent. I compare the current situation of consent today with Indigenous traditions that privilege consent in terms of how a society is organized. Part of colonialism in contexts like the United States and Canada has been the reorganizing of societies in North America to undermine Indigenous consent. The dismantling of traditions of consent is one way to understand how colonialism attacks self-determination. Although the United States is a unique context, many of the consent issues in relation to environmental justice arise in other contexts around the world. Readers should come away from this chapter with a good sense of why consent matters in relation to injustice, and why affirming consent is a strategy for achieving environmental justice for the sake of future generations.
Consent, Indigenous Justice, and the Dakota Access Pipeline
Denial of consent is a key reason why environmental injustice occurs in the case of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in its territory. The story of the Tribe’s resistance to the pipeline was covered widely in national and international media in 2016 and 2017, and was considered a major issue in the U.S. presidential election during that time. Understanding why consent matters in Indigenous struggles against oil and gas pipelines and coal terminals involves learning about the culture, history, and self-determination of Indigenous peoples who are involved and the motivations behind the projects that threaten to cause pollution, land dispossession, and other environmentally related harms and risks.
The Lakota and Dakota peoples of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who are part of the larger Oceti Sakowin Nation, are Indigenous peoples in North America. Oceti Sakowin peoples have a rich cultural heritage that involves respect and care for water, including Mni Sose (the Missouri River). The river flows through their territories. Jaskiran Dhillon and Nick Estes (2016) write that “Mni Sose (the Missouri River) is not a thing that is quantifiable according to possessive logics. Mni Sose is a relative: the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. She is alive. Nothing owns her.” For Oceti Sakowin peoples, their lives and the waters of the river are interdependent. According to Craig Howe and Tyler Young (2016), “Mnisose, the Missouri River, is a living being…. Throughout her life, Mni Sose has nurtured the adjacent fertile bottomlands by intermittently inundating them with upriver nutrients, and she serves as a transportation corridor for peoples and their nonhuman relatives. Her waters and riparian areas provide sustenance to countless living beings.”
Nick Estes (2019) and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019) document decades of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to nonconsensual actions of the government, corporations, and private businesses of U.S. settlers. Let’s consider some examples. In the 19th century, U.S. settlers overharvested bison, an animal depended upon by the tribe, without having ever attempted to make legitimate agreements or diplomatic arrangements over sharing the bison harvest. They overran the region with mining speculation in the late 1840s as gold was discovered in California and the tribe’s sacred Black Hills region. While treaty agreements were made that protected some Oceti Sakowin lands, such as in 1851 and 1868, continuous settlement and prospecting violated the terms of those treaties. The effects ultimately reduced the tribe’s land area from more than 100 million acres to 2 million acres by the late 19th century. The lack of Indigenous consent to these actions and outcomes led the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 to claim that “[a] more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history” (United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 1980, 448 U.S. 371).
The end of the 19th century was by no means the end of nonconsensual U.S. actions. The United States imposed the Dawes Act or General Allotment Act (1887) on Indigenous peoples to break up their lands into private property, which would open up lands not owned by Indigenous persons to settlers. Indigenous extended kinship networks were forcibly broken up during allotment to make way for nuclear families who would be sedentary farmers. The United States literally endorsed actions that separated families and discontinued relationships