INDG 2015 Week 2: Introduction to environmental racism, colonization and Indigenous Studies

INDG 2015
Week 2: human-environmental relations, environmental racism,
colonization, and Indigenous Studies, an introduction
Copyright: Dr. Zoe Todd 2021

Week 1 Recap
• Global Indigeneity
• Intersec2onality (with credit to Kimberle
Crenshaw): we must think about Indigeneity in
rela2on to intersec2ng experiences in North
America and elsewhere. Indigenous experiences
are varied across con2nents and historical
experiences (cannot map North American
Indigenous experiences directly onto other parts
of the world).

Week 2 human-
environmental
relations,
environmental
racism,
colonization, and
Indigenous
Studies,an
introduction
• Objectives for Today’s Class
• Examine what environmental racism is
• Apply this framework to examining
environmental crises/disasters in Indigenous
contexts
• Fanon: we will examine how Frantz Fanon’s now
historical engagement with decolonization
struggles in the mid-20th century in Damnés de
la Terre (or Wretched/Damned of the Earth)
connects to contemporary questions about
Indigenous land struggles and environmental
racism

Week 2
• Environmental racism:
• Credited to Benjamin Chavis, who coined the
term in 1982:
• “racial discrimination in environmental policy
making, the enforcement of regulations and
laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of
color for toxic waste facilities, the official
sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of
poisons and pollutants in our communities, and
the history of excluding people of color from
leadership of the ecology movements.[2] ”
• Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_ra
cism

Week 2
• “ a national report found that racial
demographics were the number one predictor
of where hazardous waste facilities were located
across the United States. Since then, strong
empirical evidence in the U.S. has shown that
non-white communities are disproportionately
exposed to environmental risks, have less of a
say in the development and implementation of
environmental laws and regulations, and are
less likely to have their voices heard on issues of
environmental degradation.” source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ecojustice/enviro
nmental-racism-canadal_b_7224904.html

Week 2
• Short learning activity:
• Brainstorm some examples of environmental
racism you are aware of in Canada or abroad
• Map these out onto a piece of paper or on
Word/editing software of your choice
• How do these instances of environmental racism
impact you in your day-to-day life?
• How does your positionality impact your
experiences of environmental violence?

Week 2
Environmental
Racism case
study
• Africville:
• “an industrial boom that swept Halifax in the
late 1800s brought racism to Africville’s
doorstep. Facilities shunned by Halifax
cropped up around the black community.
Africville’s backyard filled with human feces
disposal pits, an infectious disease hospital,
an abattoir, a prison, an open dump and an
incinerator.”
• (source:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/128
2706-weekend-focus-the-toxic-sites-of-nova-
scotia-racism)

Week 2
• http://thechronicleherald.ca/nov
ascotia/1282706-weekend-focus-
the-toxic-sites-of-nova-scotia-
racism

Week 2: Short
Video
• “Environmental Racism: Black
communities face more health
risks from industrial pollution”
(RT America, 2015)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=PxLbgDsLHNc

Week 2: 30 minute
documentary
• Please watch this documentary
and reﬂect on how it links to this
week’s readings
• hWps://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=UnHWZE0M_-k

Week 2
• Chemical Valley
• “Sarnia is home to more than 60 refineries and
chemical plants that produce gasoline, synthetic
rubbers, and other materials that the world’s
industries require to create the commercial products
we know and love. The city’s most prominent and
profitable attraction is an area about the size of 100
city blocks known as the Chemical Valley, where 40
percent of Canada’s chemical industry can be found
packed together like a noxious megalopolis. ”
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/video/the-chemical-valley-part-1

Week 2
• Re-cap first half of class
• Environmental racism is the tangible reality:
racialized communities are more likely to be
exposed to contamination through the siting of
dumps, toxic waste facilities and projects which
pollute waters, soils, air in the USA and Canada
(and elsewhere)
• This phenomenon brings together our study of the
issues of nature, culture, and social justice

Frantz Fanon
(1925-1961)
• “Frantz Omar
Fanon (/ˈfænən/,[1] US: /fæˈnɒ̃/;[2] French: [fʁɑ̃ts
fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known
as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West
Indian[3][4][5] psychiatrist and poliUcal
philosopher from the French
colony of MarUnique (today a French department).
His works have become inﬂuenUal in the ﬁelds
of post-colonial studies, criUcal
theory and Marxism.[6] As well as being
an intellectual, Fanon was a poliUcal radical, Pan-
Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with
the psychopathology of colonizaUon[7] and the
human, social, and cultural consequences
of decolonizaUon.[8][9][10]”
• Source: h7ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon
• Image: h7ps://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3319-forgeNng-fanon-
remembering-fanon

Week 2: Fanon’s text On Violence
• Les Damnés de la Terre was written in ten weeks at the end of Fanon’s life,
when he was ill with cancer (see:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/21/-sp-frantz-fanon-
documentary-concerning-violence)
• the book was banned in France (ibid)
• At the crux of the book is Fanon’s reflections on the violence at the heart of
colonialism – laying bare the genocide, extraction, death that animated
and animates european and imperial conquest and control of
nations/societies around the globe (but with specific focus on his lived
experiences in the Caribbean and in Africa)
• His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (which started as a PhD thesis that
was rejected in France (see Gordon 2015)) examines the psycho-social
effects of anti-Black racism on Black people and communities [a grounding
text for important works by other Black Studies scholars that followed]

Les Damnés
de la
Terre//The
Wretched
of the Earth
• Fanon states: “For a colonized people, the most
essen3al value, because it is the most meaningful, is
ﬁrst and foremost the land: the land, which must
provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity
has nothing to do with “human” dignity. The colonized
subject has never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever
seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and
starved with impunity; and no sermonizer on morals, no
priest has ever stepped in to bear the blows in his place
or share his bread. For the colonized, to be a moralist
quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the
colonist, breaking his spiral of violence, in a word
ejecEng him outright from the picture. The famous
dictum which states that all men are equal will ﬁnd its
illustraEon in the colonies.”
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (p. 9).
Grove/AtlanEc, Inc.. Kindle EdiEon.

Les Damnés
de la
Terre//The
Wretched
of the Earth
• Fanon states: “colonialism is not a
machine capable of thinking, a body
endowed with reason. It is naked
violence and only gives in when
confronted with greater violence.”
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the
Earth (p. 23). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle
Edition.

Les Damnés de la Terre//The Wretched of the
Earth
• There is a lot to unpack in the essay On Violence. But for a second
year Indigenous Studies and Sociology course we will focus on the
following:
• Fanon shows us that the violence of the colonizer/state/empire is left
implicit/unsaid/invisible in the minds and words of the colonizer
(state violence is ‘acceptable’ violence in the colonial worldview in
order to maintain supremacy/power), while the resistance of the
colonized to oppression is the object of intense scrutiny, surveillance,
panic by the colonizer (think about the contrast between how the
state and policed responded to Indigenous blockades in Canada in
early 2020 and how they are responding to non-Indigenous people
blocking hospitals today)

Op>onal learning ac>vity
• Drawing on Fanon’s reflections on the ubiquity of violence in the colonial worldview --
how does his attention to how violence against the colonized is downplayed by the
colonizer help shape our understandings of environmental racism?
• Activity: Search online news sites to help you sketch out how environmental disasters
that impact racialized communities are described in the news in Canada (what verbs and
other descriptive terms are used to describe issues like drinking water on reserves;
mercury or other toxin contamination; forest fires when they impact Indigenous or other
marginalized communities?)
• Now examine how mainstream outlets describe an environmental catastrophe that
impacts mainly settler communities (ie: flooding, fires, oil spills etc) – how are these
stories written? What descriptive terms are used? How does the government respond to
an environmental disaster when it impacts a predominantly wealthy, settler community?
• If you struggled to find good case studies, take a look at how different the government’s
responses were to flooding in Calgary vs on Indigenous lands in the 2013 Bow River
Floods http://www.indigenouspolicy.org/index.php/ipj/article/view/521/504
• This quick discourse analysis helps to illustrate Fanon’s underlying point that colonial
violence against the oppressed is downplayed/dismissed/invisibalized by the colonizer
due to the very fact that it is the fabric that colonization is built on.

Week 2
• WEEKLY reflection (2-3 sentence reflection)
• Discuss how the idea of environmental racism impacts
your understanding of environmental issues in Canada

INDG 2015 Week 2: Introduction to environmental racism, colonization and Indigenous Studies

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INDG 2015 Week 2: Introduction to environmental racism, colonization and Indigenous Studies