Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene

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Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene
Kyle Powys Whyte
Forthcoming. Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by Ursula
Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann.
Conservation in the Anthropocene
The proposed Anthropocene epoch is understood geologically as a time when the collective
actions of humans began influencing earth systems in marked, unprecedented ways. Some claim
that the Anthropocene could have started in the year 1610 with “colonialism, global trade and
coal” (Lewis and Maslin 177). Scientists and environmental ethicists often characterize futures in
the Anthropocene in additional ways, one of the most common being as a future involving
climate destabilization that will likely threaten the very existence of certain ecosystems, plants,
and animals (Kolbert; Thompson and Bendik-Keymer; Vaidyanathan; Sandler). Ever-expanding
human economic activities and consumer lifestyles are major drivers of climate destabilization
through their dependence on burning fossil fuels and certain kinds of land-use such as
deforestation. Some conservationists argue that we will inevitably have to learn to live with these
changes, make careful decisions about conservation priorities, and, in some cases, learn to let go
of certain ecosystems and species (Kareiva and Marvier). Yet others in the conservation
community take an adamant position that these changes, especially extinctions, are morally
dreadful (Vaidyanathan; Cafaro and Primack).
Cafaro and Primack express this latter position clearly when they argue that “Anthropocene
proponents” have “selfish and unjust” views that deem the extinction of species as morally
acceptable as long as humans suffer no harm. Human expansion that extinguishes the “polar
bear” and other species ends the value of these natural species as “the primary expressions and
repositories of organic nature’s order, creativity, and diversity… Every species, like every
person, is unique, with its own history and destiny…” To destroy species through human
expansion is to bring a “valuable and meaningful story to an untimely end” (2014, 2).
Conservation views à la Cafaro and Primack can help to explain why some scholars and writers
have noted various strains of dystopian thought in Anthropocene discourses (Trexler; Singleton;
Weik; Johnson et al.). For such views can be used as a basis for depicting futures in which many
hundreds of “valuable and meaningful [stories]” (Cafaro and Primack) are irreversibly
extinguished, leaving human societies to reckon with a world marked by greatly limited
historical memories, biodiversity, and expressiveness. In an article titled, “Climate Change is So
Dire We Need a New Kind of Science Fiction to Make Sense of It,” futures writer Claire Evans
writes that “we need an Anthropocene fiction. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological
collapse requires a new dystopian fiction… a form of science fiction that tackles the radical
changes of our pressing and strange reality...” (Evans).
As a Neshnabé (Potawatomi) and scholar-activist at a U.S. university working on indigenous
climate justice, I was initially struck by what seemed to be some similarities between the
dystopian Anthropocene views and the views motivating quite a few indigenous projects to
conserve and restore native species. Indeed, indigenous peoples have long advocated that the
conservation and restoration of native species, the cultivation of first foods, and the maintenance

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of spiritual practices require the existence of plants and animals of particular genetic parentage
whose lives are woven with ecologically, economically and culturally significant stories,
knowledges and memories. I wondered whether indigenous peoples share the same dread of
species extinction in an Anthropocene dystopian future.
While surface similarities are present, it is perhaps more accurate to say that indigenous
conservationists and restorationists tend to focus on sustaining particular plants and animals
whose lives are entangled locally—and often over many generations—in ecological, cultural and
economic relationships with human societies and other nonhuman species. We try to learn from,
adapt, and put in practice these relationships, ancient as some may be, to address the
conservation challenges we face today and in the future, especially the environmental destruction
of settler colonialism in North America. In this sense, while we may embrace the value of
species such as the polar bear—even when we may have never interacted with one—it is also
true that we are unlikely to invoke the polar bear in the absence of also invoking the species’
significance to particular human and nonhuman communities for whom it has long, local,
complex, and unique relationships.
What is more, the environmental impacts of settler colonialism have made it so that quite a few
indigenous peoples in North America are no longer able to relate locally to many of the plants
and animals that are significant to them. In the Anthropocene, then, some indigenous peoples
already inhabit what our ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future. So we
consider the future from what we believe is already a dystopia, as strange as that may sound to
some readers. Our conservation and restoration projects are not only about whether to conserve
or let go of certain species. Rather, they are about what relationships between humans and
certain plants and animals we should focus on in response to the challenges we face, given that
we have already lost so many plants and animals that matter to our societies. In this way,
indigenous conservation approaches aim at negotiating settler colonialism as a form of human
expansion that continues to inflict anthropogenic environmental change on indigenous peoples—
most recently under the guise of climate destabilization.
The Dystopia of Our Ancestors
A longstanding environmental advocate and friend, Lee Sprague (Potawatomi / Odawa, Little
River Band of Ottawa Indians), always reminds me that Anishinaabek1 already inhabit what our
ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future. Indeed, settler colonial campaigns in the
Great Lakes region have already depleted, degraded, or irreversibly damaged the ecosystems,
plants, and animals that our ancestors had local living relationships with for hundreds of years
and that are the material anchors of our contemporary customs, stories, and ceremonies. Settler
colonial campaigns refer to the various global projects of combined military, commercial, and
cultural expansion of European, North American and many other states (e.g. New Zealand).
These waves of settlers, such as those forming the U.S. and Canadian states, continue to deploy
strategic tools and weapons to establish permanent roots in indigenous territories with the
continued hopes of inscribing homelands for their own families and societies in those territories
(Lefevre).
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# Anishinaabe or Anishinaabek (plural) and Neshnabé and Neshnabék are English spellings that correspond to
different accents of the language of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. There are multiple English spelling
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I use the term campaigns because these waves of settlement are sustained, strategic and
militaristic. These campaigns include both war-like violence and the tactics for suppressing
populations that are used alongside belligerence, from assimilative institutions (e.g. boarding
schools) to containment practices (e.g. reservations) to the creation of dependency (e.g.
commodity foods). As a means of carving out settler homelands from indigenous homelands,
waves of settlers harnessed industrial means, from military technologies to large-scale mineral
and fossil fuel extraction operations to sweeping, landscape-transforming regimes of commodity
agriculture. Industrial settler states are the corresponding polities, from federal nation state
governments to local municipalities and subnational provincial governments, that create and
enforce the laws, policies, and jurisprudence that serve to protect and incubate the homeland-
inscribing process from indigenous resistance, refusal, and resurgence in such territories.
The fallout of what I will call “industrial settler campaigns” is that, as indigenous peoples, we
continue to exercise political and cultural self-determination even though there are now states
such as the U.S. and Canada that are perceived by most people as being the preeminent
sovereigns in the places where indigenous communities live, work, and play. Our degree of
success in exercising self-determination is irreversibly coupled with our political relations with
states whose constituent people and institutions wield daunting financial, military, and police
resources and regulatory and legal enforcement capabilities. Ecosystems have been reshaped to
such a degree by settlers and their institutions that it is hard to recognize anything “indigenous”
about them. Hence many scholars and activists describe settler colonialism as a structure of
oppression that erases indigneous peoples (Lefevre).
It would have been an act of imagining dystopia for our ancestors to consider the erasures we
live through today, in which some Anishinaabek are finding it harder to obtain supplies of birch
bark, or seeing algal blooms add to factors threatening whitefish populations, or fighting to
ensure the legality in the eyes of the industrial settler state of protecting wild rice for harvest. Yet
we do not give up by dwelling in a nostalgic past even though we live in our ancestors’ dystopia.
My friend Deb McGregor (Ojibwe, Whitefish River First Nation) always points out to me that
we are really living in just the tiniest sliver of Anishinaabe history. The vast majority of our
history precedes the campaigns that have established states such as the U.S. and Canada. Our
conservation and restoration efforts are motivated by how we put dystopia in perspective as just
a brief, yet highly disruptive, historical moment for us—at least so far.
This historically brief, highly disruptive moment, “today’s dystopia of our ancestors,” sounds a
lot like what others in the world dread they will face in the future as climate destabilization
threatens the existence of species and ecosystems. Yet for many indigenous peoples, the
Anthropocene is not experienced as threatening in precisely the same sense because the
particular era of settlement I am describing forced many of our societies to let go of so many
relationships with plants, animals and ecosystems at a wrongfully rapid pace. Rather, if there is
something different in the Anthropocene for indigenous peoples, it would be just that we are
focusing our energies also on adapting to another kind of anthropogenic environmental change:
climate destabilization. Indeed, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we already suffered
other kinds of anthropogenic environmental change at the hands of settlers, including changes
associated with deforestation, forced removal and relocation, containment on reservations (i.e.

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loss of mobility), liquidation of our lands into individual private property and subsequent
disposession, and unmitigated pollution and destruction of our lands from extractive industries
and commodity agriculture, among many other examples. While all societies alter the
environment in which they dwell, anthropogenic environmental change here refers very
specifically to how industrial settler campaigns both dramatically changed ecosystems, such as
through deforestation, overharvesting and pollution, and obstructed indigenous peoples’
capacities to adapt to the changes, such through removal and containment on reservations.
Though the climate destabilization described in Anthropocene futures may be a distinct
ecological challenge for indigenous peoples, we experience it nonetheless as associated with an
iteration of patterns of industrial settler strategies and tactics that is very familiar to us from our
experiences with and memories of the other kinds of anthropogenic environmental change just
described. Indeed, settler industrial campaigns paved the way for industrial and capitalist
collective actions whose ecological footprint contributes significantly to today’s climate
destabilization ordeal that, for many indigenous peoples, includes numerous conservation
challenges involved in adapting to conditions such as sea level rise, warming waters, and
increased severity of droughts, among others. Indigenous peoples are on the frontlines of dealing
with these changing conditions, from coastal communities who have to relocate permanently to
communities who are losing habitats in their homelands needed to continue their relationships
with the remaining culturally and economically significant plants and animals. What makes
many of these communities particularly vulnerable to the local impacts of climate destabilization
is their continued intertwinement today with the same industrial settler strategies that already
degraded many of their relationships with plants and animals in the past. For example, many
indigenous peoples lived as highly mobile, multispecies societies capable of exercising great
agency in shouldering environmental changes of the sort we are discussing now with climate
destabilization. Yet industrial settler containment practices in North America rendered many
indigenous peoples immobile, confining them to reservations, treaty harvesting areas or small
islands that provide fewer options for adapting to changes that threaten their land base or shift
the habitats of significant plant and animal populations farther away. As in the past, industrial
settler campaigns today also obstruct the efforts of indigenous peoples to respond—from legal
and diplomatic failures to mitigate dangerous climate change by lowering emissions to the
enactment of laws, policies and bureaucratic institutions that stymie indigenous efforts to adapt
within current confines such as reservations (Marino; Whyte; Wildcat).
In all these ways, climate destabilization fits into a larger pattern of a particular kind of
anthropogenic environmental change taking place across this brief, but disruptive period of
settlement. The ecosystems in which we live today are already drastically changed from those to
which our ancestors related—a fact which shapes how we approach discussions of Anthropocene
futures. Our ways of approaching conservation and restoration, then, are situated at the
convergence of deep Anishinaabe history and the vast degradation of settler colonial campaigns
occurring in such a short time. I think of this junction as our ancestors’ dystopia.
Anishinaabe Restoration and Conservation
Anishinaabek/Neshnabék throughout the Great Lakes region are at the forefront of native species
conservation and ecological restoration projects that seek to learn from, adapt, and put into
practice local human and nonhuman relationships and stories at the convergence of deep

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Anishinaabe history and the disruptiveness of industrial settler campaigns. These projects also
seek to find ways to reconcile—as much as makes sense—with settler societies so that
indigenous and settler conservation can share responsibilities and hold each other accountable.
Consider three projects.
Nmé
Nmé (Lake Sturgeon) is the largest and oldest living fish in the Great Lakes basin, sometimes
exceeding 100 years in age. Nmé served the Anishinaabek as a substantial source of food, an
indicator species for monitoring the environment, and a clan identity, playing a role in
ceremonies and stories. However, industrial settler campaigns in the Great Lakes region
threatened the stability of nmé populations and the Anishinaabe system through over-harvesting,
dams, stocking rivers with non-native fish species for sport fishing, and pollution. Nmé used to
be plentiful, yet are now reduced to less than one percent of their historic numbers (Holtgren).
Kenny Pheasant, an elder, says “Decline of the sturgeon has corresponded with decline in
sturgeon clan families. Only a few sturgeon clan families are known around here” (Little River
Band). The Little River Band of Ottawa Indians sought to restore nmé in the early 2000s.
The Natural Resources Department of the tribe started a cultural context group, composed of a
diverse range of tribal members and biologists, which developed goals and objectives for
restoration. The cultural context group facilitated “a voice” that “was an amalgamation of
cultural, biological, political, and social elements, all being important and often
indistinguishable” (Holtgren 135). The goal was to “restore the harmony and connectivity
between Nmé and the Anishinaabek and bring them both back to the river . . . Bringing the
sturgeon back to the river was an obvious biological element; however, restoring harmony
between sturgeon and people was steeped in the cultural and social realm. Each meeting began
with a ceremony, and the conversation was held over a feast” (Holtgren 136). Ultimately, the
Department created the first streamside rearing facility for protecting young sturgeon before they
are released each fall in order to preserve their genetic parentage (Holtgren et al.).
Annually in September, a public event featuring a pipe ceremony, feast, speeches and education
about Ottawa traditions, the Band’s sovereignty and conservation science takes place and
attendees use buckets to personally release nmé back to the river. The event can attract hundreds
of attendees from all over the watershed. The relationships between people and sturgeon change
and become stronger as individuals realize their dependence on nmé and the significance of how
the deep historical relationship between the fish and Anishinaabek can guide innovate restoration
and conservation efforts today that can improve environmental quality and heal people’s
relationships in the watershed. Participants, including many children, begin to feel a sense of
responsibility to nmé, developing a lasting connection when holding the fish in the atmosphere
framed by Anishinaabe traditions and conservation science. I have talked to attendees who
proclaim how they have come to realize through the event that it is people who also depend on
nmé. This is especially significant in a watershed where the relationships among people have
been strained by settler colonialism. The participants do not necessarily adopt the Anishinaabe
way of thinking or living, yet they come to feel a sense of themselves as co-occupants of and
relatives in a shared watershed. Success, perhaps, lies in how nmé restoration has changed the
relationship between the settler Americans in the Manistee area and the Anishinaabek through

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situating the project at the convergence of deep Anishinaabe history and industrial settler
campaigns (Holtgren, Ogren, and Whyte).
Manoomin
Wild rice, or manoomin, is another important native species for Anishinaabek. Wild rice grows
in shallow, clear and slow-moving waterways and can be harvested in early autumn. After
harvesting, manoomin is processed through activities such as drying, parching, hulling,
winnowing, and cleaning (that is, handpicking out any leftover rice husks). Manoomin is rich in
vitamin, mineral, and protein contents and is easily stored as a dried good. The origin story tells
of how Anishinaabek migrated from the East until they reached the land where food grows on
water, or the Great Lakes region. Neighboring groups of U.S. and Canadian citizens and
companies engage in activities such as mining, damming, growing commercial paddy rice for
mass distribution, and recreational boating. These activities directly affect manoomin and its
habitat—especially the interdependency of manoomin and water. Historically, settlers drove
prices of manoomin down, making it uneconomical for Anishinaabe to sell it commercially as an
alternative to subsistence use (Wallwork). For example, in states such as Minnesota, manoomin
abundance has declined by half in the last 100 years (Andow et al.).
Anishinaabe people are leaders in the conservation of wild rice. The Nibi (water) and Manoomin
Symposium, which takes place every two years, brings tribal rice harvesters in the Great Lakes,
indigenous scholars, paddy rice growers, representatives from mining companies and state
agencies, and university researchers interested in studying genetic modification of rice together.
Elders share their stories about manoomin and youth share their perspective on how manoomin
fits into their futures. Indigenous persons working as scientists in their Tribes share the
experiences working with elders to understand the deep historical implications of the work they
do to study and conserve manoomin. Other indigenous peoples are often invited to share their
experiences restoring and conserving other native species, such as taro and maize.
Many at the symposium emphasize the importance of wild rice for the collective well-being of
Anishinaabe people. While members of settler society may come to the event understanding
manoomin as something of scientific curiosity, or a commodity to sell in a niche market, or a
nuisance to the growth of mining, they are instead exposed to the deep historical relationship
between Anishinaabek and manoomin and the significance of manoomin for Anishinaabe self-
determination today. In the most recent white paper from the symposium, Norman Deschampe,
former Minnesota Chippewa Tribal President, speaking of the state of Minnesota and the U.S.
federal government, said that “we are of the opinion that the wild rice rights assured by treaty
accrue not only to individual grains of rice, but to the very essence of the resource. We were not
promised just any wild rice; that promise could be kept by delivering sacks of grain to our
members each year. We were promised the rice that grew in the waters of our people, and all the
value that rice holds” (Wild Rice White Paper 3). All of these actions have formed an important
front of manoomin-based conservation that has challenged mining and other polluting activities,
research on genetic modification, and the mass distribution of commercial “wild” rice.
Nibi
For Anishinaabek, as exemplified in the previous projects, it is hard to talk about native species
conservation without nibi (water). Nibi has traditional value for Anishinaabek because it is

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among the basic elements of Anishinaabe cosmology, as told in the creation story, which frames
how community members view their relations to water. Water quality and abundance benefits
human and animal health (McGregor, “Honouring”). Anishinaabe scholar Deb McGregor says
that
We must look at the life that water supports (plants/medicines, animals, people, birds,
etc.) and the life that supports water (e.g., the earth, the rain, the fish). Water has a role
and a responsibility to fulfill, just as people do. We do not have the right to interfere with
water’s duties to the rest of Creation. Indigenous knowledge tells us that water is the
blood of Mother Earth and that water itself is considered a living entity with just as much
right to live as we have. (McGregor, “Honouring” 37-38)
Water is sacred for Anishinaabek. Though the Great Lakes region has a high proportion of the
world’s fresh water supply, things have changed in recent times. The waters are now the
dumping ground of numerous pollutants. Agricultural runoff, sewage disposal, and
contamination from industry, such as mercury, become entangled in the food chain and affect
habitats for species important to Anishinaabe, such as fish. Changes in the Great Lakes,
including the recent profusion of algal blooms which threatens whitefish populations, are
projected to affect the ecological contexts needed for Anishinaabe to harvest first foods.
Anishinaabek are taking collective action to protect nibi. A group of Anishinaabe women began
walking around the Great Lakes in the early 2000s, calling their efforts the Mother Earth Water
Walk. The purpose is to help people in the basin recognize and re-recognize human relationships
to water in its spiritual dimensions instead of seeing water as an inanimate resource. The walks,
which take place in the spring, include a water ceremony, feast, and celebration, and the
participating grandmothers take turns carrying a water vessel and eagle staff. Similarly, the
grassroots women’s group Akii Kwe, made up of Anishinaabe women from Walpole Island,
“have been diligently trying to protect water in their territory for years. Guided by their
traditional responsibilities, they consider it their duty to speak for the water” (McGregor,
“Traditional Ecological Knowledge” 107). Akii Kwe members are guided by their knowledge of
how to be sensitive to water and care for water, which arises from their living near and attending
closely to rivers and lakes (McGregor, “Considerations”).
These collective actions by Anishinaabe women are changing decision-making processes in
Canada. The Anishinaabek Nation, an indigenous multi-party organization that plays an
important role in Canadian politics, created the Women’s Water Commission for bringing
women’s voices into Ontario and Great Lakes water issues. The explicit goal of the commission
includes fostering “the traditional role of the Women in caring for water.” “Traditional,” here, is
important not because of pseudo-factual claims about indigenous women’s roles, but because it
indicates that certain kinds of orientation towards water imply cultural understandings of one’s
responsibilities to the earth’s living, non-living, and spiritual beings, as well as criticisms of
industrial settler campaigns in the region that have damaged indigenous systems of stewardship.
The Commission seeks to encourage recognition of traditional responsibilities along with the
need to include women as part of the decision-making processes (McGregor, “Considerations”).
The Walk too has also spread across North America, becoming a regional form of action that
includes more people each year, not just Anishinaabe women alone (McGregor,
“Considerations”; Mother Earth Water Walk). Again, these water conservation efforts place in

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context how recent degradation of the Great Lakes looks from a deep Anishinaabe historical
perspective.
Nmé, Manoomin & Nibi
The three restoration and conservation projects just described all take place today in our
ancestors’ dystopia. In each project, the focus on native species puts in perspective the
convergence between deep Anishinaabe stories and histories and the more recent industrial
settler degradation of the environment. The projects bring attention to how industrial settler
campaigns erase the particular systems of interdependent relationships of humans, nonhumans,
and ecosystems that matter to many indigenous peoples, from more historic seasonal rounds to
more contemporary structures of self-determination. Participants in the projects learn from,
adapt, and put into practice ancient stories and relationships involving humans, nonhuman
species, and ecosystems to address today’s conservation challenges in the Anthropocene. The
value of these local stories and relationships derives from indigenous peoples’ knowledge of
what it means to survive and flourish in times our ancestors would have likely imagined to be
dystopian. They are not based on dread of certain futures; rather, they arise from indigenous
perspectives on how to respond to anthropogenic climate destabilization based on having already
lived through local losses of species and ecosystems.
It is certainly true that sturgeon or wild rice are not likely to play the same prominent dietary or
cultural roles that they once did. Yet the very act of engaging these stories and relationships
through restoring and conserving native species brings attention to indigenous perspectives on
the harms of settler colonialism and engenders collective actions based on the lessons we can
draw from those experiences. These kinds of native species conservation go along with many
other forms of adaptation that indigenous peoples do that are often seen as “untraditional,” from
investing in science education for youth to updating building codes and other tribal infrastructure
to engaging in advocacy through direct actions coordinated by social media and writing
declarations. It is also true that the water relations of Anishinaabek will not be restored to what
they were. But the Mother Earth Water Walk seeks to engender a greater understanding of how
the water was and is degraded through industrial settler activities such as pollution, and to foster
respect for the sorts of responsibilities humans of all nations and heritages must have in order to
protect the water now and moving into the future. The projects emphasize that the industrial
settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and
nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by
different human societies.
These projects acknowledge that before people can work together to grasp the nettles that are
conservation problems in the Anthropocene, there needs to be reconciliation among people so
that they come to have sufficient appreciation of their different histories and can share
responsibilities and be accountable to each other. The sturgeon, wild rice, and water restoration
programs feature public events that bring together indigenous people and members of settler
society to learn about how humans are entangled with other species and with the environment.
These multispecies engagements are not aimed solely at avoiding the physical loss of certain
species or ecosystems, but also at building people’s appreciation of what it means to share local
places in light of how they are implicated in more regional and global forces such as industrial
settler colonialism. The conservation of native species, then, is not only about restoration for the

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species’ sake in the absence of histories and relationships with other human and nonhuman
species, but because the act of starting to conserve some native species—the ones that are still
around—serves to raise questions about environmental justice and colonialism that too often are
marginalized in global discussions of the future.
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