While scientists have sounded the alarm regarding anthropocentrically-fueled climate change for decades, global governmental and even smaller-scale responses to slow or halt this process have sometimes been sluggish or wholly ineffective. Yet Indigenous Peoples whose homes are on lands claimed by the United States, particularly coastal Peoples, have been engaging with climate change’s effects and working to mitigate them for decades, often using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Kyle Powys Whyte, Zoe Todd, Gregory Cajete, and other Indigenous scholars working in the environmental sciences, environmental humanities, and Indigenous studies more broadly have explored and documented how various Indigenous communities are refusing displacement from this latest crisis caused by colonization.
Indigenous activists and scholars have long connected climate change and the Sixth Extinction with settler colonialism and colonization more broadly, noting that the systems responsible for the increased carbon output, namely capitalism, directly result from colonization. Todd and Heather Davis, for example, argue that the Anthropocene’s golden spike should begin with colonization in the 15th century, a suggestion taken up in varying degrees by non-Native scholars, such as Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, and Kathryn Yusoff.
This essay examines the work of several Indigenous poets, particularly those belonging to coastal Peoples whose homelands are currently claimed by the US, such as Craig Santos Perez (CHamoru), dg nanouk okpik (Iñupiaq-Inuit), Houston Cypress (Miccosukee), and Thomas Parrie (Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb) in order to gain insight regarding how these regions and Peoples both frame climate change and respond to it through contemporary ecopoetry.