Kyle Powys Whyte

Works

• 2017Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now

  Essay in the Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities: for many Indigenous peoples the environmental collapse that others fear for the future already happened under colonialism.

Position

Whyte argues that for many Indigenous peoples the dystopia that climate change seems to hold for the future has already happened. Colonialism, forced removal, deforestation and industrial pollution severed the relationships between peoples, lands, waters, plants and animals on which Indigenous economies, cultures and self-government depended; Indigenous peoples already live, in his phrase, in “our ancestors’ dystopia now”. Climate change is therefore a continuation of settler colonialism, and environmental injustice is in large part the disruption of relationships. Drawing on Anishinaabe traditions, to which the Potawatomi belong, he describes “collective continuance”: a society’s capacity to adapt in ways that sustain its relationships of responsibility, consent, trust and reciprocity. In “Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice” he warns that relational tipping points can be crossed before ecological ones: where trust and accountability between peoples and governments are missing, hurried responses to crisis tend to repeat colonial harms. Against such “crisis epistemology”, which presents emergencies as unprecedented and demands urgent action without consent, he calls for climate policy that begins by repairing relationships and respecting Indigenous self-determination.

Life & context

Kyle Powys Whyte is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. He studied business at Babson College and philosophy at the University of Memphis and at Stony Brook University, where he took his doctorate in 2009. He taught philosophy at Michigan State University, where he held the Timnick Chair in the Humanities, and since 2020 has been George Willis Pack Professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, where he also directs the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment. He served on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, was a US Science Envoy from 2022 to 2024 and has contributed to the US National Climate Assessment. Much of his work is done together with tribal communities.

Further main works

• Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action (2014)
• Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice (2018)
• Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice (2020)
• Against Crisis Epistemology (2021)

Appears in

• Debate ‘Climate, Anthropocene and Responsibility to the Future’