Land Dispossession As Climate Justice: Lessons from Secwepemculecw and the British Columbia Fires

Research incorporating perspectives from racial capitalism, Indigenous studies, critical development studies, and others have importantly illustrated how what is often thought of as climate vulnerability or ‘maladaptation’ is rather a result of larger power structures, including colonialism and global capitalism. In Indigenous contexts, this has included how settler colonial processes, such as land dispossession, extractivism, and the curtailing of Indigenous mobilities, have created maladaptation to climate changes in Indigenous communities. Such insights have importantly highlighted how Indigenous peoples face climate risks largely because of how colonialism, along with capitalism, shape the geographic spaces they live in and their socio-economic conditions. This presentation aims to investigate the role played by settler colonial dispossession, or settler enclosures, in creating and maintaining climate risk, including climate-related displacement, experienced by Indigenous communities in a settler colonial context, particularly focusing on Secwepemc communities in western Canada. Recognizing that vulnerability in the context of climate change and ecological precarity is largely a consequence of ongoing histories of colonialism and racial capitalism, this paper examines how settler enclosures both exacerbate ecological instability and limit the possibility for climate adaptation and emergency responses to climate-related events. The British Columbia wildfires, which have particularly affected numerous Secwepemc communities, will be used as a case through which to explore how settler enclosures and settler colonial infrastructures enhance climate-related precarity for Indigenous communities.