Undoing settler climate change: Acton Éamon McHenley, Landback As A Way Forward: The Return of Stolen Public Lands as Adaptation in the Alaskan Climate Crisis, MA Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Undoing settler climate change: Acton Éamon McHenley, Landback As A Way Forward: The Return of Stolen Public Lands as Adaptation in the Alaskan Climate Crisis, MA Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

02May24

Excerpt: Access to land and property ownership has been racialized since the inception of the US settler colonial state, with the relocation, resettlement, and genocide of Indigenous peoples through the dispossession of their traditional homelands serving as a key origin point. Today, Alaska Natives are facing a similar process, having lost around 80% of their traditional lands to colonization via the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and losing more land each day with upwards of 70 of their 200 communities facing imminent threats from the colonially created climate crisis. With climate change and the associated increase in frequency and intensity of natural hazards putting millions of people at risk around the world, especially Indigenous Peoples, the cycle of dispossession and forced relocation could start all over again if the US government fails to address the colonial past and present. Yet, despite increasing climate impacts globally, no single set of policies or strategies exists to determine if or when communities can no longer be protected in-place in the face of climate impacts. So, while the federal government has a duty to assist Alaska Native communities in proactive, preventive community relocation in the face of rising sea levels and eroding coastlines, the current legal and funding structures have thus far limited federal and state response to piecemeal, reactive projects, and left ANVs with little recourse to address climate change. However, investing in Indigenous land return, often referred to as “Land Back,” could provide a way forward. Land Back, rematriation, or land return—defined sometimes as the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands—is a process that “addresses the root of colonization—the theft of Indigenous lands (including their destruction through resource extraction), the violence committed against Indigenous peoples to build capitalism across the country, and the effects that [Indigenous] communities still experience today”. As an Indigenous-led movement and a decolonial set of actions, the structure and strategy of Land Back are built with the tacit understanding that existing systems are what is causing climate change, not what will solve the climate crisis. Looking to a tool such as Land Back to address the urgent needs of Alaska Native communities, and recognizing the difficulty faced by these communities in accessing their rights in existing legal and policy frameworks, it is essential to reassess existing (and inadequate) disaster recovery and climate adaptation systems. Recent legal research on the duty of the federal government—via the Federal Trust Doctrine and international Indigenous human rights law—combined with the social pressure for reparations and climate justice, could create an environment that is ripe for systemic change, which could leave the door open for the beginning of Indigenous land return and just climate adaptation via existing but underused legal tools.

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