Title: Indigenous Decolonial Climate Hope through the Land
Abstract:
In the face of climate despair and environmental collapse, Indigenous peoples offer a vital perspective that reframes both the crisis and the possibilities for hope. This talk explores “climate hope through the land” as a decolonial and kinship-based alternative to dominant narratives of an impending climate apocalypse. Against frameworks that reduce land to a resource or frame hope as disembodied optimism, this talk centers Indigenous philosophies of landedness to articulate a grounded and accountable vision of hope. Rather than viewing climate change as a singular rupture, Indigenous decolonial thought understands it as the latest wave in a long history of colonial genocide and ecocide, carried out through the violent reconceptualization of land and humanity. Hope, then, arises not from escaping this history but from returning to it—with humility, kinship, and a spatial point of view rooted in land, where land is not an object but a creator, a relative, and an ethical agent whose vitality offers the ground for transformation. This talk calls for a radical shift in how we imagine and enact climate hope—not as an abstract ideal, but as a decolonial practice of being together in and through the land.
Bio:
Dr. Brian Burkhart is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and was the director of the Native Nations Center at OU from 2020 to 2023. His research specializes in Native American and Indigenous philosophy. His 2019 book, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures, argues that land is key to both the operations of coloniality as well as the anti-colonial power that grounds Indigenous liberation. Land, as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing, provides a framework for Indigenous environmental ethics that can also function as an anti-colonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. His current book project, As Strong as the Land that Made You: Native American and Indigenous Philosophies of Well-Being through the Land, extends these land-based methodologies into reflections on both environmental and individual health for Native people and Native Nations. Burkhart is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with roots in the Jaybird Creek community of Northeastern Oklahoma as well as the Indian Wells community of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University.
