Dismantling climate coloniality: Reflections from a Bangladeshi diaspora researcher in the United States

By Azmal Hossan| Issue 27

The author (fifth from the right) is with the leadership team and staff of the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance, and Tribal elders and leaders in the Northern Great Plains. Photo courtesy of https://www.tribalwateralliance.org/ 

“কী এই ভারীতা, যে আমি অনুভব করি, যেটা আমাদের ভারাক্রান্ত করে, যেখানে অনেক শব্দ ছুটে আসে কিন্তু আমি স্পষ্টতার সাথে প্রকাশ করতে পারি না? [What is this heaviness I feel that weighs us down, where many words rush in that I can’t quite articulate into sentences with any clarity]…… মনে হয় সারাক্ষণ প্রতিরোধ করি আমরা, লড়াই করে যাচ্ছি কত কাল [It feels like we are constantly resisting, having to battle for so long].……আমরা কি দুংখ, স্নিগ্ধতা, দুর্বলতা, ক্লান্তি, আতঙ্ক প্রকাশ করতে পারি যাতে করূণা, পরিত্যাগ, ভয়, অবহেলা, বিচ্ছিন্নতা পাশ কাটা যায়? [Can we be sad, soft, weak, weary, and terrified, without being pitied, discarded, feared, ignored, sidelined, alienated] ……আমি চেষ্টা চালিয়ে যাবো, শিখতে থাকবো, আর কাজ করবো; কোন শেষ নেই, এটি একটি অবিরাম কাজ [I will continue to put effort into this, learn more, I must do better. There is no conclusion; this is endless work]……লড়াই চলবে [The struggle continues].” (Farhana Sultana, The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality)      

Farhana Sultana, a professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University and an internationally recognised, award-winning interdisciplinary scholar, reflects on her own lived experiences in developing the theory of climate coloniality, a critical framework for understanding the contemporary climate crisis. Sultana is a middle-class, educated woman with Indigenous roots in the marshes of the Bengal Delta, a postcolonial territory known as the epicentre of climate change, climate heterodystopia, climate dystopia, and adaptation regime. It is also the place of climate reductive translation, and metacode of climate change, and where critical analysis and knowledge production are reserved for Western Scholars. 

Sultana is academically trained and settled in the United States, one of the major contributors to the global climate crisis and a poster child of settler colonialism. In developing the theory, she intertwines theory, empirics, emotions, and storytelling, and navigates her emotional atmosphere of rage, resolve, frustration, and desire. Methodologically, she relies on an autoethnography that she created based on her situated knowledge and standpoint. Drawing on her critical climate justice praxis, Sultana argued that the burdens of climate change are unequally and unevenly distributed across different places and among different groups where those [i.e. poor developing countries in the Global South, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) communities in the Global North] contributing the least to climate change suffer the most. It is therefore urgent to establish scalar and contextual climate justice. This is because “context matters in understanding coloniality”. For Sultana, one of the central ways to confront climate coloniality is to decolonise it, both epistemologically and materially. This is because decolonisation is not a metaphor, as climate colonialism is more than a metaphor. 

Sultana’s theory of climate coloniality deeply resonates with me. Despite distinctive gender and generational identity, I share the same situated knowledge and standpoint with her. I am also from the Bengal Delta and academically trained and settled in the United States. I argue that Sultana’s theoretical and methodological approach is important because climate, like a physical idea, can be an imaginative idea – an idea constructed and endowed with meaning and value through cultural practice – which is always situated in a time and a place. Memory, behaviour, text, and identity, along with meteorology, can be used to read the registers of climate. According to Sultana, although scholars in recent times have become interested in the connection between colonialism and climate change, the issue is yet to be theorised, discussed, and confronted. I designed my Ph.D. dissertation project on decolonising Indigenous climate change adaptation in the settler colonial context to address this knowledge gap. 

The project is also inspired by the two most authentic scientific reports on climate change. For the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Sixth Assessment Report, acknowledges that colonialism exacerbated Indigenous climate change vulnerability. This understanding also resonated in the Fifth National Climate Assessment Report published by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The report argued that Indigenous peoples’ well-being, including their livelihoods, health, nutrition, and cultural practices, as well as the ecological resilience of their territories, are negatively affected by climate change. The U.S. Northern Great Plains region has been the home of many Indigenous Nations for time immemorial. The area is experiencing unprecedented climate change-induced extreme events, including severe droughts, increased hail frequency and size, floods, and wildfires. Given their close relationship with the natural world, rooted in their deep spiritual and cultural connections and traditional lifeways, Indigenous Nations are the hardest hit by and least adaptable to climate change. The right to self-determination can help Indigenous Nations respond to climate change in ways that meet the needs and aspirations of their communities. 

For my Ph.D. dissertation, I am conducting community-engaged participatory action research on how the revitalisation of Indigenous self-determination capacity, rooted in the practice of traditional ecological knowledge, can help them adapt to the changing climate. Partnering with the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance (GPTWA), a South Dakota-based Indigenous grassroots organisation working for Indigenous climate change resilience through treaty-mandated water sovereignty in the Missouri River Basin, I am using a decolonising approach. Over the past two and a half years, I have established this partnership and trust relationship through my student internship with GPTWA. During this period, I have contributed to various actionable Indigenous climate change resilience projects, such as assessing Indigenous climate change adaptation water needs, developing drought adaptation plans, and drafting grant proposals. 

Although I am neither an Indigenous member nor a United States citizen yet, my lived experiences as a formerly colonised individual are commensurable with the lived experiences of the Indigenous communities in the United States. I understand that decolonisation of Indigenous climate change adaptation in the (settler) colonial context cannot be achieved overnight, rather, it is a continuous process. This is because (settler) colonialism is not an event; it is an ongoing process and structure generating multilayered and multigenerational trauma among the Indigenous Peoples. In doing so, we need to unlearn and relearn this trauma intensified by climate coloniality. This is more crucial for a diaspora early-career researcher like me.

Azmal Hossan

Azmal is a Bangladeshi Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Colorado State University. Azmal’s research interests are Indigenous climate change adaptation, food-energy-water nexus, environmental justice, decolonisation, and science communication. His research is supported by Interdisciplinary Training, Education, and Research in Food-Energy-Water Systems at Colorado State University. He can be reached at azmal.hossan@colostate.edu.