In a book that provokes the humanities as a modern academic endeavor to rethink its ontological underpinnings, Dipesh Chakrabarty asks how this academic terrain, developed to understand humans in their own scale of world history, can revise itself to reflect on the meaning of the planetary scale. He sets out the challenge:
The figure of the human had doubled, in effect, over the course of my lifetime. There was (and still is) the human of humanist histories—the human capable of struggling for equality and fairness among other humans while caring for the environment and certain forms of nonhuman life. And then there was this other human, the human as geological agent, whose history could not be recounted from within purely humanocentric views (as most narratives of capitalism and globalization are). (3)
With this doubling of the human Chakrabarty reveals the nature of the new age and the insufficiency of the humanities of the previous age for apprehending it.
Chakrabarty engages attentively not only with what the humanities—philosophy in particular—can provide from its historical reflections on that first human, but also with what Earth System scientists offer regarding the second: to apprehend planetary history, now that humans’ impact on the planet's climate and on other planetary systems is part of human ethics. In turning to these sources, he never abandons the modern approach to these questions. However, one of his main arguments throws into question the appropriateness of modern tools for wrestling with a decentered human in the planetary age. The entire middle section of the book and chapter 3, which he characterizes as the “fulcrum” of his argument, suggest a mode of contemplation inconsistent with modern thought: “contemplating our own times required us to behold ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. The global is a humanocentric construction; the planet decenters the human” (18–19). He does not intend to set aside the role of sociogenic oppressions—“colony, race, class, gender, sexuality, ideologies, interests” (17), capital, and extraction—in contributing to climate change and injustice with his turn toward developing a planetary (not merely global) humanities of climate change, but he relies on mainstream academic Earth System Science, philosophy, and, to a lesser extent (see chapter 7), the social sciences to provide the basis for this two-perspective adventure.
Chakrabarty both challenges and advances the humanities by clarifying why decentering the human is also part of taking on the ethical challenge raised by climate change, proposing along with Earth System Science that the ontological basis for humanocentric modernity no longer holds. Thus, his approach is in praxis—in theory and in practice—modern. It is a modern academic methodology for approaching human problems. Despite his dissatisfaction with postcoloniality because as a mode of governing it has maintained the political commitments to modernity, Chakrabarty does not look outside those academic approaches that claim authority over the problem as he frames it: Earth System Science and philosophy.
Given Chakrabarty's question, his distinction between global and planetary perspectives on climate change, and the questions it prompts him to explore, decolonial theory generally and Indigenous climate studies in particular would seem like appropriate engagements. Indigenous climate studies offer a range of ways of conceiving of ontology that can frame the problem of the two perspectives without centering modernity. Moreover, the experience of Indigenous communities of North America of being relocated from one climate to a completely different one illustrates the need to consider the deep connections between sociogenic injustice and climate change as causal mechanisms and contacts of adaptation.
Chakrabarty briefly considers that Indigenous histories may provide “some exemplary lessons on some of the principles involved here” (48, see also n95). This reflection focuses merely on limited “exemplary lessons” from non-Indigenous anthropologists about Indigenous communities and is dismissive and extractive. It is dismissive of the contributions of Indigenous knowledge and a form of colonial extraction from Indigenous knowledges. In fact, Indigenous studies generally, and Indigenous climate studies in particular, have provided valuable insights that bear centrally on Chakrabarty's puzzle “in search of a redefinition of human relationships to the nonhuman, including the planet” (19).
Across a range of empirical contexts and Indigenous histories, Indigenous climate studies offer (in Western academic language) empirically supported theoretical contributions to the question of how we should understand the planetary age. Taken together (but not lumped together in some constructed pan-Indigenous cosmology), this scholarship goes beyond laying out the question that Chakrabarty raises and illustrating its deep history. It offers multiple ancestral, land-based wisdoms to human relationships in the planetary age. Indigenous climate studies have been developing the answer. It provides as least three broad directions to enable those who find the problem Chakrabarty raises ontologically provocative and have an interest in learning how it might be explored.
First, it offers methodologies. Nishnaabeg storyteller and theorist Leanne Betasomasake Simpson reveals in her community's intellectual history—in “Nishnaabeg Brilliance”—methodologies (Kwe) to understand the world without constructing binaries.Footnote 5 The first problematic binary Chakrabarty uses is the construction of a time when “we” were unaware of the planet as he defines it. Many people raised in Indigenous knowledge systems are not newly aware of the planet as Chakrabarty conceives of it, because they have always been aware of humans’ relationships to the nonhuman, animate and inanimate (to use another modern binary).
Second, Indigenous studies offers ideas that span human engagement with the planet long before the blip in human time that began with colonial extractivism. Of course, Indigenous people have a history of survivance,Footnote 6 resurgence,Footnote 7 refusal,Footnote 8 and political determination.Footnote 9 Through settler-colonialism, much of what has been suppressed includes their linguistic and other cultural resources for conceiving of humans’ relationships in a planetary way.Footnote 10 Despite these losses, Indigenous studies provides an intellectual resurgence that makes these insights available. These ideas are shared with non-Indigenous audiences through organizations like the First Alaskan Institute,Footnote 11 media,Footnote 12 policy briefings,Footnote 13 and scholarship. Kyle Powys Whyte reviews much of this literature in his essay on Indigenous climate studies.Footnote 14
Third, it provides an ontology and politics for the planetary age. Again, in turning to this thought from a settler-colonial academic mindset (regardless of critical and postcolonial orientations within settler-colonial academe), we risk appropriating Indigenous thought to address material and conceptual problems caused by the same modern praxis that justified and organized centuries of settler colonialism and that continues to sustain its legacies of oppression and exploitation. The harms perpetuated by the forces supported by settler colonial ontology include ignoring, killing, displacing, impoverishing, and suppressing Indigenous thought and people. The history of resistance and resurgence in the face of settler colonialism is also telling.Footnote 15 In that vein, it is possible to learn from Indigenous climate studies made available through the efforts of Indigenous academics in a way that respects by engaging with those ideas. Such engagement need not be extractive. Rather, in this context, ignoring and ignorance is a form of epistemic oppression.Footnote 16 Indigenous climate studies provides many examples of a “humanities” for the “planetary age” by ontologically and methodologically decentering the human and centering relationality in understanding these at the planetary scale across time, but doing so in a way that does not artificially construct a binary cognition of global sociogenic problems and planetary ones.
A more thorough review of Indigenous climate studies would only make the point more thoroughly. Indigenous thought has asked Chakrabarty's question in another way generations before Chakrabarty. Further, integrated within these knowledge systems are deeply relational politics that provide not just “principles,” but historically resilient, surviving, evolving, dynamic modes of engaging with each other and with earth systems that maintain that integrated view even through change.
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