I keep noticing settlers reaching for Indigenous knowledge as if we have already lived through an apocalypse and can therefore provide a reusable survival template for the one that’s coming.
The story underneath is that colonialism was a kind of world-ending event, Indigenous people survived it, and therefore climate breakdown is just another rhyme in the same historical pattern. That framing quietly turns Indigenous survival into proof that “humanity survives” and even that things eventually come out morally right, with respect and recognition following endurance.
It is a comforting narrative because it lets the future feel familiar and manageable, rather than genuinely new.
From where I stand, that analogy is false at the level that actually matters. This is not about resilience or spirit or cultural continuity; it is about material conditions exiting historical ranges. I see ecological signals that settlers around me simply do not register as signals at all.
When I lived in South Dakota, the limestone was literally falling apart from acid rain. That is not a hard time, a bad cycle, or a familiar stressor. That is the chemical dissolution of the ground itself under conditions that have never existed here before. Knowledge formed in relationship with stable rock, water, and seasons cannot simply be “applied” when those substrates are no longer behaving like themselves.
What frustrates me is being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to translate “this is different” into a language that still assumes continuity. Often the turn toward Indigenous knowledge functions less as respect and more as reassurance: a way for settlers to believe they can face collapse without fundamentally changing how they perceive, inhabit, or take responsibility for place. But Indigenous survival under colonialism happened within a world that still operated inside Holocene norms, even as it was violently reorganized.
Climate breakdown is pushing us beyond those norms entirely. Treating one as precedent for the other erases the very ecological perception Indigenous people are trying to point to: the moment when a place stops being able to carry the stories told about it.
