Natural resource justice as an anticolonial practice : policies of sovereignty
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Natural resources underpin our wellbeing as a species. Humans attribute value to these resources in different and sometimes competing ways. For Indigenous peoples, government dismissal of their natural resource values has created an unequitable relationship, where Indigenous social, political, economic, and cultural ties to nature are damaged. The shared struggle for Indigenous people living in post-colonial governments is that the pervasive effects of settler colonialism are ongoing, and the pursuit for natural resource rights continues. This dissertation uses legal document analysis and unstructured interviews with key informants to examine governance policies and structures through the lens of Indigenous rights. The dissertation is formatted in three manuscripts. The first manuscript examines jurisdictional tensions over surface mining rights on tribal lands in the state of Oklahoma following the United States Supreme Court case McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020). The second manuscripts examines the implications of changing federal Cannabis policy for the enforcement of criminal law, regulation of commercial activity, and regulation of cannabis research in Indian Country. The final manuscript identifies challenges in multilevel governance of natural resources with Indigenous peoples based on the perceptions of key informants in Aotearoa New Zealand and Hawaii. Overall findings reveal natural resource management challenges specific to Indigenous populations are complicated by legal pluralism, cultural mismatch, and institutional voids, and action must be taken by post-colonial governments to uphold the land and natural rights guaranteed to Indigenous peoples.
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Ph. D.