Digital Natives: Climate Change and Tactical Performance of Colonial Imaginaries

• In Event: Pedagogies of the Anthropocene: Constructing and Disrupting the Human and the Natural Through Public Display

Abstract

In 2014, a group called the Pacific Climate Warriors placed themselves in the path of barges seeking to deliver coal to the largest processing port in the world. The members of the group – a coalition of indigenous residents of twelve small islands off the coast of Australia – wore traditional tribal outfits and paddled handcrafted canoes in front of oncoming ships. Their protest was timed to coincide with the People’s Climate March in New York City and amplified by famous environmental advocate Bill McKibbon, who promoted the cause on the website of his nonprofit organization, 350.org. This visual and narrative juxtapositions of indigenous knowledge as an antidote to industrial excess were aimed at exciting the concern of those marching in the West. To do so, it played upon colonial conceptions that have provoked Western intervention in the past.

My paper, “Digital Natives: Climate Change and Tactical Performance of Colonial Imaginaries” will examine the Pacific Climate Warriors as one example of the ways in which indigenous cultures threatened by global warming and environmental destruction narrate their plight via new media to viewers in Western countries using performances that echo primitivist imaginaries of indigeneity and life on islands. These digital pleas for help often revolve around ideas of neocolonial consumption of “natural” places and primitivist constructions that frame native voices as mouthpieces for “the wild” and indigenous home spaces as global treasures that are valuable resources for Westerners looking for spatially antidotes to the ills of hyper-industrialization. “Digital Natives” will read these new media narratives in tandem with discourses that justified colonial expansion to illuminate another way in which climate change is disrupting spatiotemporal assumptions in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Shannon Davies Mancus, Colorado School of Mines