ECOLOGICAL RECONCILIATION: BRIDGING HUMANITY AND NATURE FOR JUSTICE By Esme Greene Murdock           A DISSERTATION Submitted to  Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of PhilosophyÑDoctor of Philosophy 2016    ABSTRACT ECOLOGICAL RECONCILIATION: BRIDGING HUMANITY AND NATURE FOR JUSTICE  By  Esme Greene Murdock  The disciplines of political philosophy and environmental ethics are both concerned with the articulation and analysis of harms as well as the creation of normative and sustainable remedies. However, these disciplines rarely overlap in either the scope of their analysis of harm or their remedies. For they largely articulate harm as either ÒpoliticalÓ or Òenvironmental,Ó and not importantly, both. ÒEcological Reconciliation: Bridging Humanity and Nature for JusticeÓ explores this separation between political philosophy and environmental ethics as exemplified in the separation of the literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration.  This dissertation argues that both political reconciliation and ecological restoration attempt to articulate processes of reconciliation as remedies to harmsÑwhere reconciliation is defined as the instantiation of right relations out of harmful ones. However, both the analysis of political and environmental harm and the proposed processes of reconciliation regarding these harms can be improved through the incorporation of more inclusive ecological relations within political reconciliation and through the incorporation of more inclusive political relations within ecological restoration. Ecological relations, roughly, track the physical processes and functionalities of ecosystems, while political relations track the human perspectives, lived experiences, and values that construct human relationships to power. Political reconciliation can come closer to its aspirations toward social justice from understandings of how environmental injustices both aggravate and contribute to social and political marginality; ecological restoration  can come closer to its aspirations to create greater environmental responsibility from analysis of how social and political injustices infuse and color restoration plans and projects.  This dissertation argues that the integration of ecological relations and political relations is key to better analyzing harm, as well as to the construction of sustainable, practical remedies. For example, the disproportionate siting of commercial toxic waste facilities in poor, communities of color in the United States is an instance of both social/political injustice and environmental injustice. Both levels of harms must be analyzed and addressed through reconciliatory frameworks that are expanded to account for them both. As solutions, this dissertation explores the literatures of environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics as areas of inquiry that center the relatedness of political and environmental harms/remedies. Both environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics prioritize the wedding of inclusive ecological relations and political relations to the instantiation of right relations and, thus, produce integrated, better models of reconciliation, which overcome limitations of both political reconciliation and ecological restoration models explored in the first part of the dissertation. Environmental justice tracks the ways in which environmental, social, and political ills disproportionately affect already vulnerable and marginalized communities, which illustrates the inextricable links between political and environmental injustice. Similarly, Indigenous environmental ethics examines how the rampant injustices (especially to the environment and ecosystems) of settler colonialism engender networks of harm that are deeply political and ecological, which call for reconciliatory processes that result in the ability of Indigenous communities to live in and experience the world in just, authentic, and culturally appropriate ways.                Copyright by ESME GREENE MURDOCK  2016  v              To those uprooted, eliminated, erased, and silenced. To those who cannot go home.   vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: The Separation of Ecological Relations and Political RelationsÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ1  1.1 Situating the Dissertation Project in Current LiteratureÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ........4  1.2 Political Theories of JusticeÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...8  1.3 ReconciliationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..18  1.4 Dissertation Chapter OutlineÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ22 Chapter 2: Does the Environment Have a Place in Political Reconciliation?...............................27  2.1 Ecological Vulnerability and Political RealitiesÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..30  2.2 Models of Political ReconciliationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...36   Models Resistant to Environmental ConcernÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ36    (1) ForgivenessÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..36    (2) Political ValueÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ......39   Models Amenable to Environmental ConcernÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...É43    (3) TrustÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.43    (4) Political CommunityÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ46    (5) Moral Agency/ReciprocityÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...49    (6) IndigenousÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..É..51             2.3 Is the Exclusion of the Environment from Political Reconciliation Justified?............54 Chapter 3: The Evolution of Ecological RestorationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.58  3.1 The Thin Paradigm of Ecological RestorationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.61   Culture Versus Nature RejectionÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...63   ÒValue-freeÓ/ÒObjectiveÓ Landscape RejectionÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ67  3.2 The Thick Paradigm of Ecological RestorationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...70  3.3 Is the Thick Paradigm Better?......................................................................................74  3.4 Case Study: The Sinkyone Intertribal Park ProjectÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.77 Chapter 4: Environmental JusticeÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..81  4.1 The Emergence of the Environmental Justice MovementÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...82  4.2 Amendments to the Environmental Justice MovementÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...90   Civic Estrangement and the Erasure of Black Ecological IdentitiesÉÉÉÉÉ.92  4.3 Case Study: ÒThe Flint Water CrisisÓÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..É..101 Chapter 5: Indigenous Environmental EthicsÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..É109  5.1 Coloniality, Time, and SpatialityÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ.É..112                          Settler ColonialismÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..114  5.2 The Danger of Testimony and Epistemic ViolenceÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...ÉÉÉ119   The Emotional Space of TheoryÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ..124  5.3 The Restoration/Reconciliation of Community is LandÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ126  5.4 Co-Management Models of ReconciliationÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...130   Sinkyone and Sturgeon Restoration ProjectsÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ...133 Concluding RemarksÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ137 BIBLIOGRAPHYÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ....141  1 Chapter 1: The Separation of Ecological Relations and Political Relations This chapter provides an overview of the dissertation problem. This is the problem that is often analyzed as either political or environmentalÑa conceptual division that then appears in conceptions of repair. This dissertation argues that the presentation of ecological relations and political relations as separate and oppositional to each other leads to similarly bifurcated methods of harm analysis and proposed remedies. It does this through briefly exploring the separation of political and ecological relations as they manifest within the areas of political reconciliation and ecological restoration. Section I situates the dissertation project in relation to literatures within both political philosophy and environmental philosophy. This section examines the ways in which specific conceptions of humans and environments construct political analysis of harms and remedies and environmental analysis as exclusionary categories. Section II explores both distributive and recognition frameworks of justice as specific examples of how harm has been analyzed within political philosophy. It argues that each articulation does not have a way of considering or incorporating environmental dimensions of harm and that this is problematic. Section III examines the concept of reconciliation through various scholarly, political and philosophical engagements with it. It explores what is both philosophically promising and challenging about the notion of reconciliation as a particular mode of repairing harm/damaged relations, and ultimately justifies the decision to examine reconciliation as the suggested mode of repair within the dissertation. Finally, section IV provides a detailed breakdown of each of the dissertationÕs chapters.  Social and political philosophy and environmental ethics are each areas of inquiry focused on understanding and improving our well being in the world. Both are importantly interested in understanding and articulating the nature of harm and how harms are to be repaired.  2 Particular methods for reconciliation are presented within the sub-literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration. Political reconciliation and ecological restoration both prioritize repairing relations. In this way, political reconciliation and ecological restoration fall under the larger category of reconciliation. They both identify harms, as a disruption of relationships or as an instantiation of harmful relationships, which must be repaired. I define reconciliation as the process through which right relations are formed out of harmed relations. The development of right relations will often rely on unoppressive examples from the past (where present) or will create new relations (in the absence past models) to move toward a better future.1 Either way, they each point toward a different way of relating that is not harmful or injurious. Right relations are relationships that are just and allow the entities involved to exist in ways that are not oppressive. Right relations allow members within a relationship to ensure a positive future for all involved.   As reconciliation is about the formation of right relations, it is concerned with understanding harm, injury and degradation. Despite the areas of overlap, little dialogue exists between the environmental and social and political literatures. For example, literatures on ecological restoration tend to leave out political reconciliation with few exceptions, while literatures on political reconciliation do not mention the need to repair environmental damages and harms as part of establishing right political relations. These missing connections are troubling because often privileged people fail to see why environmental injustices, such as polluted air and water supplies, require deeper forms of reconciliation than simply enacting stricter environmental regulations. Similarly, ecological restoration practitioners do not aim to address issues of racial and economic privilege that can bias what restoration projects aim to                                                 1 This does not disallow the possibility that both aspects of past models of right relations and new instantiations of better relations can be combined to carry out reconciliatory processes.   3 restore. Consider how Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in cities like Detroit may fall short of achieving long term goals if obvious environmental inequalities continue to divide urban residents even after they have engaged in dialogue on other forms of oppression, such as racial segregation; or how ecological restoration initiatives such as the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference (SOLEC) in the Great Lakes Region fail if they do not include political reconciliation between settler societies and the Indigenous peoples of the region. This dissertation is concerned with the ways in which the assumptions and frameworks that support the separation of social and political relations from ecological relations are articulated and argued for, while also proposing that these hyper-separations are ultimately not as useful or intuitive as they appear. Throughout the dissertation, I explore in detail some of the reasons why these literatures are not in dialogue. I propose solutions that emerge from literatures in which dialogue between political relations and ecological relations are present.   I posit that one of the key reasons that political reconciliation and ecological restoration are not in dialogue with each other is that they both rely on various conceptual separations, or boundaries, between what counts as the properly political and the properly environmental (Haila 2000; Heyd 2005). That is, political reconciliation and ecological restoration each feature underlying assumptions that what needs to be reconciled is either primarily political or primarily ecological in nature. By implication then, ÒharmÓ is assumed to be either political or ecological. This separation impedes dialogue because people think they are working with analytically distinct types of harm. To go back to the example of Detroit, there is a desperate need to restore and repair the broken trust that exists within that city and among its citizens from a legacy of abandonment, segregation, and exploitation. This legacy engenders communities in which already vulnerable and marginalized populations live in the most ecologically degraded  4 environments, which serve as waste sites for privileged populations. Trust cannot be repaired or reestablished in systems like this without addressing the histories and practicesÑboth political and environmentalÑthat mark certain citizens of Detroit as disposable.  A key aspect of my analysis relies on identifying political relations and ecological relations as influential factors present in the context of any ecopolitical2 harm and proposed methods of repair. Ecological relations, roughly, track the physical processes and functionalities of ecosystems, while political relations track the human perspectives, lived experiences, and values that shape the structure of social institutions and conflicts.3 The primary thesis of the dissertation is that ecological relations and political relations both co-constituteÑor mutually constructÑthe harms we categorize as either political or ecological. This connection means that our reconciliatory processes must also instantiate just solutions motivated by ÒrightÓ ecological relations and ÒrightÓ political relations. The process of connecting these literatures, in which ecological relations and political relations are viewed as mutually exclusive, demonstrates a process of reconciliation in itself.  1.1 Situating the Dissertation Project in Current Literature By focusing on how political relations and ecological relations are both contributing to analyses of harm and repair, I highlight a level of analysis that is continuously overlooked within the literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration. Political reconciliation excludes ecological relations as an important feature of political processes, harms, and resolutions. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa did not                                                 2 Ecopolitical is a term I use to include scenarios that are often coded as either political or environmental when they are, in fact, both. An ecopolitical situation is one where both ecological and political factors influence each other to produce the situation.  3 The definitions of ecological relations and political relations are provisional. They are offered to advance my analysis and expose the problem the dissertation is working through, they are not unchanging or uncomplicated givens.  5 include within its report an analysis of the way in which the ideology of Apartheid was actively supported by a geographical and territorial isolation of black South Africans in homelands (Truth & Reconciliaton Commission 1998; Butler, Rotberg, and Adams 1978). Under Apartheid, the South African government divided the Black South African population into 10 Ònations,Ó each of which were assigned a corresponding Òhomeland.Ó The majority of these homelands were in rural areas. While the majority of the population of South Africa is black Africans, the land allocated for all the homelands combined accounted for less than 13 percent of the total area of the Republic. Black South Africans are considered, in some respect, citizens of their homelands and Òare grantedÓ a certain degree of self-governance (Butler, Rotberg, and Adams 1978, 2).  The development and placement of Black South Africans in homelands intended to keep the Republic of South Africa sanitized and free of Black presence, while at the same time suggesting that these homelands were desirable because they tracked (externally identified and mandated) Òethnic/familialÓ designations. This physical separation included a host of negative ecological relations such as inferior environmental quality and lack of access to municipal services that resulted in poorer health conditions for black South Africans within the homelands, which consequently fulfilled and enabled their marginalized status politically (Butler, Rotberg, and Adams 1978).4 Similarly, while ecological restoration focuses on the ecological relations involving humans and ecosystems, it does not engage in the political aspects of restoration projects. For example, the State of the Lakes Ecological Conference (SOLEC) exists as an attempt to ecologically restore the Great Lakes Basin, but it has been critiqued for its westernized perspective that mostly ignores Aboriginal Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and political relations between Indigenous and settler societies. This is problematic because the                                                 4 For further evidence of the legacy of Apartheid regarding geographical separation, drastically different environmental quality, and urban planning that still exists today between White South Africa and Black South Africa see: (The Guardian 2016).  6 restoration of right political relations between these two groups is integral to long-term sustainable ecological relations in the region. The exclusion of ecological relations in the realm of political reconciliation and the exclusion of political relations in the realm of ecological restoration constitute practices of incomplete reconciliation and sometimes the creation of completely different harms and injuries. In Canada, for example, the completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may have led some settler Canadians to believe that reconciliation had occurred despite the fact that no reforms had been made to some of the major environmental issues Indigenous peoples face in Canada, such as control over subsurface rights on their lands (Hoogeveen 2014; Stanley 2016).  The separation of political relations and ecological relations manifest in distinct ways within the political reconciliation and ecological restoration literatures. Within the literature on political reconciliation, the ÒpoliticalÓ is mostly constructed in a way that excludes the natural world. This is evident in the ways in which some political reconciliation theories only reference the environment as a support system for human survival or as an economized resource that sometimes causes human conflict (Moellendorf 2007; Murphy 2010; Walker 2006). More often than not, the natural world is not referred to at all, as if politics and human affairs occur in a vacuum or that the environment is merely a convenient contingency of human flourishing. The history of the lack of theorization of the environment within the realm of politics is deeply embedded in (white) Western philosophical traditions.  Consider the depictions of the Òstate of natureÓ as articulated within the limited purview of what is considered the classical, Western political philosophy canon (Rousseau 2010; Hobbes 2011; Locke 2011b). These idealized or demonized depictions of nature as base, something to be overcome, property, or as a panacea operate in ways that disallow dynamic and complex understandings of human interactions with  7 the environment. The development of political philosophy has always relied on some consideration (however limited or warped) of the natural world, the vestiges of which still surface in contemporary discourse. What is important to track here though is how ecological harm is not a harm that is conceptualized as co-constitutive of or importantly connected to political realities. Relatedly, how the environment is theorized is not critically examined as a condition of the possibility for particular manifestations of political systems, including their problems. For example, consider how HobbesÕ depiction of the state of nature relies on representations of nature (both human and environmental) as wild, dangerous, and war-like. This initial characterization of nature leads him to propose a social contract in which humans accept the rule of government and governmental figurehead to combat the alternative (supposed) chaos that ensues without this political structure (Hobbes 2011). The construction of nature as a separate realm from human affairs and political governance does not allow for the articulation of a political system that demonstrates right relations with nature for Hobbes. His particular model of governance and political structure relies deeply on constructions of both internal and external nature as something separate and antithetical to political relations.  Within ecological restoration literature, the natural world is also theorized as separate from the human/political sphere. Many times the natural world is referred to as something that is by definition exclusive of humans in order for it to be considered authentic. As in political philosophy, this constitutes a human-structured and idealized construction of the environment. Early articulations of the environment in classical (white) environmental philosophy still focused on the use-value of the environment, but in less economized or explicitly profit-motivated ways. John Muir and others discuss the natural world as a cathedral, place of reverence, and escape (Thoreau 2008; Muir 2015). Notions of the environment, as places where humans are not, still  8 motivate human interactions with the environment even within restoration projects. Projects of ecological restoration have been framed as practices of restoring natural environments to a pre-human/ÒpristineÓ state. This mode of interaction is the only context through which human interference in nature is considered appropriate and warranted (Katz 1992; Elliot 1997). In this way, we can see that political theories of harm and reconciliation and ecological restoration formulate almost identical methods of excluding each other ultimately founded on a pernicious opposition of political relations versus ecological relations. Even in the case of Aldo Leopold, who argued that humans should be considered citizens of the biotic community, Leopold touches very little on political relations (Leopold 1989; Whyte 2015).5 I will sketch in more detail the landscape of the various literatures and how more inclusive philosophical theorizing and use of various conceptual frameworks might improve the work being done to think about and practically resolve complicated political and ecological problems. By bringing the political and ecological together as a unified framework importantly focused on relationality, my analysis will offer new ways of theorizing harm as both political and ecological, which will tailor different solutions that have less likelihood of creating previously unanticipated and new harms during the process of reconciliation.  1.2 Political Theories of Justice This section will engage in an analysis of two conceptual frameworks of justice critical to political philosophy: economic frameworks and recognition frameworks. Both frameworks propose different modes through which injustice is produced and how justice is achieved. Both                                                 5 By prioritizing political and ecological relations as the focus of analysis/inquiry, I am moving away from the broader culture/nature dualism, which has an extensive history of critique within the history of environmental ethics. Surely, ecological restoration projects encompass the interface of humans and the environment. However, I am arguing that these modes of analysis are lacking in a particular attention to political relations inherent in these human/nature encounters.    9 are engaged in argumentative strategies that aim to locate and articulate harm as a specific kind of entity. As evinced in the existence of this dissertation project, trouble occurs when we try to make frameworks strictly exclusive and oppositional when they are actually related.         Within political philosophy, there are a series of arguments and debates about what the specific genesis or genealogy of the harms we characterize as political is. This debate is about where harm finds its origin or rather what type of conceptual frame we see as most fundamental (if at all) to describing and understanding harm as well as correcting or repairing harm. One of the frameworks for examining harm is distributive justice. In a basic sense, distributive justice is an economic framework that tracks justice based on the distribution of economic benefits or burdens as carried out through societal structures such as laws, policies, and institutions (Rawls 1999). Where distribution is unjust, proposals of redistribution serve as models of repair (Fraser 1997). Since distribution of economic benefits and burdens hinge upon the structures and institutions in place in particular societies, redistribution of things like wealth similarly requires a reorganization of those structures and institutions. There is ongoing debate about what things should be distributed (income, wealth, opportunity, and so on) and also who or what qualify as recipients (individuals, groups, classes, and so on) (Barry 1991; Roemer 1998; Arthur and Shaw 1991). However, distributive justice proposes the mode through which justice is achieved or denied is ultimately distribution, regardless of questions concerning what is being distributed and whom it is being distributed to. Distribution is the main tenant of this framework where harm, philosophically, concerns not being allocated enough of some good. An example of this type of harm is economic harm, where having less financial means or access to useful financial resources, such as loans, harms a person.     10 While distribution and economic forms of harm affect people and societies in serious ways, there is another important form of harm that is related, but not captured in primarily distributive frameworks. Another form of harm is being denied the right to participate equally in how distributions are determined. This deontological articulation of harm prompts a focus not only on the consequences of mal-distribution as harm, but also the harmful means through which that unequal distribution comes about. While the distributive model is explanatory and useful for tracking the consequences and harm of unequal distribution, it does not track well the ways in which that distribution comes to be unequal. Unequal and unrepresentative participation when it comes to the formation and maintenance of societal structures and institutions is a major harm that contributes to the predictable patterns of whom in society receives the most distributive benefits as well as burdens. This aspect of harm and justice must be addressed if distributive harms are to be remedied in real ways (Young 2011).    There are many critiques of economic frameworks of harm and distributive models of justice. A prominent critique is that economic and distributive frameworksÕ focus on distribution of economic benefits and burdens is too narrow. It is too narrow in the sense that it does not address other kinds of harm that may be related to, but not reducible to economic classification. Critiques posed by advocates of recognition justice fall within this camp. Recognition justice is concerned with the ways in which society or other members of society harm communities and individuals by misrecognizing them in negative and harmful ways. Misrecognition has been studied in relation to those groups and communities who have been victims of racism and colonization, where being misrecognized is related to warped relationships with oneself and carries a distinct psychological/existential harm (Fanon 2008). Thus recognition justice focuses on proper and appropriate recognition as a Òvital human needÓ (C. Taylor 1994, 26). Recognition  11 frameworks of justice expand notions of justice beyond a primary focus of how many goods a person or community should have, to considerations concerning how the recognition of others affects oneÕs standing as a person (Young 2011). Since one of misrecognitionÕs primary functions within societies is to marginalize and oppress certain groups, I am interested in how misrecognition designates some communities not only as socially/politically inferior, but also as sites for rampant environmental injustice. While economic and recognition frameworks of justice gesture towards differing ideas about what justice requires or looks like, there is little consideration in either for the importance and distinctiveness of environmental injustice. As evidence of this, I offer an overview of two political theories of harm: that of Axel HonnethÕs whose focus is on harm as misrecognition and that of Nancy FrasersÕs whose focus is on the mutual influence of both misrecognition and unfair distribution.          Honneth frames his theory of harm by proposing that all harms issue from the same sphere of misrecognition and disrespect. Misrecognition refers to the process of being identified and treated in a way that is harmful, that distorts oneÕs ability to relate to oneself in positive ways. One form of harmful treatment related to misrecognition for Honneth is disrespect, which encapsulates physical maltreatment, exclusion and social devaluation (Honneth 2004; Honneth 1992). In this way, HonnethÕs theory of justice, grounded in recognition, moves away from previous models of justice that focused primarily on the distribution of economic goods in terms of righting the wrongs of inequality. For Honneth, economic inequalities can ultimately be explained through the lens of recognition; unequal or unjust distribution or access to economic goods or burdens stems from a lack of recognition that denies a person his or her full citizenship or status as a full citizen. Economic inequality, then, shows up as yet another distortion of misrecognition. Recognition, for Honneth, is the basic unit/frame for conceptualizing harm or  12 injustice and thus proper recognition must also be the solution or method of repair for such harms.         Honneth characterizes the most pernicious form of misrecognition as Òdisrespect.Ó He breaks this concept of disrespect into three major kinds: disrespect to a personÕs physical integrity or physical maltreatment, disrespect by ostracism or exclusion, and disrespect by social devaluation. Disrespect for a personÕs physical integrity results in Òsocial shame, loss of self-confidence and trust in the world, as well as adverse effects in practical interactions with otherÓ (Honneth 1992, 190). Disrespect by ostracism or exclusion results in individuals feeling as though they are not full members of society with full-fledged access to the same moral rights as others. Individuals who are disrespected in this way feel Òa loss of self-respect, of the ability to relate to oneself as a partner to interaction in possession of equal rights on a par with all other individualsÓ (Honneth 1992, 191). Finally, disrespect through social devaluation involves evaluative forms of disrespect such as denigration of individual or collective lifestyles. ÒIf this hierarchy of societal values is structured so as to downgrade individual forms of living and convictions for being inferior or deficient, then it robs the subjects in question of every opportunity to accord their abilities social valueÓ (Honneth 1992, 191). Individuals who are socially devalued usually experience a severe loss of self-esteem because Ò[they] are no longer in a position to conceive of [themselves] as beings whose characteristic traits and abilities are worthy of esteemÓ (Honneth 1992, 191). All of these forms of misrecognition that Honneth characterizes constitute harmed relations that are in need of reconciliation in order to instantiate right relations.          The solutions Honneth proposes to righting these harmed relations are the development of relationships of mutual recognition and are characterized as love, rights, and solidarity. For  13 Honneth, love does not refer to romantic love, but rather a foundation of emotional support and encouragement. He defines it as an Òunderlying layer of an emotional body-related sense of security in expressing oneÕs own needs and feelings, a layer which forms the psychological prerequisite for the development of all further attitudes of self-respectÓ (Honneth 1992, 193). The reparative category of rights involves the mutual recognition of equal rights or that people recognize each other as legal persons with knowledge of norms that their community dictates as rights and responsibilities to which everyone is equally entitled (Honneth 1992, 194). Solidarity involves the moral capacity for sympathy for and solidarity with Òunconventional lifestyles.Ó This would allow for encouragement and approval of persons based on an understanding that people have special characteristics that are informed by their Òspecific biographiesÓ (Honneth 2004b, 194).      Fraser has taken issue with HonnethÕs reduction of all harm and repair to the framework of recognition because she is weary of a psychological attitude or category being the basic structure of how we understand harm and larger systematic interworkings that contribute to injustice. Thus, she rejects HonnethÕs solitary conceptual framework of recognition. While Fraser does not abandon the conceptual framework and importance of recognition for justice, she does not ultimately reduce all such concerns for justice to a recognition framework and disagrees with how Honneth defines recognition. She instead offers a bivalent theory of justice that views just distribution and proper recognition as both distinct in nature and important in diagnosing and remedying injustice.         She distinguishes socioeconomic injustice from cultural and symbolic injustice. Socioeconomic injustice involves activities such as economic exploitation, economic marginalization, deprivation, and the like, while cultural and symbolic injustice concerns itself  14 with realities such as cultural domination, non-recognition, and disrespect. Since she breaks injustice (the systematic confluence of factors resulting in wide spread and particularized harms for some citizens) into these two analytically distinct categories, her antidote similarly involves two distinct solutions. The solution for socioeconomic injustice is redistribution, while the solution for cultural and symbolic injustice is recognition. Redistribution requires Òredistributing income, reorganizing the division of labour, subjecting investment to democratic decision-making, or transforming other basic economic structuresÓ (Fraser 1997, 73). While recognition involves Òupwardly revaluing disrespected identities and the cultural products of maligned groupsÉrecognizing and positively valorizing cultural diversityÉwholesale transformation of societal patterns of representation, interpretation and communication in ways that would change everybodyÕs sense of selfÓ (Fraser 1997, 73, emphasis in original).         While Fraser views socioeconomic injustice, cultural/symbolic injustice, redistribution, and recognition as distinct entities, she also asserts that these entities interact and influence each other in important ways. The reality that we inhabit a world where there exist multiple kinds of injustice that can mutually inform each other leads Fraser to advocate for transformative remedies to these problems as opposed to affirmative remedies. Affirmative remedies are Òremedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them,Ó while transformative remedies are those Òaimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative frameworkÓ (Fraser 1997, 82). An example of a symbolic cultural injustice being treated with an affirmative remedy alone would be something like trying to tackle cultural domination with something like a superficial multiculturalism. Changing the rhetoric of how cultural dominance is enacted in such a way that it affirms the value of cultural minorities may be a step in the right  15 direction, but without attending to the deeper structural problems that continue to generate disadvantaged and discounted cultural identities seems to be only a half-remedy at best. Transformative remedies might look to deconstruct the underlying structures that result in such systematic and widespread devaluing of cultural minorities and also how these structures reinforce narratives and practices of cultural dominance and supremacy.          While both Honneth and Fraser contribute to theorization of injustice and harm within the literature of political theory and both push for more holistic and robust theories of repair that attend to the various types of injustices that can crop up, both miss key relationshipsÑespecially ecological ones, for my purposes here. What I mean by this is that neither actively or seriously attends to the way in which ecological relations inform both of their accounts of justice. Fraser and HonnethÕs accounts each expand the parameters of justice frameworks beyond distribution, but neither creates a space to allow for deep and robust notions of the environmentÕs importance. Through a lack of theorization or consideration of the importance of the environment and ecological relations, the environment is presented in particular way, primarily as a resource or support system on which humans/human affairs depend. This not only marginalizes and alienates other views of and relations to the environment that go beyond this instrumental view, but it also prescribes remedies to injustice that do not attempt to instantiate better/different ecological relations. The presentation of the environment as inert matter and not as a scientifically complex, determinate agent is in itself harmful and allows for mistreatment of the environment as well as the unhampered progression of environmental injustices.  Now, it could be argued that both Honneth and Fraser do have ways of addressing the environment and environmental concerns within their frameworks. One might argue that HonnethÕs first notion of disrespect as physical harm could encapsulate environmental injustices  16 or that FraserÕs notion of symbolic injustice can account for the injustice of the disposability of certain populations through environmental degradation and marginalization. However, HonnethÕs concept of disrespect as physical harm still seems too narrow to incorporate deep, robust conceptualizations to the environment and ecological relations. For example, I can imagine a scenario where environmental racism still exists, but the physical harm of living in a degraded environment is not viewed or characterized as a direct form of physical maltreatment. Or consider again the views of some settler Canadians who believe reconciliation is achieved after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there, while First Nations peoples still have no subsurface rights on their lands. First Nations peoples could be seen by some as being respected in this instance and yet are still dealing with deeply harmful structural injustices that infringe upon their sovereignty, land tenure, and environmental well-being. By theorizing all harm as fundamentally a refraction of proper recognition, Honneth under theorizes how harms involving recognition directly result in distributive or other structural harms. It is unclear how his solutions to misrecognition would ultimately connect to or repair problems of structural injustice/mal distribution.  And what about FraserÕs notion of symbolic injustice? Could the disposability of populations affirmed through environmental racism be explained through FraserÕs symbolic injustice category? I would argue that while symbolic injustice captures some of the serious harm inflicted upon populations through misrecognition and cultural domination, it does not consider the centrality of ecological relations sufficiently. For example, many Indigenous peoplesÕ cultural beliefs, practices, and traditions are inseparable from the land they belong to. While Indigenous land theft and relocation of Indigenous peoples could be seen as both a symbolic injustice and an economic mal-distribution under FraserÕs account, this injustice is not reducible  17 to either. This is due to the fact that the mutual influence of both cultural elimination and dominant settler conceptions of land largely make Indigenous ways of life impossible such that solutions to ensuring justice for these populations go far beyond redistribution and affirmation/transformation in the general sense. Further, economic accounts of distribution of land where land is viewed as an interchangeable commodity do not square with Indigenous conceptions of a land and are in themselves harmful. FraserÕs account would be improved by deeper attention to the environment and ecological relationsÕ centrality to justice.  Both Honneth and FraserÕs accounts fail to theorize environmental harm or ecological relations as important aspects that attribute both to misrecognition and unfair distribution. As I will argue throughout the dissertation and specifically in chapters four and five, reconciliation requires the repair of both ecological relations and political relations at the same time. The confluence of political and social marginalization of vulnerable populations and their relegation to severely degraded environmental spaces is not reducible to either mal-distribution or misrecognition, but these areas of harm are overlapping and mutually influencing each other.          I find this absence of ecological conceptions of harm to be a more general trend in theories of harm within political philosophy. It is almost as if the term political is, without explicit awareness or explanation, confined to the sphere of human projects alone, while disregarding the actual embedded nature of humansÕ existence in and among the natural world. This is a limitation in the sense that is does not allow us to theorize harm and injustice completely, which means that our remedies are similarly incomplete. With this neglect of the environmental now established, I move to examining the ways in which reconciliation as a concept has been theorized and utilized.     18 1.3 Reconciliation As shown above, there are many ways to conceptualize what repair in response to harms and injustices should look like. In this project, I focus on reconciliation and that is a decision worth addressing and justifying. To begin, I am not arguing that reconciliation is necessarily the only way to address or repair oppressive, unjust, or harmful relationships, but it is the one I focus on here given that reconciliation is used in a number of contexts globally. Part of what a more expansive treatment and articulation of reconciliation as a goal and process requires, however, is to closely study what it is about reconciliation that is both philosophically appealing and philosophically challenging. There are many different ways reconciliation is theorized and these theorizations encompass different levels. A distinct context in which reconciliation is thought about is at the interpersonal level where what is being reconciled is a relationship between individual persons (Walker 2006; Griswold 2007; Radzik 2011). We can track the goal and process of reconciliation through a hypothetical interpersonal scenario. Imagine two people who are friends with one another and that Friend A betrays Friend B, thus damaging the friendship. Here, the primary harm is the betrayal, which belies a normative structure informing the relationship: friendship. Friendship as a type of relationship encapsulates a variety of assumptions that friends rely on to build and maintain an authentic friendship. Some characteristics of a good friendship might include: trust, honesty, respect, consideration, and holding the otherÕs best interests at heart. A betrayal in the midst of these characteristics constitutes a deviation from the norm, but can also convey a calculated choice one party is making to intentionally harm the other, knowing the betrayal will cause the other considerable harm.  One might also assume that given a particular history of good relations within the friendship up until the point of betrayal could make the betrayal more poignant to Friend B.  19 Reconciliation in this scenario would require many things, but perhaps most importantly an acknowledgment of how the betrayal harmed Friend B and damaged the friendship, thus ushering a new chapter of the relationship in which harm needs to be repaired in order for both friends and the relationship to move forward. There are already here many questions and potential challenges to examining harm and reconciliation within the context of an interpersonal friendship. For example, what if the nature of the betrayal was so damaging to the relationship that salvaging or building a new friendship is either not possible or not desirable to Friend B? There is also the danger of putting the onus of reconciliation on one party in a way that disproportionately burdens the recipient of the harm or further harms that party. Now, this is a particular scenario that has rather neat parameters. What I mean by this is that it involves two individual actors, a history of benevolent and friendly relations, and a single act of betrayal that has damaged that history and relationship. We can assume here that both actors speak a language the other understands and that they share somewhat similar worldviews or at least exist with some commonalities that allow both actors to recognize and respect each other.  When we consider just how complicated, involved, and challenging interpersonal reconciliatory processes are with limited actors, we can appreciate how difficult reconciliation is for groups of people in much more complex historical contexts where a starting point of conciliation is not assumed or indeed present. Questions of scale become increasingly relevant. For example, the occurrence and examination of events in the 1990s such as the end of South African Apartheid, the Rwanadan Genocide, and the wars within former Yugoslavia, prompted the expansion of reconciliation and transitional justice as massive sites of political and philosophical inquiry. The larger context of and number of actors within these crises encouraged  20 theorization of reconciliation beyond the confines of individual interpersonal contexts to broader legal and political scales. Transitional justice6, which was largely developed and deployed to understand and analyze the crises listed above, focuses on what is necessary to transition post-conflict societies to more stable/democratic states (Minow 1999; Teitel 2000). However, the value of reconciliation has also been taken up in the context of stable, non-transitional societies such as the US, Canada, and Australia. Questions of reconciliation, here, attend to how to cope with large historical injustices of the past that still affect communities within states who must interface and live with each other (Brooks 1999; Thompson 2002; Barkan and Karn 2006; Kymlicka and Bashir 2010). Different models of reconciliation abound because of disagreement and debate as to what processes are appropriate in particular cases, as well as how reconciliationÕs success is measured. The fact that this debate is ongoing and critical is encouraging because it exemplifies the resistance to master harm and repair narratives.  A major challenge of reconciliation especially, within the new context in which it is applied, is understanding what goals and processes are required to achieve the goals of reconciliation in any given scenario. The word reconciliation in itself is challenging as the ÒreÓ prefix channels a backward, past, reflective movement. This is not in itself a problem and can be seen as an important directionality since the historical context matters and needs to be examined in scenarios where harms and injustices are present, where reconciliation is called for. What could be problematic about a purely retroactive directionality, in regard to reconciliation, is when a better or unproblematic past or situation is assumed. Many communities embroiled in the pernicious harms and injustices (such as racial minorities in the US) are tangled in a systemic and structural machine created and reconstituted all the time to manufacture and perpetuate their                                                 6 A closely related framework of justice is restorative justice. For articulations of restorative justice see (Umbreit and Armour 2011; Van Ness and Strong 1997; van Wormer and Walker 2013).  21 oppression. For African Americans in the US, in particular, there is no conciliatory historical moment or context to recall or use as a blueprint for instantiating right relations and justice for these communities in that nation.   There are also factors present within the contexts of massive historical injustices that outstrip the somewhat neater parameters of person-to-person reconciliation within the relationship of a friendship. For one, massive historical injustices have differing time spans and in the case of US slavery the harm spans generations and encompasses the actions and inactions of countless actors, the majority of whom are no longer present. In these cases, it is hard to pinpoint a single or primary harm since the harms and injustices have been compounded through repetition and the carving out of patterns of structural predictability (Bourdieu 2000). These patterns and structural pathways through repetition become normalized, but not less reprehensible. The suggested inertia of the realities dictated by these patterns is relied upon to justify the objective or neutral nature of the unjust outcome systematically doled out to certain populations, e.g. African Americans. A major focus of this dissertation is tracking harm and injustice when the normative background against which these deviations stand out is immoral. This requires paying attention to the ways in which systematic injustices are naturalized as the status quo to try to blend the foreground and background of ethical reasoning and the process of distinguishing right from wrong.  A major contribution of the dissertation to the reconciliation literature is exploring and articulating the way in which the environment and ecological relations are deeply connected and constitutive to the political problems we experience and analyze. Even within the hypothetical interpersonal example of a betrayal between friends, we can imagine how ecological relations might factor into interpersonal betrayal. Suppose that different conceptions of the environment  22 and differing beliefs about the place and importance of ecological relations might amplify interpersonal conflict. Suppose Friend A interacts with Friend A and BÕs shared environment in a way that illustrates a harmful relation to the environment and Friend BÕs worldview/culture as related to that environment. An attitude toward the environment that dictates through Friend AÕs behavior an oppressive position toward Friend B and Friend BÕs relationship to her environment could constitute a serious harm that fundamentally challenges FriendÕs A expressed respect and friendship toward Friend B. Similarly, in broader group contexts, attitudes toward the land of a shared nation state or national boundary might constitute deep harms of cultural domination, elimination, and attempts to justify environmental degradation. Through expanding the avenues of inquiry and analysis of reconciliation to include ecological reconciliation, this dissertation offers ways of theorizing and practicing harm analysis and remedies that are more thorough and sustainable.  1. 4 Dissertation Chapter Outline Since the dissertation is motivated by the problematic separation of political relations from ecological relations, chapter two explores the ways in which ecological harms and concerns are left out of the theorization of political reconciliation. The main questions this chapter attempts to answer are: (1) are there any compelling reasons as to why it is acceptable to allow for and/or justify this exclusion?  And, (2) is political reconciliation justified by valid reasons in excluding the environment from its analysis? Section I will examine the South African and Detroit TRCs as case studies of political projects of reconciliation that exclude environmental concerns and offer three reasons as to how political and ecological concerns are connected. These reasons are broadly: (1) that social harms often map onto environmental harms, (2) that historical context such as environmental and settler colonialism matter for justice, and (3) that  23 political relations are dependent on a finite physical environment. Section II will assess six prominent models of political reconciliation based on the three reasons formulated from section I. Finally, section III will provide and examine two pseudo reasons that justify the exclusion of environmental concerns from models of political reconciliation.  Conversely, chapter three explores the ways in which political relations are excluded from the field of ecological restoration. This chapter examines debates within ecological restoration surrounding the extent of human involvement in restoration projects. I use the distinctions of thin and thick to categorize distinct paradigms of ecological restoration that espouse different goals and commitments. The thin paradigm of ecological restoration is concerned with whether it is possible or desirable to restore landscapes to a particular historical state through human interventions, where the particular historical goal landscape is a ÒpristineÓ wilderness. This commitment promotes a process of ecological restoration that requires human intervention only until the landscape is Òrestored,Ó then the erasure and removal of human presence. The thick paradigm of ecological restoration views the ecological integrity of landscapes as intimately linked to the health and well being of people and, thus, engages ecological restoration projects as a way to reconcile humans with one another and their stewardship obligations to the environment.  Section I examines a prominent understanding of ecological restoration found within the thin paradigm and its focus on restoration as the creation of a chronologically past and historically specific ecological system and offers reasons for rejecting this view. Section II examines how the thick paradigm of ecological restoration provides more inclusive and dialogical frameworks for restoration projects. Section III argues that the thick paradigm of ecological restoration is preferable to the thin paradigm because it creates more space for vulnerable communities, who are increasingly becoming more involved in  24 environmental issues. Section IV examines why the thick paradigm of ecological restoration is better for more responsible restoration projects through the case study of the Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project.  Chapter four closely follows the argumentation of chapters two and three that supports the unreasonableness of excluding the environment from analyses of harm. This chapter argues that political agency is not achievable as a goal without analyses and interrogations of environmental harm that foreclose the possibility of full political agency to many communities. This chapter examines the environmental justice movement as one literature that understands environmental dimensions of harm as roadblocks to the creation of reconciliation and instantiation of right relations within society. Section I will explore the ways in which environmental justice tracks the patterns of social inequality and environmental inequality that lead to the most socially/politically marginalized and vulnerable communities incurring the least safe and most degraded environments, with special attention to black American communities in the US. Section II focuses on black American communities in the US as a group disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and suggests that one of the ways in which harm is done to black American communities is through the destruction of their unique environmental heritages and environmental identities. Section III investigates the Flint Water Crisis as a case study, which illustrates the need for reconciliation among black American communities and characterizes the instantiation of right relations as the ability of these communities to express their environmental heritages and identities. The ability to express and the acceptance of these heritages and identities by society is integral to the practice social/political agency. In this way, this chapter will argue that environmental harm, environmental heritages, and environmental identities are all integral to reconciliationÕs goals of  25 political agency and environmental health. Thus, this chapter illustrates how environmental justice is fundamentally a project of reconciliation.  Chapter five continues previous chaptersÕ argumentation for the integral nature of the environment and ecological reconciliation to the construction of reconciliatory processes that aim to build political agency and trust among the marginalized communities affected by social, political, and environmental harm at the hands of the state.  Chapter five expands upon this thesis through exploring the ways in which Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, and knowledges inform particular methods of analyzing harm and designing reconciliation process. Essential to this analysis is the emphasis of the harmful effects of settler colonialism on Indigenous lands, ecosystems, and peoples. In this way, reconciliation always requires the instantiation of right relations with the environment (i.e. right ecological relations), which is inextricable from political structures and realities. Section I analyzes the disruptions to Indigenous systems (physical, epistemological, ecological, spiritual) and lifeways that were interrupted and displaced through ÒContactÓ and settler colonialism. Section II examines the danger of dominant epistemological systems uprooting and erasing Indigenous ones in the form of reconciliatory processes that rely on specific testimonial exchanges as the primary basis for evidence of wrongdoing. This section also explores the importance of the emotional space of theory as articulated by Dian Million, which is necessary for addressing the excessive trauma and lived experience of Indigenous histories with settler states and their relationships to the environment. Section III studies the essential role and place of land, Creation, and relationality to the existence and flourishing of Indigenous communities as well as their primary roles in reconciliatory processes. Section IV explores Indigenous/settler co-management practices as sites of reconciliation that incorporate, acknowledge, and honor Indigenous peoples and their  26 epistemological systems, traditions, and lifeways.  This section also examines the practical applications of Indigenous-centered forms of reconciliation through the sturgeon and Sinkyone case studies touched upon briefly in chapters two and three.               27 Chapter 2: Does the Environment Have a Place in Political Reconciliation? This chapter explores the ways in which ecological harms and concerns are left out of the theorization of political reconciliation. The main questions this chapter attempts to answer are: (1) are there any compelling reasons as to why it is acceptable to allow for and/or justify this exclusion?  And, (2) is political reconciliation justified by valid reasons in excluding the environment from its analysis? Section I will examine the South African and Detroit TRCs as case studies of political projects of reconciliation that exclude environmental concerns and offer three reasons as to how political and ecological concerns are connected. These reasons are broadly: (1) that social harms often map onto environmental harms, (2) that historical context such as environmental and settler colonialism matter for justice, and (3) that political relations are dependent on a finite physical environment. Section II will assess six prominent models of political reconciliation based on the three reasons formulated from section I. Finally, section III will provide and examine two pseudo reasons that justify the exclusion of environmental concerns from models of political reconciliation.  Scholars and activists view political reconciliation as a transition from harmful political relations to more democratic and inclusive political relationships (Schaap 2005; Walker 2006; van Wormer and Walker 2013; Moellendorf 2007; Murphy 2010).  The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is viewed largely as a prototype for political reconciliation processes that promote healing and moral political relations. The South African model of reconciliation set out to correct harmful political relations that specifically targeted and maintained an oppressed population based on the arbitrary marker of skin color (Truth & Reconciliaton Commission 1998). In 2009, the City of Detroit, Michigan drafted a charter for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, inspired by South AfricaÕs TRC, in hopes to address the  28 systematic and institutional racism that has plagued and continues to plague the city (Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion 2011). The impetus and need for reconciliation is undeniable in societies characterized by rampant political injustice and strife. Yet in both of the cases just referenced, I am struck by the absence of the environment. Both processes are firmly located within the realm of human affairs. What I mean by this is that political reconciliation engages with a community of actors that are human. The political reconciliation literature does not offer any justification for the exclusivity of politics to the human domain. This is initially troubling if the purpose of political reconciliation is to repair harmful political relations. For recent academic literaturesÑenvironmental justice being an exampleÑshow how political injustice and strife are often coupled with environmental degradation (Cole and Foster 2001; Shrader-Frechette 2002; R. D. Bullard 1990; P. Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009).  Take the example of the South African TRC. Actors in this TRC envisioned reconciliation necessary in post-apartheid South Africa as a means of redressing a pervasive and damaging harm, namely, the state-sanctioned segregation and unequal treatment of Black South Africans. This injustice and harm is framed solely as an intra-human affair remedied by human solutions. However, it was not merely human actions or the human sphere that was complicit or responsible for the successful occurrence and maintenance of Apartheid. Part of what makes atrocities like Apartheid possible are the structural and physical conditions which reproduce the interpersonal/individual beliefs that a certain population is not worthy of equal and just treatment (an idea that interestingly enough finds its origin in rhetoric around the inferiority of the natural world). Apartheid was not only possible through an ideology of difference that equated difference with inferiority, but was actually produced through physical and material markers and  29 significations of inequality (such as black South AfricansÕ relocation to ecologically specific Homelands). Apartheid could not have been successful without the physical separation of bodies and environments that accompanied the message of black marginalization and oppression.   The now abandoned Metropolitan Detroit Truth & Reconciliation Commission on Racial Inequality exhibited similar blind spots when it came to thinking of the environment and environmental degradation as not importantly related to the injustices of racial inequality and systematic racism (Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion 2011). The charter offers an obscure analysis of institutional structures as being important to the reproduction of unjust beliefs and practices against African Americans in the city of Detroit, but it does not offer a specific analysis or hypothesis as to how that reproduction is so consistently and successfully carried out. For example, how are we to understand reconciliation amongst human Detroiters divorced from the rampant environmental degradation that actively asserts the disposability of this same urban population? What is critical to me in both cases of the South African and Detroit TRCs is that they pronounce such a thorough commitment to healing and reconciliation, while at the same time ignoring the environmental aspects of injustice that are instrumental and critical to producing and reproducing the very realities they wish to dismantle and never repeat. The human sphere not only occupies an uncritical place of privilege that permeates most rhetoric about reconciliation, but is also constructed as positively and importantly different from the environment. The exclusion of ecological relations from the category of political relations integral to the process of reconciliation leads to the inadequate theorizing of harm and inferior solutions. For example, rampant environmental hazards or environmental inequalities affect the quality of life of those experiencing them (most often already vulnerable or marginalized populations) and their ability  30 to experience the world in dignified, safe, and culturally appropriate ways. The pronouncement of reconciliation in cases where these environmental injustices are still present and still affect communities in serious ways are not properly reconciled and do not instantiate the development of right relations. Given that notions of environmental harm are so routinely and consistently left out of the conversation of political reconciliation, the question this chapter concerns itself with is this: are there any compelling reasons as to why it is acceptable to allow for and/or justify this exclusion?  Is political reconciliation justified by valid reasons in excluding the environment from its analysis? 2.1 Ecological Vulnerability and Political Realities The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission tasked itself with an investigation into the conditions and realities that produced and reproduced the massive injustices experienced during systematic Apartheid. The report published by the Commission is extensive and provides a deep and nuanced history and overview of the social and political realities that supported and allowed Apartheid to flourish on such large scale. The report draws attention to the fact that virtually no sector of society escaped the abuses that the regime of Apartheid so consistently and predictably doled out (Truth & Reconciliaton Commission 1998). The Commission was composed of three committees: the Human Rights Violation Committee (HRVC), the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee (R&R), and the Amnesty Committee (AC). Each committee structured the commission and had distinct duties and responsibilities within the reconciliation process. The HVRC investigated human rights abuses that took place between 1960-1994, identified victims, the nature of the violation, and perpetrators. The R&R committee supported victims through development of policy proposals and rehabilitation programs. This committee also disbursed monies from a PresidentÕs Fund for urgent interim  31 reparation to victims. The AC acted as the convening body through which applications for amnesty were considered (Truth & Reconciliaton Commission 1998). Parties and individuals who desired amnesty in exchange for their testimony had to apply to the AC and applications were reviewed, approved, or denied based on the committeeÕs deliberation and reasoning. Although not in the CommissionÕs official mandate, the Commission stated: In this process of bridge building, those who have benefited and are still benefiting from a range of unearned privileges under apartheid have a crucial role to play. [É] This means that a great deal of attention must be given to an altered sense of responsibility; namely the duty or obligation of those who have benefited so much (through racially privileged education, unfair access to land, business opportunities and so on) to contribute to the present and future reconstruction of our society (Truth & Reconciliaton Commission 1998, 134).  In this way, the Commission showed sensitivity to the diverse and complicated ways in which Apartheid affected not only South African society, but also particular individuals and resources within that society. This quote also represents a common theme throughout the CommissionÕs endeavor and mission, which is to move forward into a new, more democratic society by trying to understand and coming to terms with the truth(s) that constituted an unjust and harmful past.   While the South African TRC is commendable in its commitment to the historical truths and realities of the Apartheid regime, there are certain areas the Commission and its report do not address. Chief among them is the absence of the physical environment as a sector of society that not only suffered from Apartheid, but also as an agent and entity that facilitated the systematic segregation and marginalization of black South Africans. There are ecological relations at play in the political construction of black South Africans as second-class citizens and an oppressed population. Black South Africans were relegated to homelands with inferior environmental conditions and resources as well as poor municipal support and services. As mentioned in chapter one, homelands were akin to reservations/reserves in North America that  32 the South African government developed as a way to confine and segregate Black South Africans based on externally identified ethnic criteria. They were located in preponderantly rural areas with limited or underdeveloped municipal infrastructure as well as planning and zoning (Butler, Rotberg, and Adams 1978). This lack of sustainable and sufficient ecological relations led to poorer health outcomes for black South Africans such as Ò[h]igh rates of kwashiorkor, marasmus, pellagra, and vitamin deficiency illnesses...tuberculosis, and eye diseasesÓ (Butler, Rotberg, and Adams 1978, 132). To focus purely on the formation of an oppressed population and marginalized category of person without also attending to the ways in which ecological relations factor into that construction leads to forms of reconciliation that are incomplete and unsustainable. The intersectional nature of injustices around racial equality and environmental quality mean that disciplines like environmental justice cannot ignore the way racial injustice and environmental degradation influence each other. It is not just a matter of trying to prioritize one type of harm over another, but instead interrogating how notions of racial injustice inform poor environmental outcomes and vice and versa.   In the spirit of the South African TRC, the city of Detroit drafted a Charter for its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission with the express purpose of examining the historical roots and current legacies of racial inequality. The Charter gestures strongly toward the history of the racial makeup of and industrial investment in the city of Detroit that falls out of larger historical narratives within the United States such as slavery and migration (Hahn 2005). The Charter also expresses a commitment to understanding and expounding upon the ways in which racism and racial inequality within the city of Detroit are not merely interpersonal phenomena (although it does show up on an interpersonal level), but is also a structural and institutional phenomenon (Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion 2011). So, part of understanding how Detroit  33 got to its current existence of extreme racial inequality and economic disparity requires an examination of the structural and institutional means through which racial inequality and economic injustice is produced, normalized, and reproduced to seem like a natural and unchanging reality. This TRC for the city of Detroit was abandoned when more specific actions like the selection of Commission members failed to materialize.   Even within the final draft of the Detroit TRC Charter, there are clear environmental harms that are not addressed. For example, Detroit has higher asthma and lead poisoning rates among African Americans than other areas of the country and a higher incidence of African Americans living near polluting facilities that produce riskier and more hazardous health conditions in these populations. Part of understanding the current state of Detroiters as the legacy of racial inequality also requires an examination of the ecological relations and environmental conditions that place African Americans at higher risk of negative health outcomes and links to a more general and abstract disregard for the health and well being of African Americans and communities of color (Paul Mohai et al. 2011). In each of these cases, I can think of at least three reasons why it seems unusual that the reconciliation processes did not address environmental harms explicitlyÑespecially in light of their goals to repair political relations:  (1) Social harms map onto environmental harms in very transparent and straightforward ways. In the case of South African Apartheid, the larger ideological project of segregation of black South Africans and white South Africans was supported by and predicated on the actual physical separation of black South Africans into geographically distinct Homelands. This not only limited the interface between  34 segregated populations, but also pushed black South Africans to the periphery of society and societyÕs interest with limited access to physical and social resources. This lack of access and care for the actual environmental conditions of human well being further reproduces an existential/tangible difference of these persons such that differential (read inferior) treatment appears natural and justified.  (2) If reconciliation is supposed to address historical harm, then, it has to address how processes of colonization and historical oppression were occurring simultaneously. Consider, for example, the historical concurrence of projects of colonization and oppression as wedded to the appropriation of natural resources and the severing of connections of local colonized populations from their natural environments. If political sovereignty has traditionally or historically been bound up with territorial control and control of natural resources, then any colonial/imperial project concerns itself, in the first instance, with domination of territorial lands and geographies; followed closely by the construction of colonized populations as ÒnaturalÓ (in a derogatory sense) and as closer to nature, thus prompting colonial control and domination of these peoples as well. Many of the ways humans learn to control other human populations stems from the initial dominating and controlling way in which the Western world has practiced dominating nature (Plumwood 2002b). (3) Finally, in a world of scarce resources, political relations must be concerned with sustainability and resilience. Part of the problem is that todayÕs political relations were set up in ways that did not have any regard for human relationsÕ dependency on the environment. The process of denying the multitude of ways in which humans are dependent on the natural world is called Òbackgrounding.Ó According to Val  35 Plumwood, backgrounding occurs when we obscure or deny our dependence on ecological relations/processes, which leads us to believe that we, as humans, are outside of nature. Our denial of this dependency does not invalidate it as a form of dependence, but rather encourages us to treat nature as a Òlimitless provider without needs of its ownÓ (Plumwood 2002b, 21). This denial has led and will continue to lead to unsustainable uses of and interactions with nature. Thus the sustainability of better political relations is directly connected to sustainable relations with our environments. The fact that the natural world and our dependency on it has been backgrounded so systematically and consistently uncovers part of the reason why theories of reconciliation and practical solutions to political problems often exclude environmental conceptions of harm and environmental concerns. However, if our current ecological crisis is any indication, our dependency on the natural world and its well being can no longer be so conveniently ignored. In the face of such dire scarcity and the disappearance of natural resources on which we depend, does it make sense to privilege political relations over environmental dependency to the point of the erasure of the latter completely? Similarly, issues of resource scarcity amplify tensions that fuel political and interpersonal problems. For example, racism against American Indian tribes is more pronounced when there is a contested natural resource dwindling. In Arizona, a water shortage might reignite latent forms of racism against the sovereignty and cultures of tribes in that area (Burton 1987; Barnett and Adger 2007; Weinmann 2011). Therefore, processes that purport to reshape political relations without taking the opportunity to make sure that these solutions are conducive to sustainability will most likely end up recreating harms compounded by the fraught conditions of resource scarcity and all that entails.   36 In light of these three areas, I seek to understand whether some of the common theories of reconciliation exclude such environmental dimensions of harm and explore whether any exclusions are justified. In the next sections, I will examine six prominent models of reconciliation and whether or not each of them is justified in excluding the environment/environmental concerns from their theory. These six models are reconciliation as: forgiveness, trust, political community, political value, moral agency and reciprocity, and an Indigenous model of reconciliation. The first five models are categories of reconciliation Colleen Murphy examines and develops in her comprehensive study of moral theories of political reconciliation . For each model of reconciliation, I will consider whether or not it addresses the three reasons given as to how reconciliation and environmental concerns influence each other. The first two models I consider (forgiveness and political value), I categorize as models that exclude the environment and are also not easily adaptable to considering environmental harms/concerns. I categorize the final four (trust, political community, moral agency and reciprocity, and Indigenous) as models that lend themselves more easily to the sphere of environmental concern, with the final model of Indigenous reconciliation as unique in the sense that regard and communion with the environment and the repair of the relationship between humans and the environment is built into the very notion of reconciliation it offers. 2.2 Models of Political Reconciliation Models Resistant to Environmental Concern (1) Forgiveness The reconciliation as forgiveness model conceptualizes harm as a deviation from a prescribed and normative set of conditions, which are referred to as normal/moral. This deviation  37 represents an exception to the rule of proper behavior and ways of relating. In this way, forgiveness takes on a role of repairing that harm by allowing the victim of the harm to overcome the negative reactive attitudes and emotions that he/she experiences as a result of being harmed. These negative reactive attitudes are justified for the victim because they constitute a reasonable position to occupy when someone crosses the line of normative expectation/acceptability. The forgiveness model sets itself up as requiring specific conditions and a certain interaction in order to function. This interaction is a person-to-person or human-to-human model that has difficulty capturing any type of harm that exists outside of the actual interaction that occurs, such as human to environment harms or environment to human harms. This is partially because the model is so reliant on an interior, psychological account of emotion, that sets definitions for the beings that are capable, or deemed capable of, doing this type of psychological/emotional work; namely, humans.  The forgiveness model relies on a separation between humans and other beings that results in the exclusion of environmental dimensions of harm. This separation is one between entities that are considered capable of a type of characteristically human emotional work. Forgiveness as a process, then, already reveals a deeper conceptual separation between humans and the natural world. William Jordan explores the existential shame of being in the world that is inherent to the natural world. By doing so, he problematizes the neat boundaries or limits of emotional and existential experiences of humans and nature. In particular, Jordan identifies a trend in environmental thinking Òin which shame, trouble, and badness are introduced into the creation peculiarly late and as a result of a human failing, the idea that nature itself is innocent and therefore morally discontinuous from human beings, whose lapse introduced shame, trouble  38 and evil into creationÓ (Jordan 2003, 40). This myth is a prominent feature of environmental thinking and limits, according to Jordan, the complexity of humansÕ relationship with the natural world and the possibilities of reconciliation and communion.  While the forgiveness model relies on a background of normativity as a metric for assessing harms, it does not offer a robust space or accounting of history.  As mentioned above, the forgiveness model confines itself to very specific criteria, conditions, and interactions. Whereas earlier I considered the narrow human confines of this model of reconciliation, here I consider the necessary temporal limits of a model that necessitates two living and present actors and a harm confined to a temporal period. Implied within the forgiveness model is that there must be someone around to ask forgiveness of another and another to consider, reject, or accept the proposal and forgive the perpetrator. Many times historical harms originate in the distant past and become compounded by the passage of time and many times actors (perpetrators and victims) are either no longer living or no longer present. The forgiveness model does not seem capable of addressing these sorts of harms or cases where repair is desperately needed, but occurs on a scale that well exceeds the specific limitations that the model employs. It also relies on an emotional and moral separation between humans and the natural world such that emotional work and expanded notions of forgiveness are excluded. If as Jordan suggests, our creation myths dictate a natural world free of harm and negativity while regarding the introduction of evil into that space as a human enterprise, then attempts to understand and improve upon our relationship with the natural world will be incomplete from the beginning. The exclusion of the natural world as an agent for and subject of both harm and healing limits the type of harms forgiveness as a model can identify and the scenarios through which forgiveness as a model of reconciliation can be employed.   39 Just as the forgiveness model excludes environmental dimensions of harm, it does not establish itself with an awareness of our dependence and reliance on a sustainable environment. The only way in which the forgiveness model could be interpreted as being cognizant of the ways in which political relations are tied to ecological conditions and scarcity of resources is to vaguely gesture towards the normative background upon which a trespass or harm must be foregrounded in order to count as harmful or as a deviation from the norm. It does not take into account the actual environmental concerns that might make the normative background an immoral or questionable one.  (2) Political Value Darrel MoellendorfÕs theory of political reconciliation takes the goal of reconciliation as the formation of a political community wherein former strangers are treated as equal citizens. Political reconciliation is different, for Moellendorf, from justice or social justice because it operates as a more particular process. Moellendorf believes that the minimal requirement for politics is democratic equality. Therefore, a society that is interested in moving past problematic and unequal political relations requires a shift from the interaction of persons as strangers to an establishment of equal citizenship among the political community. In this way, Moellendorf suggests that political reconciliation is based on the minimum requirement of more just politics or relations at the political level. If one were to compare what he calls person-person reconciliation to political reconciliation the requirements would be as follows: the reestablishment of trust in the service of the restoration of friendship; to the formation of more just politics in the service of democratic equality (Moellendorf 2007, 206Ð207). Here, it is clear that MoellendorfÕs theory does not use interpersonal moral reconciliation as a blueprint for political reconciliation. Rather, the minimal institutional requirement for reconciliation at the  40 political level is a Òpolitical community of equalsÓ (Moellendorf 2007, 208). And political equality requires institutional arrangements that ensure juridical equality and a constitutional democratic legal framework.  MoellendorfÕs theory of political reconciliation hinges quite directly on what he means when he states equal citizenship. Equal citizenship is the ideal end goal of any process of political reconciliation. Given the prominence of equal citizenship as an integral feature of reconciliation, it is surprising that Moellendorf does not explicitly discuss what characterizes equal citizenship. In this way, the essential goal of reconciliation is under theorized in his account. Citizenship is a loaded concept that can be defined broadly as the conditions necessary for recognition and belonging within a nation state or political territory. However, different notions of identity can be conveyed or actualized through the concept of citizenship. A place: whether real or imaginary, or both, is almost always involved in a conception of what it means to be a citizen. Equal citizenship, then, would seem to have something to do with some basic equitable level of existing in the world or benefiting from a geographical space. There is also an aspect of citizenship that is both backward and forward-looking. What I mean by this is that there is a notion of commonality and shared history that unifies a people that are, have been, or will be citizens of a particular place. This also means that there are moral expectations of what will become of future citizens. Given these characteristics of citizenship, a theory of political reconciliation based on equal citizenship that is not importantly allied with environmental concerns seems confused at best and neglectful at worst. Surely, the preservation of a nation state or geographical territory also importantly depends on a general attitude of stewardship or care for that physical place. Indeed, there are cases where what we might refer to as equal citizenship is  41 ÒachievedÓ while certain neighborhoods are still zoned for garbage disposal (Robert D. Bullard 2005). Moellendorf remains at a conceptual level in explicating his theory of political reconciliation, which means he is not attendant to the practical matters concerned with the establishment of equal citizenship, as the goal of reconciliation. For this reason, Moellendorf is also unclear on what it actually means to be a citizen and, hence, an equal citizen. It also explicitly leaves out different histories and methods of incorporation, as well as competing claims to sovereignty and original land tenure, such that Òequal citizenshipÓ is not a just goal for many groups of peoples, especially Indigenous peoples (Turner 2006). It seems to me that a dimension or type of citizenship should include environmental citizenship. Being a good environmental citizen could be an important characteristic to being a good person in a society. In fact, many conflicts between groups of people have stemmed from different conceptions and ideas of what it means to be an environmental citizen. If one person thinks resources and natural habitats should be cared for and used sustainably, while another thinks we should use resources only insofar as they serve human needs and damn the consequences, this could cause significant harm and problems between members of these respective groups.  Moellendorf allows that historical situation and context matter in the proliferation of a particular harm or harmful situation. He states that the history of societal divisions and harms are real and act as serious obstacles to the transformation he believes essential to political reconciliation (Moellendorf 2007, 211). However, merely stating this fact does not coincide with an attention to the ways in which those obstacles can or should be overcome. Stating that there is some sort of history responsible for the current situation is not comparable to a process of understanding and a commitment to moving past these harms in a meaningful way. Equal  42 citizenship cannot just entail that different citizens have equal access to similar resources (a distributive model of justice), but must inculcate justice in the sense of allowing the ends those resources are used for to be self-determined and self-actualized by differently positioned peoples. Think of the conflicts that still exist between settlers and Indigenous peoples. The ongoing project of settler colonialism is an imposition of external ÒvaluesÓ on a particular group of people and landscape (Hoogeveen 2014). In many ways, the formal and informal acts of forced assimilation dictate the parameters of what it means to be a citizen. If settler colonialism dictates that assimilation requires an instrumental attitude toward the environment embodied in rapid resource depletion and lack of respect for the natural world, this largely erases and makes impossible other (Indigenous) modes of being in the world and relating to the environment. Part of what makes the inequality of citizens (settler versus Indigenous) in this situation is the fact that the dominant hegemony of settler colonialism makes indigenous life ways illegal for all intents and purposes and also ignores Indigenous claims of sovereignty. Therefore, ignoring these underlying systemic and structural ways in which inequality is enacted and ÒcitizenshipÓ is constructed will not result in sustainable modes of reconciliation.   The environment is not mentioned in the sense of sustainability although it does function as a background upon which the political stage is set. Again, Moellendorf does not provide tangible conditions that must be met to ensure the founding of a political community of equal citizenship. Imagine a scenario in which the legacy and present practices of settler colonialism dictate that the dominant culture (even if the pronouncement of equal citizenship is audible) declares certain (namely the non-dominant cultureÕs) life ways illegal. Here, on paper, citizens may in fact be considered equal, but only equal once certain populations cede their own identities and are assimilated into a culturally different and dominant body politic. This is not the kind of  43 equality or justice necessary for reconciliation and by not addressing these types of harms Moellendorf leaves room for the perpetuation of these unjust realities even within a process of reconciliation. This then also makes MoellendorfÕs model of reconciliation inattentive to deep notions of environmental sustainability because it cannot read environmental harms such as those instantiated through the dominant and unjust practices of settler colonialism as important to the way in which inequality amongst citizens is established in the first place. Without a theoretical space and eye for the ways in which environmental and resource scarcity often fuel and exacerbate already existent tensions between groups of people or indeed between people and environments, reconciliatory solutions will similarly prove unsustainable and in need of revisiting. Models Amenable to Environmental Concern (3) Trust Margaret Urban Walker largely develops the reconciliation as trust model in her book, Moral Repair. For Walker, the establishment of normative expectations resulting in the development of trust is the foundation of well-functioning moral relationships. Walker, importantly, distinguishes interpersonal trust from reliance or what she calls Òdefault trust.Ó Interpersonal trust requires: [a] kind of reliance on others whom we expect (perhaps only implicitly or unreflectively) to behave as relied upon (e.g., in specified ways, in ways that fulfill an assumed standard, or in ways so as to achieve relied-upon outcomes) and to behave that way in the awareness (if only implicit or unreflective) that they are liable to be held responsible for failing to do so or to make reasonable efforts to do so (Walker 2006, 80). This is different from what Walker refers to as Òdefault trustÓ which is the kind of general reliance we have on things or objects that are not human such as institutions or the environment.  44 Trust is fundamental to moral relationships in a way that exceeds basic reliance. One might think about this additional requirement for interpersonal trust as the sense that another person has our best interests at heart or takes our interests, hopes, fears, and the like to heart. In this way, there is an additional element for interpersonal trust that results in a negative personal response when trust is violated. Thus, for Walker, trust is the normative expectation and grounding of interpersonal moral relationships by which we define deviance and wrongdoing. Moral repair, then, is the task of (re)building that foundation of trust.  In terms of the environmental dimensions of harms, Walker explicitly excludes non-humans and the environment as part of the sphere of reconciliation.7 However, environmental components are integral to the way trust is developed. The state of the environment is one way in which we can see if someone is pursuing his/her interest at the expense of someone else. Similarly, one way of displaying untrustworthiness is directly through the exploitation and degradation of the environment.  It would seem then that environmental reconciliation and repair is a condition of trust since environmental degradation and exploitation is absolutely a cause for the breakdown of trust as a relation. When considering reconciliation as trust, then, with an environmental component it is crucial to stress that the restoration of trust cannot happen merely at the level of language. What might a politically and ecologically informed version of reconciliation look like? Figueroa and Waitt explore reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and white settler Australians through the co-management of ecological spaces. Uluru, or Ayers Rock as settlers call it, is in a national park co-managed by both groups in attempts to heal past harms. Posted by the rock is a prohibition to climb dictated by the Anangu, a culturally specific                                                 7 This initial exclusion of non-human animals or entities from the category of trusters could be critiqued from a biocentric position as problematic because it elevates humans to a level unwarranted by the maxim that all living things matter. However, it is outside the purview of this chapter to sufficiently address this critique.   45 prohibition that stems from the AnanguÕs responsibility for what happens to climbers. In this example, we can see how trust cannot be just symbolic in reconciliation processes. Part of what it means to address the harm of settler colonialism in this particular context is that tourists see and feel a distinct harm that came out of settler colonialism, which is the erasure of a particular way of life and ecological experience. Part of what it means to reconcile is to experience Uluru as a tourist in the Aboriginal way. The previous and current occurrence of prohibited climbing by settler Australians re-inscribes a harm that is trust based. Interfering ecologically with this site through climbing exerts the interest of one group (white settlers) over and at the cost of Anangu people and their life ways (Figueroa and Waitt 2010). WalkerÕs model sees history as integral to the evolution of norms within a society. The very idea of repair acknowledges that certain historical factors have contributed to the current situation of harm within a society that calls for repair and that this will also be important for the actual repair and imagined future of a society with more functional and just relationships. As such, WalkerÕs model of reconciliation as trust could be adapted to make space for certain types of history, in this case environmental history. In incorporating environmental history as crucial to the development of a harm in need of repair, one might focus on how relationships to the environment influence and interact with relationships to non-human others, humans, and groups of humans respectively. Revisiting the Uluru case, we can see how the elevation of white settlersÕ experience over the AnanguÕs, through ecologically prohibited behavior, is a breakdown of trust that must be addressed. An initial ecological degrading activity has implications for a pattern of distrust specific to the larger context of settler colonialism. In this way, the trust model is much more amenable to historical context than the forgiveness model, which seems constricted to contemporary context and temporal limits.   46  While the trust model exceeds the forgiveness model in terms of actually addressing that there is an environment/physical world upon which we rely and depend, it does not go far enough in incorporating the extent to which this reliance and dependency goes. In fact, it does not explicitly address the ways in which trust established in one realm probably affects the foundation and types of trust established in other areas. Citing again Figeuroa and WaittÕs example in Australia: attempted reconciliation of white settler tourists and the Anangu without an experiential component of experiencing Uluru the Aboriginal way, results in incomplete and largely symbolic reconciliation. Leaving this environmental harm unaddressed, does not grant the environment or climate agency in ways that compose distinct life ways and practices erased by settler colonialism. The exclusion of this type of harm and subsequent reconciliation as well as lack of agency for the environment can ignite distrust within a population or community.    Overall, WalkerÕs trust model of reconciliation captures a crucial aspect of repair, which is the ability to trust and form meaningful trust relationships. The formation and maintenance of trust is integral to overcoming pervasive harms. However, Walker misses an essential element of what she calls default trust, which is that relations to and among the environment can and do form key aspects of what it means to trust and how and with whom trust can be built and expanded upon.  (4) Political Community Andrew Schaap theorizes political reconciliation as the founding of a political community that creates an authentic space or possibility for politics. Schaap is deeply informed by Arendtian notions of politics such that he rejects any conception of reconciliation as a predetermined goal or closed event. Rather, he believes that it is through the struggle of founding  47 a political community that the standards reconciliation strives for are constantly being formed and reformed. True reconciliation should involve creating a space for politics where people need not be enemies, but through which the common world we occupy is revealed through a plurality of perspectives.  Schaap states, ÒPolitical reconciliation thus always involves this constant back and forth between sustaining politics with the promise of reconciliation and holding open the horizon of reconciliation by assuming the risk of politicsÓ (Schaap 2005, 151). SchaapÕs model of political reconciliation can also be understood as reliant on the philosophical tradition that emerged out of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, commonly referred to as critical theory. One project of the first generation of critical theorists (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin) is the attempt to understand the trend of domination for the sake of (human) reason. This general trend is referred to as the domination thesis which sees the Western ÒcivilizingÓ project as a thorough attempt to suppress and dominate human nature as well as external nature: the environment. Within the domination thesis, we see a logic of domination that makes connections between the domination and oppression of the physical world with the domination of human nature as instantiated in other human beings.  What is critical to take away from this thesis crucial to the Frankfurt School is that domination of the environment and domination of humans are not mutually exclusive phenomena. They are importantly connected and co-constitutive in ways that matter for the theorization of harms such as social and environmental injustices (Gunderson 2015). SchaapÕs model acknowledges the environment insofar as it realizes and upholds the idea that politics and human relations do not occur in a vacuum. Thus, an important part of politics or the properly political for Schaap is that politics is made possible by conditions in the actual world and that politics also discloses the common world we share. While SchaapÕs model does  48 not name environmental concerns specifically that might frame certain political realities or that might disclose certain political realities to us through the common space of the world we share, it makes progress from other models considered thus far in that it does not try to mystify or obscure the ways in which the physical world is a part of any endeavor, no matter how we try to abstract away from that fact.  The political community model is also similar to the tradition of critical theory coming out of the Frankfurt School in its thorough commitment to a type of historical materialism that supports the idea that current realities/conditions are predicated on a specific historical moment and material realities out of which they arise (Marx 1979). Schaap would agree that many of the situations in the world that require reconciliation are not born wholly ex nihilo, but rather can find their roots in historical and material conditions that shaped them and birthed them. Now, whether or not the environment is conceptualized, as its own material condition worthy of its own consideration and connection with the production and influence of political realities is not as clear. But as a model informed by critical theory, this model should be attendant to the ways in which our domination of external nature is indicative of other forms of domination amongst and between humans, making human injustices against humans and against external nature an importantly related phenomenon.  ShcaapÕs model of political reconciliation includes concerns for sustainability and resiliency of the environment because it relies heavily on ideas originally formed by Hannah Arendt that share this perspective. One of these ideas is a notion of the fragility of the world that we share and which is revealed to us through the sphere of politics and the moment of politics (Arendt 1998). As such, the world requires a deep and abiding care be taken with it. This indicates that both Arendt and Schaap are aware of the fragility and exhaustibility of the world  49 and its resources. If we fail to take care of the foundation that makes all other things possible, the world that will be revealed to us will be degraded and dangerous at best, non-existent for certain beings (humans among them) at worst.  (5) Moral Agency/Reciprocity Colleen Murphy offers a theory of political reconciliation that is committed to capturing precisely the ways in which civil conflict and repressive rule Òsystematically undermine the conditions in which political relationships can express reciprocity and respect for moral agencyÓ (Murphy 2010, 28). She critiques previous models of reconciliation as only offering pieces of a theory that is not unified in the way hers is. She argues three frameworks, which are interrelated and mutually reinforcing, unify her particular theory of political reconciliation. These three frameworks are the rule of law, political trust, and relational capabilities.  The rule of law captures the way in which political relationships go wrong and can be fixed at the institutional level, Òspecifically how legal institutions structure political interaction and define the expectations citizens and officials have of one anotherÓ (Murphy 2010, 28). The rule of law should constitute a clear and accessible codified expectation of rights and behavior that all citizens and officials understand and can reference. Political trust operates at the attitudinal level and Òhighlights the view that citizens and officials should ideally take of each otherÓ (Murphy 2010, 28). Political trust is the ideal relationships of trust and trust responsiveness that a stable rule of law should engender. Finally, capabilities Òrefer to the genuine opportunities of individuals to achieve valuable doing and beings such as being adequately nourished or being respectedÓ (Murphy 2010, 28). Capabilities is the framework that aims to capture the way both economic and political institutions work to either provide or deny  50 political efficacy and the success or failure of political relationships. Murphy highlights four capabilities she sees as most important to political reconciliation and the goals it seeks. These include Òbeing respected by others; participating in the social, economic, and political life of a community; being recognized as a member of a political community; and surviving and escaping povertyÓ (Murphy 2010, 31). Murphy acknowledges that political and economic realities/conditions are often wedded. She does also include a capabilities framework as part of her model, which relies on the fact that physical and economic conditions do influence the type of political realities and organization within particular societies for better or worse. However, she does not include a critical and deep consideration of how exactly environmental factors, outside of a commodified understanding of economic well being and its relationship with the environment, inform political realities and reconciliatory processes. For example, we might think of how black South AfricansÕ sense of belonging was not only affected by being denied certain economic advantages through the allotment of lower wage paying jobs, but also how their sense of belonging and identity was affected by being isolated in homelands with inferior access to physical resources and completely divorced (in many cases) from any source of ethnic identity (even though the homelands were meant to be ethnic enclaves separate from the nation state of South Africa).  This model does not allow space for considering the ways in which many historical and physical conditions are predicated on an initial logic of domination first enacted upon the environment then upon humans by humans. Think about how oftentimes the historically oppressed groups in history are those who have been systematically disenfranchised of their ÒpropertyÓ rights and environmental heritage/relationship with the land. This disenfranchisement, though no fault of their own, is usually blamed upon the ÒinferiorityÓ of the oppressed population,  51 which was actually a historical consequence of the oppressorsÕ actions. So in this sense, legacies of domination and colonization create and erase their own myth of how oppressed people get to be oppressed and why oppressors are justified in continuing to oppress these populations and keep them in lives devoid of physical and psychological environmental supports necessary for self-actualization and justice. In this way, MurphyÕs model does not move far enough away from viewing the environment as a resource.  MurphyÕs inclusion of a capabilities framework and in particular a capability dedicated to the survival and escape from poverty shows an awareness of the way in which environmental injustice in the form of poverty and subpar living conditions/access to resources affects the prospects of many people and their need/ability to transition to more democratic political realities and more autonomous modes of political efficacy. Again, as stated earlier, however, MurphyÕs model does not go far enough in conceptualizing environmental harm in terms other than economics. Economic harm is not the only way the environment figures in for people on the losing end of an oppressive political structure/society.  (6) Indigenous The Indigenous model of reconciliation pulls from the overlapping, foundational similarities found within the cosmologies of Indigenous peoples. One particular Indigenous model of reconciliation examined is reconciliation as the Navajo people conceive of it. The Navajo have a rich cultural tradition and narrative that informs their notions of justice and thus peacemaking. The Navajo have a conception of justice Òthat is relationship centered, not based on a political authority beyond the individualÓ (Wall 2001, 535). Thus, when a wrong is committed, it is not solely left to the state as arbiter and enforcer of justice. Rather, since the  52 Navajo conception of justice is firmly rooted in the reality of relationships and relationality, an offence is understood in all the ways it relates to the cosmos. Peacemaking involves a focusing on the deed and not the doer, but through conversation and accountability the offender comes to hear intimately the ways in which this wrongful action has negatively affected relationships with others. So, justice, then, is a speaking of truth that leads to a realization of the ways in which this action has affected the community and cosmos, which ultimately promotes a return to that community through right action and understanding.  Another instantiation of an Indigenous notion of reconciliation appears in the Idle No More movement. Idle No More is a social/political/environmental movement thatÕs mission is to Òhonour Indigenous sovereignty and to protect the land & waterÓ (ÒIdle No More,Ó n.d.). This movement responds to a long and well-documented history of the abuse of Indigenous peoples by state governments who have reneged time and again on treaties and disrespected Indigenous life and cosmology by actively disregarding and destroying their relationship to the land and each other. This instantiation of Indigenous justice and reconciliation focuses on an accountability and understanding through the narrative of truth telling and through the call for the healing of relationships that have resulted in unjust actions and outcomes.   The Indigenous model cannot fail to capture the way that social harms often map onto environmental harms because the concept of relationality with the environment is built into both its conception of justice and, thus, its conception of reconciliation or repair. It is no surprise to this model that social harms map onto environmental harms because an affront against a human operates within the nexus of relationships and harms on multiple levels that must be acknowledged, understood, and ultimately resolved. The Navajo have a rich creation narrative that guides, grounds and is recalled during many peacemaking processes. In this creation story,  53 the Holy People (the beings responsible for the creation of all things) created the five-fingered persons we commonly refer to as humans. Even within this assignation of humans as five-fingered persons we are presented with a different and wonderful cosmology that captures the fact that humans are one among many beings and are instantiated in their own unique way that is neither better nor worse than the manifestation of other persons. Many Indigenous cosmologies, including that of the Navajo, view every entity in creation as a person with a unique and important bodily and spiritual manifestation. Thus we are all related through our personhood as being and our connectedness to each other means that an offense against one affects all in a drastic way that calls for healing, for a restoration of right relations. Therefore, environmental concerns and harms are intimately related to the affairs of five-fingered persons in a way that must be righted in any resolution or attempt to instill peace amongst humans.  The Indigenous model relies on a cosmology that understands and respects the relationality between all things, which means it cannot make space for a conception of reality as separated from the context out of which it arises. In the Navajo practice of peacemaking, we see this by attention and reverence for the ways in which each person in the process shows up and factors in, which might make understandable, but not justify a personÕs negative behavior. In this way, the Indigenous model again builds in from the beginning a notion of accountability that also takes stock of the background and history of the situation that has influenced and led up to the deed that has necessitated peacemaking. In the case of Idle No More, we also see a movement that starts from the idea of both the inherent relationality of existence (oneÕs actions affect othersÕ reality and vice versa), but also a deep and meaningful historical accounting of the ways in which the Canadian governmentÕs past and present actions have established the disrespect and discounting of First NationsÕ peoples and their cosmologies.   54 Notions of the sustainability and resiliency are central to the Indigenous model because it does not start (as many Western models) from the place of a distinction between humans and the environment. Since it is deeply committed to the ways in which all things in existence are related, it of course has to be concerned with sustainability and resilience of all relations including political relations. If a process or solution to the problem is not sustainable, then it is not properly a solution. The Indigenous model of justice and reconciliation recognizes that relationships are delicate and tenuous and change, but the ultimate underlying fact that we are related is unchanging. In this way, it is necessary to think about the best and least harmful ways of existing with each other in ways that respect the fragility of existence and the limits of our world and resources. For it is not just the five-fingered persons we have to take care of but all the persons within creation and the cosmos. Any exceptionalism in this way is already a manifestation of a negative behavior for relationality because it disturbs the balance of reciprocity and sacred justice.  2.3 Is the Exclusion of the Environment from Political Reconciliation Justified?  So far, I have analyzed the six models of reconciliation and discussed whether or not they capture the three reasons of how the environment figures into political realities and the repair of those realities. In light of this analysis and discussion, I have a question: is there any compelling and substantial reason that models of political reconciliation should exclude environmental concerns/harms? My answer is ÒNo.Ó I will now consider two pseudo reasons that may be listed as compelling reasons for excluding the environment from the realm of political reconciliation and I will counter each reason with a response that shows that these reasons are not actually valid.   55  First, someone might propose that since the conflict is amongst humans, it must stick to the narrow context in which it arose, namely the human sphere. This reason rests on an already untenable assumption, which is that humans are exceptionally not a part of the environment proper. Such an account relies on a distinction that is not sustainable. To see the human sphere as separate from the environment proposes that physical conditions and environmental factors are not an important part of why and how human communities manifest themselves in certain ways. Abstracting away from the ways humans exist and subsist in the world is not only not helpful in crafting solutions to so called Òhuman problems,Ó but it also leads to uncritical action that can further deteriorate human relationships intrahumanly and among other aspects of creation, e.g. with non-human animals, ecosystems, and so on. As we saw from the three reasons given earlier, the environmental and political come together in a variety of important ways. For example, social harms often coincide with and map onto environmental harm and degradation (reason one), political harms are based on historical forms of ecological domination (reason two), and conflicts such as those falling out of settler colonialism are bad for sustainability (reason three).   Next, someone might say would it not be better considering the individual complexity of political problems and environmental problems to give each its own realm of consideration and space? This claim seems more reasonable than the first and seems to make sense, however, it does not make sense to view the political and environmental as analytically distinct to the point of mutual exclusion. What I mean by this is that there should not be within this claim a separation so strict that mutual influence and reciprocity between these categories is disallowed. The fact that we can analyze them and explore them as separate entities does not exclude them from being connected in ways that matter and that must be addressed. Many times, one would miss a key injustice if one enforced this separation. Consider the case of Uluru and the  56 reconciliation between settler Australians and the Anangu. If that reconciliation process ended at the linguistic level of apology, without an experience of the harm of a particular form of settler tourism in an Aboriginal way, it could be concluded that the only harm of settler colonialism in this instance was an abstract disrespect for Anangu identity. However, this disrespect involves a much larger harm, which is literally the illegality of Anangu life ways with the land and environment. Missing this component of harm is morally problematic and should be avoided in political reconciliation theory and political reconciliation processes.  Also, a dangerous tendency with this idea of keeping entities or concepts distinct is that it can lead to the creation of a hierarchy among said entities/concepts. In this way we can see arguments on either side claiming the superiority of the political (human) over the environment or vice versa. These hierarchies and arguments represent a conflict in need of resolution in themselves and unnecessarily detract from the more pressing and prescient political-ecological issues at hand. It is not an issue of which should come first or be considered greater, but given the intricacy and relatedness of the areas how are we to move forward with comprehensive and sustainable solutions?  While these reasons initially seem persuasive, they are proven to be residue of an outmoded yet familiar way of thinking that has more often than not led to the very issues we currently face, politically and ecologically, with very few sustainable and lasting solutions. As seen through the examples and literatures referenced, political reconciliation and the theory of political reconciliation can be furthered through engagement with environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics, as we will see in chapters four and five. This expanded inclusion promises more fulfilling and sustainable reconciliation processes.   57 In conclusion, I hope that by offering an in depth analysis of the current topography of political reconciliation we can agree that the exclusion of the environment from many models of reconciliation is unjustified. This lack of justification indicates an impetus to reconsider seriously amending our models of political reconciliation such that the environment is built in from the beginning as a category and agent for reconciliation and serious consideration. Certain models explored in this chapter show promise and manifestations of serious consideration and incorporation of the environment, with the Indigenous model being the most comprehensive because the environment as a category and member of society/existence is built into it from the beginning. That other models do not share this initial conception of the environment as a primary agent of existence and reconciliation does not exclude them from moving forward in making a place for environmental concerns/harms, but it does mean that there is serious work to be done in creating and adapting models of reconciliation that importantly consider the many and varied manifestations of being including the affairs of the five-fingered persons. Chapter three moves on to consider the exclusion of political relations from discussions and practices of ecological restoration.        58 Chapter 3: The Evolution of Ecological Restoration With chapter twoÕs analysis of the dangers of excluding ecological relations from projects of political reconciliation established, chapter three explores the exclusion of political relations the field of ecological restoration pose its own set of problems. This chapter examines debates within ecological restoration surrounding the extent of human involvement in restoration projects. I use the distinctions of thin and thick to categorize distinct paradigms of ecological restoration that espouse different goals and commitments. The thin paradigm of ecological restoration is concerned with whether it is possible or desirable to restore landscapes to a particular historical state through human interventions, where the particular historical goal landscape is a ÒpristineÓ wilderness. This commitment promotes a process of ecological restoration that requires human intervention only until the landscape is Òrestored,Ó then the erasure and removal of human presence. The thick paradigm of ecological restoration views the ecological integrity of landscapes as intimately linked to the health and well being of people and, thus, engages ecological restoration projects as a way to reconcile humans with one another and their stewardship obligations to the environment.  Section I examines a prominent understanding of ecological restoration found within the thin paradigm and its focus on restoration as the creation of a chronologically past and historically specific ecological system and offers reasons for rejecting this view. Section II examines how the thick paradigm of ecological restoration provides more inclusive and dialogical frameworks for restoration projects. Section III argues that the thick paradigm of ecological restoration is preferable to the thin paradigm because it creates more space for vulnerable communities, who are increasingly becoming more involved in environmental issues. Section IV examines why the thick paradigm of ecological restoration is  59 better for more responsible restoration projects through the case study of the Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project.  Ecological restoration is often characterized as the process through which ecological systems (i.e. ecosystems, landscapes, ecological spaces, and the like) are restored. However, ecological restoration is also a contested philosophical concept. An important arena of contestation involves debates about whether human intervention in ecological restoration is positive or negative. While it is obvious that any restoration project requires some degree of human involvement, the question of how the type and extent of that involvement colors particular restoration projects as ÒgoodÓ or ÒbadÓ remains unsettled. Many debate, for example, whether restoration is always a bad imitation of historical landscapes as imagined to exist at some point before human intervention.   I identify the various debates about human intervention in ecological restoration as falling into two paradigms, thick and thin. The term paradigm denotes a set of assumptions about what the axis of disagreement is on a particular issue. The thin paradigm includes a set of assumptions about ecological wellbeing that are largely guided by ideas of preservation and wilderness protection predicated on human absence. The axis of disagreement here revolves around whether it is possible or desirable to restore ecological spaces to a particular state (usually a chronologically prior or ÒhistoricalÓ state). The thick paradigm engages assumptions that view ecological integrity as intimately linked with the health and wellbeing of people. The axis of disagreement here concerns how we can achieve restoration projects that reconcile humans with one another and their stewardship obligations to the environment.     60 In this chapter, ecological relations and political relations will be employed as terms through which to understand differing goals of restoration. Ecological relations, roughly, track the physical processes and functionalities of ecosystems, while political relations track the human perspectives, lived experiences, and values that shape the structure of social institutions and conflicts. I will argue that the deliberate bracketing of political relations within the thin paradigm of ecological restoration makes it more likely that restoration projects will predominantly seek to fulfill the interests of privileged, dominant populations. Whereas the heightened attention to political relations in the thick paradigm makes it more likely that restoration projects will address issues of human conflict and oppression and hence be inclusive to marginalized and nondominant populations as well as the needs of justice for both humans and ecosystems.  This distinction suggests that the assumptions about the axis of disagreement in the thin paradigm can be considered, in some ways, irresponsible because they exclude values concerning how ecological restoration should be beneficial for both ecosystems and diverse human populations. While both thin and thick paradigms instantiate particular human values, perspectives, and lived experiences, I argue that what I define as the thin paradigm of ecological restoration is narrower in its commitments to especially vulnerable human populations. The marked exclusion of diverse human populations in the framing and enactment of restoration projects that attempt to focus purely on physical/ecological relations neglect the opportunity to create more ethical and just relationships between humans and nature as well as between human communities. The lack of inclusivity and relative narrowness of the thin paradigm is what explains its diminishing presence in discussions of ecological restoration (Light 2000b) and why the thick paradigm of ecological restoration is more appealing and generally preferred, by my  61 reading. The thick paradigm of ecological restoration is more responsible because it opens a space for dialogue about sites of human conflict and collaboration.  In this way, this chapter examines how differing paradigms of ecological restoration (thin and thick) espouse different commitments.  3.1 The Thin Paradigm of Ecological Restoration Ecological restoration has become a topic of interest as an approach to analyze and understand how humans relate to the natural world. Some view ecological restoration as another form of land management akin to conservation and preservation (Mauritz 2005, ii; Cabin 2011; Throop 2000; Gann and Lamb 2006). Conservation and preservation bring with them differing ideas and assumptions about how relationships between humans and the natural world are formed. Ideas about ecological restoration as an environmental ethic and land management strategy have been closely followed and critiqued by philosophers (Katz 1992; Elliot 1997; Rolston III 1994; Jordan 2003; Light 2000b). One iteration of restoration within the thin ecological restoration paradigm views the goal of ecological restoration as the return of a degraded landscape to a chronologically prior and often romanticized period or state. I use ÒromanticÓ here in the sense of the imagery of wild, untamed landscapes devoid of human taint and often invoking human awe and reverence. Eric Katz and Robert Elliot feel that ecological restoration is a project involving an attempt to restore a natural space to the conditions it existed in at some time gone by, particularly a time before human intervention occurred, with any previous human intervention largely being conceived of as negative. Eric Higgs refers to this reliance on ÒhistoricalÓ measures of ÒoriginalÓ conditions as a reliance on Òpre-disturbance conditionsÓ (Higgs 2003, 95). Pre-disturbance is correlated with an ecological place existing before human interference or impact.   62      In his essay ÒFaking Nature,Ó Elliot compares the attempts to restore an ecosystem to aesthetic projects of restoring works of art. Elliot argues that part of the reason we value natural places is because of their difference from human structured places. In this way, he posits that places with a higher degree of authentic Ònaturalness,Ó as it were, are more valuable than others. He is against restoration, then, because he believes that attempts to restore a natural space to an ÒoriginalÓ state are imitative at best and deceptive at worst. For, even if an environmental engineer somehow secretly restored an environment to such a degree that it looked relatively untouched and Ònatural,Ó the viewer would be losing some of the historical authenticity of that place, just as if a real Vermeer painting was secretly replaced with an exact replica not painted by the Dutch master. He states, Similarly, it is not just those things which make me feel the joy that wilderness makes me feel that I value. That would be a reason for desiring such things, but that is a distinct consideration. I value the forest because it is of a specific kind, because there is a certain kind of causal history, which explains its existence. Of course I can be deceived into thinking that a piece of landscape has that kind of history, has developed in the appropriate way. The success of the deception does not elevate it to the level of the original, no more than the success of the deception in the previous example confers on the fake the value of the real Vermeer (Elliot 1982). This limited interpretation of the goal of restoration allows Elliott to disagree with it as a process. Elliott relies on a certain set of human values and perspectives informing his understanding of ecological restoration, in this case, ones that are useful for aesthetic, art restoration projects. These chosen values and perspectives make possible his ability to disagree with restoration in its entirety. Different imported values and perspectives would constitute a different form of restoration entirely, which is why paradigms of ecological restoration vary.       Eric Katz in ÒThe Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,Ó similarly argues that the act of restoration in itself is morally suspect and its results are consequently also morally troubling. He  63 argues that projects of ecological restoration merely expand the ways in which humans attempt to dominate and control nature. He also argues that through the act of restoration, which Katz largely seems to view as interference, humans are creating an artifact; turning a natural object into a product of human labor and invention. In this way, he believes humansÕ attempts at restoration somehow denigrate and contaminate nature in such a way that we can no longer view or interact with it as ÒNatureÓ (Katz 1992). Many of Katz and ElliotÕs concerns illustrate a reasonable anxiety about the rampant abuse and degradation of the natural world by humans. With the increase of restoration projects and new types of environmental interventions calling for the creation of positions such as environmental engineers, there is of course a fear that so called restoration will be a superficial attempt to erase the marks of human involvement. Or that restoration will occur within the same human paradigm that created the harm in the first place. While these fears appear justified at first blush, I offer two responses that reject the validity of this position. First, this position supports an over generalized view of humansÕ relationships with and behavior toward the environment, which supports the untenable culture versus nature dualism. Second, the premise upon which both Katz and ElliotÕs rejections of ecological restoration rely supports a belief in the possibility of value-free, ÒobjectiveÓ landscapes.  Culture Versus Nature Rejection  Elliot and KatzÕs rejection of ecological restoration relies on a relatively rigid view of human involvement. Humans have interacted with their environments for generations in ways that affect discrete as well as massive changes for both humans and environments. To code all human involvement then as negative, and further immoral, is to take to a hard view of the ways  64 in which humans and environments are related and how they affect each other. For example, there are those that argue that humans are not outside of nature, but inherently natural beings. While we can understand some human interactions with the environment as good or bad, moral or immoral, motivated by various perspectives/values, etc., human interactions are importantly always natural (Plumwood 2002b; Plumwood 2002a; Cronon 1996). (It is also worth mentioning that many times particular political realities often guide the type of human intervention in environments we code as negative. For example, logics found within the system of capitalism encourage humans to view the natural world primarily, and sometimes solely, as a resource base of inert matter awaiting development and extraction by humans for profit and pure human benefit. However, this is just one way, of many, of relating to the environment) (Cock 2011).  The narrow conceptualization of ecological restoration as espoused by the complementary texts of both Elliot and Katz have been highly criticized within the literature for supporting the untenable dualism between culture and nature and for excluding humans from the sphere of ÒnaturalÓ entities or beings. Many ecological restorationists reject the idea that environmental restoration is always already harming nature by being somehow intrusive or inauthentic due to human involvement (Higgs 2003; Light and Higgs 1996; Jordan 2003; Light 2000a; Light 2006; Boyce, Narain, and Stanton 2007; Hall 1997; House 2000; Ray 2005; Van Wieren 2008). One could also question whether Katz could even conceptualize any truly ÒNaturalÓ places under his definition because humans exist within nature to such an extent that finding an area untainted by human interaction seems at best highly unlikely.8 It is also interesting that these scholars take such a negative view of human involvement in ecological restoration. As ecological restorationÕs attempt to promote ecological health and well being                                                 8 Historically, the introduction of nature preserves such as national parks has been accompanied with oppressive political practices such as the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands (Igoe 2003; Carroll 2014).  65 signals a new environmental ethic that replaces an older mentality of nature as a resource base to be used and discarded in a degraded state (Mills 1996; Jordan 2003; Higgs 2003; Light and Higgs 1996; Cronon 1996). This understanding of ecological restoration exists by creating ÒNatureÓ as an exclusionary category to human endeavors, which I assume would also exclude any notion of political relations. Humans are only actors in this sphere in their always already negative interactions with nature regardless of intention.   Conversely, William Cronon argues that definitions of ÒnatureÓ or Òwilderness,Ó which rely on the complete absence of human existence are untenable. He suggests that humans socially construct notions of pure or untouched wilderness and that its use in framing restoration projects can actually cause more harm than good. This type of thinking is harmful, because it forecloses the possibility of a space for humans to relate to nature in mutually beneficial and ethical ways. If humans are always already bad for and harming the environment, there is no room to explore different and more positive ways of relating to the environment (Cronon 1996). This also has distinct harms for environments themselves, since coding any and all human intervention with ecological spaces as negative and inauthentic means that the attitude of care and respect for the environment through specific human involvement is also foreclosed. This is harmful to ecological spaces that may require our care to restore their functionality and integrity. Ultimately it closes off the possibility of both restoring ecological spaces and reconciling ourselves to these spaces for the good of responsible stewardship.  For Cronon, the construction of wilderness Òembodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fallÓ (Cronon 1996, 17). This understanding of a socially constructed wilderness embedded with the values of the culture that  66 created it as the only place worthy of being called Òproperly natural,Ó could explain the thin paradigm of ecological restoration that guides particular restoration goals such as those espoused by Elliot and Katz.9 The equation of the properly natural with ÒwildernessÓ for Cronon is a serious problem because by separating humans from the properly natural, we Òleave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable, human place in nature might look likeÓ (Cronon 1996, 17). This construction of wilderness or the Òproperly naturalÓ as predicated on the absence of humans has also proven to be harmful especially for historically vulnerable and marginalized human populations. Preservation projects aimed at fulfilling this idea of an imagined wilderness devoid of human presence has led to the removal and relocation of American Indian tribes as well as the illegalization of American Indian lifeways and relationships with the land. Harmful political relations have been instantiated to build the image of a ÒNatureÓ that never existed in these places. It has also led to the environmental racism seen in poor/urban communities of color. By creating a conception of the environment that is devoid of humans, urban and especially poor communities of color have endured the disproportionate siting of environmentally noxious facilities (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). Polluters have attempted to justify the placement of these facilities (overwhelmingly) in these communities through an argument that relies on the implicit understanding of ÒNatureÓ as not being in these places. Built or urban environments do not fall within the purview of what the ÒenvironmentÓ is as constructed by mainstream environmentalism therefore our regard and ethic for the environment need not extend to these places or peoples (R. D. Bullard 1990).                                                 9 Indeed, Elliot in particular imbues ecological restoration projects with cultural values found in art restoration, which he attempts to argue is analogous. It is not clear that his conception of nature is not already also compromised by certain perspectival biases and imported values.   67  Therefore paradigms of ecological restoration that rely on this separation of ÒnatureÓ and Òwilderness,Ó as being devoid of humans, necessarily preclude the possibility of restoration, as such, since restoration relying on the absence of humans as a criterion does not exist. Restoration projects will be programmed to fail or be limited in the same scope as long as the nature we are endeavoring to ÒrestoreÓ is a place that has never once existed or involved robust human involvement. This paradigm, then, presents a limitation in the sense that it claims not to be engaged with political relations at all and sees this as a strength by focusing purely on ecological integrity and preservation. However, as we will see in the next section, this thin paradigm only thinks it is operating outside the realm of political relations, when in fact it is enacting a very particular and problematic set of political relations.  ÒValue-freeÓ/ÒObjectiveÓ Landscape Rejection   Much is revealed through the terminology both Katz and Elliott use to discuss ecological restoration. ÒFakeÓ and ÒlieÓ both divulge a fundamental preoccupation with deception. Similarly, ElliotÕs analogy of ecological restoration to art restoration further highlights a fear of deception. This analogy introduces the particular iteration of thin ecological restoration examined above that relies on the restoration of a chronologically past and historically specific state of a landscape. This chronologically past landscape is in fact the goal of this type of restoration. However, the analogy of restoring a landscape to the process of restoring a piece of art is a bad analogy. It fails because landscapes are not objects in the same sense that works of art are. It is true that landscapes may have particular features but these features are not static and are imbued with relationality all the way through. What I mean by this is that restoring a particular color or scene to a painting represents a difficult but finite set of steps that are accomplished through comparison to an equally static original or likeness. However, landscapes are composed of  68 changing systems and relationships that are not as discretely knowable or apparent. In this way landscapes are not ÒobjectiveÓ or object-like in the same ways that paintings are.    Further, Katz and Elliott rely on this goal of a chronologically past and specific historical state of a landscape, while simultaneously treating it ahistorically. The attempt to resurrect and restore this landscape as one would restore a piece of art erases the political and historical relations imbued in that landscape in the first place. These motivations and context are largely ignored for the physical and technical task of making it look or behave similarly to a previous existence.10 The motivations for framing ecological restoration this way is not free of ideals or values or perspectives, but they are largely presented as an objective state of affairs, which are simply and unprobelmatically being reinstated. This type of framing is limited in that it ignores the ways in which those values and perspectives are not representative of a broad population, especially already vulnerable populations which may be disproportionately and negatively affected by this restoration and/or the degradation in the first place.  Making the goal of restoration the impossible act of successfully replicating a particular historical object is what allows Katz and Elliot to reject restoration as such, but this rejection is based on a fallacious comparison. By setting the goal of restoration as a product or an object, in this case a culturally specific product framed as an objective state of affairs, they are able to reject the entire process of restoration. For they frame all restoration projects as necessarily aiming at the resurrection of a specific landscape/cultural object and not as an opportunity to include political relations for the betterment of both humans and landscapes. They think restoration is an attempt to fool humans regardless of the ecological benefits restoration might                                                 10 This is not to say that restoration projects are not and should not sometimes be guided by historical or past motivations, but not in such a way that focuses so intently on the replication of one particular historical object to the erasure of all other factors. Which is yet another reason why the art restoration analogy does not work with regard to landscapes.   69 entail, but this is because they are onboard with value-free objective renderings of physical landscapes. Landscapes are not isolated works of art wherein all the ratios and proportions make internal and objective logic. Changing an ecosystem in a particular landscape has relational value and consequences for many stakeholders. Katz and Elliot are so preoccupied with the possibility of humans being fooled by restoration projects, where the goal is seamless replication of a historical object that they neglect to see the ways in which the process of restoration with different goals can produce ethically beneficial results.   To further illustrate my point, consider the removal of many American Indian tribes for the development of Yellowstone National Park (Spence 1999). This was not a value-free decision or project nor was the decision to manicure the park in such a way as to harken back to a Òtime before humans.Ó That landscape was largely imagined and imbued with values of those wishing to enjoy that landscape as a recreational escape from the imperfections of society and culture. However, these projects are largely framed as not only beneficial or good, but objectively so because they enact a perspective of privilege and power that asserts itself as both normative and objective. The erasure of the political relations associated with the tribes in this instance for the instantiation of white ÒSettlerÓ political relations was calculated and subjective. The product of this restoration is not unethical because it was guided by a particular historical state of a landscape, but because the sole focus on that outcome resulted in means that enacted gross injustices for tribes, their land, and their relationship to their land. The appeal to objectivity through the unexamined political relations at play, here, acts as a way of justifying the means of political and ecological domination. This kind of thinking, which the thin paradigm allows for, is dangerous not only because it has real harmful consequences for those not embodying the  70 privileged position, but also because the thin paradigm offers limited interpretations that do not examine and justify the values that are guiding restoration projects and ecological restoration.  3.2 The Thick Paradigm of Ecological Restoration The thick paradigm of ecological restoration does not code all human intervention in ecological spaces as inherently negative or problematic. It also expands the paradigm of ecological restoration beyond projects of restoring a historically specific landscape to considering how to create more ethical relationships amongst humans, humans and environments, and ecosystems. This counter movement to the sentiments expressed within the thin paradigm (primarily by Elliot and Katz) also involves, importantly for my project, a different conceptualization of transparent and non-dominative political relations as both integral and necessary for projects of ecological restoration, since ecological restoration is ultimately about restoring a relationship between political and ecological relations; it is a practice of reconciliation. In this way, the thick paradigm of ecological restoration opens a space for dialogue about what kind of values, perspectives, and experiences are included in human involvement in restoration projects and who gets to participate.  Consider the project of attempting to restore Lake Sturgeon in the Big Manistee River. Focusing primarily on returning the Sturgeon to the river and increasing their population, to the exclusion of the political relations at play that resulted in the decreasing number of Sturgeon in the area, would constitute a problematic restoration project. The Manistee River is located in part of the Little River Band of Ottawa IndiansÕ territory, an Anishinaabe nation in the Great Lakes region, commonly referred to as Northern Michigan. The native fish population of Lake Sturgeon, or Nm” as they are called in the TribeÕs language (Anishinaabemowin), has  71 experienced a significant decrease in their numbers within the Manistee Water Shed. Nm” thrived in pre-colonization settings within the Great Lakes basin and Òserved as a substantial source of food, an indicator species for monitoring the environment, and a clan identityÓ (Holtgren, Ogren, and Whyte 2015). However, with the introduction of white ÒSettlersÓ and settler colonialism, the viability and stability of Nm” populations decreased and was put in danger. The Anishibek relationship to Nm” and the subsequent cultural, political, social, and biological systems constructed to ensure the health and stability of Nm” populations are guided by a perspective and valuing of Nm” as relatives. A restoration project that ignores this crucial aspect of relationality as well as the historical context of disruption and impediment of Anishinaabe lifeways and systems by settler colonialism, to the exclusion of the involvement of the Anishinaabe peoples as stakeholders in this process, constitutes a bad restoration project. This is one of the ways in which we see how who is involved and allowed to participate in restoration projects matters. Without acknowledging the historical, political context and examining how ecological relations are related to political relations, a restoration project of attempting to restore Nm” through purely technical and physical processes of increasing the number of fish seems like a sufficient restoration project. But it also misses certain harms still intact and the opportunity to restore relationships and lifeways foundational to the survival and flourishing of both humans and Nm”.  There are a number of scholars in the ecological restoration literature attempting to make the ecological dimension of harm and injustice an integral player in how we attempt to think about reconciliatory projects previously reserved to the sphere of humans. In acknowledging that political relations and ecological relations are always connected, there is a better chance of capturing targeted problems and creating better solutions. The thick paradigm of ecological  72 restoration will hopefully produce more ethical and sustainable solutions to problems within the political/ecological nexus. Stephanie Mills stresses the relatedness of ecological issues and political/social issues.  The forces that are tearing apart ecological communities are identical with those tearing apart human communities, and there is probably no saving the former without regenerating, or sometimes reinventing, the latter (Mills 1996, 8). In failing to see the connectedness of human social and political endeavors with humansÕ relationship, conceptualization of, and behavior toward nature, our solutions and thinking about these problems will be similarly incomplete and bifurcated. This is one way of viewing the obfuscation of political relations (through not examining which ones are at play) presented in the thin paradigm. These abstract distinctions do not capture the reality of the intertwined existence of relationships between humans and nature or as Andrew Light references, the ways in which moral and social things are always going to be a part of humansÕ relationship with nature in such a way that the things we do to harm the natural world are also harming us, in meaningful ways (Light 2000a, 49).  In combatting the exclusion of politics from ecological restoration, Light argues that restoration projects are inherently political. There is a politics in restoration as well as a politics of restoration (Light 2006). Instead of focusing on whether restoration is possible due to human involvement not squaring with rigid conceptualizations of nature as excluding humans (Katz and Elliot), Light sees that the organization and process of particular restoration projects can be morally suspect when they are not carried out in a democratic and participative manner.  There is also an important moral dimension to good restoration, namely the degree of public participation involved in such projects. This view argues that there are unique values at stake in any restoration that can be achieved only through some degree of public participation in a project, for example, the potential of restorations to help nurture a sense  73 of stewardship or care between humans and the nature around them (Light 2006, 173, emphasis in original). Now, part of this move to expand the paradigm of ecological restoration to include political relations prompts a clarification of how the ecological restoration process should see its relationship to the natural world. The thick paradigm should not become purely anthropocentric either. There should be a balance in trying to instill non-oppressive practices and realities for both humans and nature. The danger of ecological restoration becoming a purely anthropocentric process is a legitimate possibility and would again instantiate another thin model of ecological restoration albeit at the opposite end of the spectrum from the particular iteration of the thin paradigm explored in this chapter so far. Light and Higgs point out why restoration projects must include positive value for both human and nonhuman communities:  The value of the act of restoration and the value of the restoration itself are inextricably linked because restorations do not occur accidentally. As a result, an assessment of restoration as a practice must involve both the act as a value to the community and the product as a value for nature. Part of the distinctive value of restoration, therefore, is the production of this simultaneous positive value (Light and Higgs 1996, 235Ð236). There has to be a space for conceptualizing part of the value of restoration as a value capable of being conceived without solely linking it to human interest. In this way we need to change our thinking about how our relationship to nature and the flourishing of ecosystems is a good in itself that also has important political and moral implications and lessons for human communities.  This would require a move beyond the view of nature as primarily a resource base. The resource base mentality allows us to care about the natural world in a semi-inauthentic way because we care about its functioning only in relation to how that allows us to function. By expanding consideration of ecological functioning as a good in itself, however, we acknowledge that healthy ecological relations have inherent value that can also benefit human political  74 relations. Recall the Nm” restoration project happening in the Manistee River watershed. The Anishibek lifeways were constructed around systems that ensured the ecological integrity and flourishing of an ecosystem that supported the Nm” populations. Relatedly, the flourishing of a multiple ecosystemsÕ network (that also supported the stability of Nm” populations) deeply informed the AnishinaabeÕs cultural and political identities as well as their personal relationships to Nm”. With the onset of settler colonialism, the ecological systems that informed Anishinaabe lifeways and economic/political/social systems were replaced with a Settler model that prioritized the flourishing of settler communities to the detriment of the Anishinaabe people and Nm” (Whyte 2016a, 16). In this way, we see not only how ecological management systems inform the political realities and models we see in societies, but also how different management systems not in touch with certain relationships and knowledge endanger the health and stability of ecological systems, humans included.  3.3 Is the Thick Paradigm Better?  So far, I have offered an analysis two paradigms within ecological restoration literature. The thin paradigm concerns itself with possibility or desirability of ecological restoration per se where the goal of ecological restoration is a very particular kind of landscape, while the thick paradigm calls us to examine how the values, perspectives, and experiences of human involvement are weighed in the framing of restoration projects. This thick paradigm of ecological restoration is better than thin alternatives for the following reasons: i. The thick paradigm of ecological restoration allows us to identify oppressive and liberatory forms of ecological restoration.  ii. The thick paradigm of ecological restoration gives us the space to deliberate about  75 different ecological relations and political relations at play in the formation of restoration projects towards the creation of just restoration for both humans and ecosystems.  By rejecting the goal of thin ecological restoration as an objective and unquestioned historical landscape free of particular political relations, we are allowed to assess whether particular types of human intervention are desirable or not due to the particular ecological relations and political relations promoted. For example, imagine a restoration project that attempts to restore ecosystem health and viability through a technical solution, but this technical solution is formulated and implemented by a group of practitioners that are made aware of local experts and knowledge bases, which they subsequently neglect to consult. Imagine also that these local experts and knowledge holders are part of a socially and politically vulnerable community. Suppose the practitioners who are not from the area suggest constructing a nature preserve that would severely limit local peoplesÕ activities within the preserve. The local knowledge holders and residents would prefer the restoration of ecosystem health the practitionersÕ technical project would produce, but in the service of reestablishing important relationships with the flora and fauna. If this important cultural and existential desire is discounted because practitioners are operating within a paradigm of restoration that codes certain human involvement as negative and harmful11, then this particular restoration project is inauthentic and harmful. Without a space for the localsÕ values, experiences, and perspectives to help shape the restoration project, the project itself can incite further harms even if ecological relations end up better off. Similarly, we are able to challenge whether even the ecological relations resulting from this type of intervention are preferable without the input of local                                                 11 For example, if the people are allowed to enter the preserve but only for recreational viewing purposes and not foraging or plant collection.   76 knowledge holders who know the ecological relations at play in their community and space.  The inclusion of multiple frameworks for assessing the viability and success of ecological restoration projects within the thick paradigm also allows for more inclusive participation in not only the framing of restoration projects, but also the procedural decisions being made throughout the process of restoration. It justifies expanding the scope to examine competing attitudes, beliefs, experiences, and values that influence ecological restoration all along whether we acknowledged them in the past or not. By moving the debate away from arguments around whatÕs properly human and whatÕs properly natural, we can include pressing issues invaluable to restoration projects. This opens the space of possibility for assessing and weighing differing concerns, both political and ecological. This allows us the pragmatic, deliberative forum to argue for particular political relations over particular ecological relations, certain ecological relations over certain political relations, integrated political and ecological models, co-management of ecological spaces for political reconciliatory purposes, and so on as each case presents. The opening of this deliberative space is essential to the forging of new environmental ethics in the sense of allowing for the possibility of different and new ways of relating to the natural world both politically and ecologically.  The positive potential of the thick paradigm restoration is illustrated through the examination of the case of the Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project. We see here how the openness of the space of deliberation and transparent discussion about what values, experiences, and perspectives being utilized tailor this restoration project to the enhancement of ecological relations and political relations.    77 3.4 Case Study: The Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project  The Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project is an ecological restoration project that operates within the thick paradigm of ecological restoration. This project, initiated in the early 1990s in the northwestern coastal forests of the United States, relies on cultural cooperation and collaboration for the restoration of redwood forests, coastal fog, and streams as well as restoration of American Indian cultural practices. It is important to remember when considering this case, the historical, social, and political conditions that resulted in the degraded ecosystem space restoration aims to ameliorate. In this case, the environmentally degraded landscape of this Pacific Northwest region was not the result of general human misuse and mismanagement. The arrival of white settlers to this area and the introduction of the systems of settler colonialism drastically changed not only the physical landscape through natural resource extraction such as logging for timber, but also severely affected interhuman relations amongst tribes in the area, between settlers and American Indians, and between American Indians and the land. Settler land management and land use practices as well as the physical, political, and social oppressions of American Indians removed and displaced Indian lifeways and systems with settler ones (Whyte 2016a). Settler ways, in this instance, were presented as objective and normative with no consideration of the IndiansÕ connection to and knowledge of these places. This erasure and lack of acknowledgement were used to kill, remove, and dispossess tribes.  This case is important because it provides an example of why thick restoration is preferable given its attention to the social and political context that resulted in both human and environmental degradation. This intertribal project relies on an openness to explore the human conflicts present and the collaboration necessary for producing a more just restoration project. This case requires more than just the reintroduction of ecological relations or native species  78 because the tribes were and are part of the physical landscape. It is not surprising, then, that the project of settler colonialism destroyed relationships to the land and cultural lifeways at the same time that it destroyed certain ecological realities. Since the project of settler colonialism harmed both peoplesÕ cultures and the physical aspects of the landscape, both those sites of harm are in need of repair.  Part of what is emphasized through the co-management of this project amongst Indian and non-Indian collaborators is a respect and space for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (that might be silenced were only practitioners from the dominant settler culture involved). It also is sensitive to the fact that certain cultural practices were detrimental to both ecological and cultural integrity and health in the region. This allows us to conclude that these same dominant cultural practices should not be solely relied upon in the development of sustainable solutions and restoration.  For example, a campaign of reforestation accompanied with the withdrawal of human involvement afterwards would not work in this region where long-term involvement and the rejuvenation of multiple ecosystems is required. A purely aesthetic campaign might restore a semblance of ÒwildernessÓ without actually substantially altering ecological health or sustainable cultural practices. Dennis Rogers-Martinez states ÒRestoration is not reforestation, but is much moreÉReforestation is the bringing back together of people and land in a close working relationship to ensure the health and survival of bothÓ (Rogers-Martinez 1992, 67). As witnessed in the Nm” restoration project, the outcome of simply larger or more abundant fish populations is desirable, but not on its own. In order for the relationship between the Anishinaabe and Nm” (or more generally, between humans and particular fauna, flora) to be restored, requires more than the ecological work of increasing fish populations or in this case, tree populations. Part of the  79 project of restoration in the Sinkyone case is to repair relationships between humans and the ecosystems such that certain values are apparent. One such value is sustainability. A restoration campaign focused purely on reforestation would not be sustainable in the long run or engender the repaired relationship stakeholders seek.   Addressing ecological issues without also addressing the political practice of settler colonialism that led to the wide scale degradation of ecological relations as well as the illegalization and erasure of Indian cultural and ecological practices will be an incomplete restoration project. To quote Rogers-Martinez again, What do we want to restore? We want to restore life. We want to restore the living and sacred relationship between the people and the earth. We want to restore our spirits as we restore the land. We want to restore our culture, our songs, our myths and stories, and the Indian names for creeks and springs. We want to restore ourselves. This is what we want to restore at Sinkyone (Rogers-Martinez 1992, 67). The utilization only of the thin paradigm of ecological restoration, in this example, would simply not be apt at capturing the full extent of harms present and necessitating restoration generally. The degradation of the Sinkyone land is not simply a consequence of poor human management, but a larger political project of oppression and severing of relationships between the Sinkyone people and their environment.   This chapter has examined two paradigms of ecological restoration. The thin paradigm of ecological restoration presents restoration as encompassing projects that attempt to restore physical landscapes without openly addressing or confronting the political relations that inform the historical landscapes (ecological relations) practitioners wish to recreate. The thick paradigm frames ecological restoration as the opening of a space that allows for deliberation about sites of human conflict and collaboration relevant to restoration projects. The creation of deliberative  80 space within the thick paradigm is what makes it less probable to enacting dominative and oppressive restorations. I have argued that the thick paradigm is preferable because it actively addresses a wide range of the relations at play in constructing political and ecological landscapes for the creation and enactment of more environmentally ethical realities. In this way, thick restoration is a better process for ensuring the production and continuation of right relations necessary for reconciliation. Chapters four and five will explore the literatures of environmental justice and indigenous environmental ethics as sites that conceptualize harms and propose solutions from an integrated standpoint that pays careful attention to both ecological relations, political relations, and the ways they are related. In this way, chapters four and five will also track processes of reconciliation as the instantiation of right relations both ecologically and politically.            81 Chapter 4: Environmental Justice As elucidated in chapters two and three, it is unreasonable to exclude the environmental from analyses of harm. Reconciliation as the instantiation of right relations requires analysis and righting of both political relations and ecological relations.  Chapters two and three focused on the problems that abound when only one set of relations is considered. The literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration each benefit from the examination of both ecological relations and political relations because this integrated purview allows for more precise harm analysis as well as more innovative proposals for repair/reconciliation. Articulations of what is required for political reconciliation within chapter two named things such as trust, political agency, and citizenship. This chapter argues that political agency is not achievable as a goal without analyses and interrogations of environmental harm that foreclose the possibility of full political agency to many communities. This chapter examines the environmental justice movement as one literature that understands environmental dimensions of harm as roadblocks to the creation of reconciliation and instantiation of right relations within society. Section I will explore the ways in which environmental justice tracks the patterns of social inequality and environmental inequality that lead to the most socially/politically marginalized and vulnerable communities incurring the least safe and most degraded environments, with special attention on black* communities in the US. Section II focuses on black American communities in the US as a group disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and suggests that one of the ways in which harm is done to black American communities is through the destruction of their unique environmental heritages and environmental identities. Section III investigates the Flint                                                 *  Black, for the purposes of this chapter, will refer to decedents of enslaved Africans within the United States. Thus, Òblack AmericanÓ and ÒAfrican AmericanÓ will be used interchangeably throughout.    82 Water Crisis as a case study, which illustrates the need for reconciliation among black American communities and characterizes the instantiation of right relations as the ability of these communities to express their environmental heritages and identities. The ability to express and the acceptance of these heritages and identities by society is integral to the practice of social/political agency. In this way, this chapter will argue that environmental harm, environmental heritages, and environmental identities are all integral to reconciliationÕs goals of political agency and environmental health. Thus environmental justice is fundamentally a project of reconciliation.  4.1 The Emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement Environmental justice began as a movement concerned with the interrogation of certain realities communities faced. Communities of color, poor communities, and most frequently communities where these populations intersect (within the US) face distinct environmental challenges. In 1988, the United Church of ChristÕs Commission on Racial Justice published a report that confirmed what members of poor, communities of color knew: that race and socioeconomic makeup of communities corresponded with the siting of commercial hazardous waste facilities. This study was able to illustrate the systematic and predictable structure through which certain communities are targeted as outlets for the externalities of corporate affluence, thus objectively verifying the day-to-day experience poor, communities of color were navigating. The report states: The findings of the analytical study suggest the existence of clear patterns which show that communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities. The possibility that these patterns resulted by chance is virtually impossible, strongly suggesting that some of underlying factor or factors, which are related to race played a role in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities in the United States (Commission for Racial Justice 1987).  83 The significance of this study should not be understated especially considering the societal dismissals that often discount, silence, and erase the testimony of marginalized and vulnerable populations. This report made legible the realities, which are largely rendered invisible and isolated within these communities, precisely because the situations of those communities affected prompted the investigation.   Environmental justice examines the racist and classist logics that result in environmental racism. Environmental racism is the disproportionate burdening of poor, communities of color with environmental ills free of the related affluence these ills engender for other parties (R. D. Bullard 1990). In this way, we can understand a major motivation of environmental justice as an attention to the ways in which environmental bads and goods are distributed unevenly or unfairly across populations; a series of connected inequalities that constitute a set of deeply harmful relations calling for reconciliation. Environmental justice, as a framework, also centers and privileges the tacit knowledge and expert navigation of the communities experiencing these environmental ills. Communities living with and navigating these realities everyday are empowered to speak for themselves, especially in the face of environmental racism and corporate greed that labors under the assignation and identification of these communities as powerless.  The distribution of environmental harms and burdens follows what Robert Bullard terms a Òpath of least resistanceÓ (R. D. Bullard 1990). ÒThe path of least resistanceÓ is the phenomenon by which communities identified as least likely or able to thwart predatory and unjust environmental burdens incur these harms. These communities are chosen as targets for these additional harms precisely because of their social, political, economic positionality and its contribution to these communitiesÕ inability to push back against this unjust distribution. In many ways, these communities are manufactured as recipients of societyÕs refuse precisely through their  84 construction as people who are socially, politically, and environmentally disposable (R. D. Bullard 1990; Robert D. Bullard 2005).  Thus, environmental justice articulates a particular harm and injustice in not only the unfair distribution of environmental harms and goods, but the basis of this distribution being based on racist identifications and racist constructions of identity that associate (for the purposes of this chapter) black Americans with societal waste. It is not surprising that the ÒNot In My BackyardÓ (NIMBY) movement only gains practical traction in white/affluent communities that have the resources to make this pronouncement audible and effective through social/political as well as material representation and follow-through. In fact, the rare occurrence in which NIMBY is enacted within a community dealing with rampant environmental injustice, may largely sidestep the procedural inequalities/injustices necessary to actually address the environmental justice claims occurring (Whyte 2010). That which makes NIMBY possible as a movement to white/affluent communities is precisely the burdening of poor, communities of color through the phenomenon of ÒPlace in BlacksÕ BackyardÓ (PIBBY) (R. D. Bullard 1990). In this way, environmental justice situates itself at the intersections of multiple oppressions and sees the social, political, and economic harms experienced by highly specific demographics of the human population as inextricably linked with environmental quality, human health, and environmental degradation. Additionally, the construction of people of color and poor communities (especially poor black communities in the US) as not properly concerned with the environment supports dominative logics that degraded environmental spaces are Ònormal,Ó or unproblematic to these populations. These logics of domination also importantly construct designations of what the environment is and who is allowed to care for or regard the environment in critical ways. One of the ways in which environmental racism flourishes is through the manufactured disregard of  85 poor, communities of color through racist and classist logics within the US, but an equally important well worn path of environmental injustice is to construct the spaces where black Americans and people of color live as not the environment.  The rise of the ÒmainstreamÓ environmental movement in the US throughout the 1960s and 1970s articulated restrictive, racist, classist, and discriminatory constructions of not only what the environment or ÒnatureÓ is, but also what environmental regard, care, concern, and appreciation looked like. What we refer to as the US ÒmainstreamÓ environmental movement was largely produced by white, upper class men (R. D. Bullard 1990; Shrader-Frechette 2002). ÒNatureÓ was, for the most part, constructed as a place Òout thereÓ free of human involvement or taint and functioned as a retreat through which (some) humans could remove the base trappings of civilization and find oneÕs Òtrue selfÓ through contemplation and recreation (Muir 2015). In this way, ÒnatureÓ became something remote, Òwild,Ó and devoid of humans. The ÒurbanÓ was constructed as ÒnatureÕsÓ foil, a place thoroughly debased with the corruptions of industrialism.12 Concerns for the environment within this limited construction of ÒnaturalÓ and ÒurbanÓ spaces promoted ÒauthenticÓ relationships with ÒnatureÓ in a highly specified and biocentric way. While, biocentrism is a broad and general term, there was a prominent strain of biocentrism promoted by the US mainstream environmental movement that privileged the flourishing of ecological systems to the erasure and sometimes active harming of human communities and concerns. This particular conception of biocentrism has been referred to as Òmisanthropic biocentrismÓ or indeed Òenvironmental fascismÓ (Shrader-Frechette 2002, 4Ð5). Misanthropic biocentrism and Òenvironmental fascismÓ both elevate the human-interpreted needs of natural systems/ÒnatureÓ                                                 12 The same industrialism that created the wealthy confined the poor to the urban areas directly surrounding their industrial sites of employment. Thus making recreation in nature an activity of the rich and inaccessible to the working class/poor. Similarly agricultural workers were similarly restricted from this narrative of nature as the environment quiet literally was their workplace, a place of toil.   86 above or to the peril of human flourishing; in this way, human affairs become something not only separate, but antithetical to ecological integrity and flourishing. C.R. Palamar cites the exclusion of human health concerns from understandings of ecological integrity as a major limitation to mainstream environmental movementsÕ broad social uptake: The failure of contemporary environmental movements to provide for protection of human and non-human communities and health, their limited understanding of Ôenvironment,Õ and their failure to focus upon healthy restoration of both social communities and ecological stability is, in part, responsible for their inability to manifest as powerful social movements (Palamar 2008, 91). So, part of the reason environmental justice emerged was to create a movement that included the concerns not only of those dwelling in built/urban environments (mainly lower income populations and populations of color), but also to expand notions of who/what was included within realms of environmental concern. Consider how this racist/classist construction of the environment and environmental interaction limits and dictates who is allowed to care for or express regard for the environment. Here, the construction of ÒurbanÓ or industrial spaces is not just raced and classed to single out poor communities and communities of color, but also functions in such a way as to suggest urban spaces are not spaces in which environmental health exists or can exist. Nature is not existent in urban spaces under this logic and therefore cannot be in peril or negatively affecting communities in these areas. If environmental beauty existed in urban places how would bourgeois and classed notions of nature outside the ÒcityÓ function as exclusive retreat?   However, it is necessary to make a further distinction in regard to misanthropic biocentrism. Misanthropic biocentrism assumes that the concerns of all humans are secondary to the prescriptions necessary for ecological integrity (assumes human health is not a part of or an integral aspect of ecological integrity). This is the kind of perspective that when taken to its most  87 extreme conclusion leads to proposals of species wide extinction of humans through suicide as the most logical solution to enact ecological flourishing of the planet (Singer 1972; Ormrod 2011).13 What, I argue, is more prevalent is the intersection of misanthropic biocentrism with environmental racism that leads to what I term discriminatory biocentrism. Much as in chapter three, it is not simply the exclusion of human concerns from the realm of environmental regard, but rather the exclusion of particular humansÕ concerns and the instantiation of privileged humansÕ concerns presented as the objective/best course of action for environmental management and flourishing. A topical example of the ways in which racist and classist logics are interacting and inflaming environmental issues is the discussion surrounding the killing of Harambe, the silverback gorilla, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Zoo officials shot Harambe after a four-year-old child fell into the gorilla enclosure. Almost immediately after the incident racist, classist, and sexist rhetoric began to circulate that largely focused on the parenting skills and abilities of the boyÕs mother. It is relevant to mention the family is black. There was even a petition circulated calling for the parents of the child be held accountable for HarambeÕs death amidst related discussions of child abuse/neglect (Lang 2016). Absent from these discussions is a problematizing of the zoo as a place that exists in the first place, but these responses also illustrate the logic in which remnants of racist, classist, sexist constructions of environmental regard quite easily and eagerly suggest that certain humansÕ health and safety are less important than the unfettered flourishing of Ònature.Ó It suggests that some peopleÕs lives should be sacrificed or at least not mourned when they are lost in ÒwildÓ or ÒnaturalÓ circumstances.14                                                 13 This is a problematic conclusion and proposition for many reasons, which I will not expand upon here, but most critically because it assumes that all human existence is necessarily detrimental to the ecological flourishing of Earth. 14 Here, I want to avoid assumptions about the ÒvalueÓ of human lives over non-human lives or vice versa, but I want to stress the ways in which we build environments like zoos for entertainment, while simultaneously trying to promote problematic rhetoric about wildness. It seems to me this kind of rhetoric encourages a move to arguments  88 The characterization of environmental regard and care as predicated on the marginality of particular humansÕ concerns led to particular land use and management models that also promoted a lack of human presence (such as preservation and wilderness protection).  These models relied on concern for a very specific construction and understanding of what the environment and ÒnaturalÓ world is. As mentioned earlier, this construction relied on depictions of nature as wild and untamed, as well as free of human occupation, presence, and influence (Cronon 1996). As such, the mainstream environmental movement did not adequately consider the concerns of those living in ÒbuiltÓ environments especially highly vulnerable populations (communities of color, poor communities, women, children, and the like) dealing with housing, siting, health and safety, environmental quality, and resource access issues. It missed these issues because it did not properly consider them environmental and was indeed a movement constructed by persons not situated in those lived experiences and contexts. Palamar states, Ò[a]ttentiveness to wilderness protection, while important culturally, intellectually, and ecologically, belies adherents who are not subject to the ravages of environmental pollutionÓ (Palamar 2008, 83). From the inception of the mainstream environmental movement, certain realities were excluded from the purview of environmental concern because of the foundersÕ positions of distance from these realities (e.g. living in neighborhoods populated with environmentally noxious facilities). Environmental justice, as well as the existence of activists and scholars articulating diverse avenues of inquiry and interaction within/about the environment suggests that amendments to environmentalism are necessary (P. Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009; Ranco et al. 2011; Schlosberg 2010; Sze and London 2008; D. E. Taylor 2000; Cole and Foster 2001; Figueroa 2006).                                                                                                                                                         of Òyou should have known better,Ó when violent incidents or deaths happen with ÒwildÓ animals. I think these constitute moves to innocence that ultimately blames certain people for their own deaths or misfortunes in these contexts; oftentimes in the US, those found blameworthy are not white.   89 Environmental justice, as a movement and as a discipline, is interested in the dismissal of discriminatory biocentric models of environmental concern, which privilege ecological flourishing to the exclusion of examinations of human health and well being, especially the health and well being of those most vulnerable and marginalized. Environmental justice incorporates and centers humans as a fundamental part of the natural world and environment, whose concerns and well being must be considered. But it is also importantly concerned with the insertion of particular values, lived experiences, and perspectives associated with populations of humans whose needs and concerns have been largely excluded or erased from the development of mainstream environmental movement(s). In this way, environmental justice rearticulates the project of environmentalism and environmental concern with the concerns of all affected in actuality, whereas previous mainstream environmental movements assumed universality and inclusion while enunciating environmentalism from a particular location of privilege and disregard for those humans affected differently by environmental degradation.  Environmental justice is distinctive in its inclusion of ecological issues as importantly related to or indicative of political relations. The fact that the most predictable recipients of environmental harms are the most socially/politically vulnerable communities of a society exposes a structural and systematic pattern that drastically affects outcomes for certain populations. The focus on the intersections of race and class in terms of access to environmental quality and resources shone a light on communities usually excluded from environmental discourse and regard because their realities and issues did not fall within the discriminatory biocentric purview of the properly Òenvironmental.Ó  In this way environmental justice, does not attempt to view the environment as a place out there for which we must primarily care for or focus on. Rather it views the environments we live, work, and play in as integral to our health  90 and well being as humans and vice versa.  4.2 Amendments to the Environmental Justice Movement Environmental justice expands the space of possibility for examining the intersectional sites of humans and environments while also expanding who we consider when we talk about environmental degradation, however, there are additional realms of concern related to the exclusion of people of color when thinking about the natural world. The focus on environmental racism limits the place and identity of people of color in relation to the environment to always already negative or degraded sites of interaction. This is not to dismiss or diminish the importance of environmental justice or the work being done by people of color in relation to the environment, but it does constitute a limited approach in terms of analyzing particular environmental identities and heritages. The reactionary nature of environmental justice is limited by certain avenues of inquiry (again this is not to diminish the real urgency of these interventions and avenues of inquiry) that can often obscure other concerns such as positive and historical sites of interaction with certain communities and the environment. It also obscures the ways in which histories are inscribed into the sites of conflict as they appear in the contemporary context. This section will explore how the oft-erased and obscured historical narratives, environmental heritages, and environmental identities of black Americans are linked to the goals of political agency and citizenship necessary for reconciliation within US society.  In her book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans the Great Outdoors, Carolyn Finney examines the largely unheard and unexamined narratives of African Americans and their relationship(s) to the environment. The dominance of particular narratives within the US, largely the narratives of European Americans who are  91 ethnically white, erases and obscures the unique narratives of African Americans and the environment. This tracks a larger trend found within settler colonialism that displaces the histories, customs, lifeways, and very existence of those that do not embody a settler identity where, here, settler implies European ethnicity and white skin (Tuck and Yang 2012). The destruction and erasure of these histories and heritages also profoundly affects African AmericansÕ connection to place and environment in ways that diminish their political agency and claims to belonging/citizenship. This dearth of easily accessible and available narratives relevant to African Americans help to perpetuate the myth that African Americans do not ÒcareÓ about the environment or that they are only involved in environmental issues in regard to the realm of interaction outlined by the environmental justice movement. In relation to this limitation Finney states: One of the biggest challenges for individuals whose work is considered ÒenvironmentalÓ is how quickly anything related to African Americans and the environment gets designated as an Òenvironmental justiceÓ concern. There is usually no discussion about the particularsÑjust the mere fact that Òrace,Ó or Òblack peopleÓ are involved usually relegates African American environmental interactions to a particular point on the environment spectrumÑenvironmental justice (Finney 2014, 108).  The assumption that all African American interest in the environment need necessarily or exclusively take the shape of an environmental justice concern is damaging. Not only does it further limit the sphere of environmental concern from the externality of white privilege, but it also is another way in which African AmericansÕ experiences are coded as monolithic and identical in content.  Part of what FinneyÕs work urges us to consider is how landscapes and geographies are imbued with meanings and histories, which can and have been sanitized of certain populationsÕ presence for the dominance and propagation of other narratives. ÒBut while all individuals may  92 imbue a landscape with meaning, only some meanings gain traction in our quest to define ourselves and the places we live, or to shape a national narrative that supposedly reflects the beliefs and experiences of all AmericansÓ (Finney 2014, 76). The erasure of the narratives, histories, and presences of African Americans from landscapes and nationalistic mythmaking further marginalize African Americans not only from the physical landscape and territory of the US, but also from notions of citizenship and civic belonging.15  Civic Estrangement and the Erasure of Black Ecological Identities In chapter three, I explored the ways in which the instantiation of political relations can privilege particular lived experiences, values, and perspectives that support or challenge dominant narratives in the field of ecological restoration. This chapter continues this interrogation in regard to what dominant narratives of environmentalism or environmental interaction within the US tells us about whose experiences, histories, and narratives largely construct the meaning the environment holds for people.  Oftentimes the environmental burdens communities of colorÑespecially black communitiesÑin the US face drive the narrative that prioritizes social justice to black environmental movements. While the immediacy and severity of these disproportionate and racist sitings of environmental burdens within these communities is unquestionable, this section will focus on the erasure of black American environmental heritages and environmental identities as a importantly related to the political ÒothernessÓ that makes these environmental degradations commonplace. Black AmericansÕ construction as alienated and not belonging to the physical territory and land of the US is a strategic political move to further construct their identities as existential and political others ÒdeservingÓ societyÕs ills. I examine                                                 15 I should add here that it is not only black histories/narratives that are displaced and erased through dominant settler ones, but also American Indian ones. These narratives are displaced and erased on many fronts and, importantly, through the narratives and consequences of slavery and territory allocation to freed/former slaves and their descendants.   93 how the permanent mediation of social injustice in constructions of blackness both contribute to and result in different relations to the ecological world. The erasure of black environmental heritages and identities alienates them not only from environmental participation as itÕs coded for white Americans, but also alienates them from expressions of political agency and citizenship related to the territory of the US in deeply meaningful ways.  The proclamation that black Americans do not ÒcareÓ about the environment in ways that sync with mainstream (white) environmentalism in the US becomes, then, a consequence of white supremacist logics that aim to exclude black Americans from full civic membership and protections of their communities, especially in terms of environmental quality and safety.  Given the integral nature of political relations and ecological relations as well as political/ecological harms, the placing of environmental burdens on already socially/politically marginalized groups exposes itself as a logic of domination (Plumwood 2002b; Warren 1990). One of the results of overburdening already socially and politically marginalized group in a way that dictates a particular relationship to the environment (a risky, dangerous, negative one) is that it obscures or makes impossible other ways of relating that may be informed by certain environmental identities, environmental heritages, and environmental histories. An under examined aspect of environmental justice is the primacy of environmental identity and environmental heritage among groups experiencing environmental injustices. Environmental identity is Òthe amalgamation of cultural identities, ways of life, and self-perceptions that are connected to a given groupÕs physical environment,Ó while environmental heritage is understood as the ways in which Òthe meaning and symbols of the past frame values, practices, and places we wish to preserve for ourselves as members of a communityÓ (Figueroa 2006, 371Ð72, emphasis in original). Environmental degradation and overburdening of certain communities can  94 be read, then, as a fundamental disrespect or erasure of the environmental identities and environmental heritages of particular peoples.  The fact that vulnerable groups are so often the victims of the unfair distribution of environmental burdens reflects discrimination against the groupsÕ environmental identity. [É] More generally, the distribution of environmental burdens is closely related to the ways in which groupsÕ environmental identities and environmental heritages are respected within a societyÓ(Figueroa 2006, 372). When particular groupsÕ environmental identities and heritages are disrespected and discriminated against, this is not just an interpersonal slight. Rather, it is a sign of the denigration of an entire populationÕs relationship to their environment and the shared world we inhabit. We can see the truly horrific outcomes of attitudes of disrespect to environmental identities and heritages through the quite literal outlawing of certain groupsÕ lifeways (Tuck and Yang 2012; Whyte 2016a). The outlawing and erasure of these cultural group practices and lifeways is directly related to ongoing marginality and oppression within the geopolitical spaces of nation states, particularly nation states such as the US that came to existence through the violent elimination and forced enslavement of specific groups.  In Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, Salamishah Tillet explores how the erasure and reinsertion of black historical narratives informs the possibility of racial reconciliation and democracy within the United StatesÕ context. Essential to her examination, is the concept of Òcivic estrangement.Ó ÒCivic estrangementÓ refers to the paradoxical position of African Americans as legally enfranchised, while simultaneously alienated from complete civic membership. Tillet states that, Ò[i]n the case of African Americans, civic estrangement occurs because they have been marginalized or underrepresented in the civic myths, monuments, narratives, icons, creeds and images of the past that constitute, reproduce, and promote an American national identityÓ (Tillet 2012, 3). These  95 obstacles to full civic membership, as outlined by Tillet, constitute the damaging existential status of both citizen and non-citizen for African Americans Òwho experience the feelings of disillusionment and melancholia of non-belonging and a yearning for civic membershipÓ (Tillet 2012, 3). The erasure of black presence from Òcivic mythsÓ leads to a harmful alienation that infuses and colors the subsequent and current racial inequalities within the US.   These absences and erasures of black environmental heritages and environmental identities similarly marginalize black political agency and notions of citizenship. The out of place-ness facilitated by the estrangement of black people from natural spaces that function as modes of recreation, relaxation, reflection, and civic participation for white Americans is indicative of a continuous othering of and violence against black bodies within the US. This has led to a problematic trend of theorizing blacks as not adequately or seriously invested in ecological and environmental issues.16 Kimberly Smith explores the perception that blacks have less concern for the environment by expanding what is properly regarded as environmental thought. Smith defines environmental thought as Òa set of ideas concerning the relationship between humans and nature, including the norms that ought to govern that relationshipÓ (K. Smith 2004, 268). Smith considers what the erasure of black agrarianism from the civic memory and myths and of the U.S. means in terms of a pervasive (mis)understanding of American blacks not ÒcaringÓ about the environment or not having a distinct environmental heritage. She studies black agrarianism within 19th century slave narratives as a site for early black environmental thought and a nuanced environmental ethic. The active ÒforgettingÓ and erasure of black narratives and relationships to the environment/land obscure the ways in which                                                 16 This is especially repugnant given arguments that black Americans are not Òof this landÓ made by ethnically white Americans who are also not Òof this landÓ in the same sense to the complete misrecognition of American Indians land tenure/presence/existence as well as the context of forced enslavement that brought the majority of African Americans to this territory.   96 existential/phenomenological experiences (re)create attachments to the world and the environment. In this way, the privileges of white settler Americans dictates the environmentalism viewed as mainstream in ways that are not attentive to or respective of the varied experiences of black Americans as formerly enslaved peoples in the US. This social injustice serves as a barrier to a relationship to the land that most white Americans take for granted and why many times environmental concern for black Americans is coded differently, largely as civil rightsÕ issues. These mainstream constructions based on racist, sexist, and classist logics also cannot track or make legible the ways in which black Americans are constantly negotiating environmental spaces or environmental issues within their communities informed by environmental ways of knowing, heritages, and identities. Additionally, the lack of landed status of enslaved Africans, their descendants, and later freed African Americans, despite promises of property with the abolition of slavery, (a promise entirely predicated on the oppression and theft of land from Indigenous peoples) constitutes a unique positionality of African Americans generally within the US body politic.  Relevant to discussions of ÒcitizenshipÓ and political agency are the varying histories and narratives of ÒincorporationÓ to the body politic/nation state of the US; the historical context by which Africans were brought to the US matters. It matters because Africans did not come of their own volition as settlers, but were brought forcibly and enslaved. That is the nature of their introduction to what we refer to as the US. In order to justify the unjustifiable, or continued multi-generational enslavement of Africans and later African Americans, there had to be a construction of a fundamental difference between whites and blacks. We can see this is in the construction of the concept of Òcitizen.Ó Before the contemporary understanding of legal citizen, notions of belonging and unbelonging pervaded what it meant to be a citizen of a place. This was  97 clearly because actually existing within the geopolitical ÒbordersÓ of a nation-state should not have been sufficient to legal citizenship or else slaves would have to had been considered citizens in this regard. Owning land as an avenue to citizenship was obviously foreclosed to slaves. Similarly, notions that what made land oneÕs property was working the land or mixing the physical earth with oneÕs labor were not extended to the slave labor performed by Africans and their descendants in the US (Locke 2011a). Thereby the very nature of the context that brought Africans to be enslaved in this country also became the condition by which they were excluded from the rights and protections of legal enfranchisement.  The ÒexceptionalismÓ of blackness, then, becomes an exception to the rule of good(s): citizenship, enfranchisement, freedom, property, bodily integrity, safety, belonging, and so on. Tillet explores the erasure of black presence from civic myths that determine what it means to be American and of America. This erasure and active forgetting is political because should it be successful and unquestioned, then the current context of racial injustice in the U.S. becomes a feature of blackness and not importantly a consequence of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and massive historical oppressions. To draw this comparison out to environmental injustices, the disproportionate overburdening of black communities with environmental hazards and risks also becomes a coincident of blackness and not a premeditated construction of black undesirability by a racist state. The connections and inter-imbrications of social, political, and environmental harms instantiate harmful relations that impede reconciliation and must be addressed in order to bring about right relations for black Americans within the US.  It is necessary to acknowledge and analyze here the ways in which the structures of race-based enslavement and settler colonialism co-constituted and supported each other in highly gendered ways. I have relied on generalized constructions of marginalization and vulnerability  98 within black American communities, but I have not attended to the ways in which gender creates hyper-marginality and hyper-vulnerable positions for women within these communities, especially black women. Tiffany KingÕs In the Clearing: Black Female Bodies, Space and Settler Colonial Landscapes, examines black female bodies as sites where the projects of settler colonialism and slavery intersect. The need for space within the project of settlement (settler colonialism) created a concomitant need for bodies (slavery) to ÒclearÓ and maintain, that space, which required and produced the Òblack female slavery body as a unit of unending propertyÓ (King 2013, abstract). ÒClearingÓ required both the genocide of Native Bodies and the self-actualization of settlers through the creation of land and bodies (brown and black) as property. Both of these structures support each other, then, in the production of space/clearing that allow the settler to inhabit that space and self-actualize their identities as inhabitants/citizens of this spaceÉthe US. In this way, the construction of bodies as property was as integral to the space-making project of settler colonialism as literal land theft/land clearing. King states: ÒSettlement is redefined as a space producing and subject producing act that is always happening in relation to the self-actualization of the Settler, the death of the Native and the negation of the SlaveÓ (King 2013, 28). It is important to keep this triad in mind in the formation of what we call the US precisely because projects of settlement and enslavement were related to the production of a space primarily for and of settlers. Natives and slaves were never viewed as persons within these projects only as means to the end of the self-actualization of settlers through the expansion, settlement, and domination of land and bodies as property. They were never meant to be incorporated as citizens in any real way because that would require the status of settler that was reserved for ethnically European occupiers of the US. In this way, theorizations of the construction of the US as a settler state, which are Òoften overdetermined by Native and White  99 bodies, and spaces, is also a spatial practice that requires the production of Black bodiesÓ (King 2013, 17). The US still requires and relies on the production of black bodies, particularly black female bodies, as property and sites of domination directly foreclosing the possibility and desire for the reconciliation of black Americans as citizens and full civic members of society. The ongoing murder of black women within the US can be understood as an ongoing project of settler colonialism and slavery attempting to assert territorial control and space-making through the instrumental use and elimination of black female bodies. The particular gendered hierarchies that accompanied both slavery and settler colonialism work together to ensure the hyper-marginalization and oppression of black and Native women17 specifically, which can also be seen in the lack of visibility of black and brown women in mainstream environmental movements despite their presence, as well as their erasure from environmental histories and heritages.  The erasure of black American agrarianism as well as relationships to land within rural contexts is important precisely because of the importance land and relationships to land has to notions of belonging, membership, and political agency. The incorporation of African slaves within the US body politic as property meant that their relationship to land was a property-to-property relationship in the eyes of the state and their masters. The transition from enslavement to ÒfreedomÓ (abolition of slavery) did not in fact confer the status of citizenship to freed slaves or those still enslaved. After the Union victory in the Civil War, populations of nearly four million slaves were freed and conferred a new and ambiguous status within the US body politic (Baptist 2014; Sinha 2016).  The Òforty acres and a muleÓ policy was proposed as a way to                                                 17 The continued disappearance and murder of Native women within the US and Canada also illustrates the ongoing project of settler colonialism and view of the elimination of the Native as necessary to the ongoing assertions of US and Canadian sovereignty.   100 incorporate former slaves as landed individuals in the US and existed as an attempt to ÒpeacefullyÓ incorporate former slaves into US society. These lands were confiscated and/or ÒabandonedÓ by confederate populations (these lands were stolen from Native Americans in the first place). This policy and even the provisions of the FreedmenÕs Bureau disappeared as the US reneged on its commitments to help ÒsettleÓ formerly enslaved blacks in the US18 (Berlin et al. 1992; Foner and Hahn 2007; Glymph 2008; Hahn 2005). These histories and narratives are important to understanding the ways in which current race relations and attacks upon black personhood (especially black womanhood) persist. The erasure of these social, political, existential and ecological histories and narratives aids in foreclosing the possibility of understanding how current political and ecological realities are related and imbued with historical turmoil. It also points to the fact that reconciliation is necessary for addressing the injustices that continue to happen. Viewing black populations as primarily urban is inaccurate and erases the long and continuous history of black agrarianism and relationships to land that fall outside of the provincial urban/rural distinction. It erases the history of slavery, migration, broken promises, genocide, indigenous land theft, and so many others that mark and constitute the moral, imaginative, and physical landscape of the US. Black Americans still long for belonging, they long to be; to be heard and acknowledged, to have their histories honored and addressed as integral to the fabric of this nation, and to not be the place holders or vessels of racial hatred, refuse, environmental destruction, and much more.  In this way, we see how non-dominative environmental identities and heritages are discriminated against and sacrificed up to the dominating societal conception of the environment                                                 18 Primarily because former confederate landholders began to terrorize black agricultural towns/communities when they came back to ÒclaimÓ their land.   101 as a resource base, as property. Environmental identities and heritages that contest this narrative are subjugated and made invisible in order for the fundamental disrespect of those ideas to be enfolded into the status quo. So, the ways in which we use and view the environment or participate in environmental relations is fundamentally political and requires reconciliation. Our ecological relations inform the structure of our environmental identities and heritages. ÒThe environmental justice paradigm calls us to recognize that environmental practices, values, and politics have serious repercussions; in order to anticipate, understand, and ameliorate theses repercussions, environmental consciousness must be transformed so that we promote justice for both ecologies and communities instead of framing the two goals as irreconcilableÓ (Figueroa 2006, 374).  4.3 Case Study: ÒThe Flint Water CrisisÓ  As the previous sections have illustrated, the environment cannot be disentangled from projects of reconciliation and achieving the goals of political agency that underserved communities seek. The articulation, acceptance, and respect of black communitiesÕ environmental heritages and identities are integral to the creation of right relations through the goods of citizenship, civic membership, political agency, and national belonging. This section will examine the Flint Water Crisis as a case indicative of the dangers of harmful relations stemming from the erasure of the importance of relationships to the environment from the purview of political realities.  In April 2014, the city of Flint, MichiganÑunder the emergency management of Darnell Earley (appointed by Governor Rick Snyder) and advisement of the Michigan Department of Environmental QualityÑswitched water sources from the lake Huron water source, serviced  102 through the city of DetroitÕs water treatment infrastructure, to the local water source of the Flint River. The Flint River is a historically, well-known polluted river due to the plethora of industrial polluters from FlintÕs booming industrial peak. The river has been the site of industrial runoff, illegal dumping, and pollution from automotive factories and factories contingent to automotive production (e.g. paint factories, part factories, chemical factories, etc.) for nearly 80 consecutive years (Rosner 2016). The switch to Flint River water was regarded as a temporary switch while another pipeline was being constructed to access Lake Huron water and FlintÕs multi-decade contractual dependency of the Detroit Water Sewage Department. The river water was so highly contaminated that it required intensive and excessive chemical treatment. However, without additional corrosion control measures, the water corroded the existing pipes within the cityÕs water infrastructure causing metals such as lead and others to leach into the drinking water servicing FlintÕs residents (Davis et al. 2016).  Flint is a city that is nearly 60% African American, where approximately 40% of people live below the poverty line. The affluence of FlintÕs automotive industrial boom receded when major industrial manufacturers withdrew from the area, while the ramifications of the externalities required to create that industrial affluence and production remain. Indeed the history of Flint, and many other post-industrial cities such as Detroit, tracks a narrative of disempowerment at the hands of both industrial polluters and government intervention. The Environmental Protection Agency dismisses or rejects the majority of administrative complaints and an investigation conducted by the Center for Public Integrity found that out of Ònearly 300 complaints filed by communities of color, the EPA has never once made a formal finding of a civil rights violationÓ (Cha 2016).  There are a confluence of factors at many levels of government and management that have led to the events Flint currently faces, not least of all the  103 problematic, paternalistic, and entirely undemocratic policy of the Michigan Emergency Manager Law. Public Act 436 has been deployed primarily in majority African American, economically struggling, post-industrial cities (Carrera 2016). However, the hyper vulnerability and lack of regard for communities such as Flint and Detroit is foremost an issue of injustice levied on people we count as outside the bounds of proper civic membership and environmental concern.   The Flint Water Advisory Task Force Final Report, commissioned by Governor Snyder and completed in February 2016 states: The facts of the Flint water crisis lead us to the inescapable conclusion that this is a case of environmental injustice. Flint residents, who are majority Black or African American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities. Moreover, by virtue of their being subject to emergency management, Flint residents were not provided equal access to, and meaningful involvement in, the government decision-making process (Davis et al. 2016, 54). Here we see the classic features of a case of clear environmental justice. Following environmental racism, Flint was designated, as a site for commercial hazardous sites due to is racial and socio-economic makeup. Protections or safety provisions were never in place, but were seen as unproblematic during FlintÕs industrial affluence, but the exodus of capital after the auto industry tanked left the residents of Flint impoverished via lack of municipal services as well as dealing with the legacy of pollution from industrialization. Worst of all, after being left to fend for themselves amidst rampant environmental destruction and danger, the invocation of the Public Act 468 (Emergency Manager Law) effectively stripped Flint residentsÕ of its access and ability to participate in government decision making procedures. The Flint case directly illustrates the ways in which constructions of black Americans, especially poor blacks in urban, post-industrial areas, as disposable in terms of environmental quality and regard are directly tied  104 to political agency and citizenship. As the task force reportÕs clearly identities, race was a determining factor in the entirely preventable tragedy of a cityÕs water supply. The fact that the community of Flint was further disempowered by having their democratic decision making power as citizens stripped by their own government is unconscionable.  The context in which the decisions were made for the switch to the Flint River as a primary water supply for the city matters. Both Detroit and Flint were under emergency management during the ÒnegotiationsÓ leading up to the switching of water supplies. Public Act 43619 that establishes Emergency Management procedure in the state of Michigan is one of the strictest and most undemocratic in the US. An Emergency Manger is appointed when the Governor deems it necessary during a municipal financial emergency. The law has historically been voted down by referendum by the citizens of Michigan, only to be modified, made into law again, and amended to disallow it to come up to vote by referendum any further. Public Act 436 allows the Governor of Michigan to select and appoint one person as Emergency Manager to make any and all decisions for an entire municipality and this person is only accountable to one other person, the Governor who appointed him/her. Throughout Public Law 436Õs various iterations, it has been used 77% of the time in cities that are majority African American (Carrera 2016). Factually, it can be argued that the Emergency Management law is undemocratic by a variety of metrics. First, since it has been prohibited from being voted down by the citizens of Michigan further, democratic checks on gubernatorial power have been effectively removed. Next, citizens of municipalities under emergency management are unable to have any say in decisions that directly affect them (and in the Flint case any input into decisions that directly                                                 19 This law was initially enacted in 1988, and the number has changed as it has been passed numerous times with the content, which empowers emergency management in financially distressed municipalities remaining the same. PA 436 carries the additional provision that it cannot be voted down by referendum by Michigan residents.   105 aversely affected their physical, psychological, and emotional existence). Finally, it is applied in a predatory fashion to relinquish control and power from local governmental and community structures in places with a history of mismanagement, discrimination, segregation, and abandonment by the state of Michigan and the US.   In many ways the Flint Water Crisis was foreseeable and preventable but the vehicle of the discriminatory and predatory emergency management directly elided communityÕs input, voices, and refusal. In fact, after the water source switch, community members voiced urgent concerns about the water quality and direct adverse effects on their health (Davis et al. 2016). These concerns were entirely ignored and unaddressed further affirming that Flint as a community of people did not matter. Negotiations about the switch never amounted to a conclusive decision to change water sources and the decision to make this change was entirely decided and enacted by FlintÕs Emergency Manager (Davis et al. 2016). The lack of response on the part of the Michigan government headed by Governor Snyder is indicative of a trend of ignoring the environmental injustice in poor, communities of color. The logics of domination present in this case most definitely factored into the ignoring and silencing of citizens of FlintÕs direct voicing of disaster. If we live in a society where black Americans are always already political others we never wish to integrate or incorporate in any real means (evinced by the patently obvious urban segregation of Flint years in the making), then why should we care or listen to their direct testimony of being poisoned by the state of Michigan (Highsmith 2015)?  The stereotypical construction of African Americans largely as urban dwelling populations is already an elimination of the agricultural and environmental histories African Americans have, while also ignoring the migrations and violence black agricultural workers faced due to the logics of a white supremacist state (Wilkerson 2011).  The predatory and  106 disproportionate practice of placing commercial toxic waste facilities in communities of color is well-documented and relies on a fundamental discounting of those communitiesÕ identities and well-being (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The ÒFlint Water CrisisÓ as it is so euphemistically called is not an accident or natural disaster (even though Governor Rick Snyder applied more than once for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and was denied), rather, it is the quite linear, logical conclusion of policy, leadership, and design that will sacrifice the means of people, integrity, ethics to the altar of capitalistic affluence (Nann Burke 2016). We reserve the most perverse environmental degradation and human rights violations such as undrinkable, poisoned water and polluted, noxious air to the segments of society most vulnerable to these externalities and farthest from our regard. Is it really such a coincidence that descendants of slaves whom the US has never gone out of its way to acknowledge, apologize to, offer reparations to, are still reaping the ills of a state that refuses to confront that history? Is it abject circumstance that allows those least able to financially combat externalities of industrial pollution to remain trapped in cities abandoned by all others who had the resources to leave?   What happened in Flint is a symptom of the much larger racist, classist, sexist, logics of a white supremacist settler state that erases non-dominative histories, heritages, identities, and environmental relations of the already socially/politically marginalized to such a point that they are not viewed as humans let alone citizens, civic members, or political agents. As a symptom of this larger problem, reconciliation is required not only in Flint, but in the US generally otherwise there will be many more Flints, Detroits, Greensboros, Norcos, Kettleman Citys. The environment cannot be disentangled from these problems or kept out of these solutions. As shown in this chapter, connection, relation, and inhabitation of place/land all inform aspirations  107 to political agency, citizenship and the establishment of trust necessary for reconciliation that is so desperately needed in the US.  In this chapter, I have explored the historical context through which environmental justice as a movement and a discipline came about. Through an examination of environmental racism and discriminatory biocentrism, I have argued that environmental justice was established largely as a way to move past the limitations of an exclusive environmental movement that only focused on the lifeways of the privileged people who created it. This prompted an investigation into how environmental identities and environmental heritages of certain groups are discounted and erased from environmental histories in an attempt to establish the mainstream (white/settler) environmental histories as objective and normative. By examining the various environmental histories and identities of African Americans and their oft-unacknowledged contributions to the history of the US, I argued that the obscuring of African AmericansÕ narratives is directly related to their marginal and oppressed status within the body politic arguing that the environment and relations to the environment are inextricable from social and political projects and the process of reconciliation.  Finally, I examined the logic of the political and environmental disregard for African Americans through the case study of the Flint Water Crisis in which we witness the confluence of political/ecological harms resulting in disaster. The interaction and influence of political and ecological marginality have been stressed and illustrated through this chapter to ultimately support an integrative starting place when it comes to theorizing environmental harm as inherently political and prompting similarly integrated processes of reconciliation. The construction of environments and those within those environments as disposable, outside of national regard directly relates to marginalized and vulnerable communitiesÕ construction as political others and civic strangers deserving of environmental injustice. The erasure of black  108 American communitiesÕ environmental heritages and identities is part of the process of keeping them in positions of marginality and oppression. These patterns are not unrelated and coincidental, but rather well worn pathways meant to paint unjust and dominative state practices against poor, people of color as objective, unquestionable, and an unproblematic feature of these marginalized communitiesÕ identities.               109 Chapter 5: Indigenous Environmental Ethics ÒDonÕt admire what you perceive as our stoicism or spiritualityÑwork for our lives to continue in our own Ways. Despite the books which still appear, even in radical bookstores, we are not Vanishing AmericansÓ(Chrystos 1988). As argued in chapter four, the environment and ecological relations are integral to the construction of reconciliatory processes that aim to build political agency and trust among the marginalized communities affected by social, political, and environmental harm at the hands of the state. This chapter will support this thesis through exploring the ways in which Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, and knowledges inform particular methods of analyzing harm and reconciliation. Essential to this analysis is the Indigenous emphasis on the harmful effects of settler colonialism on Indigenous lands, ecosystems, and peoples. In this way, reconciliation always requires the instantiation of right relations with the land, which is inextricable from political structures and realities. Section I analyzes the disruptions to Indigenous systems (physical, epistemological, ecological, spiritual) and lifeways that were interrupted and displaced through ÒContactÓ and settler colonialism. Section II examines the danger of dominant epistemological systems uprooting and erasing Indigenous ones in the form of reconciliatory processes that rely on specific testimonial exchanges as the primary basis for evidence of wrongdoing. This section also explores the importance of the emotional space of theory as articulated by Dian Million, which is necessary for addressing the excessive trauma and lived experience of Indigenous histories with settler states. Section III studies the essential role and place of land, Creation, and relationality to the existence and flourishing of Indigenous communities as well as their primary roles in reconciliatory processes. Section IV explores Indigenous/settler co-management practices as sites of reconciliation that incorporate,  110 acknowledge, and honor Indigenous peoples and their epistemological systems, traditions, and lifeways.  This section also examines the practical applications of Indigenous-centered forms of reconciliation through the sturgeon and Sinkyone case studies touched upon briefly in chapters two and three.  In the current context of environmental degradation, political turmoil, and the exponential growth of problems stemming from anthropogenic climate change, there is a marked increase in the search for solutions external to the paradigm that created these realities. One such route of exploration involves the engagement of Indigenous cosmologies and philosophies as sites for different ethical attitudes and interactions with the environment/world. While this is, at face value, not an inherently problematic practice, increasingly engagement with the cosmologies and philosophies of Indigenous peoples is pervaded by the same spirit of coloniality that has not only physically and geographically marginalized Indigenous peoples, but that has also relegated their lifeways and worldviews to the periphery of intellectual regard. This has resulted and continues to result in the prevalent and unacceptable practice of Indigenous knowledges and lifeways being coopted by dominant discourse, especially in academia, and branded as original material through its appearance in scholarship by privileged persons. It is my intent in this chapter to provide an overview of salient aspects of Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing as an avenue to understanding our current context through the thoughtful engagement of these ideas with full credit and authorship given. In this way, these ideas will not be presented as new, but rather as a return necessary for reconciliation within and among human and environmental communities.  Given that the initial problem this dissertation takes up is the untenable bifurcation of political relations and ecological relations as it presents in both how we analyze harm and how we construct solutions, this chapter revisits Indigenous cosmologies and lifeways as a space of  111 theorization and practice where political relations and ecological relations are wedded. In this way, Indigenous cosmologies and lifeways offer a different path to the dominative, colonial relations that were forcibly and violently imposed upon Indigenous peoples and the Earth. These colonial forms of dominance and violence paved over, but did not completely erase (not through lack of effort) different ways of relating to the world. Given that Indigenous peoples possessed and continue to possess rich cultural traditions, lifeways, epistemological systems, ways of knowing, and rich cosmologies, this chapter will analyze the ways in which the forcible displacement of these relations and replacement of them with colonial, dominant systems was the primary mode through which settler power was and is articulated, which also contributes to the staying power of coloniality (Tuck and Yang 2012; Whyte 2016a). What is important to note throughout the analysis of this chapter, however, is that the very recognition of Indigenous lifeways and cosmologies was necessary and integral to the negation of these ways of thinking and practices by colonial powers. This recognition and then non-recognition or mis-recognition betrays a fundamental acknowledgement of the ways in which political relations and ecological relations are related and deeply inform how we exist and navigate the world, whether recognized correctly or recognized incorrectly. The practice of settler colonialism is deeply physical and the analysis of the ways in which physical domination and destruction of the environment is indicative of the practice of the construction of settlers and settler states reveals the irreducible nature of environment/land as a locus of harm and fundamental site of reconciliation. Thus, reconciliation can never be just the restoration of either political relations or ecological relations, but must be both.     112 5.1 Coloniality, Time, and Spatiality The prioritizing of Indigenous theorizing illustrates that a major barrier to reconciliation within settler states is the ongoing physical effects of settler colonialism on land and ecosystems. With the initiation of ÒcontactÓ largely memorialized as the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the ÒNew WorldÓ(the Americas) in 1492, Europe expanded its geographical and territorial reach to lands conceptualized and referred to as Ònew.Ó However, this categorization of newness was only extended to these unknown (to Europeans) lands in an attempt to expand the territorial reach and physical space of particular European powers. This was part of the spatial ideology and domination of the colonial project and marked a reconceptualization of the world as a system of parts in relation to other parts. Walter Mignolo discusses the perspectival shift that accompanied cartographies of the ÒNewÓ world (Mignolo 1997). Earlier maps depicting geopolitical territories centralized the physical place commissioning and making the actual map. For example, if Spain were making the map, Spain would be featured prominently in terms of landmass and centralized location in relation to other known territories. Here, we can see how projects of cartography and boundedness or closedness directly correlate to articulations of power or dominance whether imaginative or actual.  In this way, projects of colonial dominance and articulations of colonial power were always concerned with land and relationships to land. This process of colonial mapping also attempted to obscure Indigenous peoplesÕ understandings of their lands and relationships to their lands and territories.  With the ÒdiscoveryÓ of the ÒNewÓ world, maps fundamentally changed since they had to account for the space of previously unknown geographical territories and the new spatial relationality and aimed for accuracy (perhaps over propaganda) for those ÒexplorersÓ interested in reaching these new lands. This rearticulation brought the Eurocentric perspective into question  113 because subjective renderings of Europe as the center of the world/map were no longer accurate or objective. Since, physical space no longer afforded the centrality necessary to Eurocentric perspectives, ideologies were developed to compensate. Thus, other logics were developed to ensure the centralization of Europe and to keep Eurocentrism, as a locus and enunciation of power, intact (Quijano 2008; Mignolo 2008).  This ideology required the production as well as maintenance of two founding and contradictory myths to support it (within the face of the spatial decentering and reorientation of Europe): Òfirst, the idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of powerÓ (Quijano 2008, 190). Within Eurocentric ideology, time and progress are imagined and articulated as linear trajectories infused with hierarchies colored by both moral and power differentials. This allows for the contradictory pronouncement that peoples of the ÒNewÓ world and non-Europe are both inferior and chronologically in the past. It is important to note that each of these myths are necessary to the coloniality of power because just relying on the chronological backwardness of non-Europe is insufficient in a logic where progress is measured linearly. If non-Europe is simply behind Europe in terms of chronological time or linear progression, then surely non-Europe could catch up, as it were. To combat the rationality of this occurrence, the myth of inferiority had to accompany chronological deficits to ensure that it was never possible under any circumstance that non-Europe could be considered on relatively equal footing or regard to Europe.  The new identity also involved their [non-EuropeÕs] relocation in the historical time constituted with America first and with Europe later: from then on, they were the past. In other words, the model of power based on coloniality also involved a cognitive model, a  114 new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past and, because of that, inferior, if not always primitive (Quijano 2008, 200). This has implications not only for the interaction of European/colonial powers with the Indigenous populations of the American continents, but also importantly points out the physical and conceptual/epistemological process of colonialism. This constitutes one avenue of understanding why Indigenous knowledge(s) are overlooked, stolen, re-appropriated, and then recast as ÒNewÓ in neocolonial discourse.  The concept and practice of mapping and relationality will be integral in understanding the consequences of ÒContactÓ both for Indigenous populations and as sites of harmful interaction between Indigenous peoples and settlers. As mentioned above, the act of mapping is essential not only to articulating spatial ideologies and understanding the world, but also constitutes a cognitive/epistemological process through which we attempt to comprehend the world and our relationships to the world as well as others in the world. The prominence of colonial maps and closed/bounded spatial ideologies was integral in not only erasing or paving over unique Indigenous understandings and articulations of land, space, territory, and relations to all of these, but also encourages understandings of land as object, property, and parcel.   Settler Colonialism Another theoretical practice that obscures the extent of harm done to Indigenous communities is the tendency of postcolonial studies to focus on types of settlement and colonization that view colonialism as a thing of the past. This often leads to the study of settler colonialism that directly affects and includes Indigenous peoples to be under theorized. Settler colonialism combines both external forms of colonialism and internal forms of colonialism that resist the ability to argue that it is a past event. External colonialism Òoften requires a subset of  115 activities properly called military colonialismÑthe creation of war fronts, frontiers against enemies to be conquered and the enlistment of foreign land, resources and people into military operationsÓ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4). Within external colonialism, Òall things Native become recast as Ônatural resourcesÕÑbodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattelÓ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4). Internal colonialism is theÓ biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the ÒdomesticÓ borders of the imperial nationÓ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4 emphasis mine). Both external and internal forms of colonialism found within the structure of settler colonial projects require drastic consequences on land and ecosystems and consequently Indigenous peoplesÕ well being, heritages, and identities as related to those spaces.  The especially pernicious nature of settler colonialism is that in settlersÕ quest for new territories, it invokes in the wholesale and continuous displacement and erasure of not only Indigenous land tenure, but also the entire historical/social/political structures that are bound up in those peopleÕs relationship to that landscape. This is what Patrick Wolfe refers to as the Òelimination of the native,Ó which is one of settler colonialismÕs main aims. ÒWhatever settlers may sayÑand they generally have a lot of sayÑthe primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialismÕs specific, irreducible elementÓ (Wolfe 2006, 388). In this way, Òsettler colonialism is a structure not an eventÓ (Wolfe 2006, 388). Settler colonialism is a structure by virtue of the fact that it is constantly working to establish and re-establish itself. Part of this is done through a mythical narrative of how the settler state comes into being and subsequent erasure of the facts that directly contradict and disprove this Òcreation story.Ó This involves a strange double movement in which Òsettler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the other symbolic level, however, settler society  116 subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its differenceÑand, accordingly, its independenceÑfrom the mother countryÓ (Wolfe 2006, 389). So the entire project of settlement requires the displacement and elimination of the Indigenous populations and societies to the end of establishing settlers, foreigners, and invaders as the actual indigenous sovereigns.  Fundamental to the ongoing project of settler colonialism is the land, but a key misunderstanding of land is deployed when settler colonialism is attempted to be understood (mistakenly) as an event and a not a structure. Ò[L]and/water/air/subterranean earth,Ó are all things land is, but it does not exhaust all the things land means (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Settler colonialism is primarily motivated by land and specific settler conceptions of what land is and what/who it functions for. ÒLand is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violenceÓ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Yet again, it is clear that the political relations of settler colonialism cannot be divorced from the ecological relations it aims to promote. Indigenous relationships to land affect and deeply constitute their epistemic, ontological, and cosmological systems/relations in ways that are directly threatened and harmed by land theft, relocation, and illegalization of lifeways through the violent inscription of settler systems.  In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relations to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5).  117 The domination of the property relationship ascribed by settler systems fundamentally makes impossible, undesirable, and eventually illegal Indigenous ways of relating to the land outside of this ascription.   In articulating how injurious and unjust settler colonial articulations and understandings of land are to the existence of flourishing of many Indigenous peoples, Kyle Whyte states: [I]njustice also occurs when the social institutions of one society systematically erase certain socioecological contexts, or horizons, that are vital for members of another society to experience themselves in the world as having responsibilities to other humans, nonhumans and the environment. Injustice, here, involves one society robbing another society of its capacities to experience the world as a place of collective life that its members feel responsible for maintaining into the future (Whyte 2016b, 178). Thus one of the most pervasive harms of settler colonialism is that it severely hinders or makes impossible the ability of many Indigenous peoples to practice their responsibilities and relations to land and ecosystems. The erasure of these socioecological horizons is directly related to the serious harm of foreclosing the possibility of Indigenous peoplesÕ practices that are guided by their ways of knowing, relations, and responsibilities. It fundamentally disrupts and harms their way of being in the world, which is deeply related to their heritages and identities, as well as being who they are.  Now that settler systems have run aground with the myriad political and ecological crises they have created, we see a return to relations outside of the dominant property relationship to land proposed by settler societies. However, as mentioned earlier oftentimes this practice of return is carried out in an equally colonial manner where once again Indigenous systems are co-opted as settlersÕ perpetuating the production of settler colonialism. The entire quest of settler colonialism is bound up in a territorial/physical and epistemological, social, and political nexus. All the parts are necessary for reproducing the fiction that the settler society is real and justified.  118 Hence, why epistemological projects of research also exhibit this settler appropriation, domination, and move to establish settler indigeneity. Citing and acknowledging the presence, existence, and epistemologies of Indigenous peoples within the context of settler colonialism directly unsettles the charade of settlement.  Similarly, projects of mapping are directly related not only to the practice and constant reproduction of settler identities and society, but also how cartography frames the way we think about the places we inhabit and our relationships to them. Indeed, the very concept and process of mapping asserts a knowledge base or attempt at knowing a space or the world in which we dwell. The imposition of boundaries and actual or imaginary borders establish and extend the impositions as well as ideologies of closed, bounded spatial areas. They also attempt to express or track settler social institutions and socioecological contexts, which directly support settler flourishing and erase Indigenous ones. Mishauna Goeman explores the ways in which the spatial policies effect the cognitive mapping of Native lands and bodies with the goal of developing strategies to Òuproot settler maps that drive our [Native] everyday materiality and realitiesÓ (Goeman 2009, 170). In particular, the way in which settler maps present territories as closed and spatially/temporally bounded is a yet another attempt to settle and reify settler colonial relations and support claims to settler indigeneity. Even the way in which settlers employ language to speak about bounded territories works to reinforce settler belonging: Òthe tribes in the state of Michigan,Ó betrays an understanding of Indigenous presence and sovereignty as beholden to the state and found within the settler logic of statehood. A more accurate way to communicate that statement would be to say, Òthe tribes surrounded by the state of Michigan.Ó This phrasing acknowledges that the state of affairs is not neutral and resists the attempt to enfold Indigenous populations into the settler logic of bounded and closed spatiality, although it does not  119 completely escape those logics. Language and epistemology have power to uphold and resist the ways in which we think about the spaces we find ourselves in, our relationships to those spaces, and the possibilities of experiencing the world in culturally important/appropriate ways.  5.2 The Danger of Testimony and Epistemic Violence This section will focus on the problematic nature of testimonial exchanges and epistemic violence within settler states involving Indigenous peoples. One of the contextual conditions that render apologies and testimonies problematic is the ever-present settler construction of land and ecosystems, which is directly related to the marginalization and oppression of Indigenous peoples.  What I mean by this is that these testimonies and apologies are still operating within the settler colonial constructions of land as being divorced or irrelevant to the status of Indigenous peoples as carried out by the state. These testimonies and apologies, in order to be legible and accepted by settler states must be performed in ways that map onto settler social/legal/political institutions, which are fundamentally developed based on an understanding of land/ecosystems directly harmful and unjust to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous sovereignty (Turner 2006).  When we think about the socio-historical context that produces and contributes to the harmful situations requiring reconciliation, it is easy to be tempted to focus primarily on a ÒfactualÓ accounting of the injustices. However, as evinced from the work done on trauma and disaster, the testimonial and epistemological limits of expression or representation of these situations are challenging (Agamben 2002; Blanchot 1995). Since many of the protocols used within the Truth and Reconciliation models for healing and repair rely explicitly on testimony, it is necessary to examine the ways in which certain testimonial practices and procedures can act as a site of harm as well as healing. Within the context of settler colonialism, in this instance, it is  120 critical to examine whether the processes advocated for within the journey of healing are not also vestiges of a deeper and now normative coloniality. Often in dominant Western/settler epistemological systems, testimony is conceptualized in a very particular way, especially where testimony is being relied upon to try to determine wrongdoing and blame. We can think about these instances of testimony as juridical interpretations of testimony (Walton 2007). These interpretations of testimony often rely on a thesis as a guiding principle of what this testimonial exchange is modeled on (Adler 1996; Welbourne 1979; Reynolds 2002; Evans 1982; Audi 1997; Lackey 1999). Jennifer Lackey describes the transmission thesis as the process through which Òknowledge is acquired through testimony when speakers transmit their beliefs, along with the epistemic properties such beliefs possess to their corresponding hearersÓ (Lackey 2008, 1). She also analogizes the transmission thesis to a bucket brigade in which water is transmitted and passed from bucket to bucket down the line. This model and analogy assumes that each actor has some water to pass down and that the water ultimately originates from another source (Lackey 2008, 1Ð2).    Within the context of western/settler epistemological systems that produce testimonial models upon which wrongdoing and harm are tracked, we can look to the transmission thesis as an explanatory model that guides many of the ways (though not all) in which we think about what is happening in formal/state-mandated reconciliatory procedures. These models assume that within testimonial confessions, the speaker is transmitting some content that can be directly translated into proof or evidence of wrongdoing or harm. It also usually assumes that the proof or evidence that testimonial confessions profess track some sort of truth or falsity that is verifiable. There are many valid critiques of the transmission thesis and the corresponding bucket brigade analogy. For one, it assumes that everyone is similarly situated to give and receive water and that  121 they are also equipped with the properly shaped and maintained buckets to hold and contain that water/knowledge. Another major oversight is the idea that different languages can be translated in seamless ways or that transmission can be perfectly successful even within the same language. By viewing testimony as akin to passing water down the line of the bucket brigade, we ignore the very messy and complicated nature of testimonial exchanges. We disregard the excess that is always present within any testimonial exchange when the ÒwaterÓ of an utterance isnÕt neatly contained in anotherÕs bucket. Utterances frequently outstrip their receptacles because human agents are not buckets designed to collect testimony. In a fictional novel set in the aftermath of the government mandated and sanctioned massacre of Haitians or those presumed to be Haitians within the Dominican Republic (an actual historical event), Edwidge Danticat expresses the violent and pernicious potential testifying to trauma and disaster can pose. ÒÔI know what will happen,Õ he said. ÔYou tell the story, and then itÕs retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yoursÕÓ (Danticat 246). Within the context of settler colonialism, this concern is especially poignant and relevant as one of the main ways ÒsettlementÓ is achieved is through the destruction of Indigenous languages and Indigenous peoplesÕ freedom to practice their linguistic traditions. Language and linguistic traditions are essential to Indigenous peoplesÕ cultures, lifeways, and their very ability and desire to relate to the world/creation.  The impetus to tell and say what has happened to one and oneÕs people in the aftermath of systematic, generational trauma is strong, but it is also complicated. The project of settler colonialism at its heart is a project of stripping Indigenous peoples of their capabilities to practice their own lifeways, one of which is their very ability and freedom to practice their own language. Through the recounting of trauma primarily through somewhat public testimony as it  122 occurs within these Truth and Reconciliation Commission styles of healing, we must be aware of the danger of this revealing. A key aspect of testimonial exchange is examination of the conditions, which make testimony possible. In examining a particular instance of testimony, whether successful or not, it is valuable to investigate the conditions that frame such an exchange. This is important not only for evaluating the success or failure of very mundane acts of interlocution, but also is especially relevant when life-threatening consequences are at stake. In her paper ÒTracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,Ó Kristie Dotson offers an account that addresses the practice of epistemic violence as it occurs when hearers exhibit Òpernicious ignoranceÓ and are not adequately attuned to meet their speakersÕ need within a testimonial exchange (Dotson 236). But a speaker has no direct way to force an audience to ÒhearÓ her/him, where direct control would take the form of some kind of mind control. In short, to communicate we all need an audience willing and capable of hearing us. The extent to which entire populations of people can be denied this kind of linguistic reciprocation as a matter of course institutes epistemic violence (Dotson 238). One could question whether settler audiences are even capable of hearing and accepting the testimony emerging from Truth and Reconciliation Commissions settings when hearing and accepting these testimonial exchanges as valid and true is directly related to the unearthing and delegitimization of their own settler histories, projects, and existences. The translation of testimony and the guidelines by which testimony is considered proof of wrongdoing are set my settler colonial institutions that directly harm and silence Indigenous life ways, ways of knowing, cosmologies, relations to land, and so on. Will these traumatic and vulnerable testimonial pronouncements be heard or fall on the pernicious ignorance Dotson describes, further reinscribing problematic power relations? There is also the potential of the objectification,  123 othering, and oftentimes re-victimization of those delivering testimony of their pain and suffering due to historical traumas and wrongdoing.  While one of the problems with these models is the perpetratorsÕ ability to hear or listen to victimsÕ testimony, there is also the potential for perpetrators to add their own testimonials in the forms of asking for forgiveness or articulating symbolic apologies. Andrea Smith discusses the problematic nature of confessionals of privilege. The conditions, which allow for the self-reflexivity (and political saving face) that prompt privileged confessionals, such as ÒIÕm sorry,Ó largely work to constitute and affirm the white settler subject over and against the still abject other; these confessionals run the risk (especially when motivated by disingenuous or not immediately transparent reasons) of further reifying the hierarchical relation of perpetrator versus victim, victor versus vanquished, and the like. In this way, the acknowledgement of privilege even within the admission of somewhat abstract wrongdoing, without clear and deliberate actions to interrogate or attempt to dismantle white supremacy and setter colonialism, still function in supporting those structures of oppression Indigenous peoples face (A. Smith 2014, 217). A symbolic and empty apology on its own does nothing to address the structural system and unearned privileges that constantly reaffirm and reconstitute the injustices and traumas that very apology attempts to repair. A meaningful apology would require an understanding that these problems are not just isolated incidents to be Òfixed,Ó but rather foreseeable conclusions of unjust structures, which eliminate non-white-settler narratives, histories, and existences and must firmly commit to the work of dismantling these structures.  Integral to the theories of political reconciliation examined in chapter two is the idea of the re-establishment and sometimes, wholesale creation of trust necessary to the work of moving past historical injustices and harms. The examination of the conditions present and also the  124 conditions necessary for reconciliation require critical attention and discussion. This also requires an analysis of the limits of language and testimony for expressing the deep embodied and felt experiences of these injustices and traumas.   The Emotional Space of Theory Through the process of researching some of these reconciliation projects, I came across many video testimonials of various First Nations individuals speaking about their experiences within the Indian Residential School System in Canada. The theme of shame is one that surfaced over and over again. First Nations men and women, who were taken as children from their families and put into residential schools, spoke about the intense feelings of shame they felt in not only recalling these experiences, but also in being approached to participate in this project for the purposes of reconciliation. They spoke about the shame of reconciliation. They recounted not understanding what was happening to them in these schools and why they were so hated and abused for being who they were: speaking their languages, practicing their traditions, existing as First Nations peoples (Legacy of Hope Foundation 2001). This testimony directly speaks to the dangers of these sort of models of Truth and Reconciliation, while also articulating space for the felt knowledges and the unspeakable yet experienced traumas that occur that cannot and maybe should not be captured by certain dominant epistemological frames and testimonial venues.  In her essay, ÒFelt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,Ó Dian Million writes of the danger, vulnerability, and power that emotional and felt knowledges hold within a settler colonial framework of Òtruth-telling.Ó She writes about how the personal experiences recounted through the sharing of emotional knowledges Òchanged the actual conditions for what could be said about the poverty and discrimination that were their [First  125 Nations womenÕs] daily fareÓ (Dian Million 2009, 54). Instead of viewing emotional or felt knowledges as something additional or outside the realm of theory, Million explores how integral personal experiences, especially of First Nations women, is to the process of truth-telling and reconciliation. In trying to understand the paralysis of shame the residential school survivors spoke of in their testimony, Million examines the moral affective power that centering lived/felt experiences can have in transforming the very frameworks that try to further stigmatize and other Native existence. ÒNative womenÕs personal narrative explored the racialized, gendered, and sexual nature of their colonization. In doing so, they transformed the debilitating force of an old social control, shame, into a social change agent in their generationÓ (Dian Million 2009, 54). As in chapter four, we see the ways in which experiences of oppression and trauma within settler states is highly gendered and often disproportionately affects women for the worse.   Million explores the ways in which what she calls Òfelt analysisÓ challenges and also Òcreates a context for a more complex Ôtelling,Õ that illuminates the deeper meaningÓ of the dominant (in this case CanadaÕs) narrative of what happened within the Indian Residential School System (Dian Million 2009, 54). The very assertion of a lived/emotional sphere of experience within this context directly contradicts the ÒtruthsÓ the state views as valid in terms of evidence and uncovers/makes present a realm of experience that this trauma and record actively attempt to cover over and make unreal. Addressing the power of ownership of their stories, Million references the process of centralizing emotional knowledges and lived experiences as a way in which these Indigenous women Òcreate[ed] a new language for communities to address the real multilayered facets of their histories and concernsÓ (Dian Million 2009, 54). By making lived experience and emotional knowledges actively present within the remembrance and telling of their own histories, Indigenous women are in many ways expressing the inexpressible, the  126 truth that in many ways exceeds pure juridical models of testimonial exchange or transmission models of testimonial exchange. By claiming and asserting these emotional and experiential knowledges as knowledge, Million points to a condition of existence the project of settler colonialism, and the attempts at elimination of Indigenous peoples, is unable to control or destroy. It is within this space, that the work of Indigenous futurity both resists erasure and expresses itself.  5.3 The Restoration/Reconciliation of Community is Land [W]e have a lot to offer society. But we have to look at the bad stuff, and what has happened to us, and whyÉ.We cannot do this without going through the past, and watching ourselves and analyzing ourselves, because we are carrying a pain that is 400 years old. WeÕre carrying the pain of our fathers, our mothers, our grandfathers, our grandmothers itÕs part of this land (LaRocque 1993, xxvii). In mapping the centrality and integral nature of felt/lived experience and emotional knowledges to the remembrance and telling of Indigenous existence, knowledge becomes an embodied practice that is situated and living in the world. The idea that we are embedded in a world of relationships is a guiding Indigenous philosophy.  This philosophy and knowledge is not new, but as mentioned above, it was/is often denigrated and obscured by dominant settler society until it becomes beneficial to that same society to ÒdiscoverÓ it again and appropriate it. The framing of these dominant theoretical inquiries as ÒnewÓ is untrue and extremely harmful. It is yet another instance of coloniality that operates to disempower and strip indigeneity from Indigenous people so it can be worn and expressed by settlers.  I hope by drawing attention to this phenomenon to bring awareness to the fact that many times the work and ideas of people of color are excluded from mainstream discourse, ÒdiscoveredÓ by white scholars, and appropriated/made visible by these same scholars in ways that are transparently colonial and harmful. Excluding Indigenous populations from the realm of knowledge production, and the  127 land that informs that knowledge, from the story of reconciliation and what it means to be reconciled, perpetuates a system of exclusion and white supremacy that dominant theories of reconciliation proclaim to want to deter.   In This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, Dale Turner explores the ways in which Indigenous knowledges are discounted and disrespected within the context of political interactions between Indigenous peoples and the state of Canada. Turner states: The key problem of participation arises because most Aboriginal peoples still believe that their ways of understanding the world are, de facto, radically different from Western European ways of understanding the world. These differences raise tension between Aboriginal ways of knowing the world and the legal and political discourses of the state (Turner 2006, 7).  Again we come back to the problem of the ÒtranslatabilityÓ of epistemological systems and knowledges. Thus the burden of translation or intelligibility is placed upon Indigenous populations when they are continually asked to make their situations and perspectives ÒintelligibleÓ within the parameters of the legal and political structures/languages of the state. This is further insulting by the consideration that if any epistemological system or structure is foreign, it is precisely that of the now ÒnormativeÓ legal/political discourses of the settler Canadian state. Turner elucidates the additional epistemic injustice of this process of burdening and disrespect: ÒThe fact that our ways or understanding the world are not worthy of equal participation in a dialogue over the meaning and content of our rights is itself a form of inequality (Turner 2006, 26, emphasis mine).    Part of the inability of the state to understand or correctly track what true reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government means to both parties is due to the  128 dismissal of treaty law that allows the state of Canada to assert its sovereignty as more foundational than that of First Nations peoples.  For Aboriginal peoples, the treaties have a normative role in the contemporary relationship because they recognize rights that Aboriginal peoples possess by virtue of their unique political status, not by virtue of shared citizenship. In other words, for many Aboriginal people Aboriginal rights are political rights that predate the formation of the Canadian state, not rights that arise from post-Confederation concept of shared citizenship (Turner 2006, 44).   This passage is essential to understanding that for Indigenous peoples the ÒsovereigntyÓ of the state of Canada is predicated on a recognition then erasure of Indigenous nations and sovereignties. This erasure is based primarily on the simultaneous ignoring and erasure of the Indigenous cosmologies and philosophy that informed their understandings of treaty agreements and relationships to land, in the first place. A critical distinction between Indigenous and European settler perspectives on land is the difference between ownership of land and belonging of/to land. Indigenous philosophies largely view land in a reciprocal, relational manner such that ideas around land ownership are not the primary way in which land is conceived or experienced. Injustice in many Indigenous communities is tied up with a correct balance of relationships and the existence/maintenance of right relations.  Notions of belonging and relationality permeate Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies. The positioning of relationality as the central node that connects and guides our interactions in the world requires an understanding of the importance of creation.  Harm and injustice, then, become the ways in which we are out of balance or badly related to creation and all of our relations amongst creation.  An Anishnaabe understanding of environmental justice considers relationships not only among people but also among all our relations (including all living things and our ancestors). Environmental in-justice, then, is not only inflicted by dominant society upon  129 Aboriginal peoples, people of colour, and people in low-income neighbourhoods but also upon Creation itself (McGregor 2009, 28). This point is fundamental to understanding why and how Indigenous philosophies are positioned differently from other Western paradigms of injustice/harm and reconciliation that rely on the separation of what happens in the ÒhumanÓ world and what happens in the ÒnaturalÓ world. In this case, environmental injustice is not just the harm dominant society inflicts on certain marginal and vulnerable populations, but also the injustices being inflicted upon creation itself. Since creation and everything within it is related and related in a dependent and deep way, harming one part of it affects the entire system and web of relationships. By engaging with this perspective and way of being in the world, we quickly see that models of reconciliation that are not motivated deeply by understanding the ways in which harm is not and cannot be an isolated incident, will not produce long-lasting, effective, or satisfactory suggestions and solutions. Approaching ourselves and the natural world as all a part of creation with dynamic, shifting, and unique gifts and responsibilities to each other motivates a very different way or relating to our shared world; one in which the proposition of relating to the world as a commodity or pure resource would already be framed as an incorrect and immoral way of being and way of understanding.  It is important to think about how our orientation to ourselves and to all the beings of the world and the land changes when we conceptualize justice as a way of honoring our obligations and gifts. In this way, our relationship to the earth, to the land, to creation involves honoring and listening to the duties and obligations present in maintaining those relationships. We must practice honoring the gifts we bring and that other beings bring to living in an authentic and healthy way within the world (Wall Kimmerer 2016). This understanding also changes the ways in which we view the historical context and spirit in which treaties and agreements were entered  130 by many Indigenous nations and peoples. ÒThe treaty position, in its various forms, takes the political stance that the treaties represent not only binding political agreements but also sacred agreements, and that to violate them is morally reprehensible in a political relationship between nationsÓ (Turner 2006, 28). The fundamental and deep disrespect Indigenous peoples have faced at the hands of invading settler states and populations are numerous and nuanced, but the ill will of faux and never honored treaty agreements is surely a central injustice. Not only does this constitute a recognition injustice, as well as a legal and political injustice, but also, as noted in the quote above, betrays a sacred trust. Reneging on treaty agreements carries the additional harm and injustice of upsetting and unbalancing Indigenous peoplesÕ relationships and specific obligations to their communities, their lands, and creation itself. Learning and honoring Indigenous epistemological systems and ways of knowing is crucial not only to respecting their traditions and their ideas crucial to moving forward in a more positive way in our shared world, but also to understanding how certain solutions may be inappropriate and undesirable based on nuanced comprehension of shared and honored knowledges.  5.4 Co-Management Models of Reconciliation While I have focused largely on the problems of Indigenous cosmologies and philosophies being mined and coopted for their innovative problem solving within our current eco-political crises, there is also revolutionary work being done in the form of co-management and collaboration of settler and Indigenous groups. These exchanges rely on non-dominative ways of relating that require the discomfort of difficult conversations necessary for coalition building and transcultural understanding. In keeping with this chapterÕs emphasis on reconciliation for Indigenous peoples requiring an accounting and reconciliation of the drastic physical effects of settler colonialism on land and ecosystems, this section will illustrate through  131 the examination of three case studies (Uluru, Nm”, and Sinkyone) conceptions of reconciliation that focus on the reshaping of land and ecosystems through settler/Indigenous co-management projects.  Robert Figueroa argues that reconciliation for and amongst Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples requires a deep acknowledgement, understanding, homage, and honoring of their traditions, knowledges, and worldviews. Figueroa claims that the damage and harm of injustice are not just about the deprivation of environmental goods, such as clean air. Rather, harm has deep physical, psychological, and existential dimensions and consequences that are far-reaching in terms of time, nature, and severity. Reconciliation, then, as a single, once-and-for-all style or primarily symbolic acknowledgement is insufficient. Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples have been sharing, living, and educating settler populations for hundreds of years mostly to the continued disrespect and oppression of their communities at the hands of settler communities and states. Reconciliatory processes must include and collaborate with Indigenous communities in serious ways that open the space for the possibility of transcultural understanding and practices. FigueroaÕs conception of harm aims to capture a broader picture of the intricate network that can result from the complicated erasure and imposition of unjust structures (Figueroa and Waitt 2010). One of those unjust structures is settler colonialismÕs ability to erase and make impossible Indigenous socioecological horizons through which they experience the world (Whyte 2016b). An example of the kind of solution Figueroa envisions is the reconciliation and healing that occurred at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia. Uluru is a sacred natural site for the Anangu people, and is currently under joint management of the Anangu and white settler Australians. Uluru is a rock that many white settlers wish to climb, which is in direct violation of the AnanguÕs belief that the rock is not to be climbed. Figueroa states:   132 Indeed reconciliation is a central discourse for achieving justice between the Aboriginal and settler Australians. Although Òworking togetherÓ had been the purpose of the Joint-Management Committee since 1985, the Park became harnessed onto more explicit politics of reconciliation one year after the 1998 reinvention of National Sorry Day a Journey of Healing, when officials gathered at Uluru as a part of the ÒPeopleÕs ApologyÓ to deliver healing message sticks to representatives of the Stolen Generation (Figueroa and Waitt 2010, 142).  Figueroa leaves room for reconciliation politics such as ÒSorry DaysÓ or ÒSorry BooksÓ but warns that they should not be couched in colonial analysis. Ultimately, he thinks that reconciliation as a process within an environmental justice framework is beneficial because it emphasizes obligations to Òlocal voices, grassroots efforts, and, in this case, the indigenous voices, knowledge, and perspectives for justiceÓ (Figueroa and Waitt 2010, 142). The positive potential of these co-management style reconciliations is that it requires constant and ongoing dialogue about the ways in which spaces and places are used, while at the same time confronting tourists and settlers with the histories they have never learned, or learned and erased/ignored. Imagine the power of confronting dominant settler society and articulating the world from an Aboriginal point of view that the tourists and settlers at Uluru are compelled to consider. For the first time perhaps in their entire lives settlers have to face the knowledges and peoples their dominant epistemological, political, social and legal systems encourage them and reward them for ignoring, erasing, and paving over.  These types of co-management reconciliation projects resist articulations or prescriptions of harm as a single act or event. Rather reconciliation here, allows for the participants to connect nodes of these networks such that they make oppressors aware of the harms done and give voice to the oppressed who have been silenced. This fits in importantly with particular Indigenous political philosophies as well, which stress the unstable nature of relationships due to the natural vulnerabilities of beings among creation. Relationships are living, delicate things that need to be  133 handled carefully, as evinced in the status agreements and treaties as living notions, which consider how all beings are related to creation. The concept and practice of renewal is essential to Indigenous frameworks on what agreements and treaties require (Turner 2006). This entails revisiting agreements and terms because the centrality of relationality requires an acceptance and acknowledgement of changes in orientation, in growth, and in understandings. The space of co-management matters because it stresses the difference that exists in how these places are conceived, and how they could be and are related to, by different peoples.  Sinkyone and Sturgeon Restoration Projects  Both the lake sturgeon (Nm”) restoration project and the Sinkyone Intertribal Park project illustrate what projects of reconciliation can look like when transcultural cooperation is done well. In the Nm” restoration project, the state of decreased and struggling Nm” populations is seen not only as the result of improperly balanced relations between Indigenous peoples and ecological systems due to settler colonialism, but also as indicative of a lack of understanding of the ways in which beings in the world are intimately related. The collaboration of tribes (Anishaabek) in the area of the Manistee Water Shed and settlers enables both parties to confront the system of harms that have led to the Nm”Õs situation and how that situation affects members of each party differently. Restoration in this case is not just about helping the Nm” population to flourish in terms of their population numbers, but also working to restore relationships between people and Nm”, as well as tribes and settlers, such that this problem will not occur again. What I mean by this is that restoring one relationship in what can be viewed as a relatively, singular case (fish population) requires a whole series of other relations and relationships to be made right that fundamentally transforms land and ecosystems at the same time. One of the key aspects of this restoration project was the focus on the Little River Band of Ottawa IndiansÕ relation to Nm”  134 whom they view as relatives. The nature of this connection to Nm” requires certain sacred responsibilities to Nm” such that simply restoring their populations is beneficial, but not nearly a complete restoration of that relationship. A huge part of what makes the entirety of this restored relationship possible is an understanding and facilitation of the lifeways that make this practice of honoring the Little River Band of Ottawa IndiansÕ responsibilities to Nm” possible. Marty Holtgren states that the goal of the project is to: [R]estore the harmony and connectivity between Nm” and the Anishinaabek and bring them both back to the riverÉ Bringing the sturgeon back to the river was an obvious biological element; however, restoring harmony between sturgeon and people was steeped in the cultural and social realm. Each meeting began with a ceremony, and the conversation was held over a feast (Holtgren 2013, 136). Thus in the practice of reconciling communities, when viewed as restoring relations, allows for the healing of political relations and ecological relations because it recognizes their relatedness from the outset.   Similarly, the Sinkyone Intertribal Park Project promotes the development of better relations between settler Americans and the Sinkyone Tribe (as well as other tribes in the Pacific Northwest) to restore coastal redwood forests and the ecological systems related to redwood forests. Here the story of ÒcontactÓ and settler colonialism matters deeply because settler systems erased and replaced Indigenous ones to the barring of Indigenous lifeways and practices. When landscapes are altered in the dramatic ways in which settler colonialism alters them, it is not simply the physical and ecological representations and functionings that are changed. As stressed within this chapter and throughout the dissertation, histories, customs, cosmologies, and much more are inscribed within landscapes such that the destruction of a landscape is related to the destruction of all that is imbued within those spaces. Rogers-Martinez stresses the necessity of this understanding within Sinkyone intertribal park project by stating that this project is about the  135 restoration of Òourselves,Ó with all that entails. That requires the restoration of Òour spirits, our cultures, our songs, our myths, our stories, [É] Indian names for creeks and springsÓ (Rogers-Martinez 1992, 67). Thus restoration requires a restoration of land where land has be acknowledged and honored not simply as a biological entity, though it is also that, but it is the relationships of peoplesÕ to that land, it is language, it is culture, it is tradition, it is knowledge. Without the restoration of all these things and more, which perhaps we cannot name now or may never be able to name that constitute landscapes, that give places, and peoples meaning. The healing and reshaping of settler and Indigenous relations to land and ecosystems helps to undo the harm of settler colonialism by attending the centrality of land to Indigenous identity, survival, and flourishing. Processes of reconciliation that do not prioritize, centralize, and include the importance of land and ecosystems to Indigenous peoplesÕ ability to live and relate to the world are still upholding settler colonial structures that block justice and reconciliation for all.   This chapter has argued for the centrality of reconciliation that confronts the profound harm of settler colonial destruction of land and ecosystems that directly leads to the marginality and continued oppression of many Indigenous peoples. If the balance, reciprocity, and centrality of relatedness is a defining characteristic of Indigenous cosmologies informed notions of reconciliation, it seems to me that reconciliation becomes a contextualized process in which history, traditions, and lifeways of all involved matter for the creation of an improved network of right relations. This means reconciliation needs to be viewed as a series of processes and goals that are revisited constantly since they are composed of various relationships, duties, gifts, and obligations to the world we share. There is not a space for absolutes or hard separations between the ÒhumanÓ world or the ÒnaturalÓ world, the ÒpoliticalÓ or the Òenvironmental.Ó These are all integral relationships and parts of the whole that are attempting to coexist in ways that do not  136 over determine or denigrate, but allow the gifts and responsibilities of all to flourish and be held in a balance that honors creation.                137 Concluding Remarks  In this dissertation, I have examined the ways in which seemingly disparate and often-separated avenues of inquiry, within both political philosophy and environmental ethics, articulate similar processes of reconciliation. I have defined reconciliation as the restoration or creation of right relations that moves communities out of unjust or oppressive situations to situations in which members are related to each other in just and honorable ways. Within political philosophy, I critically engaged the literature of theories of harm and political reconciliation to understand why environmental harms and concerns are not considered integral to both the analysis of harm and the analysis, as well as implantation, of reconciliatory processes. Ultimately, I concluded that the continued exclusion of ecological relations from the analysis of harm and reconciliation within the ÒpoliticalÓ sphere is a relic of the dominant western ideological systems that still (mistakenly) view the environment as a resource base/property that supports human existence. The crises we see both politically and ecologically are results of the continued and unchecked development and flourishing of this way of thinking. Within the field of environmental ethics, I looked at the area of ecological restoration as presenting a similar problem as political philosophy, but through the exclusion of political relations instead of ecological relations. The hyper-focus on the state of ecological relations and the urgent impetus to restore them and then leave them alone, belies a similar belief found within political reconciliation theories that humans occupy a primary role, which should be severely limited within the restoration projects happening within ecological spaces. This type of thinking led to curious restoration projects in which physical/technical processes were promoted and argued for without serious consideration of the social and political relations that helped affect these harms  138 initially, or that could impede long-term, sustainable ecological stability and human/environmental stewardship.   After identifying and interrogating the similarly situated ways of thinking that manifested in the separation between political philosophy and environmental ethics through the subfields of political reconciliation and ecological restoration, I moved onto areas of inquiry that wed political relations and ecological relations. A major conclusion of the first part of the dissertation is that lack of diverse perspectives, values, and lived experiences creates and maintains similarly one-dimensional ways of thinking and problem-solving. Expanding upon this thesis, chapter four explores the ways in which environmental racism and discriminatory biocentrism affect communities of color and poor communities, specifically African Americans. Beginning from the heart of environmental and political crisis allows for an integrated analysis that can accurately and sufficiently articulate the ways in which political relations and ecological relations are mutually influential. The erasure of black AmericansÕ history of political incorporation to the nation state, erasure from US civic myths, as well as the erasure and ignoring of their ecological identities and ecological heritages are a critical component of their relegation to unsafe and unjust conditions in almost every aspect of their lives: social, political, ecological, spiritual, and the like.  The final area the dissertation explores Indigenous philosophies as sites of theory and praxis which offer many critical solutions precisely because they are situated in a tradition and history that directly confronts and contests the dominant western epistemological and physical processes which have largely led us to these current massive crises. Chapter five tracks and articulates some of the ways in which contact and settler colonialism with North America interrupted, erased, and illegalized the practice of indigenous lifeways and thus discredited and  139 tried to invalidate rich indigenous epistemological systems and knowledges. It examines how the extreme effects of settler colonialism on land/ecosystems was integral to the destruction of Indigenous peoples relations to those land/ecosystems and displaced their socioecological horizons of existing in the world in authentic and healthy manners. It proposes that part of the resurgence of western, white, settler co-optations and further colonization of indigenous philosophies, which western white scholars and activists are presenting as not only their own, but new, is due to the completion of the project of settler colonialism. Having completed the phase of running aground a dominant western system of power, which displaced more sustainable and balanced indigenous philosophies and life-systems, the settler returns to the sites of indigenous destruction to attempt to restore or reconcile the issues. This is not reconciliation; this is the furthering settler futurity. This chapter suggests that reconciliation of the natural world and of humans, especially within the complicated and traumatic history of settler colonialism, requires coalition building that is fundamentally different from the context that created settler colonialism and allowed it to flourish. This requires a deep and serious accounting of historical injustices, harms, and traumas as well as a large space for healing and an understanding that some harms are incommensurable between groups and will never be healed in an ultimate or finite sense (Tuck and Yang 2012). The work of rebuilding relations and trust is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and uncomfortable.   This dissertationÕs purpose has been to lay some initial theoretical groundwork for thinking about the ways in which political relations and ecological relations grow together. They influence each other in creating harms and injustices, but also work together to offer us solutions and ways forward. We no longer (if we ever had) the time or luxury to support the ways of thinking that have led us to this current state. Ideas have consequences and we are forced to  140 confront that thesis given the challenges and opportunities we face to preserve our world as well as our humanity. The health of the planet and the health of the peoples of this planet, including our more-than-human relations are both indications of how are thinking and doing are flourishing or failing. 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