Plastic Podcast Episode 21: Indigenous Approaches to Plastics Pollution Governance

This episode delves into Indigenous-led environmental management and the interaction of plastics with Indigenous communities. It explores how Indigenous approaches to plastic pollution offer unique and effective solutions. The episode features an insightful conversation with Riley Cotter, a Master's student at Memorial University, whose research bridges natural science and social justice. Riley discusses their work on microplastics in surface waters and the importance of Indigenous participation in environmental governance. The discussion highlights the diversity of Indigenous perspectives and the need for inclusive, justice-oriented frameworks in plastic pollution management. Join us for an enlightening episode on the intersection of science, society, and Indigenous knowledge.

Episode Guests:  Riley Cotter

Read Riley Cotter’s Review of Participation of Indigenous Peoples in Plastics Pollution Governance

Read Dr. Max Libiron’s article Pollution is Colonialism 

Find more information about the CLEAR Lab

More information about the episode and the Plastic Podcast

Episode Transcript  and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted, produced, and edited by Clark Marchese 

Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong. 

Theme music by Tadeo Cabellos 

Transcript:

[00:00:09.290] - Clark

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Plastic Podcast, the show that tells the science and the story of our relationship with plastic. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about Indigenous-led environmental management and the interaction of plastics with Indigenous communities. All right. The idea for this episode came to me when I was making our third episode ever on Zero Waste Cities, and We were talking about strategies for how to transform European cities towards circularity. Upon reflection, I was thinking that the OG zero-waste cities are indigenous communities around the world since the dawn of human history. I started looking into this when it comes to plastic, and I found a handful of governments around the world that are setting aside funding for indigenous-led solutions to plastic management. I got curious about what that might look like, and I found this article published by our guest today that is titled A Review of Indigenous Approaches to Plastic Pollutions Governments. Today, I am speaking with one of the authors of this article, Riley Cotter, a Master Student at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, Labrador. Riley's research focuses on microplastic concentrations in surface waters, but also now, folds in a social justice approach to plastics.

[00:01:33.040] - Clark

Riley is also a close colleagues with the prolific researcher in plastics and social justice, Dr. Max LeBron, whose work has come up a number of times on this show. Dr. Lebron wrote a book titled Waste is Colonialism, and we'll also talk a little bit with that today. Also, I'll say that there's obviously a lot of different avenues we could take when discussing indigenous interaction with plastic. We could talk about how it exists in and harms communities or specific policies. But we have to remember that none of those things would be a monolith. The conversation will look different depending on whichever specific context we decided to investigate. That's also one of the major points that was driven through in the interview today. What we are going to do is explore how Riley's work bridges natural science and social justice. We'll talk about the importance of indigenous led environmental management, and also the unique perspectives that indigenous communities bring to the issue of plastic pollution. With that, let's get started. Okay, perfect. Welcome to the show. Maybe we can start by having you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.

[00:02:51.070] - Riley Cotter

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me. My name is Riley Cotter. I'm a master student at the Department of Geography at Memorial University. In St. Thomas, Newfoundland, Labrador. My supervisor is Dr. Max Libiron, who is my co-author on this paper that we're going to be talking about. My work is mostly, for my thesis, is mostly on surface water microplastics. So plastics that are floating in the ocean in New Nancy Alba, Labrador. I think it's important for this discussion, specifically for me to note that I'm a settler who has lived my whole life on the ancestral home of the Bayotuk and the Mi'kmaq on the island of the other land.

[00:03:30.570] - Clark

Thank you for saying that. It's great to meet you. Now, you mentioned you're doing a project about surface waters, and this podcast is also meant to be a very interdisciplinary space. You also operate within a social justice approach to this topic. Can you tell me maybe how the natural science and the social science approach either transitioned into each other or how they operate well together?

[00:03:52.750] - Riley Cotter

I'd say it's more like the projects were parallel to each other or came together at once. I feel like I do social science and natural science pretty much at the same time. I do work on environmental plastic, which is often a topic relegated to science or natural science, at least when you're quantifying plastics. But it's also true that my work needs to be really attuned to ideas of justice and the politics of academic knowledge production, for example, since I do plastic monitoring work that's centered around community leadership and involvement, specifically. I think to answer your question more specifically, I think that employing scientific and social scientific methods at once allows you to get a better and more intimate understanding of what plastic is. I think a natural scientist is really inclined to think of it as an object of investigation, for my case, that just floats in the water. But the social scientist side of me sees plastic as a process and a symptom and an indicator and a great way to see how systems of power are working. I think taking two of those things at once rather than one after the other has given me a really dynamic understanding about what plastic is and what it means to different people in different contexts.

[00:05:11.880] - Riley Cotter

I don't think I'd be quite as good at my job as I can only do one or the other.

[00:05:18.610] - Clark

Well, that's great to hear. We're going to talk about the article you wrote titled A Review of Participation of Indigenous Peoples in Plastics, Pollution, Governance. Now, the very first sentence, I believe, in the impact statement is that there are increasing calls for Indigenous participation in Plastics Pollution Governance as part of a larger trend of Indigenous-led environmental management. Let's break that down. Maybe first you can help us understand what is the concept of Indigenous-led Environmental Management, and then maybe you can also speak to this recent trend, how it started and why it's important.

[00:05:49.480] - Riley Cotter

Yeah. Firstly, I think Indigenous-led environmental management is relatively simple as a concept. It's just management that's led by Indigenous people or indigenous peoples. So anywhere where indigenous people are decision-makers in an environmental monitoring program. As for why it's important, I think there's tons of reasons. Firstly, and maybe the most striking is that the UN and other international organizations have asserted for a very long time that indigenous peoples have the right to govern their own lands. So there's that. I think it's also true that Indigenous peoples have been excluded from dominant Western and colonial governance systems. I also think that that makes it even more important that we adopt these equitable governance systems because reparations for historical systems of wrongdoings over centuries. And also not to mention that Indigenous environmental governance has shown to be extremely successful. I know there's been a lot of scientific buzz recently about the connection between Indigenous environmental governance and success of protecting biodiversity, for instance, a whole host of reasons. I don't think that is one reason or the other. I think it's just there's a really broad and diverse history of colonialism across the world that has led to this point where I think it's more important than ever.

[00:07:11.450] - Riley Cotter

I think that it's more true that Indigenous peoples are so diverse across the globe and have encountered plastics in different ways in different time skills for as long as plastic has existed and have different values and different understandings of plastics that make it more or less of an issue or an issue in different ways. Take, for example, In our purpose of literature that we looked, there's groups of people that are entering the discussion of plastics for the first time because the Canadian federal government was banning single-use plastics, and their only source of drinking water was through plastic bottles. So they were concerned with what a ban on plastics could mean for their health versus the many, many, many others who are concerned with the presence of plastics and what the presence of plastics means for their life, ways, and health. I think a better understanding of the picture on plastics in Indigenous peoples is one that's extremely local and extremely case-specific, and there's no one single time scale or reason why this discussion is happening.

[00:08:11.970] - Clark

So then this project is to map Indigenous participation in plastics governance. I'm curious what question or questions, specifically, the article or this research was trying to address. Can you tell me about this project and how it got started?

[00:08:25.420] - Riley Cotter

To start the project, there wasn't really a particular agenda other to then to describe what was out there in terms of indigenous participation in plastic pollution governance. I think, of course, we had an idea of what thing was going to be at. My lab, not so much me, but Max, Dr. Leroy, and my lab have been in this field for a long time, and I think I had an idea, but we really just wanted to find out what examples of governance were looking like in the world in plastics. We were motivated by the question of in this field of plastics, which we work in. So intimately, what does indigenous environmental governance look like for our field of study and what we're concerned with.

[00:09:04.560] - Clark

Okay, so then in this review, you were doing a sweep to find different specific policies out there that were either addressing or enacted by indigenous peoples?

[00:09:14.830] - Riley Cotter

We started very nonspecifically. We were looking basically at academic literature, literature, newspapers, anything we could find, government documents, anything. We looked in different databases in a lot of different places. There was no specific mandate for the thing we were looking for. We ended up, since we're academics, finding a lot of academic literature because that's our way we work and what we're most familiar with. We did find a lot of newspapers and news literature, but I think it was maybe a little more challenging for us to find government documents and government policies because we're not super fluent in that thing. But I think as far as academia operates as a system within Western society and it operates very close to government and news and it operates within these systems, we did get a good picture of what's going on, but it is maybe a little skewed academia because that is what is, of course, our specialty.

[00:10:11.190] - Clark

Then once you aggregated all these different forms of documents, you were trying to identify some of the differences within the documents based off of the stakeholders who created them. Is that correct?

[00:10:21.930] - Riley Cotter

At first, we just wanted to see what was out there, and then we started to pick up on the fact that depending on who wrote it or who led it, there were huge differences. It's interesting to use the word stakeholders. In our paper, we use the term rights holders when we're referring to Indigenous peoples on Indigenous land. They don't have a stake, they have a right to be there. The way we ended up looking at it was we defined authorship based on whether authors or leaders were Indigenous or non-Indigenous. Of course, since we're dealing with something like Indigenous environmental governance, Indigenous plastic pollution governance, we thought that that might be an important thing to look at and it proved to be very influential on the differences that were made. We also had other categories in there for mixed authorships. Of course, when there's teams of people, not everybody has the same identity. A wide group of people who didn't self-identify, there's a whole superpublic for people who don't self-identify. That's the stress of it in the paper. Yeah, so those, I think, were the four main... Oh, and we also distinguished between indigenous included in the authorship an Indigenous lead author.

[00:11:31.180] - Riley Cotter

In an academic paper, if there was an Indigenous person as the first author, we took that to mean something probably different than somebody who was a fourth or fifth or sixth author. Since, again, we trade in an academia and we know what being a first author looks like versus once you're going to have an authorless, the power that one might have in a project like that.

[00:11:50.840] - Clark

So once we have these categories identified, what variations began to reveal themselves?

[00:11:57.260] - Riley Cotter

The biggest and most stark difference that we is that indigenous author groups were more likely to talk about indigenous rights and opposition to colonial systems and their uptake and the uptake of rights-based governance structures that subvert this common idea of dominant Western governance system that we're really used to. For example, indigenous author texts were more likely to talk about treaties and sovereignty, whereas non-indigenous author texts were more likely to favor terms like inclusion and recognition within existing systems of governance. So non-indigenous authors were more likely to talk about engaging with Indigenous communities and more likely to involve Indigenous peoples as a source of data rather than search families. So dealing with more vague terms of participation and then terms that were not explicit to leadership, but more so dealt with extraction and data extraction. And then we also note that author lists were more likely to talk about things like partnership, which I think is... I, of course, don't think that's a bad thing, but I think it's just funny to see that when there is a partnership among people, they, of course, think that the way to do work is a partnership. One of the big points that we know is that it's very evident that authorship and who leads a project is very influential to what collaboration or involvement or participation is involved.

[00:13:29.030] - Clark

Okay, so then Based on the idea that who the person is, their background, and even their institution will affect the nature or the frame of their research, leads me to my next question about how we understand plastic pollution in a general sense. I'm going to quote from your article as well. You said, Western non-indigenous elite research has over-determined what plastic pollution is and how it must be governed. Then maybe to put it another way, our conception of plastic waste is somewhat imbalanced by an overrepresentation of research that comes from Western elite institutions. I guess maybe that could imply that we have some blind spots in our mainstream understanding of plastic pollution. What are they? What blind spots do we have?

[00:14:09.440] - Riley Cotter

I'm not so sure about blind spots. I think it's more apt maybe to say that dominant Western culture has told us what it is and left no room for other completely separate understandings that differ and systems of colonization need to do that very well. I think that it's not just that there are bits of the picture on plastic pollution that are missing, but it's more that there is a whole gallery of other pictures that dominant Western science doesn't seem to really pay attention to or care about or can't see or however you want to see it. We provide some examples in the text of how some Indigenous authors in our work or in the work that we looked at talk about plastic pollution. There is a ton of examples of these different understandings that we note. But take, for example, when we about weariness to Western science. A dominant Western scientific understanding of plastic pollution would probably make us believe that we must seek to understand plastic everywhere on a global scale, no matter what it takes, through robust scientific exploration. But many indigenous understandings of plastic pollution of research in general that we noted, seek to understand plastic really locally and independently, with the caution that the burden of knowing through academic research to contribute to these really complicated notions of colonial access to and extraction from indigenous land.

[00:15:43.010] - Riley Cotter

So it might be the case that indigenous peoples don't want academic research for plastic pollution on their land. It becomes at the cost of their rights and their sovereignty. This is just one of the big examples of the difference between indigenous and dominant Western understandings of plastic pollution since it gets at the whole reason for knowing or whether we want to know about it. We discussed a ton of different examples that illustrate this point, but that's just one that really stuck out to me.

[00:16:13.950] - Clark

Okay, we love examples. There's also another one that particularly stuck out to me. A handful of episodes that we've done for the podcast are trying to understand what research is out there having to do with plastics in human health. One thing I found in your article was that typically, Western research The conversation about plastics in human health only focuses on the physiological aspects of how plastic might impact health, but also that there could be an Indigenous conceptualization that is more holistic. I read even that some may perhaps include if plastic has an impact on birds, and people are no longer able to hear bird songs, that could qualify as an impact on human health and well-being, which is something that I certainly... Well, that's not part of the conversations I'm having with health researchers on plastic. So that definitely stood out to me. Are there any other examples like this?

[00:17:01.960] - Riley Cotter

There are a ton of other examples in the text, but also I just did want to say that I think it's interesting that you bring that up because the neck is at another thing of a different understanding of health. So we were imposing this, that down the Western academic view of health, of plastic in your body and chemicals in your body. But there is a whole plethora of other different ideas of what health is. It might be birthsongs, and it might be wild food, and it might be clums of water, and it might be the ability to walk down the street not see any plastic. I think that is another great illustrative example. It's not just plastic that has all these different meanings, something like health care, too. I'd say another big one is the understanding of place-based plastics. Plastic versus global plastics. In Western science and in Western culture, we tend to talk about plastic as a global phenomenon. So plastic as in there is X amount of plastic in the ocean. The ocean as a concept, meaning all of oceanic waters. We're really concerned with these big and scary numbers about weights and those things.

[00:18:08.690] - Riley Cotter

But when we look more into indigenous conceptions of plastic and environmental plastics, Most people are writing about what's happening on their land or in their home or in their area or within their family. It's more about understanding which plastics are directly, I don't want to say directly in my circle or directly relevant to me, but there is a more place-based understanding that plastic can mean something in a different place. Whereas Western scientists tend to view plastic as a global phenomenon that needs to be seen everywhere and needs to be looked at as if we're all in equal proximity to all Plastics, indigenous understandings are more likely to take into consideration that plastics live and exist in a place, and that affects how we should look into it, how they want to look into it, whether we want to look into it and what it means.

[00:19:00.000] - Clark

I'm also curious if we have any examples of how these different conceptualizations translate into different types of strategies for management. This isn't necessarily in your article, but I was researching for a different episode, and I found that the government in British Columbia has invested millions of dollars into Indigenous-led waste management solutions. I'm wondering if there are any approaches that maybe someone like me wouldn't have considered that might be effective.

[00:19:23.750] - Riley Cotter

I hate to sound like a broken record, but I think I don't know enough about it to say a lot because It's so different to everybody. The Indigenous peoples who are working on this in British Columbia have all different stakes in waste management than do Indigenous peoples where I am, for example. But I think one of the beauties about it is that I can't answer that question because I don't know enough about it because each version of this could look so differently.

[00:19:53.150] - Clark

That might be your answer to this next question, but I'm going to ask you anyways. What would you think is the way forward after reviewing all these different strategies, all of these different conceptualizations of participation, inclusion, partnership? What do you think should be different than how things are happening now when it comes to, I guess, approaches to plastic pollution?

[00:20:14.220] - Riley Cotter

Right now, I'd say the step forward is making space and allowing for our Indigenous understandings of plastic pollution to really continue to grow. Like we're talking about, they're all so different. We just need to make space for them to exist and happen within these structures to hopefully make some difference. To do that, as we argue in the paper, we'll need to really promote and uphold models of Indigenous participation that aren't just inclusive or in recognition of, but rather we'll have to foster models that work to include indigenous leadership and promote indigenous justice and sovereignty to work towards frameworks for governing plastic pollution that don't continue to uphold the same old business as usual, colonial norms. So allowing for diverse ways of understanding then hopes to foster more anticolonial, non-dominal ways of dealing with plastic pollution.

[00:21:10.430] - Clark

Okay. And then on the topic of colonialism, and I have this question down because I've read your colleagues this book, Waste as Colonialism by Dr. Max LeBron. I'm wondering if you can help us understand what that relationship is, and then also what is the intersection between plastic as colonialism and indigenous communities?

[00:21:30.040] - Riley Cotter

This is my favorite question because when I started working with Max, it was the thing that blew my mind the most. Maybe not blew my mind, but it was certainly one of the most interesting parts of their work for me. Firstly, I think it's important to understand that colonialism is settler or colonizer or non-indigenous access to indigenous land to meet settler goals, and we're always on indigenous land. Plastic, by its very nature and existence, assumes access to indigenous land through its very, very long lifespan. For instance, we mine fossil fuels to create plastic, which requires access to indigenous land. Then once, plastics are created from these fuels We understand that plastic is disposable and often travels very long distances, so maybe from where it was created all the way to the most northern Indigenous community in Canada, for instance. We understand it as transboundary and disposable, like I said. The creation of this everlasting disposable material assumes that for as long as it exists, which might as well be forever, considering human time scales, that the plastic will have for somewhere to go. Whether that's in a landfill or in the water or in an incinerator and then into millions of tiny Airborne particles, settlers assume through creating plastic, and then the colonial systems that uphold and continue to reproduce and distribute it, that plastic will have and continue to have access to Indigenous land.

[00:23:12.190] - Riley Cotter

Like I said, Max Lieber, who is my co-operant supervisor, talks a ton about this idea and even uses waste management itself as a key example of plastic in action as colonialism.

[00:23:25.450] - Clark

Can you explain that a bit?

[00:23:27.050] - Riley Cotter

Yeah. A good example that they use is about the community of Maine. That's an Inuit community in Nunatsyava in this province, neighborhood, Labrador, and that's where our primary research partners are. But Maine is the northernmost community in Nunatsyava, and it was the first community in this province to ban disposable plastic bags because they used to see a ton of them in the waters around the community, and they didn't want them to be there anymore. That's great. It was really innovative, considering how there's a nationwide on disposable plastics in Canada. But the expectation is for people in Maine to deal with plastic bags at the end of what Max's called in their article, the quote, Plastic Pipeline, rather than to deal with plastics where they're created by multibillion dollar companies thousands and thousands of miles away. The idea that infrastructures have to be developed in every corner of the country to deal with plastic is indicative of this assumption that settlers through plastic are are planning to continue to access indigenous land for a while through plastics that float in the water or plastics that we ship there because we told them that there's no other way that we can get stuff to them every while off that.

[00:24:42.860] - Clark

I'm also seeing a slight dimension of capitalism in there as well, which tries to place our focus on waste management rather than policies that might perhaps reduce production, which would thereby reduce profits. So yeah, I see that element in there as well.

[00:24:58.010] - Riley Cotter

The way I see it, I don't know if people who are probably smarter than me would think about it in a different way, but in a very simple way, I like to think of it as capitalism is the fuel that fuels the boat of colonialism. It's like capitalism needs to expand to grow. So how do you do that other than to colonize, which is all their conversation, of course.

[00:25:20.480] - Clark

Yeah, I think we could go on a bit of a runaway train with that topic, but suffice it to say that these are very interwoven concepts. Okay, let's see. As we start to get towards the end of the episode, again, noting that we could go on this topic for a long time, but I want to ask if there's anything else or a couple of things that you think are important to mention in this conversation?

[00:25:38.890] - Riley Cotter

Again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but I think it's the most important thing that I come into knowing through this project. I think it's really crucial to be aware of that when we're talking about indigenous anything, there's such huge plurality and diversity in any discussion. I don't mean in any of this discussion to flatten different people into one category that is indigenous anything. I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about this discussion and entering this discussion, for sure.

[00:26:11.570] - Clark

Also, to try and go forward on a note of optimism, there's one question I like to ask towards the end, which is, is there one piece of good news that's come out in your line of work or your research that you can share with us?

[00:26:22.500] - Riley Cotter

Yeah. I think the work that our lab does, which is on environmental plastic monitoring, again, in the United at is doing some really cool work involving plastic monitoring that subverts academic ideas of expertise and is doing work in a really justice-oriented, community-centered way. I'd say that the great news is that justice-based environmental plastic monitoring, it is not only possible and not only viable, but we're finding that our results are really much more meaningful and more robust than if we just follow the typical academic way of doing things.

[00:27:00.170] - Clark

Well, that's great news. I'm really happy that that lab exists and that all of you are putting out that amazing work. I hope that labs around the world start to replicate that approach. Well, with that, I'll ask, where can listeners find you and follow your work and also the work of this lab?

[00:27:14.380] - Riley Cotter

The lab that I'm a part of is called the CLEAR Lab, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research. We have a website, research of CLEAR Lab website. Other than that, I'm my name everywhere. If you want to search me up. I'm on all social media, just being myself.

[00:27:34.620] - Clark

Perfect. I'll put it in the episode description so everyone can find it very easily. With that, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having this conversation with us and for your research in this space.

[00:27:46.800] - Riley Cotter

No, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed that.

[00:27:59.440] - Clark

You've been listening listening to Plastic Podcast. You can find more information about this week's guest and links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Tadeo Kbezios. I am your host, Clark Morkasi, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. Plastic Podcast is part of a larger network of sciencey podcasts called Pine Forest Media. You can find more information about us in the episode description or on our website at pineforestpods. We're also on TikTok and Instagram at pineforestmedia. We've got some exciting science podcast coming out this year, and a five-star rating across platforms and a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to support science communication like this, help us reach more people, and for the entire network to grow. All right, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much, and we'll chat soon.