Environmental Reproductive Justice, Indigenous Health Knowledge and Indigenous Women on the Climate Frontlines

Place and the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge are deeply intertwined among Indigenous groups due to the significance of the environment and land within Indigenous ideologies, and the legacies of displacement wrought by settler colonialism. Little research explores this topic among Indigenous tribes in the Gulf South, who face unique environmental challenges related to climate change, land loss, oil extraction, and who depend on the coastal environment for cultural and subsistence resources. Scholarship on this topic among tribes that are not federally recognized is similarly limited. Using semi-structured interviews among 31 self-identified women members of a U.S. Gulf South tribe, we show how gendered and place-based knowledges manifest within the embodied and material experiences of tribal members, as well as the ways that those experiences and the transmission of knowledge are mediated by political and environmental changes through the example of traditional health and healing practices and knowledges. Key findings that emerged include: (a) Place-Based Concerns about Environmental Change and Displacement; (b) Concerns about Future Generational Changes in Knowledge Transmission; (c) Loss of Indigenous Health Knowledge. We suggest that there are significant impediments to the sociocultural reproduction of traditional health and healing practices and knowledges within the tribe brought about by environmental changes (e.g. saltwater intrusion, land loss, etc.) and the continuing influx of Western medicinal knowledge and practices. In contextualizing these findings within the environmental reproductive justice framework, we echo extant intersectional environmental research suggesting that environmental degradation and legacies of settler colonialism, by virtue of place-based and gendered knowledges and labor, disproportionately burden women, especially Indigenous women. We also note that despite significant material and cultural threats, tribal members demonstrate resilience and resistance to the macro-scale forces obstructing Indigenous ways of life.