Climate and Kinship
What Cornell can learn from Indigenous perspectives
Guest post by Professor Eric Cheyfitz published on December 17, 2025
Image credit: The Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from an event posting for a talk by Indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte
Dear Cornell on Fire,
In 2019 Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte published the essay “Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points.” Six years later, a report in the Guardian notes: “The world is heading for a catastrophic 2.6°C rise in temperature as governments have failed to commit to sufficiently strong climate action, while fossil fuel emissions have hit record levels, two major reports have found.” The Guardian points to what Whyte (and other climate scholars) term the ecological “tipping point,” the collapse of the climate as temperatures continue to rise toward the failsafe baseline of 1.5° C.
The relational tipping point is necessarily related to the ecological tipping point and represents the gap between the Indigenous and the Western views of the climate, the former driven by an ethos of sustainability, a model of kinship, and the latter by an ethos of production, a capitalist model. Whyte notes: “Here, I write primarily in terms of human relationships, yet indigenous peoples understand their societies and relationships as inclusive of diverse beings and entities beyond humans. In a more expanded version of this essay, I would cover how the violations of consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity are also against relatives such as plants, rivers, animals, insects, seas, mountains, fishes, among others.”
In this quote, Whyte references “kinship,” the system that is at the center of all traditional (pre-colonial) kinship societies and still determinative of the world view of Indigenous societies today, a system that makes relatives of the whole living world, not metaphorically but literally. It is kinship, as I argue elsewhere, that erases what the West understands as the nature/culture divide in privileging culture over nature. It is this hierarchical divide, the result of binary thinking, that has led to climate collapse. In contrast, traditional kinship societies do not think in terms of binaries but in terms of complementariness. Let us say, then, that in kinship societies there is no “nature” but only culture, a social life in which all living beings are, literally, relatives.
It is the failure of the West in its approach to climate collapse to pay serious attention to the Indigenous kinship point of view; and this failure, as Whyte notes, is the result of a persistent colonial attitude to Indigenous peoples and hence to Indigenous knowledge, as practiced world wide by Indigenous people in their resistance to climate collapse, in which they are being ignored and for which they are being murdered. We have witnessed such Indigenous resistance, for example, in the Idle No More movement in Canada, and the resistance of Indigenous people and their Western allies to the Dakota Access Pipeline that took place at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota from April 2016 to February 2017 before it was violently suppressed by local government in collaboration with Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation laying the pipeline.
The home page of the Cornell American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) acknowledges “the painful history of Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ dispossession” while “honor[ing] the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ people, past and present, to these lands and waters.” In addition to but separate from that statement, the AIISP faculty emphasize that “Cornell’s founding was enabled in the course of a national genocide by the sale of almost one million acres of stolen Indian land under the Morrill Act of 1862. To date the university has neither officially acknowledged its complicity in this theft nor has it offered any form of restitution to the hundreds of Native communities impacted.”
If Cornell wants to begin to take responsibility for its complicity in the ongoing colonization of Native lands, a first step might be to develop a plan, in consultation and with the consent of the traditional Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ leadership, for climate health on the university’s site on what remain of Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ lands.
Signed,
Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters
(Guest post for Cornell on Fire)
Get involved with Cornell on Fire:
Meditation Action for a Fossil-Free Degree: Friday, 1/30, 12-1pm in front of Day Hall. Get enlightened at an unusual meditation: Join a 40-minute sitting-and-walking outdoor meditation led by an accomplished meditator, attended by an exclusive group of Cornell trustees and senior administrators. Learn more and RSVP here. (RSVPs are optional but will help us better prepare for your serenity amid climate breakdown.) An unusual event co-sponsored by Cornell on Fire, Sunrise Cornell, Cornell YDSA, TIAA-Divest!, and the Cornell Chapter of the AAUP, inspired by Oli Frost and fossil-entangled Corporate Cornell.
Contribute your creative skills to Cornell on Fire’s art-ivism project: We are seeking people with design and artistic skills to help create humorous, critical, multi-media artworks for a public exhibit about Cornell’s shortcomings in the face of the climate emergency and CoF demands. Get in touch with Leila at l.wilmers@gmail.com for details!
Winter break: Our movement will pause meetings until mid-January. Stay tuned for opportunities to join our meetings again starting in January!
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Plurivocality: CoF Posts are written by a revolving team of writers. Our movement is diverse, so are our thoughts, and so will be our posts. If you receive a CoF Post that you think is wrong headed, can we still walk together? (We, like you, sometimes write things we later laugh at!)
