**9. Nurturing Decolonial Resilience across Space, Time, and Di**ff**erence**

It is increasingly clear that an existential risk to multiple human and natural systems is posed by anthropogenic climate change. The risks and their potential consequences confirm that continuing to assume that 'nature' is somehow under human governance and management is a dangerous assumption. Equally, assuming that natural or human systems are autonomous or independent at the smaller scales that human governance systems (nations etc.) generally occupy is deeply flawed. Rather, our common human context needs to be recognized in terms of complexly and inescapably coupled human-and-natural systems.

While it is true that many Indigenous knowledge systems have weathered large scale disruption from environmental, social and cosmological processes, their contributions to or fate in light of the existential risks posed by anthropogenic climate change cannot be adequately addressed without contesting the colonial or post-colonial frames that conventionally define and limit the nature, agency and rights of Indigenous peoples. Yuchi scholar Dan Wildcat, from the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, put it this way:

*[T]hose of us who have been paying attention to our homelands already know* ... *the world we live in is changing, not the interior spaces and places where the majority of us situated in the midst of the modern industrial and postindustrial societies spend our days and nights, but the world of unbounded landscapes and seascapes that constitute what humankind denominates the natural world. Climate change, however, is only one of many drivers of change. Its e*ff*ects cannot be isolated from the multiple social, political, economic, and environmental changes confronting present-day indigenous and marginalized communities. Indigenous peoples have long and multi-generational histories of interaction with their environments that include coping with environmental uncertainty, variability, and change.* [86] (p. 509)

In other words, the broader risk landscapes, the longer historical and wider geographical scales of contemporary Indigenous experience demand that we pay attention to issues of justice and sustainability in our more-than-human settings in developing the thinking that might allow a more inclusive 'us' to respond to the unnatural disaster that industrialized colonization has visited upon all of our human and non-human companions on the planet. New thinking about climate risk must include the negotiation of respectful modes of belonging-together-in-Country that reshape people-to-people, people-to-environment, and people-to-cosmos relationships in Indigenous domains.
