**11. Conclusions: Decolonizing for Resilience in Times of Vulnerability**

New thinking about the risk landscapes that confront Indigenous peoples arising from anthropogenic climate change can be built through acknowledgement of and respectful engagement with many Indigenous groups. This will reframe the issues in ways that will challenge many conventions of both thinking and action. It might also allow a shift which recognizes that "current transformations require political actions in numerous places, not just where it has long been assumed political power lies" [83] (p. 47).

The late Deborah Rose wrote powerfully about the force of deep colonizing and the way it corrupts even well-intentioned efforts to transform the impacts of colonization (e.g., [89]). Similarly, Haalboom and Natcher reminded us that our own academic discourses reshape how vulnerability is amplified in unintended ways by the presentation of our evidence and the narratives that people construct in response [2]. These are part of the procedural vulnerability imposed on Indigenous groups. But climate risks render us all more vulnerable.

Climate risks render Indigenous groups more vulnerable not because of their indigeneity, but because their lives are so often marked by intergenerational legacies and the newly created scars of colonialism. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire [90–92] reminded us long ago that those scars also mark those who might think of ourselves as the beneficiaries of colonialism. While I am deeply conscious of the risk of shallow applications of Freirean pedagogy as a universal solution becoming another form of deep colonizing (see e.g., [93,94]), I also recognize the value of Freirean approaches in providing a locally-referenced reading of the landscapes of risk and colonization. In internalizing conquest, accumulation and wealth as the markers of achievement, our so-called 'modern' societies have been taught to deny and disconnect. Small dissonances and occasional inconveniences in local systems of wellbeing are only now (slowly and unevenly) being reinterpreted as indicators of larger scale problems of systemic crisis. In terms of justice, sustainability and equity, the emperors and their administrators never had any clothes! From the imperial rulers of the 15th Century to the corporate mandarins of big oil, big auto and big trade, the fabric of their power has always been woven from the labor, energy and opportunity of other places, other times and other peoples.

In thinking that the power of colonialism settled their claims of entitlement to power, wealth and privilege, settler-colonial societies discounted the lessons of Indigenous nations who negotiated more sustainable relationships with and connections to place. The colonizers' restless wanderings across temporal, spatial and ecological boundaries allowed the societies they produced to steal from the past, the present and the future. The stories spun to justify their actions were woven from threads of faith, politics and ideology that became central to the modern world's understanding of itself. Those dominant (and dominating) narratives rendered all but impossible to imagine—perhaps intentionally—the alternatives woven in the experiences and practices of Indigenous autonomy, climate justice, the recognition of climate refugees, and the restructuring economic relationships for justice, equity and sustainability across time, space and difference. Indeed, for many people and peoples alienated from any prospect of belonging-in-place and sustainable relationships in coupled human-and-natural-systems, such alternative narratives have become literally unthinkable. Sometimes, in responding to or opposing those dominant narratives, we don't see just how deeply our thinking is captured by their framing of the challenges. We don't realize what has become unthinkable under the influence of the colonizers' self-serving stories.

In working with many Indigenous leaders over my professional life, I have drawn some fundamental conclusions about what lessons for scholars, scientists and academics might be drawn from their resilience, patience and determination:


acknowledgement, engagement and discussion (education), not just the assertion of expertise by leaders and advisors—humility is required, as is the ability, willingness and opportunity to listen. Recognize that what constitutes evidence in different realms and settings will vary (sometimes unpredictably) over time and between circumstances.


**Funding:** This research received no external funding. My attendance at the international forum 'Climate Change, Indigenous Resilience and Local Knowledge Systems: Cross-time and Cross-boundary Perspectives', held in Taipei, Taiwan on December 13–15 2019, was supported by funding from the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology.

**Acknowledgments:** I would like to acknowledge the organizing committee of the international forum. Their support for my participation in the conference provided the impetus to finalize this paper. I would particularly like to thank Hue-Min Tsai, Sue-Ching Jou, Jolan Hsieh and Yuju Wang.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
