**10. Rescaling the Climate Crisis**

Recognizing this, acknowledging the simultaneously local-to-global and molecular-to-cosmos relevance of Indigenous experience demands a framing (and re-framing) of climate change that shifts across scales. The conventional discourses, which frame climate change in global and near future scale frames, constrain how the challenges are conceptualized and what actions are prioritized. Shifting the scale frames to nurture thinking at the scales of Indigenous self-determination and inter-generational healing allows climate change discourse to bring into focus key issues, such as the geopolitics of Indigenous resilience, vulnerability and adaptation, and reframes the resurgence of Great Power geopolitics.

A wider decolonial project must develop respectful modes of negotiating belonging-togetherin-Country. It must reshape human-to human relations across boundaries of difference and prioritize justice, as well as insisting on state and corporate actors delivering on commitments to reduce the human burden on climate systems. It must acknowledge the continuing presence of Indigenous connections to place, to culture, to history—and to diverse futures. It must nurture modes of becoming

that reconnect people-to-people, people-to-environment and people-to-cosmos relationships within and beyond Indigenous domains. It needs to recognize that the disruption of these connections underpins the colonial project in order to release resources and energy for the accumulation of obscene wealth and unsustainable burdens on climate systems.

The current disconnection of people from place and environment is marked at multiple scales:


We could think of scale as mediating or moderating all of these relationships. But that is not enough. We certainly need to think differently about scale and the creation and moderation of vulnerability and resilience because these relationships are actually enacted through scale. For example, the scale of Indigenous governance is not something that develops in isolation. Indigenous self-determination and self-governance are always moderated by relationships internal to the dynamics of a particular Indigenous group, and others that reflect the external dynamics that constrain the exercise of governance. In other words, the scale of Indigenous autonomy is always contested and in complex relationships across the scales at which the power and action of formal government administration is constructed and exercised.

Thinking in terms of scale-as-relation [87,88] enables us to think differently about the narratives that reinforce the power of global institutions in climate discourses. It also enables us to rethink the task of decolonizing responses to climate risks facing Indigenous groups.

If one thinks of the dynamics in global climate politics simply in terms of a top-down global hierarchy, understanding what's going on reduces things to either bilateral (global–local) hierarchies or to the enactment of a policy in a local setting. It is easily assumed that the global does (and should) dominate. The paternalistic, colonizing argument says the international system cannot ultimately support Indigenous autonomy, because it will dilute the power to act globally (i.e., to act at the necessary scale) or will split national sovereignty (i.e., disempower the state institutions that are necessary to enforce global actions). That sort of thinking lays the foundations for ongoing deep colonizing. It reproduces the colonial pattern of not holding institutions to account for their impacts across space, time and difference. It allows the present systems of global privilege to continue accumulating and mal-distributing wealth, power, energy and resources from the past and the future—and to masquerade as the only alternative source of solution to the current climate emergency.
