**2. Reconsidering Indigenous Vulnerability and Resilience in Climate Risk Discourses**

Contemporary academic discourse addresses both the nature of anthropogenic climate change and the risks it poses to particular people, places and human systems, and the natural systems to which we are all coupled in complex ways. Two important discursive threads invoke the concerns of Indigenous peoples. One emphasizes vulnerability, arguing that Indigenous groups are particularly vulnerable to climate risks—often because of their indigeneity [2]. The other thread emphasizes Indigenous peoples' exceptional adaptive capacity as being relevant to framing responses to climate change [3,4]. Indeed, it often argues that Indigenous resilience will produce solutions to the problems created by anthropogenic climate change.

Both these discursive modes frame Indigenous dimensions of climate risks, suggesting that Indigenous societies in general have either particular weaknesses or particular strengths that are exposed by climate change. While both offer insights into conditions facing particular Indigenous groups, they both risk stereotyping, oversimplifying and marginalizing the diverse experiences, insights, understandings and lessons that might be generated by engaging with Indigenous peoples.

Like all generalizations, each of these discursive threads reflects some truth. But neither is always nor completely true. Context matters in how we think about the intersection of Indigenous geographies and histories with the realities, discourses and policy responses to anthropogenic climate change. Ostrom [5] acknowledged that there are no easy solutions to problems in coupled human–natural systems: no panaceas. There is "no simple way of representing, understanding or responding to the complexity in settings that are simultaneously biophysical and cultural" [6] (p. 2). Nor are the diverse cultures and experiences of Indigenous groups reducible to some sort of Indigenous-singular that reflects a distinctive and common approach to being human.

Drawing on philosophical traditions of radical contextualism [7], this paper suggests the context of climate change needs to be better understood as involving multiple scale frames (both spatial and temporal) of alienation and belonging. Policy, science and practice all need to develop a much more sophisticated literacy in the scale politics of responding to the risk landscapes that Indigenous groups negotiate.

We have to learn to think anew—to think in ways that take seriously and actually respond to information, understanding and knowledges as if difference confronts us with the possibility of thinking differently [6] (p. 4).
