Department of Geography, Western University, 1151 Richmond Street, Room 3213 SSC, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada.
Whakauae Research for Maori Health and Development, 60 Ridgway Street, Whanganui, 4541, New Zealand.
Can J Public Health. 2020 Dec;111(6):897-900. doi: 10.17269/s41997-020-00388-1. Epub 2020 Aug 6.
Indigenous peoples have long been successful at adapting to climatic and environmental changes. However, anthropogenic climatic crisis represents an epoch of intensified colonialism which poses particular challenges to Indigenous peoples throughout the world, including those in wealthier 'modern' nation states. Indigenous peoples also possess worldviews and traditional knowledge systems that are critical to climate mitigation and adaptation, yet, paradoxically, these are devalued and marginalized and have yet to be recognized as essential foundations of public health. In this article, we provide an overview of how public health policy and discourse fails Indigenous peoples living in the colonial nation states of Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that addressing these systemic failures requires the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives beyond superficial understandings in public health-related climate change policy and practice, and that systems transformation of this nature will in turn require a radical revision of settler understandings of the determinants of health. Further, public health climate change responses that centre Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives as presented by Indigenous peoples themselves must underpin from local to global levels.
土著人民长期以来在适应气候和环境变化方面取得了成功。然而，人为的气候危机代表了一个强化殖民主义的时代，这给世界各地的土著人民带来了特殊的挑战，包括那些在较富裕的“现代”民族国家中的土著人民。土著人民还拥有对气候缓解和适应至关重要的世界观和传统知识体系，但具有矛盾意味的是，这些体系被贬低和边缘化，尚未被公认为公共卫生的重要基础。在本文中，我们概述了公共卫生政策和话语是如何使生活在加拿大和新西兰的殖民民族国家中的土著人民陷入困境的。我们认为，要解决这些系统性失败，需要在与公共卫生相关的气候变化政策和实践中纳入土著知识和土著女权主义观点，而这种性质的系统转型反过来又需要对卫生决定因素的定居者理解进行彻底修正。此外，以土著人民自己提出的土著知识和土著女权主义观点为中心的公共卫生气候变化应对措施必须从地方到全球各级得到支持。
