On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

April 15, 2024

The Nicholas School of the Environment doesn’t typically produce author podcasts, but it is the most appropriate format for a discussion with Ryan Emanuel, associate professor of hydrology, about his latest book, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice." In it, Emanuel speaks about the erasure and lack of voice Native American communities in North Carolina have long endured, how colonialism is intertwined with environmental degradation, and ways tribal communities are working to save their homelands. The author discusses policy recommendations, calls for community engagement, and analyzes the impacts of colonialism, industrial extraction, and environmental injustices in North Carolina.

Author Interview

13-minute listen

When is tribal consultation performative? How are indigenous communities protecting their ancestral lands from extraction and degradation? The author’s take on these questions, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The present voicelessness born of our erasure from society is especially frustrating given that…governments often name environmental justice and indigenous rights as values worth upholding.”

—Ryan Emanuel

Author Interview Transcript

Phuong Tran:

We're speaking to Ryan Emanuel, environmental scientist, hydrologist, and member of the Indigenous Lumbee Tribe, to learn more about his book “On the Swamp.” Ryan, what can you tell us about how this book got its start?

Ryan Emanuel:

I envisioned more than 10 years ago writing a book that sort of brought to life the rivers where I grew up, my homelands, and a work that articulated my love for water in general and my love for water as a scientist and as a Lumbee person. Along the way, I realized that we had a pressing need to engage with some of the challenges that are associated with this watery world.

Phuong Tran:

Let's talk a little bit about those challenges which you trace to colonialism, something you describe as both powerful and incomplete.

Ryan Emanuel:

We have a long exposure to colonial violence, to extraction, and to exploitation that's given rise to waves of challenges that are associated with the ways that people interact with landscapes, the way that we manage lands intensively for agriculture, the way that we extract energy from the land. And now, in the past century or so, how we've had to grapple with the challenges of climate change. And so colonialism is one of the roots of these problems that we often classify as environmental issues, but really, they can't be disentangled.

Phuong Tran:

Thank you for that historical context, Ryan. And to help listeners get a sense of land and loss, I had asked you for a recording of a trip you took down Coharie River about a decade ago. Now this river runs through southeastern North Carolina in Sampson County in an area known as the coastal plains. The area's first inhabitants and their descendants still in the area are Coharie Indians. Now, tell us more about the river, which you described in your book as more than a body of water but rather a living relative or a lifeline.

Ryan Emanuel:

It's a lovely and intimate river. The water is dark; it's stained the color of rich iced tea, and that's because its headwaters are completely in the coastal plain, and it filters through these organic soils on its way to the stream. Outsiders are sometimes wary of it or fearful of it, but that's the color that represents home to Coharie people and also to me. And so, when I see that dark-colored water, it's a reminder that I'm in my homelands or the homelands of people who are close kin to me.

Phuong Tran:

Water is a central character in your book. I mean, you are a trained hydrologist after all, but foremost, you identify as Lumbee, from a Native American community primarily centered in four adjoining counties of Southeastern North Carolina. You grew up outside a few hours away from these counties in places you call ephemeral outposts of city living. Walk me between those worlds.

Ryan Emanuel:

I grew up at a distance from our homelands. My parents raised their family in Charlotte, which is about two hours away from Lumbee territory, and so my encounters with our homelands were periodic but intense. I think that that separation is one of the things that influenced me to pursue a career in science, in general, and specifically to pursue a career in hydrology.

Phuong Tran:

You wrote that sometimes it takes leaving to be able to see home more clearly. You also reflected on how much Robeson County, which is located in the southern part of North Carolina, had changed due to this country's appetite for cheap fuel and cheap protein. The county is the state's largest by landmass, whose population includes more than 40% Native American. What are some of the changes you've seen both up close and far away from your ancestral home?

Ryan Emanuel:

Energy extractivism has looked like Robeson County and similar places as, frankly, sacrifice zones for things like fossil fuel pipelines. It's also an epicenter of other types of extractivism, like industrial livestock production. Of course, there's a dire need to feed growing populations, but the cost to that has been the sacrifice of soil, water, and air, and it happens in places like Lumbee homelands and Coharie homelands.

Phuong Tran:

How can communities honor their value system and resist monetizing the land when faced with so many cyclical and consistent economic pressures? I think Robeson County has a poverty rate that's three times as high as a state average, for example.

Ryan Emanuel:

Our homelands have fed our families since time immemorial, and the idea that we can solve problems by simply monetizing our land or our water as sites of extraction or sites of waste disposal really runs counter to the idea that these are entities with which we have relationships. And I think that a step towards solving grand challenges around food and water provisioning, energy, and other kinds of sustainability requires us to flip our idea of what these places are for.

Phuong Tran:

So what's the answer?

Ryan Emanuel:

If we're going to make it generations into the future, we have to figure out a way to survive without destroying the things that are the source of life for all of us. And I don't know what the answer is, but I know that the answer can't come from the same types of thinking that got us into this mess, and that needs to look like something very different from our current practice of tribal consultation in the United States. We need to move beyond consultation into models that actually place indigenous perspectives in the foreground. And instead of giving Indigenous peoples a seat at the decision-making table, we have to figure out a way to remake the table altogether.

Phuong Tran:

And what might a new proverbial table look like now?

Ryan Emanuel:

There's a long-standing idea that is simply to make sure that people are well-informed about what's getting ready to happen to them. And that's not true engagement; it's definitely not consent, and it reflects an equal misunderstanding of the purpose of consultation, and it reflects a complete disregard for ideas around free prior and informed consent.

Phuong Tran:

You opened the book by compressing 6,000 years of Indigenous person's history into one calendar year. To illustrate how reductive most people's understanding of Indigenous history is, settlers came onto the scene within the last month of this imaginary year you'd created. Now let's use this imaginary year as a launch pad to step into the next imaginary year. What might the first months of that imaginary year look like? What are your calls to action?

Ryan Emanuel:

The beginning of this imaginary year is made up of a process of thinking clearly about where we want to end up, a century in the future, a millennium in the future. And this is fundamentally different from the kind of thinking that dominates decision-making today, where we're thinking about very short time spans that might be associated with shareholder profits or election cycles, or things like this. Indigenous peoples are concerned with four, five, six, seven generations into the future. We make decisions today knowing that our great-great-grandchildren are going to have to live with the consequences in the place that we come from. What happens when the place that you come from no longer exists or when it's radically transformed? We're certainly being squeezed at both ends out of the zone of habitability. And so, where do we go from there? And I think it's going to take some intense reimagining of the way that we organize our thinking about the environment.

Phuong Tran:

You devoted a chapter to hope and healing, a reminder for all the brokenness there might be in this story that there's also opportunity and inspiration, which you illustrate through the Great Coharie River Initiative. This is where volunteers are working to restore public access to a river that holds both ancestral and practical significance to the Coharie people.

Ryan Emanuel:

From the very beginning, I saw the story of the Coharie people as an inspirational story that could spark our imagination, and they've done a tremendous job of kindling a passion for reconnecting with rivers all over the southeast. They have Indigenous and non-Indigenous people continually visiting their homelands to see what they're doing on their ancestral river and how they've managed to be so successful in reawakening their cultural connections to water.

Phuong Tran:

You have mention of non-Indigenous volunteers. Brings me to a question about allyship, which you touch on in the book.

Ryan Emanuel:

I think one important step to allyship is to first acknowledge what colonialism and extraction has done to whatever place it is we live or we come from. There's an idea that we can't start the healing and transformation process without first acknowledging what's wrong. And so, I think it's important that each of us, regardless of where we come from or where we live, do the hard work of understanding how these places have been transformed sometimes over long periods of time, and sometimes in very recent history, by colonialism, by extractivism, by violence.

Phuong Tran:

Of all the messages this book carries, what is one takeaway you'd like to emphasize?

Ryan Emanuel:

One of the issues that I want to address through this book is the idea that for generations, if not, for centuries, Indigenous people have been virtually invisible in North Carolina and in many other places. And I think that the invisibility propagates from generation to generation because we continue to teach or not to teach about Indigenous peoples in North Carolina and elsewhere. And so, if we want this situation to change or if we want to create more fertile ground for reimagining futures, we need to start by critically examining the ways that we do or do not teach about Indigenous peoples in schools. Because we've raised up many generations of leaders and public servants who frankly know nothing about us. We're in a position where we're constantly teaching people about who we are and why we exist.

Phuong Tran:

You've been listening to environmental scientist and hydrologist Ryan Emanuel, an associate professor and co-chair of Community Engagement and Environmental Justice at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. You can visit the school's website to hear him read from his new book that we discussed, “On the Swamp,” which was released in April 2024.

'More From The Book' Author Reading Transcript

Ryan Emanuel:

Here's one from chapter one, and it ends with the idea of language and names and keeping those names alive.

‘Lumbee ancestors adopted English as a common language some 300 years ago, more than a century after first contact with Europeans. Colonial documents revealed that indigenous peoples of the Coastal Plain were proficient if not fluent in English, even before they began to gather in isolated backwaters of our present-day tribal territories. Many of these ancestors were internally displaced peoples who sought refuge from war, disease, and enslavement during the early 1700s. They spoke various Algonquin, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages, including the dialects that have been dormant for generations. Elements of their languages survive in the names of rivers and other watery places throughout the region. Roanoke, Chowan, Pamlico, Neuse, Contentnea, Pee Dee, Hatteras, Waccamaw, Mattamuskeet, and Meherrin are a few of the more prominent indigenous place names that survive. When I travel to these places, I speak their names out loud. The past few centuries have been tough on these lands and waters. And in my imagination, they take comfort in hearing their proper names spoken with a sense of familiarity. Colonized places give us a flip sense of what is familiar and what is exotic. And it can be hard to remember that Bath, New Bern and Raleigh are foreign names in these lands.’

And then I've one more from chapter eight. It's a little longer.

‘So far, Lumbee people have had virtually no collective voice in the scope or pace of Robeson County’s sacrificial transformation. The situation is similar to that of indigenous peoples across the coastal plain and around the world. The present voicelessness born of our erasure from society is especially frustrating given that state and federal governments often name environmental justice and indigenous rights as values worth upholding. Even corporations, many of whom act as modern-day agents of colonialism, claim environmental justice and human rights among their operating values. But words are cheap. Governments and corporations operating in the Coastal Plain and elsewhere have little to show when it comes to acknowledging and addressing their past and present roles in transforming indigenous homelands. The situation is unfortunate because justice begins with the acknowledgement of harm. Until governments and corporations acknowledge the impacts of colonialism and pursue meaningful actions to reverse the erasure of indigenous voices, policies on environmental justice ring as hollow as many of the institutional land acknowledgments that have emerged in recent years. Eloquent, but devoid of systemic change needed to set things aright.’

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