Sidore Lecture: Dina Gilio-Whitaker

​Decolonizing and Indigenizing Environmental Justice

As the topic of environmental justice has gained greater currency in the US with growing environmental and racial concerns, scholars are refining what EJ means in various communities. For American Indians environmental injustice begins with the history of invasion, genocide, and land theft, as Dina Gilio-Whitaker writes about in her acclaimed 2019 book As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. As part of the 2023 Sidore Lecture Series, Professor Gilio-Whitaker will discuss her work, focusing on settler colonialism as the lens of analysis for understanding an Indigenized and decolonial approach to environmental justice. 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent educator in American Indian environmental policy and other issues.  At CSUSM she teaches courses on environmentalism and American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion and philosophy, Native women’s activism, American Indians and sports, and decolonization. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. As a public intellectual, Dina brings her scholarship into focus as an award-winning journalist, with her work appearing at Indian Country Today, the Los Angeles Times, High Country News, Time.com, Slate, History.com, Bioneers, Truthout, the Pacifica Network, Grist, CSPAN Booktalk, The Boston Globe, and many more. Dina is the author of two books; the most recent award-winning As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. She is currently under contract with Beacon Press for a new book under the working title Illegitimate Nation: Privilege, Race, and Belonging in the U.S. Settler State, and is also a co-editor of a new collection from Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series on Indigenous Environmental Research.

This presentation will be virtual with a campus projection location at Boyd 144