ABSTRACT
Many activist and scholarly accounts present indigenous communities as alarmed witnesses to change, united in their conviction that dangerous flux is afoot (Parker et al., 2006), while westerners are portrayed as unconcerned or skeptical of climate change (Norgaard, 2006; Stoll-Kleemann, O’Riordan, & Jaeger, 2001). The assertion is not false: indigenous peoples everywhere are reporting strange climatic shifts and many communities are taking action (see, for instance, Crate & Nuttall, 2009b), while skepticism persists in the West, and northern governments and citizens have done far less to address the crisis than they might have. Still, this narrative is limiting for at least two reasons: it assumes that only disbelief and lack of concern about climate change need be explained—as if the objective truth of climate change were enough of an explanation for why people accept its reality—and it assumes that frontliners believe in climate change solely because they observe local changes in weather patterns and “environmental” conditions.
