ABSTRACT
Language experts estimate that 50 to 90 percent of the world’s languages will become extinct by the end of this century. The great majority of those “endangered” languages are Indigenous. After 500 years of colonial erasures of Indigenous languages, the silence of ancestral voices in their landscapes is a tragedy of global proportions. Entangled in Indigenous language loss are the transformations of Indigenous worlds into alien landscapes. The colonial introduction of invasive species of plants, animals, pathogens, and microbes, as well as ideational concepts and ideas, have rendered traditional practices unsustainable in colonial worlds. Despite these upheavals, Indigenous communities are reinscribing and rearticulating their ancestral voices in multimodal worldmaking projects that celebrate resilience but also establish foundations for their futures. The success of these projects will depend upon rethinking the terms of sustainability. Each day seems to bring news of the latest horrors of climate change due to extractive industries, rapacious capitalism, and the slow violence of settler-colonialism. Alienation of the landscape is no longer just an Indigenous concern; rather, it has become a reality for all populations. Past practices of sustainability have contributed to the current conditions of climate change. As the horrors of global warming and disruptions to human health and safety spread to wealthy populations, rethinking sustainability is urgently needed. Perhaps, it is time to rethink sustainability not in colonial terms but in Indigenous terms. This chapter is about the eradication of Indigenous sustainable and adaptive systems of environmental stewardship and how contemporary self-delusional fantasies of development and wealth are accelerating the rush toward human species suicide.
