Epistemologies of crisis name ways of knowing that frame present moments as unprecedented emergencies demanding immediate action. These knowledge frameworks have historically enabled colonisers to justify violence against Indigenous peoples by treating ethical considerations as luxuries that urgent circumstances cannot afford.
Kyle Whyte developed this concept through analysis of how crisis rhetoric functions in environmental and climate discourse. He demonstrates that settlers repeatedly invoke crisis to legitimise Indigenous dispossession. The emergency framing presents elimination as unfortunate necessity rather than colonial choice.
The structure of crisis epistemology
Crisis epistemologies operate through several interconnected moves. They construct present moments as radically new and unprecedented. This presentism obscures historical continuities and patterns. What appears as novel crisis often continues longstanding colonial violence.
Urgency becomes the defining feature. The crisis demands immediate response that cannot wait for deliberation or consent. This temporal compression justifies suspending normal ethical and legal constraints. Indigenous rights become obstacles to necessary action.
Crisis narratives employ what Whyte terms “purported newness.” Each moment is treated as fundamentally different from what came before. This prevents recognition of how current crises emerge from settler colonial structures. It also erases Indigenous experiences of repeated forced displacement and adaptation.
The framing positions crisis as external threat requiring unified response. This obscures how settlers themselves create conditions they then frame as emergencies. Soil depletion resulted from colonial agriculture. Resource scarcity follows from extractive economies. Yet responses displace Indigenous peoples rather than transforming settler practices.
Historical examples
The Guano Islands Act of 1856 exemplifies crisis epistemology in operation. Soil depletion in Europe and North America created agricultural crisis. The United States responded by authorising seizure of any island with guano deposits. This justified colonial violence and enslaved labour as necessary responses to emergency.
Dam construction throughout the twentieth century employed crisis rhetoric. The Dalles Dam in Oregon flooded Celilo Falls in the 1950s. A United States Senator acknowledged this as sacrifice Indigenous peoples made to national security. The Cold War emergency supposedly required hydroelectric power regardless of treaty rights.
The Indian Reorganisation Act of the 1930s responded to identified poverty crisis affecting Indigenous peoples. John Collier and the Bureau of Indian Affairs corporatised tribal governance ostensibly for economic development. This restructuring enabled increased settler control whilst framed as addressing emergency.
Contemporary climate change mitigation projects continue the pattern. Wind farms, hydroelectric dams and carbon offset plantations displace Indigenous peoples in the name of planetary crisis. The Mount Elgon plantation in Uganda violently removed the Benet people for carbon offsets marketed as climate solution.
Presentism and temporal violence
Crisis epistemologies rely on what Audra Simpson terms “settler colonial presentism.” This treats the present as fundamentally severed from colonial past. Each moment appears as new beginning rather than continuation of elimination logic.
Mark Rifkin analysed how settler time structures experience to naturalise colonial power. Linear progress narratives position the present as advanced stage beyond primitive past. This temporal ordering positions Indigenous peoples as anachronistic remnants rather than contemporary political actors.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson identified how presentism functions in climate discourse. Indigenous peoples are framed as especially vulnerable to climate change, requiring relocation assistance. This obscures centuries of forced displacement that climate relocation continues. Indigenous adaptive capacity developed across generations disappears from view.
The temporal framing also enables crisis rhetoric to treat each displacement as isolated incident. When Alaskan villages face climate-induced relocation, this appears unprecedented. Historical patterns of removal through laws, policies and financial instruments become invisible. Indigenous peoples supposedly face novel rather than familiar violence.
Crisis and states of exception
Crisis rhetoric enables what Giorgio Agamben termed states of exception. Emergencies justify suspending normal legal and constitutional protections. The urgent threat supposedly requires extraordinary measures outside regular constraints.
Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics illuminates how crisis declarations determine who may live and who must die. Under emergency conditions, some populations become expendable in service of broader survival. Indigenous peoples repeatedly occupy this category.
Kyle Whyte documented how climate emergency discourse risks reproducing this pattern. When Extinction Rebellion activists declare “we don’t have time to argue about social justice,” this exemplifies crisis thinking. Justice concerns become luxuries that planetary emergency cannot accommodate.
The logic proves insidious because genuine urgent problems exist. Climate change threatens catastrophic harm. But crisis framing that suspends justice will not produce just outcomes. Energy systems built without Indigenous participation and consent will not serve Indigenous peoples even if they address emissions.
Erasure of Indigenous resilience
Crisis epistemologies systematically erase Indigenous adaptive capacities and resilience. Whyte emphasises that Indigenous peoples have survived repeated forced relocations, resource depletions and environmental catastrophes imposed through colonisation.
These experiences generated sophisticated knowledge about adaptation, collective care and rebuilding. Indigenous communities developed practices for maintaining connection despite displacement, managing scarce resources, and transmitting knowledge across disrupted generations.
Contemporary crisis discourse treats climate change as presenting unprecedented adaptive challenges. This ignores that Indigenous peoples possess generations of experience with environmental transformation and forced migration. The crisis framing positions Indigenous peoples as passive victims requiring rescue rather than as holders of crucial knowledge.
Kyle Whyte cites work by Brenda Child, Mary Arquette, Jeanette Armstrong and others documenting how Indigenous peoples, particularly women, developed and maintained coordination networks enabling collective responses to colonial crises. These adaptive capacities represent resources for addressing contemporary challenges yet remain invisible within crisis frameworks.
Energy colonialism
Climate mitigation and renewable energy projects exemplify contemporary crisis epistemology in action. The planetary emergency supposedly justifies rapid transition regardless of impacts on Indigenous communities. This reproduces elimination logic through green technologies.
The Site C dam in British Columbia floods First Nations territories and displaces Indigenous clean energy projects in the name of provincial energy needs. Tribal wind farms get crowded from grids whilst corporate projects receive subsidies. The climate crisis justifies continuing the very dispossession that created environmental destruction.
Carbon offset projects prove particularly egregious. Northern states and corporations purchase rights to plant monoculture forests or prevent deforestation in Global South. This often violently displaces Indigenous peoples protecting diverse forest ecosystems. The Mount Elgon example saw over fifty people killed by park rangers. Project coordinators claimed this improved Indigenous lives.
The pattern reveals that crisis epistemology serves settler interests even when addressing real problems. Climate change requires urgent response. But framing that emergency as justification for Indigenous elimination continues rather than challenges colonial violence.
Epistemologies of coordination as alternative
Kyle Whyte proposes epistemologies of coordination as alternative framework. Rather than unprecedented crisis, coordination approaches understand change as constant feature of existence. Indigenous peoples have always navigated transformation.
Coordination epistemologies centre kinship relationships understood as moral bonds involving care, consent and reciprocity. Responding to change requires maintaining and repairing these relationships across human and more-than-human worlds. This takes time and cannot be rushed.
The Anishinaabe story of the Seven Fires teaches that settlers may present the face of kinship whilst concealing the face of death. Coordination epistemologies require discerning these faces rather than accepting crisis declarations at face value. Genuine cooperation differs from emergency claims justifying elimination.
Vicente Diaz’s work on Micronesian seafaring knowledge illustrates coordination in practice. Navigation requires constantly adjusting to moving waters and winds. Success depends on relationships of trust and collective knowledge rather than crisis response. This offers model for addressing environmental change.
Implications for climate justice
Climate change constitutes genuine urgent challenge requiring rapid transformation. The question is whether this transformation will reproduce colonial violence or enable justice. Crisis epistemology points toward the former. Coordination epistemologies suggest alternative paths.
Indigenous peoples worldwide have articulated climate responses grounded in traditional knowledge and reciprocal relationships. The Onjisay Aki Declaration from Sagkeeng First Nation emphasises Mother Earth’s agency and the centrality of ancestral knowledge. Buen Vivir frameworks from Indigenous peoples of the Americas propose living well within expanded community including all creation.
These approaches require time for consultation, consent and relationship-building. They resist the urgency that justifies eliminating Indigenous presence. This does not mean inaction but rather action grounded in responsibilities to land, water and future generations.
Deborah McGregor and other Indigenous environmental scholars demonstrate that Indigenous-led climate responses prove more effective than top-down crisis interventions. Traditional ecological knowledge, adaptive governance and long-term stewardship offer resources that crisis thinking cannot access.
Resisting crisis rhetoric
Indigenous resistance to crisis epistemology takes multiple forms. Legal challenges assert treaty rights and sovereignty against emergency claims. The Standing Rock movement against Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrated how water protection grounded in Indigenous law challenges development urgency.
Intellectual work exposing crisis rhetoric’s colonial genealogy constitutes crucial resistance. Scholarship documenting historical patterns of crisis justifying elimination makes contemporary deployments legible as continuation rather than exception.
Building alternative institutions and practices demonstrates that crisis is not inevitable frame. When Indigenous communities implement renewable energy according to their own governance, practice traditional resource management, and assert jurisdiction over territories, this enacts coordination rather than crisis response.
Refusal remains powerful strategy. Audra Simpson’s analysis shows how refusing to participate in settler crisis narratives maintains Indigenous sovereignty. When Indigenous peoples assert their own temporal frameworks and decision-making processes, this challenges the urgency that demands compliance.
Future directions
Crisis epistemology will likely intensify as climate change, resource depletion and ecosystem collapse accelerate. The question is whether these genuine challenges will be met through frameworks that enable justice or through emergency logic reproducing elimination.
Indigenous peoples articulate alternatives grounded in relational accountability, traditional knowledge and adaptive capacity developed across generations. Whether settler societies can learn from these frameworks or will continue deploying crisis to justify violence remains open.
The concept of epistemologies of crisis provides analytical tools for recognising when urgency serves power rather than addressing genuine needs. It enables distinguishing between problems requiring collective response and emergency rhetoric justifying elimination. This proves essential for navigating intensifying environmental and social challenges without reproducing colonial violence.