Indigenous youth as critical agents of biocultural survivance: education and employment in response to the challenges of global heating and climate disruption

These are unprecedented times. Like never before, humans, having separated themselves from the web of life through the skillful use of their opposable thumbs, have invented the means of extinction and have systematized it for the benefit of the few at the expense of all else. Yet humans are also designing fixes and alternatives that will soon overcome the straight line trajectory to ugliness and loss that the current order would lead the rest of humanity through. The works in this dissertation are connected by two themes: (1) those humans who happen to be closely connected to the lands, waters and wildlife, through millennia of adaptation and inventive association, have a great deal to share with the rest, who, through history have become distanced from the lands and waters and wildlife they came from; and (2) as the inheritors of all the insults that the current disrespectful and wasteful system is heaping upon all true sensibilities, young people, who are Indigenous, and who are the critical generation for biocultural survival, have an immense role to play - for their cultures, and for all of the rest. The survivance of autochthonous culture through intergenerational conduct of cultural practice and spirituality is profoundly affected by fundamental physical factors of resilience related to food, water, and energy security, and the intergenerational participation of youth. So this work is not so much an indictment of the system as it is an attempt to reveal at least two ways that the work of these young Indigenous people can be expedited: through the transformation of their education so that more of their time as youths is spent focusing on the wonderful attributes of their cultural associations with the lands, waters, and wildlife; and through the creation of a self-sustaining youth owned and operated enterprise that provides needed services to communities so they can adapt to and mitigate the increasingly variable, unpredictable, and dangerous effects and impacts of global heating and climate disruption.