CCDGB Lab | Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice"

Please join the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute for our 2024-25 speaker series. CCDGB is part of The Entanglement Project, an FHI initiative focused on the intersections of race, health, and climate.

Despite centuries of settler colonialism, Lumbee people and their Indigenous neighbors still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands among forested swamps, sandy plains, and blackwater streams of present-day North Carolina. Amid these backwaters, Indigenous communities have adapted to a radically transformed world while preserving cultures and connections to place. In recent decades, however, pollution, unsustainable development, and climate change quicken the transformation of Indigenous homelands and threaten Indigenous life-ways on the Coastal Plain. In this presentation, I share stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival, adaptation, and resurgence in the face of radical transformation, and I discuss broader lessons about environmental justice and Indigenous rights in the 21st century.

Ryan Emanuel is Associate Professor of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Co-Chair of Community Engagement and Environmental Justice. He is a hydrologist and community-engaged scholar from North Carolina. He studies ecohydrology, biogeosciences, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights. Emanuel leads a group of researchers and scholars who study water and watery places in North Carolina and beyond. His group also partners with Native American Tribes and other communities to understand environmental change through the lenses of environmental justice and Indigenous rights. Their work involves research, education, and relationship-building. Emanuel aims to amplify voices of Indigenous and other marginalized communities who shoulder disproportionate environmental burdens.

RSVP at duke.is/CCDGB-F2024.