Ikpíkyav (To Fix Again): Drawing From Karuk World Renewal To Contest Settler Discourses Of Vulnerability

The Klamath River Basin of Northern California has historically been replete with fire-adapted ecosystems and Indigenous communities. For the Karuk Tribe, fire has been an indispensable tool for both spiritual practice and ecological stewardship. Over the last century, the Tribe’s ability to burn has been severely repressed by the United States Forest Service occupation of Karuk Ancestral Territory. Only in recent decades has the federal agency come around to recognize the ecological value of fire, subsequently seeking partnerships with the very Indigenous communities it once delegitimized. This dissertation concerns itself with a critical examination of scientific and political discourses of Indigenous vulnerability. My findings reveal how the settler state employs settler colonial and racist logics to justify ongoing Indigenous dispossession. The irony is, of course, that climate change and the contemporary wildfire crisis have been produced by settler colonialism. This dissertation therefore also contests settler discourses of vulnerability by illustrating the complexity, relationality, and resilience that characterizes Karuk World Renewal, the epistemological and spiritual backbone of Karuk land management. In doing so, I make the case for the value of visual methods, and specifically illustration, in serving the nascent field of Indigenous environmental sociology