Indigeneity, Decolonization, and Just Sustainabilities
Research, education, and public engagement grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, autonomy, territorial governance, land rematriation, biocultural regeneration, and climate, environmental, food, and water justice.
Indigenous peoples and nations are not mere “stakeholders” in environmental and climate governance. Their territories, leadership, movements, knowledge systems, languages, and self-determined institutions sustain biocultural diversity, climate stability, food and water systems, and relations of care and land-based autonomy essential to the reproduction of life as a whole. At the same time, Indigenous peoples and land and water defenders continue to confront dispossession, extractivism, criminalization, and new forms of “green” territorial enclosure and green colonialism on top of centuries of continuing colonialism and extractivism.
Since 2019, the Tishman Environment and Design Center’s program on Indigeneity, Decolonization, and Just Sustainabilities has connected peer-reviewed research, community-engaged inquiry, graduate education, public programming, and long-term movement collaboration. The program centers Indigenous resurgence, land rematriation, territorial defense and restitution, autonomous governance, food sovereignty, and decolonial climate, environmental, and food justice as materially grounded pathways toward regenerative and just futures.
Place, accountability and responsibility
The New School is situated in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral territory of the Lenape (Lenni Lenape, “the Real People”). Like Turtle Island and Abya Yala --the “Americas” as a whole -- this remains Indigenous land: dispossessed but never surrendered, and continually defended through Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and relations of responsibility to land, water, community, ancestors, and more-than-human life. Territorial acknowledgment cannot therefore be simply ceremonial. It locates all university work within the power matrix of an ongoing settler colonialism and demands centering Indigenous, anticolonial, and the struggles of the subjugated human and more than human against extractive capitalism, state violence, and their “green” extensions—from carbon markets that commodify life and exclusionary conservation enclosures to energy megaprojects and other false climate solutions. Accountability and responsibility requires refusing the extraction and depoliticization of Indigenous knowledge; recognizing Indigenous peoples, nations, territorial authorities, knowledge keepers, and movements as knowledge keepers and theorists, sovereign governing authorities, and autonomous decision-makers; and making research, teaching, and public engagement answerable to their distinct priorities, protocols, histories, struggles and futures. The measure of this work is whether it strengthens territorial restitution, land rematriation, land defense, autonomous governance, territorial sovereignty, biocultural regeneration, and decolonial and depatriarchal futures for life as a whole.
Why territory and Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy are central
Climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, food and water insecurity, displacement, public-health crises, energy conflict, and sustainability failure are not separate policy problems. They are connected through territory: who governs land and water; which social, ecological, and sacred relations are protected; whose knowledge authorizes decisions; and what forms of life development projects make possible or destroy.
The program studies how colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, state and imperial formation, extractivism, and anthropocentric political economy reorganize lands, waters, forests, labor, food systems, bodies, and more-than-human life. It also studies and supports Indigenous and frontline alternatives that already regenerate relations among territory, community authority, food and medicine, language, spirituality, water, biodiversity, and intergenerational responsibility.
This framework rejects the treatment of Indigenous knowledge as a resource to be extracted, a technical input to be “integrated,” or a corrective added to institutions that otherwise leave colonial property and governance intact. Indigenous peoples and knowledges are not supplements to the dominant system. They embody diverse, living worlds and territorial futures beyond it.
Research commitments
Indigenous intellectual and political authority. Research begins from the concepts, priorities, institutions, protocols, and practices of Indigenous peoples and communities rather than treating them as objects of academic representation.
Territorial self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty. The program focuses on effective and autonomous reclamation, rematriation, and sovereign control over land, water, forests, food and medicinal systems, sacred sites, knowledge, and governance—not recognition in name alone.
Research as accompaniment. Scholarship is designed, where appropriate, through sustained relationships and co-developed outputs useful to communities, grassroots organizations, public audiences, and movement allies.
Relational and intersectional accountability. The work connects land and water to body-territory, gender, sexuality, racialization, disability, migration, labor, health, and social reproduction, including the leadership and knowledge of women and gender-diverse land defenders.
Critical assessment of false solutions. The program examines how carbon markets, offsets, biodiversity finance, nature-based solutions, geoengineering, transition-mineral extraction, industrial renewable-energy corridors, and conservation enclosures can extend colonial dispossession under the language of climate, environmental, and sustainability action.
Revitalization and futures-making. The work centers Indigenous resurgence, land rematriation, food sovereignty, agroecology, biocultural restoration, autonomous and sovereign governance, and sovereign communal provisioning as real solutions already being practiced.
Four interconnected research and engagement streams
1. Indigenous territorial restitution and autonomous defense, reclamation and governance of land, water, sky and Earth.
This stream examines Indigenous nations and communities defending, recovering, rematriating, and governing territories amid conventional extraction and new “green” territorial reorganizations. It connects comparative scholarship with conversations and knowledge exchanges involving territorial authorities, Indigenous self-governments, land and water defenders, and allied organizations across Turtle Island and Abya Yala.
2. Land-based education, rematriation, and biocultural restoration
This stream connects curriculum co-design, land-based education, food sovereignty, agroecology, forest-garden systems, Black–Indigenous solidarity, and reparative land relations in Northeastern Turtle Island.
3. Indigenous climate, environmental and territorial leadership, and resistance to false solutions, and Indigenous real solutions in coalition with diverse transformative solutions.
This stream works with climate-justice and environmental-justice networks to distinguish transformative climate action from approaches that reproduce colonial control, corporate concentration, and territorial dispossession.
4. Knowledge exchanges (intercambios de saberes), organizing infrastructures, movement weaving, communal co-learning and capacity building for decolonizing futures.
The program creates spaces where Indigenous knowledge keepers, territorial leaders, grassroots organizers, scholar-activists, students, and public audiences can analyze crisis and alternatives together. These are not supplementary events. They are sites where research questions are tested, concepts are refined, relationships are built, and public knowledge is produced.
Current flagship research
The Autonomous Restitution of Indigenous Territories as a Real Solution for Climate, Environmental, and Food Justice
This collaborative project is coordinated by professors Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland with Dulce Abigail Pérez Aguilera. It brings a comparative, community-engaged framework to Indigenous territorial restitution and autonomous governance across Abya Yala/the Americas.
The project studies Indigenous territorial recovery, defense, and autonomous governance not only as resistance and self-determination, but as critical biocultural infrastructure for sustaining life and Earth processes. Indigenous territorial governance can regenerate biodiversity, protect watersheds, preserve and enrich carbon sinks, sustain agroecological food sovereignty, revitalize intergenerational knowledge, and strengthen dignified self-determination according to Indigenous worldviews, priorities, and futures.
The comparative research spans Mesoamerica, Andino-Amazonia, and Wallmapu, with current attention to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, in connection to Turtle Island/North America. It examines strategies including territorial recovery and reoccupation; self-demarcation and autonomous mapping; watershed defense; territorial guards; strategic litigation; community protocols and normative systems; autonomous governments and territorial circumscriptions; and self-managed food, medicinal, and biocultural planning. It asks when state recognition, rights, and titling strengthen territorial control—and when they instead absorb Indigenous lands into extractive, market, or “green” development regimes.
Grounded in community-engaged and decolonizing methodologies, the project is designed to produce scholarly, public, policy-facing, and movement-useful knowledge while remaining accountable to partners and communities. Its central question is practical as well as analytical: which combinations of territorial governance, legal strategy, collective defense, intergenerational knowledge, food and medicinal systems, and community-controlled planning most effectively strengthen autonomous and sovereign territorial reclamation, defense and governance, and decolonizing futures, under varied political conditions?
Selected public programs and recordings
Indigenous Self-Governments and Decoloniality (2024)
Indigenous leaders from the Chapra and Wampis autonomous territorial governments, Acoma Pueblo, Cherán K’eri, the Miskito people, and Mapuche organizations discussed self-government, territorial authority, decolonization, and climate justice. Co-organized with Angela Martinez and Roberto Espinoza.
Indigenous Water Ethics / La Ética Indígena del Agua (2023)
Two panels and talking circles connected Indigenous water ethics to sovereignty, self-determination, rematriation, decolonization, ecosystem restoration, and sustainability, with Mona Polacca, Tom Goldtooth, Darlene Sanderson, Rawiri Tinirau, Sidney Hill, Betty Lyons, and others.
A People’s Climate Week (2023)
A two-day gathering at The New School led by grassroots frontline, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab, and South Asian organizers to advance movement strategy grounded in decolonization, grassroots feminism, Indigenous sovereignty, human rights, climate reparations, and real rather than false climate solutions.
Indigenous Women Facing Climate Catastrophe as Water Protectors (2023)
A roundtable discussion and listening session with Claire Charlo, and Tamra Gilbertson foregrounded Indigenous women’s leadership, water protection, and the defense of territorial health under climate catastrophe.
Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement (2022)
The five-day conference brought together twenty-one panels and sixty-five presentations. Selected recordings include “Indigenous & Decolonizing Approaches to Global Environmental/Climate Justice: Pathways beyond the ‘Anthropocene’” with Deborah McGregor, James V. Fenelon, and Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland.
Hoodwinked in the Hothouse (2021–2022)
A four-part webinar series co-organized with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Just Transition Alliance, and the ClimateFalseSolutions.org collective examined false corporate schemes in the Paris Agreement; frontline Indigenous resistance; public subsidies for corporate greenwashing; and the co-optation of movement concepts and Indigenous knowledge by corporations, large nongovernmental organizations, philanthropy, and academia.
Nourishing Communities of Life (2021)
An intercambio de saberes on Indigenous resurgence beyond syndemic violence and Earth crisis, connecting Kichwa, Zenú and Afro-descendant, Oaxacan communal, and Northeastern Turtle Island land-based processes.
Geoengineering from Climate Justice Perspectives (2026)
A public discussion of policy, governance, contestation, resistance, climate justice, and Indigenous alternatives with Aakaluk Adrienne Blatchford of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Eesha Rangani of Hands Off Mother Earth, and Alana Carlson of the Center for International Environmental Law; hosted and moderated by Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland.
Amazonian Calendars: Indigenous Data Visualizations (2025)
An Indigenous data epistemologies, visualization, and design circle co-hosted by Claudia Tomateo, Girvan Tuanama Fasabi, and Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland.
Indigenous Resistance and the Crisis of Mother Earth (2019)
Two Earth Week panels organized through the Tishman Environment and Design Center with Abou Farman, Dulce Abigail Pérez Aguilera, and Angela Martinez brought Indigenous resistance, biocultural diversity, food sovereignty, and climate justice into The New School’s public programming.
Reclaiming Indigenous Paths to Health in Times of Planetary Crisis (2020)
Co-organized with the Center for Earth Ethics, this program connected colonialism, climate injustice, public health, Indigenous healing, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sample Public scholarship and movement collaboration
Indigenous Speaker Series, 2022–2026
Organized in connection with the graduate seminar Indigenous Ecologies and opened to the wider university and allied communities, the series brings Indigenous scholars, knowledge keepers, organizers, artists, land and water protectors, and territorial leaders into The New School as intellectual anchors.
Speakers have included, among many others, Miguel Sánchez Álvarez (Maya Tsotsil), Petuuche Gilbert (Acoma Pueblo), Leona Morgan (Diné/Navajo), Trinity Poolaw (Lenape), Leo Killsback (Northern Cheyenne), Moñeka De Oro (Chamoru), Mark Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), Jason Corwin (Seneca), Ronald Suárez Maynas (Shipibo-Konibo), Washington Barasa Kiptoo (Endorois), James V. Fenelon (Dakota/Lakota), Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee), Gabriella Makerita Hinetu Brayne (Māori), Beatriz Chocori (Mapuche), Robert Guimaraes (Shipibo-Konibo), and Ashish Birulee (Ho Adivasi).
Land & Liberation—Climate Justice through Community Sovereignty, 2022–2025
The series created a movement-facing space for analysis and strategy and addressed resistance and liberation versus false solutions in the land sector; movement strategy around the United Nations climate process; transnational organizing for climate justice, food sovereignty, and land sovereignty; and the lessons that histories of resistance offer present movements. Participating organizations have included the Indigenous Environmental Network, La Vía Campesina, Indigenous Climate Action, Just Transition Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, Transnational Institute, Friends of the Earth International, Justiça Ambiental, World Rainforest Movement, GRAIN, Focus on the Global South, Acción Ecológica, African Food Sovereignty Alliance, Organización Boricua, Ramani Collective, ETC Group, IPES-Food, Global Justice Ecology Project, and others.
Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement, 2022–2023
Figueroa Helland served as the main organizer and convener, with the Global Studies Association–North America, of this five-day conference comprising twenty-one panels and sixty-five presentations by scholars, scholar-activists, civil-society actors, and movement organizers. The conference generated a peer-reviewed special issue of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology and a lead-co-edited scholarly intervention on racial capitalism, climate justice, ecofascism, world-systems analysis, demilitarization, Indigenous and Black environmental thought, and anti-systemic movements.
Sample publications
“Global Indigenous Struggles and Climate Change Activism”
James V. Fenelon and Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Action. This chapter connects more than five centuries of colonial ecological violence to contemporary Indigenous defense of lands, waters, lifeways, and future generations, while critically examining carbon markets, offsets, geoengineering, net-zero schemes, nature-based solutions, and transition-mineral extraction.
Read the chapter on Oxford Academic.
“[Critical Examinations of] Renewable Energy”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, for the forthcoming fourth edition of Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist Climate False Solutions (released online in 2026). The chapter distinguishes renewable energy as a possible component of community-controlled transformation from renewable energy used to expand corporate growth, extractive infrastructure, green grabbing, and colonial territorial reorganization.
Read and download the chapter.
“Nourishing Communal Territories of Life: Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous Resurgences beyond Earth Crisis”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, Angela Martinez, Neftalí Reyes Méndez, Angélica Castro Rodríguez, Juan José López Negrete, Mileida Correa, José Gualinga, and Çaca Yvaire, in Grassroots Responses to Extractivism: Case Studies from Around the World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). Developed through an intercambio de saberes, the chapter brings together Kichwa, Zenú and Afro-descendant, Oaxacan communal, and Northeastern Turtle Island processes as authoritative theories and practices of land-based self-determination, food sovereignty, restoration, and resurgence.
View the book and chapter listing.
“P’ijil k’opetik ta sk’elel, skoltael, yich’el ta muk’ ch’ul osil-balamil: Principios de Cosmovisión Maya Tsotsil para Honrar y Defender a la Madre Tierra”
Miguel Sánchez Álvarez and Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, Bajo el Volcán 5(10), 2024, 433–466. Written from Maya Tsotsil language, cosmovision, spirituality, territory, community, and practice, the article presents Indigenous concepts as philosophical and political foundations for honoring and defending Mother Earth.
“Beyond Green Colonialism in Global Environmental & Climate Politics: Towards Decolonial Solidarity with Mother Earth’s Revolt”
Mariana Brito-Millan, Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, José Guzmán Morales, Emily Harrison, Jessica Ng, Luis Quintanilla, Amber Salomón, and Brad Werner, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 2023. The article brings decolonial feminist analysis, Earth-system science, Indigenous approaches, and movement critique together against green technoscientific solutionism and climate-disaster capitalism.
“Introduction to the Special Volume: Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland (lead co-editor and lead coauthor) and Jerry Harris, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 2023. Developed from the five-day Earth Crisis conference, the special volume brings racial capitalism, climate justice, ecofascism, world-systems analysis, demilitarization, Indigenous and Black environmental thought, and anti-systemic movements into one scholarly intervention.
Read the special-volume introduction.
“Indigenous Pathways beyond the ‘Anthropocene’: Biocultural Climate Justice through Decolonization and Land Rematriation”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, NYU Environmental Law Journal 30, 2022. This single-authored article argues that real climate solutions require the restitution of Indigenous sovereignty and autonomous biocultural territorialities—not the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into state- and market-centered systems that continue to organize land through domination and accumulation.
“Decolonize, ReIndigenize: Planetary Crisis, Biocultural Diversity, Indigenous Resurgence, and Land Rematriation”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, Dulce Abigail Pérez Aguilera, and Felix Mantz, in Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures (2021). The chapter analyzes the colonial destruction of Indigenous peoples, languages, lands, and lifeways and advances resurgence, re-Indigenization, and land rematriation as necessary responses to planetary crisis.
View the book and chapter listing.
“Decolonizing Food Systems: Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Revitalization, and Agroecology as Counter-Hegemonic Movements”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, Cassidy Thomas, and Dulce Abigail Pérez Aguilera, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17, 2018, 173–201. The article links colonial and capitalist food regimes to ecological and social crisis while foregrounding Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant political agroecologies across Turtle Island and Abya Yala.
“Indigeneity vs. ‘Civilization’: Indigenous Alternatives to the Planetary Ecological Rift”
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland and Pratik Raghu, in Social Movements and World-System Transformation (Routledge, 2017). The chapter places Mesoamerican, Turtle Island, and Adivasi knowledge systems and territorialities in conversation with world-ecology, arguing that Indigenous resurgence is indispensable to repairing planetary rifts.
Selected collaborators, participating organizations, and networks
Relationships vary by project and include research collaboration, public programming, movement strategy, teaching, advising, and participation in knowledge exchanges.
Collaborators have included, among others, the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust; Indigenous Environmental Network; Amazon Watch; Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist Climate False Solutions; Plataforma de Autogobierno Social Territorial–Descolonialidad y Autogobierno; La Vía Campesina Climate Justice collective; Just Transition Alliance; Climate Justice Alliance; Friends of the Earth International; Friends of the Earth USA, Transnational Institute; Global Justice Ecology Project; Servicios para una Educacion Alternativa - EDUCA Oaxaca, among many others.
Program leadership
Program leadership is provided by Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, PhD, who is Director and Associate Professor of the Master of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management, faculty in the PhD in Public and Urban Policy, and has served as Associate Faculty Director at the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Since 2019, he has led the Center’s initiatives on Indigeneity, Decolonization, and Just Sustainabilities, building connections among Indigenous Studies, political ecology, Earth-system analysis, climate and environmental justice, food sovereignty, biocultural diversity, social movements, and decolonizing methodologies.
Contact
For research, teaching, partnership, or public-programming inquiries:
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland, PhD
figuerol@newschool.edu
RESOURCES
ORGANIZATIONS
POSTS
Indigeneity and Systemic Change
Indigenous and Local Communities Land Rights: Pathways for a Climate Resilient Future for Food
Resurrecting Indigenous Ontologies: Biocultural Responses to World-System Crises
Cultivating Biocultural Diversity through Indigenous and Peasant Sovereignty
Protecting Indigenous Languages and Knowledges: Biocultural Keys to Climate Justice
community partners
Header image courtesy of: Xochitl Enriquez, Jeff Slim, Kim Smith, Angel Diaz, Averian Chee, and members of the Cyphers Center for Urban Art. Co-hosted by the following organizations: Estria Foundation; Black Mesa Water Coalition, Tonatierra, PUENTE, The Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, The Valley Youth Theater, and the Downtown Phoenix PartnershipSource and further information at: https://www.estria.org/project/phoenix-arizona/
Institutional support:
We thank for their support the Tishman Environment and Design Center and the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program.