Now, IBES graduate affiliate Gregory Hitch is working alongside those in the Menominee community, whose skill and innovation are leading to true gains in the fight against environmental and climate change.

Hitch, a PhD candidate in American Studies, grew up in the ancestral homeland of the Menominee, now known as Wisconsin. 

“As a young climate activist, I learned from Menominees how issues of inequality, racism, and environmental injustice were bound up in the structures of settler colonialism,” he says. “It became clear to me that if we stood a chance to bring about justice and solve the climate crisis, we as a society had to do the hard work of changing how we think about each other as well as other species and ecosystems.”

As Hitch explains, not only did American settlers forcibly remove Menominees from their ancestral lands—the colonial mindset has also spent centuries indiscriminately harvesting resources and destroying ecosystems in the name of capitalist productivity. 

Hitch’s dissertation, entitled “The Forest Keepers: An Environmental History of the Menominee Nation from Colonization to Climate Change,” centers indigeneity in this seemingly bleak story, recounting the ways in which Menominees have resisted, adapted, and recreated a more sustainable way of living.

“The Menominee have long understood nonhuman species as relatives,” he says. “They thus protected what is now the last large tract of old-growth forest in Wisconsin by using their ancestral knowledge alongside ecosystem science to develop an innovative method of regenerative forestry.”

Hitch aims to bring attention to the Menominee people’s tenacity in the face of violence and environmental racism; but he also hopes to shift the dominant narrative surrounding climate change, more broadly.

“Most action and research is focused on fossil fuel emissions, which is important; however, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, industrial agriculture, and other land-use changes,” he says. “It is my hope that more energy and climate scholars in the humanities and social sciences do this type of research to uncover solutions long dismissed by economic and political elites.”