Envisioning Indigenous Models for Social and Ecological Change in the Anthropocene

Indigenous societies provide alternatives to hegemonic social institutions that global capitalism spread around the world, contributing to human caused environmental degradation called the Anthropocene, coterminous with the development of the modern world-system. In this work we describe Indigenous communities using ten social spheres, that balance human needs through ecological mindfulness, including spirituality, and then we model how these social spheres can be adapted to contemporary world-systems using a radical imaginary, building off Indigenous works by Fenelon (2015; 2016), social perspectives of Pellow (2017) and Norgaard (2019), and environmental geospatial sciences (Lui, Springer, and Wagner 2008; Jankowski 2009). We identify four social constructs from Indigenous peoples—(1) decision-making, (2) land tenure and resource management, (3) economic and (4) community—which we model for societies in world-systems through the ten imagined social spheres, to present foundations that empower communities to resist the coming climate change futures of the Anthropocene.