Time back! A research manifesto for Indigenous urgencies

Emergencies imply urgency as people are confronted by time-sensitive demands in response to an actual or perceived crisis. Yet so-called natural disasters are anything but natural and are predictable within limits. Any examination of a disaster reveals socially constructed vulnerabilities that put minorities, women and children, the poor, migrants, LGBQTi2S+ and Indigenous communities at greater risk. For this latter group - who also include the previous underserved groups - urgency itself can be interpreted as the result of resilient colonial structures that have embedded the deliberate reduction in time, space, and resources for Indigenous communities to gather, deliberate, decide, plan, and implement. All these disaster risk reduction (DRR) processes must precede any actual event. Research that continues to frame each crisis to hit our communities as if it is somehow disconnected from every previous disaster cannot be taken seriously for those committed to social and environmental justice. Indigenous vulnerabilities are a product of the post-disaster landscape on which many if not most Indigenous communities reside. Modern Indigenous worlds are a result of disaster risk creation. This chapter uses an aborted Indigenous seroprevalence program to unpack the ways in which Indigenous research strategies need to accommodate Indigenous temporal preferences if Indigenous communities are to benefit.