Racism and whiteness are embedded in higher education in Geosciences, where white people maintain structural advantages compared to other minority groups. This places a higher value on their specific production of knowledge and undermines the contributions made by their BIPOC peers. Awareness of this historical issue highlights the need to work on a decolonial approach to teaching and research in the geosciences. Through an in-depth literature review, our research examines how issues of racism and whiteness manifest in the geosciences and how/if geoscience disciplines are responding to the demand for a decolonial approach. We conducted an environmental scan of geoscience literature using terms related to racism, whiteness and epistemic exclusion in academia, with a focus on the Canadian context. Forty references were collected and analyzed into epistemic (colonial roots of the discipline, the coloniality in research, and the marginalization of scholars) and institutional (representation, faculty experiences and pipeline in the discipline) themes. Overall, the geoscience literature has focused on historical statistics of representation in the global north, the progress (or lack thereof) in decolonizing the geosciences, and provide suggestions to improve and promote equity and diversity at different stages of the education system (i.e. secondary school, bachelor, graduate studies, and higher levels). As most of the research in this area is based in the US and UK, we identify the need for more detailed research with a Canadian focus.