Indigenous People and Environmentalism

A common ground for indigenous peoples throughout the world stems from their respect for all life forms, rather than the modern separation of humans from nature. Most contemporary “modern” laws assume that the environment is external to, outside of, people and that people have the right to control the environment solely for their ends. The anthropocentric perspective attempts to control and dominate nature—people and all forms of environment. Indigenous peoples are often redefined as primitive. The modern claims of progress and civilization as part of the domination of culture is conjecture, as is the imposition of backward and primitive to nature. In this context, the term primitive is a result of ethnocentrism and the term nature is confusing. Nature has never been backward.

Even recent laws that intend to protect the environment are usually shortsighted and fragmented. One of the reasons that law in modern societies is fundamentally different than the law of many indigenous peoples is because the jurisprudence created by the modern nation-state assumes that law and nature should be separated. A common feature of indigenous cultures, however, was that law and nature were bound together; indigenous nations were comprised of peoples who share a common culture, heritage, language, geography, political system, desire for common interaction, and indigenous jurisprudence. In indigenous North American cultures, for example, law was not considered to be contained within the realm of nation-state structures, autonomous from other social institutions, interpreted only by legal specialists whose primary function was punishment as a means of state control and political legitimacy.

Law was relatively direct and accessible to indigenous North Americans because it was based on concrete notions of the individual and collective good rather than on a modern abstraction imposed by the nation-state as the ideal to which people must conform (or be punished) in order to have stability, security, and individual goods. For most North American Indians, law was accessible to everyone because the oral tradition allowed it to be carried around as part of them rather than confined to legal institutions and inaccessible experts who largely control the language as well as the cost of using the law. Oral traditions in indigenous life stimulate, develop, protect, and deliver knowledge in a systemic manner and have different qualities than the written word. American Indian law-ways based on oral traditions have continued to preserve much of the diversity and respect embedded in the cultures of many American Indians. Vine Deloria suggests that within the traditions, beliefs, and customs of the American Indian people are the guidelines for preserving life and the future of all nature.

The recent call for cultural diversity being implemented in part through recent laws is a conundrum. Corporate culture of the modern state, for example, now acts as if it has discovered diversity, yet it is only a rediscovery and is typically practiced in a bureaucratic manner, rather than in indigenous forms where the celebration and protection of diversity, especially respect for the diversity of nature, was a daily practice. The modern state attempts to control and dominate nature and then defines this process as progress. Rather than learning the diverse lessons of nature, the modern linear, univariate plan is one of controlling and dominating nature—whether it be rainforests, animals/humans, or natural technologies.

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