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Native Americans, Environment and

Environmental issues are a central concern for Native North American peoples in several different ways that intertwine with what some have called a history of colonialist racism and genocide. These include the dispossession of land, the degradation of indigenous space, and the marginalization of Native American lifeways, which, it has been argued, are more sustainable than those of modern industrial and expansionist nation-states. Despite the great cultural diversity of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas and around the world who have faced similar experiences, a sustained global indigenous movement has emerged that emphasizes cultural survival and resistance to imperial history, learning, language, religion, and trade. Much of this resistance is embodied in guarding living ecologies where tribes have specific and ancestral bonds.

Tribalism

The indigenous people of the Americas have always encompassed a diverse set of cultures and societies, perhaps best understood as distinct tribes organized through kinship rules and institutions. Indeed, tribalism, as Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote in Custer Died for Your Sins, is a quintessential element of American Indian societies. Each tribe has many variations in practices (customs) and social structures (e.g., clans), as well as norms and expectations for tribal society and individuals within the respective tribe. Thus, each tribe has a unique political history and therefore unique relations with the earth, particularly because each tribe is place based: That is, it has developed within a specific ecological space.

Because tribes are place based, intimate knowledge about the nature of ecological systems and their dynamics is learned and recorded (usually) in oral histories and ceremonies passed down through elders in the tribes or other designated leaders. This place-based evolution of tribes, in addition to their egalitarian social structures, has limited the ways in which tribes have allowed themselves to change their landscapes and degrade the surrounding ecology. This is not to say that some tribes did not degrade their environments—some did so, which led to their own demise. However, the very fact that many tribes, such as the Yakima or the Hopi, may trace histories of thousands of years of living in a specific place indicates that they were able to maintain the integrity of the large ecological structure (e.g., hydrology, soils, game) without undermining their subsistence needs. Add this to the fact that most tribes saw and continue to see the world around them as a living family and that this worldview guided theocratic governance in tribes, and it becomes clear why tribes are considered relatively sustainable compared with Western cultures that have disposed of land as if it were a cog in a machine, much less a part of the family of life.

Dispossession

The dispossession of sacred and ancestral place-based tribal land is a critical element in Native American histories and in the histories of colonizing settlers who eventually established the nations of Canada and the United States. Seizure by European-based empires of land that had been under tribal tenure, sometimes for thousands of years, has been a consistent story in the last 500 years of Native American history. This dispossession was based on frankly racist attitudes toward Indigenous Peoples, whose societies were treated and viewed as less evolved than those of Europe. In fact, Europeans considered themselves to be at the center of civilization, which they believed was produced by controlling nature and centralizing political structure in European-type monarchies, and later republics. At the same time, European colonists saw Indigenous Peoples as “savage” and “uncivilized.” Nature was something to be dominated, and Indigenous Peoples were seen as part of that untamed wilderness.

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