Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 373

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock," by Dina Gilio-Whitaker.

Ancestors of today’s Lakota, the people of Oceti Sakowin, had for generations warned about a black snake that would slither across the land, bringing destruction to the Earth and her people. The day representatives for Energy Transfer Partners entered the council chambers of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on September 30, 2014, to present plans for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), it perhaps came as no surprise to the tribal council that another pipeline was threatening Lakota lands.

The demonstrators refused the term “protestors,” referring to themselves instead as “water protectors,” and their main organizing principle was peaceful prayer and ceremony. “Mni Wiconi” was their mantra, meaning “Water is life” in the Lakota language. Drugs, alcohol, and weapons were banned in the camps. Although violence was strictly eschewed, civil disobedience was embraced; people put their bodies in the way of the construction path, locked themselves to heavy equipment, and got arrested.

The origin of environmental injustice for Indigenous peoples is dispossession of land in all its forms; injustice is continually reproduced in what is inherently a culturally genocidal structure that systematically erases Indigenous peoples’ relationships and responsibilities to their ancestral places.

While many urban Native people today maintain connection to their homelands, their lives and identities are mediated and shaped by these histories of dispossession and displacement. To be an urban Indian is to live under diasporic conditions, sometimes by choice, but more often by circumstances of birth. It is a state of disconnection from land and the culture and lifeways that emanate from land, such as language, ceremonial or religious practices, and traditional food and medicine knowledge. Even considering the remarkable resiliency Indigenous peoples have shown since European colonization, this legacy of loss has still come to be a defining characteristic of Indigenous identity. In both urban and reservation settings, Native identities are formed against a backdrop of historical tragedy and ongoing injustice, which often involves the continued struggle to defend what remains of ancestral lands, territories, resources, and cultures.

The lingering result of the Yellowstone story is that coded within the language of preservation, “wilderness” landscapes—always already in need of protection—are, or should be, free from human presence. But this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places. In Spence’s words, “the context and motives that led to the idealization of uninhabited wilderness not only helps to explain what national parks actually preserve but also reveals the degree to which older cultural values continue to shape current environmentalist and preservationist thinking.” In other words, the paradigm of human-free wilderness articulated by early preservationists laid a foundation for the twentieth-century environmental movement in extremely problematic ways. When environmentalists laud “America’s best idea” and reiterate narratives about pristine national park environments, they are participating in the erasure of Indigenous peoples, thus replicating colonial patterns of white supremacy and settler privilege.

Long before there was ever a concept called “feminism” in the US settler State, there was the knowledge of women’s power in Indigenous communities. The imposition of foreign cultures, and Christianity in particular, was corrosive to societies that were typically matrilineal or matrifocal, were foundationally equitable in the distribution of power between the genders, and often respected the existence of a third gender and non-hetero relationships. As Christianity swept over the continent, it instilled Indigenous societies with patriarchal values that sought not only to diminish women’s inherent cultural power but also to pathologize alternative gender identities, relationships, and marriage practices outside the bounds of monogamy, establishing a general pattern of gender and relationship suppression that constructs modern American society and reordered Native societies.