‘Who Had to Die so I Could Go Camping?’: Shifting non-Native Conceptions of Land and Environment through Engagement with Indigenous Thought and Action

ABSTRACT

Scholarship in the area of social movements points to the importance of inter-group collaboration and alliance building. In the case of Indigenous-led movements and the issue of solidarity with non-Indigenous movement participants, scholarship at the intersection of Native studies and social movements suggests that such alliances can be built and sustained but that unlearning colonial attitudes and behaviors is central to this process. Through in-depth interviews with non-Native solidarity participants, this article considers how engagement with Indigenous thought and action re-shapes particpants’ conceptions of environment and place. Findings suggest that such involvement calls attention to histories of violence as well as ongoing practices of dispossession causing activists to grapple not only with their personal and family histories but also with their evolving relationship with environmentalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous-Settler relations
• settler colonialism
• environmentalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this work, I use the term ‘non-Native’ to refer to anyone who does not identify as Indigenous. In some bodies of research, ‘settler’ is taken to mean all non-Indigenous peoples living on Indigenous lands. At times I use that terminology especially when referring to bodies of scholarship that tend toward this phrasing. Academic and activist contention over the most accurate and useful terms is ongoing.

2. The resistance to No DAPL should not be understood as significantly different from numerous other place-based resistance movements led by Indigenous peoples except in terms of its size and public coverage. Zoltán. Grossman (2017) suggests this is the most well-known Indigenous mobilization in the United States since the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee (p. 190).

3. Participation in solidarity does not obliterate the privileges bestowed upon non-Native peoples in settler-colonial states, but a desire to engage in more just relations is central to any project for social change. Understanding why settler descendants and other non-Natives participate, how they participate, and what encourages them to keep attempting to act in solidarity is an important part of transforming relations.

4. Consider, for example, the big name environmentalists who began acknowledging the power of Indigenous thinking and political action during the No DAPL protests (e.g. Bill McKibben’s comment published in The New Yorker September 2016). The environmental movement’s interest in the utility of treaty rights to defend ecology is actually not new. Zoltán. Grossman’s (2017) work for example, demonstrates that this is a long-term trend with known roots at least as far back as the 1970’s and 1980’s case of The Western Federation of Outdoor Club’s support of the Boldt Decision as one which provides ‘a new source of environmental control of value to the entire community’ (p. 46). What I am suggesting here is that the No DAPL resistance has encouraged a new generation of environmentalists to come to these same realizations in a very public way.

5. A Māori term which indicates a non-Māori identity.

6. Anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, liberals, neo-liberals, conservatives, libertarians to name but a few.

7. In the Wisconsin case being discussed by Lipsitz solidarity is between white settlers and the Ojibwe. This is not to suggest that settler is analogous with white.

8. Indeed, Indigenous thinkers have similarly pointed to the placeless or rootless characteristics of colonial society. Though ironically, it is the suggestion of Indigenous peoples as nomadic or rootless which has so often been mobilized as a rationalization for the theft and settlement of land (Wolfe, 2006).

9. Geiryn (2000) notes, ‘place matters for politics and identity, history and futures, inequality and community. Is there anything sociological not touched by place? Probably not’ (p. 482).

10. My participant selection has been to some extent informed by conversations about solidarity which have proliferated outside of the academy. These conversations around how and why people should participate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in what is called ‘North America’ have been diverse. In activist communities, media, and public discourse settlers, Indigenous peoples, and those who do not neatly fit in either of these categories (e.g. multi-ethnic people, the descendants of enslaved peoples, new arrivals) have raised concerns about how identity and relationships to place inform social movement participation, particularly in movements led by Indigenous peoples. While I acknowledge that the binary of Indigenous/non-Indigenous is in some ways too simplistic and that both of these terms are contested, I focus on people who do not identify as Indigenous in order to allow for the widest selection possible while simultaneously ensuring that I would be speaking with and hearing the thoughts of individuals who had – at least in their own understanding – participated in inter-group solidarity while working with Indigenous peoples (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005; Land, 2018).

11. Feelings of unfairness were expressed in various ways, but it was clear that respondents felt that not only were Indigenous people being unjustly deprived of their lands and rights, but that non-Natives were also being deprived of a factual accounts of conditions which might influence them to act differently or at least promote more effective engagement in struggles for change.

12. This shift raises important questions for future research: Can solidarity participants become bridges between environmental movements and Indigenous movements? What are the challenges to such bridging? Can solidarity participants change the focus of the environmental movements and organization they had preexisting relationships with? How?

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Coeta and Donald Barker Foundation Environmental Studies Endowment Fund [NA].