Western vs. Indigenous Views Regarding the Environment
Farzad Forouhar
We all remember the stories from our childhood, in many of which there was a witch, a demon, a big bad wolf, something vile and sinister residing in the woods. This conceptualization gave the environment and nature a sense of wilderness that needed to be tamed and controlled. The anthropocentric view embodied in religious beliefs also emphasized the dominion of human beings over the earth and everything upon the earth, and the idea that they were there for humans to explore, replenish, and subdue, while the environment and nature were embodied as where the devil roams. With the advent of industrialization, the environment and nature became an almost-free unlimited resource that turned factories’ wheels. In the context of the settler-colonial project in the Americas, the environment had the same conceptualization as wilderness. What William Bradford noted upon his arrival to Cape Cod on the Mayflower in 1620 shows such a view when he described what he saw as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”
Like all forms of colonialism, settler colonialism is based on domination, typically organized or supported by imperial authority. As an ongoing colonial process, settler colonialism happens through the alteration of land, species composition and ecological structure, and the relationships between human beings and their natural environment. Such processes undermined various core relationships that challenge every aspect of Indigenous communities, from their sovereignty to their mental and physical health, creating dominant narratives regarding settler colonialism’s ecological dynamics that consider nature as a source of wealth and a resource. The profit motives of this view marginalizes Indigenous communities, and undermines their right to subsist.
The dominant narratives and the counternarratives within the context of the environment can also be found in the concept of ecological nationalism. This notion comprises versions of nature that are a form of national pride, which is a part of the process of legitimating and consolidating a nation. It links cultural and political aspirations with political sovereignty and identity and can include nature conservation and environmental protection. In this view, nature is a source of wealth and a commodity that can generate growth and progress in the development discourse. In this context, the erasure of the Indigenous presence in nature through violence, dispossession and land alienation, exclusion and criminalization of traditional practices, and overexploitation along with forced assimilation and acculturation become necessary. This view also creates a human-nature dichotomy to mobilize the citizenry and construct new identities to form the political sovereignty of the nation-state. In the American narrative, the West was considered as the wilderness that needed to be subjugated by white settlers as if it was their destiny and responsibility, and such assumptions had a critical role in the emergence of American Democracy, the conceptualization of a new identity and citizenship, along with American nationalism and an extension of the state’s political, juridical, and cultural hegemony over Indigenous people.
On the other hand, Indigenous understanding of the environment and nature is entirely different from European settlers’ perception. The stories of creation among the Indigenous people are deeply embedded with the correlation between Indigenous people and their environment and nature. The creation stories are metaphors that indicate how Indigenous people see themselves as the stewards of their environment. They signify how the Indigenous people were aware of their reciprocal affiliation and their symbiotic relationship with their environment, nature, the earth and all its inhabitants as they acknowledged the well-being, existence, and fulfillment of them, and their environment depends on mutual respect and understanding. Such a delicate and substantial understating of nature, along with the Indigenous people’s subsistence livelihood, helped this land to thrive for millennia until European settlers arrived.
The notion of American wilderness is invented and has a culturally constructed nature with two constructs: the sublime and the frontier. The sublime concept is the older and more pervasive cultural construct embedded in Western culture, and the frontier is more embedded in American society and thought; however, it also has a European origin. Wilderness has been introduced to us as a cultural construction that has been produced by the frontiers and a romanticized culture of the sublime. Throughout time and by the emergence of the early environmental concerns regarding conservation or preservation and people like John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, the idea of wilderness has been changed from a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation where the devil roams into a place where one could see the face of God. What has been neglected in defining the wilderness is the erasure of the history of Indigenous communities through land dispossession, assimilation, and genocide. The two views contrast each other as the Western view sees the environment as a resource while the Indigenous view asserts a kinship, a symbiotic and reciprocal relationship with the environment, and sees the environment as the source of life.
Let’s contemplate a bit more about the Indigenous environmental prospect and their biocentric view of the environment that enables them to steward the land and the environment for millennia while the Western, anthropocentric view of the environment as a resource for an extractive economy that results in ecological degradation and devastation after 200 years. The American geographer Carl Sauer put it well when he wrote that “Americans had not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.”
Farzad Forouhar is a core team member at Cooperation Humboldt and works for the Wiyot Tribe in Eureka, California. Farzad moved from Iran to the United States in 2014 and since then has been residing in Eureka, CA. Farzad holds a B.A. degree in Political Science with an emphasis on Global Politics and Environmental Politics with a minor in Journalism from Humboldt State University.