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[source: NativeNews; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 13:44:24]

The Nation Magazine (www.thenation.com)

February 7, 2000

'The First Environmentalists'

by MINDY PENNYBACKER

For thirty years, since the publication of Silent Spring and Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee, the growth of the environmental movement has been fueled
with sorrow for the decimation of Native Americans and nostalgia and
reverence for their earthwise--if presumed vanished--way of life. White
writers embellished Chief Seattle's 1854 speech of farewell to his people's
sacred land with ecological homilies, making it the anthem of Earth Day
1992. The genocide and dispossession were popularized in films like Little
Big Man and Dances With Wolves, bittersweet elegies sung by victorious, if
guilty, whites. It's unrolled like an obituary for someone who turns out to
be very much alive.

For, as Winona LaDuke's All Our Relations shows, a vital Native American
environmentalism is linking indigenous peoples throughout North America and
Hawaii in the fight to protect and restore their health, culture and the
ecosystems on their lands. LaDuke herself is a member of the Anishinaabeg
nation and was Ralph Nader's Green Party running mate in 1996. These Native
American activists take inspiration from their forebears' responsible
treatment of natural systems, based on a reverence for the
interconnectedness of all life forms. Another new book stands in marked
contrast to this assumed worldview--The Ecological Indian, by Shepard Krech
III, a professor of anthropology at Brown who maintains that Native
Americans were actually environmentally destructive and, if Europeans
hadn't hastened the demise of the bison (and depletion of natural
resources), might well have brought that on themselves. But more on him later.

What the Indians lost, of course, still takes one's breath away. Regional
maps in All Our Relations show the current and former boundaries of
indigenous lands, the location of industrial, nuclear and other development
sites, and remaining resources. Glaringly evident is the extent to which
lands ceded to the Indians in treaties have been cut back and fragmented,
along with ecosystems from northern forests to the Everglades. While
confinement to "little islands," as Black Elk called reservations, was
cruel enough, and often meant die-offs from disease and starvation, things
grew worse as the islands shrank, revoked by "allotment" and opened to
white homesteaders, or taken for national parks, roads, pipelines and power
projects. "In 1875...the total reservation land base stood at 166 million
acres, or 12 percent of the continental United States," LaDuke says. By
1974 less than 44 million acres remained. Native America now covers only 4
percent of US land. The Worldwatch Institute reports that 317 reservations
"are threatened by environmental hazards, ranging from toxic wastes to
clearcuts."

Native Americans were displaced by farmers and ranchers and then by mining,
when the barren enclaves selected for reservations turned out to be rich in
minerals like gold, coal and uranium. About half the recoverable uranium
within the United States lies in New Mexico--and about half of that is on
the Navajo Reservation. The largest radioactive accident in North America
occurred not at Three Mile Island but on the Navajo Reservation in 1978. On
Dine, or Navajo, land, where Indians provided cheap labor for thirty years
without safety regulations, radioactivity enters the air and water from
more than 1,000 open slag piles and tailings, dust from which blows into
local communities on windy days; drinking water, too, has been
contaminated. Dine teenagers have a cancer rate seventeen times the
national average. Some Dine face a February government deadline for
relocation in a land dispute with the Hopi--but the prime site for
relocation is in Sanders, on land contaminated by the 1978 spill.
Washington State's leaking Hanford Nuclear Reservation sits on Yakama land.
In forty-five years, there have been 1,000 atomic explosions on Western
Shoshone land in Nevada, and now the Shoshone are battling the federal
government's decision to use their sacred Yucca Mountain as a vast
underground nuclear waste dump.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the trustee of the Indian lands, and its
policies have notoriously disfavored the beneficiaries. On Northern
Cheyenne lands, coal was strip-mined, permanently scarring the land, at
fixed leases for between 15 and 35 cents a ton when the market value stood
between $4.67, in 1968, and $18.75, in 1975. A lawsuit filed in 1996 seeks
$10 billion in missing trust-fund payments for oil, gas and timber leases
owed to 500,000 Native Americans for up to a century. Yet in many cases,
the records have disappeared. Industrial pollution and agribusiness robbed
indigenous Americans of their traditional diet--fish and the Hawaiians'
kalo plant, as well as buffalo. A study of Mohawk and Akwesasne women's
breast milk showed a 200 percent greater concentration of PCBs than in the
general population, thanks to the granddaddy of all Superfund sites, in
Massena, New York, which still leaks PCBs and heavy metals into upstate
land and water. Environmental destruction has thus meant particular
heartbreak for Native Americans. LaDuke's book conveys a deeply felt sense
of "the relations all around--animals, fish, trees and rocks... what bind
our cultures together."

* * *

In his story "The Way to Rainy Mountain," N. Scott Momaday describes the
last attempt at a Kiowa Sun Dance, in 1890. "They could find no buffalo;
they had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree." Almost 50 million
buffalo were wantonly slaughtered in a government policy calculated to
bring the fiercely independent Plains tribes to their knees, observes
LaDuke, a strategy confirmed by Native American scholars Donald Grinde and
Bruce Johansen in their new Ecocide of Native America. Krech's argument is
that Native American overhunting had already doomed the buffalo and that
the "final stage" of white hunters, supported by the incursion of five
railroads into the buffalo range, only hastened the inevitable end.

Krech's twenty-six-page chapter on buffalo devotes a scant three pages to
hunting by whites. While he admits that in the final stage, whites were
probably killing five buffalo to the Indians' one, he explores government
policies no further than a nonjudgmental mention of how "the Department of
the Interior linked the disappearance of the bison to the civilization and
eventual assimilation of Indian tribes." He omits the US Army altogether.
Others, too, deny military culpability; in a November 1999 article in the
New York Times, Dan Flores, a history professor at the University of
Montana, calls it an apocryphal story of Army policy, hanging on the thin
thread of an undocumented speech by Gen. Philip Sheridan to the Texas
legislature.

Perhaps Flores should have consulted Buffalo Nation by Valerius Geist,
professor of ecology at the University of Calgary. "Sheridan's was not the
only voice. There are many indications that this was covert U.S. policy,"
Geist says, noting that before Sheridan came west, his "scorched-earth"
tactics against the Confederacy had been made famous late in the Civil War.
"And it's no coincidence that, in 1875-76, attempts by Congress to save the
bison were not signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. He would not
oppose Sheridan, who had been his protégé," Geist writes. Buffalo Nation
quotes other bison eradicationists of the time, including Representative
James Throckmorton of Texas and Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano.

* * *

Geist also disputes the view that Indians' practices had doomed the bison
irrespective of government policy. While it's true that they sometimes
slaughtered whole herds, often by driving them over cliffs, these methods
evolved before Europeans introduced the horse, after which hunting
techniques adapted accordingly. Krech portrays Indians' eating of buffalo
tongues and humps, leaving the rest, as indiscriminate waste, but Geist
points out that for people who subsisted on animal products a diet of only
lean meat could actually kill--fat played the part that carbohydrates do in
our diet.

Scholars like Krech and Flores may be sincere in challenging the romantic
image of Native Americans as the "first environmentalists"--so it is
unfortunate that their theories so neatly suit the purposes of the "wise
use" movement, in which advocates of white entitlement are contesting
indigenous peoples' sovereignty, especially with regard to control of their
own resources and lands. One recent and dangerous manifestation is the Rice
v. Cayetano case pending before the Supreme Court, in which a white rancher
in Hawaii is suing the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs because only ethnic
Hawaiians are allowed to vote in elections for its trustees, who manage
income from their designated trust lands. Rice, supported by the Pacific
Legal Foundation, People for a Color Blind America and other right-wing
groups, has previously sued to try to stop Hawaiian-language classes. It is
in this context that the arguments of books like The Ecological Indian must
be weighed.

In fact, Native Americans have never denied that they killed buffalo, deer,
beaver and other game in increasingly large numbers. By the early 1800s,
their traditional lifestyles had been changed by the influx of whites and
the market economy, in which hides became lucrative commodities. "By the
time Europeans arrived, North America was a manipulated continent," Krech
writes. As Grinde and Johansen note, natives sometimes did alter nature by
cutting trees, grazing animals and diverting streams and rivers to irrigate
crops. Yet, to judge from a wide body of literature--settlers' descriptions
of predominantly unmarred wilderness--Indians either trod lightly on
nature, for the most part, or were cunning trompe l'oeil landscape artists.
Krech devotes his book to showing that the Indians' low-impact stewardship
of natural resources was really a case of accident rather than design
because of their low population numbers. He accuses modern Indians, who
justify such ancestral practices as burning to regenerate forests and
forage, of opportunistic fudging to fit the latest ecological fashions.
Krech's subtext is far more insidious: It seeks to absolve Europeans of
blame and ultimately can be used to help fuel a backlash of anti-Native
sentiment in this country. (Witness the outcry, for example, when the Makah
Indians of Washington wanted to hunt a whale and the Humane Society
International and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society sought to stop them; or
when the National Wildlife Federation and others blocked relocation of the
Black Mesa Dine to an area of great natural beauty along the Utah border.)

Krech also plays up disagreements between natives, implying that they
aren't likely to agree on effective environmental or social protections. Of
course there are Indians who want to make quick money off waste dumps,
strip mining, industry and gambling, as well as those who don't, and this
causes strife. But Krech ignores the growing indigenous movement founded on
the vision and hope that we can learn from our past and seed change. LaDuke
is a founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of approximately
200 Native American community initiatives to clean up the environment and
get control of local resources. These groups belong, in turn, to national
organizations such as the Indigenous Environmental Network. Victories range
from a moratorium on mining in the Black Hills of Northern Cheyenne,
Blackfeet and Crow territory, to the prevention of a mega-dam at James Bay,
Quebec, on Cree, Inuit and Innu ancestral lands.

LaDuke quotes from the Indigenous Environmental Statement of Principles,
which states, essentially, that ecology is economy and that we can't
continue to grow on a dwindling resource base. This means "curbing the
rights of corporations and special interests, transforming the legal
institutions of the United States back toward the preservation of the
commons, and preserving everyone's rights, not just those of the
economically privileged," she says.

* * *

The Native American eco-activist point of view is less compromising than
that of the mainstream environmental groups, who by now are used to
trade-offs--this tract of forest for that, this set of emissions standards
for another. "The broader environmental movement often misses the depth of
the Native environmental struggle," LaDuke contends, noting that "when the
Anishinaabeg discuss land return, as with other Native people, lines are
often drawn between those environmentalists who can support indigenous
rights to self-determination and those who fundamentally cannot." For
example, LaDuke's nonprofit White Earth Land Recovery Project has found
itself at loggerheads with the Nature Conservancy, which in 1983 purchased
400 acres on the White Earth Reservation and rejects Anishinaabeg offers to
work collaboratively to preserve the ecosystem. In the age of corporate
globalism, which promises a steady diet of bioengineered food,
hormone-laced beef and Baywatch, it's amazing and hopeful to see
alternative, local economies developing, from White Earth to the solar
power systems of the Dine.

While some environmentalists misappropriate their image and put them on a
pedestal (off which others try to knock them), Native Americans, Grinde and
Johansen assert, are interested neither in being victims nor in demonizing
whites. Leslie Marmon Silko's chilling fiction "Call That Story Back"
recognizes the ugliness in all of us. In a pre-European "contest in dark
things," witches from all the tribes try to outdo one another with stewpots
full of "disgusting objects," dead babies and severed body parts. But one
witch outdoes them all, summoning white people, setting them in motion, the
winds blowing them across the ocean. The witch narrates the whole history
of genocide, the raping of the land. This scares the other witches, who
tell her OK, you win, call that story back, but the witch replies, "It's
already turned loose. It's already coming. It can't be called back."

If they indeed brought white people here, Indians have learned from their
mistake. Indigenous Americans are taking responsibility for their past and
their future.

Mindy Pennybacker is editor of The Green Guide, an environmental newsletter.

Send your letter to the editor to letters@thenation.com.

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