Contested Concepts: "Indigeneity" and Ecological Thought

Undergraduate / Graduate

The figure of "The Ecological Indian" has been critiqued on anti-colonial grounds as a racist inheritance of the conquest era and also affirmed and mobilized by Indigenous scholars and activists as capturing something true about pre- and post-colonial Indigenous forms of life. Despite these tensions, "indigeneity" and the idea that Indigenous peoples are uniquely attuned to nonhuman reality persist as givens in much environmental thought. In this class we will examine and evaluate this persistence, asking, Why are Western environmentalists so attracted to the idea of indigeneity and what do they mean by it? Where does the idea of "the Ecological Indian" come from? In what ways does this idea track reality and how might it obfuscate or distort distinctive Indigenous perspectives? How do different Indigenous people understand and take up this concept? In pursuit of these and related questions, our readings will span Renaissance utopias, theories of colonialism, studies of the religious roots of environmentalism, historical and contemporary environmental writing, and various Indigenous perspectives on empire, the environmental movement, and the other-than-human.