The ethical code of my
own Anishinabeg community of the White Earth Reservation
in northern Minnesota keeps communities and individuals
in line with natural law. “Minobimaatisiiwin”—it
means both the “good life” and “continuous
rebirth”—is central to our value system.
In minobimaatisiiwin, we honor women as
the givers of lives, we honor our Chi Anishinabeg,
our old people and ancestors who hold the knowledge.
We honor our children as the continuity from generations,
and we honor ourselves as a part of creation.
Implicit in minobimaatisiiwin is a continuous
habitation of place, an intimate understanding
of the relationship between humans and the ecosystem
and of the need to maintain this balance.1
While no one person can possibly
speak for the diversity of peoples and traditions
signified by the term “indigenous,”
still, the quote above from the Anishinabe leader,
Winona LaDuke, provides an entry into many of
the issues discussed in this volume. Her statement
also foreshadows several of the problems raised
by any study of indigenous religious traditions
and contemporary ecological concerns. Foremost
among the values indicated in her remarks, and
echoed by the contributors to this volume, is
the description by different indigenous peoples,
in remarkably diverse ways, of a central, seamless,
organizing orientation, or “lifeway.”
Winona LaDuke’s observation brings the social,
ecological, and spiritual frames into alignment
in a way that distinguishes but does not separate
indigenous human communities, the natural world,
and the realms of the holy beings.
Minobimaatisiiwin
introduces an Anishinabe discourse that gathers
together ethical concerns of social justice, political
insights regarding gender, ecological knowledge
of local place, and religious awareness of a relational
balance that pervades the constantly changing
world. As a coherent and central conversation,
minobimaatisiiwin does not emphasize rational
development for humans exclusively. Nor does it
posit a transcendental self that autonomously
gathers objective sense data so as to know the
world. Nor does it present a transcendent realm
of the sacred beyond the circle of human-animal-earth
habitations. At the heart of this statement, and,
indeed, a primary agenda in this volume, is the
effort to express the coherence of diverse indigenous
discourses about lifeways and ecologies. Each
particular lifeway is an ongoing creative practice
that is simultaneously rational, affective, intentional,
and ethical.
The statement by Winona LaDuke
also gives us an introduction to this volume on
indigenous traditions and ecology, in which a
complex mix of political, economic, ecological,
and spiritual features are explored by native
and non-native contributors. The multiplicity
of perspectives corresponds to the thematic approaches
used to organize the essays in this volume, suggesting
that, of course, there is no one “indigenous”
view on religion and ecology. Moreover, inseparable
from considerations of indigenous religions and
contemporary environmental issues are the current
crises of survival for these peoples. Thus, these
articles explore spiritual relationships established
between native peoples and their homelands. Yet,
they also question any study of indigenous religions
that ignores such issues as the grinding poverty
leading to environmental deterioration, or the
degrading marginality from vital economic exchanges,
or the disempowering loss of political control
in community affairs.
Two problematic perspectives
need to be addressed in opening with an emphasis
on the lifeway concept that draws attention to
the seamless cosmology-cum-economy character of
indigenous societies. First, the stress on the
interrelatedness of diverse aspects of individual,
community, and natural life suggests that the
“balance” or harmony of an indigenous
lifeway is a homeostatic condition. Several early
studies of indigenous traditions and ecology,
such as Roy Rappaport’s insightful account
of ritual pig killing among the Tsembaga Maring
in Papua New Guinea, described that religious
system as a type of feedback mechanism assuring
human adaptation to a changing environment.2
Though well beyond earlier studies, in which evolutionary
theory was used to interpret this perceived lifeway
equilibrium of indigenous peoples as an “inferior”
or “primitive” development, these foundational
studies in cultural ecology suggested a closed
system accommodating internal and external pressures
as the religious ideal. The essays in this volume
modify and expand that approach, emphasizing contestations
and negotiations within indigenous communities
especially in relation to modernization. They
pointedly address the compelling questions of
how indigenous communities, within the theoretical
frames of their traditional lifeways, manage local
lands under intense development pressures from
global and national development schemes. This
first challenge embedded within the lifeway concept,
then, is the need to understand the roles of indigenous
religions in their efforts to maintain a spiritual
balance with larger cosmological forces while
creatively accommodating current environmental,
social, economic, and political changes. The Andean
activist Eduardo Grillo Fernandez described this
challenging road leading through both development
and decolonization, saying:
. . . in the Andean culture
the nurturing of harmony is not the responsibility
of a human community that arrogates to itself
the universal representation to take decisions
and implement them. Harmony in the Andes can only
emerge from the communion of the human community
with the community of the sallqa [nature’s
flora] and with the community of huacas
[deities]. And even then, it is not a
matter of a decision taken by an assembly with
opinions of the member communities. Harmony, in
order to be constantly nurtured, must be revealed
starting from the specific circumstances because
it must not correspond to the will of the collectivity
of the living world but to its physiology. The
form of the harmony to be nurtured is not in the
surface of the appearance but hidden inside the
living world. It is as the sculptor in stone of
Cajamarca said when someone asked him for the
models that inspired his works: “In the insides
of the stone is the form.” 3
In this quest for nurturance of
indigenous Andean cultural life, Grillo points
toward deeper realms than the “collectivity”
or institutional realms often associated with
“religion.” Rather than “beyond,”
however, he motions toward the within of things.
Grillo calls for attention to a traditional form
of perception that balances inner and outer cosmological
realities. Through the insights of elders and
the revelations of dreamers and visionaries, these
small-scale native communities manage acceptable
forms of modernization, mount resistance to development
schemes in which they have no voice, and successfully
transmit ethnic identity despite centuries, in
some cases, of continuing oppression. This is
an imaginative act no less daunting than that
looming ahead of Western industrial societies
as they confront the termination of the petroleum
era.
A second observation is that as
an analytical concept lifeways may make an “other”
of native religions, leading to stereotypes, an
orientalism of expectations, and an exploitative
romanticism. This point requires some consideration
of indigenous ways of knowing. A synecdochic mode
of knowing operative in indigenous traditions
may affirm the use of one material item, such
as the feathers of certain birds, or one way of
ritual action, such as dancing, to make present
the whole of the lifeway. A Western linear, rational
analysis of these articles and actions may interpret
them as holistic symbols that represent the holy.
This interpretation overlooks the lifeway context
of an interactive community of beings in the world.
Hence, an outsider wishing to appropriate the
experience of the holy within indigenous religions
seizes on a ritual article or action, as well
as excerpted and often misunderstood explanations
of native practitioners. This romantic exploitation
of indigenous religions typically accentuates
a perceived native ecological wisdom as having
been genetically transmitted. However, even a
brief example, such as that from the Gitksan peoples
of central British Columbia, reveals complex human-earth-spirit
linkages needed to access traditional indigenous
environmental knowledge.
Each Gitksan house
is the proud heir and owner of an adáox.
This is a body of orally transmitted songs and
stories that act as the house’s sacred archives
and as its living, millennia- long memory of important
events of the past. This irreplaceable verbal
repository of knowledge consists in part of sacred
songs believed to have arisen literally from
the breaths of the ancestors. Far more than
musical representations of history, these songs
serve as vital time- traversing vehicles. They
can transport members across the immense reaches
of space and time into the dim mythic past of
Gitksan creation by the very quality of their
music and the emotions they convey.
Taken together, these sacred
possessions-the stories, the crests, the songs-provide
a solid foundation for each Gitksan house and
for the larger clan of which it is a part. According
to living Gitksan elders, each house’s
holdings confirm its ancient title to its
territory and the legitimacy of its authority
over it.
In fact, so vital is the relationship
between each house and the lands allotted to
it for fishing, hunting, and food-gathering
that the daxgyet, or spirit power, of
each house and the land that sustains it are
one.4
Rather than conceptually reducing
cultural life among indigenous peoples to a social
construction, the term lifeway seeks to bridge
its own inherent depersonalizing distance as an
analytical term. The second challenge in the lifeway
concept, then, is to open interpretive possibilities
for understanding an integrated environmental
vision that transmits spiritual states of knowing
and moral ways of being in the world.
If the lifeway concept provides
us with a helpful theory of cosmological totalities
operative in indigenous traditions, it is not
without its totalizing ambiguities. That is, the
terminology available for discussing indigenous
religious traditions and ecology is fraught with
tensions and contradictions. Who are “indigenous”
peoples? In a straightforward manner indigenous
means anything produced, growing, or living naturally
in a particular region or environment. Yet, there
are semantic and political difficulties involved
in determining who is “indigenous.”
To a large extent these issues are beyond the
scope of this discussion, but it is significant
to note that the United Nations continues to grapple
with these issues. The United Nations Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, prepared
for approval by the separate nation-states during
the Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994–2004),
has posed this question largely within international
law and human rights contexts.5
In these international forums, “indigenous”
refers to ethnic groups with clear cultural, linguistic,
and kinship bonds who have been so marginalized
by modern nation-states that their inherent dignity
and coherence as societies are in danger of being
lost.
One objection to such definitions
from India, for example, is that mainstream peoples
of the nation-state of India have been in that
region for millennia. Hence, they are also “native”
or “indigenous.” In this argument, to
make such distinctions as calling minority groups
“indigenous” is unnecessary, irrelevant,
and harmful to national sovereignty. Two points
might be emphasized, namely, nation-state sovereignty
and the fear of secession by indigenous groups
underlies much of the political rhetoric in the
debate about who is “indigenous.” Second,
anxieties to create a national consciousness have
engendered a drive to “normalize” local
native lifeways and bring them into the mainstream
culture. Criticisms of these normalizing and civilizing
processes are given by several authors in this
volume. Along with “indigenous,” there
are other problematic terms, such as “religion,”
“tradition,” and “ecology,”
to name just a few.
Is the term “religion”
so hopelessly caught up in sacred and profane
dichotomies and Western institutional histories
that it is meaningless in discussing indigenous
lifeways? The sacred-secular split is largely
absent in indigenous lifeways, or, if present,
operates in a different ontological setting in
which numinous realities may emerge suddenly from
ordinary reality. The term “tradition”
also seems to mirror some of the homeostatic,
changeless presumptions discussed above. Furthermore,
“ecology” as a science studying the
interrelationships of organisms in biosystems
is quite different from the use of the term ecology
as a broad conceptual referent for human-earth
interactions. There are novel and distinctive
responses to these questions about terms, and
they are tied to larger issues of discourse analysis
and its subsequent critique of Enlightenment rationality.
Rather than jettison these terms, as well as Western
rationality and science as the embodiment of a
colonial epistemology, the following essays explore
ways of re- reasoning, and re-imaging, the natural
world that have been present and are emerging
in indigenous settings. In that sense, many analytical
terms are contested in these essays, but they
are also used as limited concepts that can guide
our thinking about indigenous traditions. In thinking
about indigenous religions it is appropriate to
acknowledge that they provide alternative epistemologies
to Western classical, medieval, enlightenment,
and postmodern modes of rational analysis. Contemporary
indigenous lifeways and ecological cultures are
not “pure” thought systems; rather,
they are distinct hybrids creatively influenced
by the regional, national, and global regimes
they have encountered and resisted.
It is helpful to step back
a bit and briefly consider some of the approaches
found in these essays. From comparative religions
has come some understanding of the shared characteristics
of many indigenous myths, rituals, symbol systems,
and concern for and deep love of local places.
The power and beauty of these cultural insights
into the fecund mystery of nature have impressed
non-native observers since first encounters. For
some time now the history of religions has investigated
changes over time in indigenous lifeways regarding
mythic narrations, ritual practices, and sacred
symbols and sites. This diachronic analysis corrected,
to some extent, the synchronic tendencies to see
indigenous traditions as static and unchanging.
Anthropology especially refocused the study of
indigenous traditions on particular cultural sources
of meaning and worldview values that inform other
aspects of small-scale society life.
With the growing attention to ecological
concerns from the 1970s, the study of indigenous
religions could no longer ignore the overt marginalization
of indigenous societies within and from mainstream
cultures. Foremost among the observations that
emerged was a Marxian analysis associated with
political economy. In this perspective the power
of production of colonial systems was understood
as having been used to marginalize and exploit
indigenous peoples and lands, as well as to impose
its own rational analytical scientific knowledge
systems over native ways of knowing. Ironically,
the indigenous regard for the inherent spiritual
connections of the life community was dismissed
as superstitious, mythic, or false logic by both
Marxist and colonial capitalist systems. Centuries-old
forms of traditional environmental knowledge were
largely ignored by dominating outsiders. Where
possible, indigenous peoples adapted traditional
ways of knowing into the new modes of productive
life available to them as peasants, laborers,
and outcast peoples.
Prior to any academic recognition
of the coherence of indigenous lifeways or indigenous
technical knowledge systems, native peoples themselves
allowed outsiders access to those insights. Often
those privileges were given because indigenous
activists mounted resistance to the hegemonic
intrusions of mainstream cultures, and they sought
the support of those outsiders. Indeed, responsible
intellectuals in mainstream cultures who have
been interested in indigenous lifeways have been
drawn to those positions as much by the depth
of resistance and capacities of articulation by
indigenous peoples as by academic presentations
of ideas, ethics, or religious practices. Certainly,
creative exchange has occurred among both indigenous
and non-native intellectuals, but the former have
seldom received recognition or credit. In this
volume the contributors draw attention to that
unique mix in indigenous lifeways in which the
cultural production of knowledge, especially in
the forms labeled “religion,” not only
opens questions about the deeper motivations of
indigenous economics, but also affirms conversations
in indigenous settings regarding the moral context
of bioregional relations between humans and other-than-humans.
With the increasing globalization
of capitalist economics in the late twentieth
century, indigenous peoples have come under another
wave of intense pressures to assimilate into mainstream
cultures and to open their homelands for resource
exploitation. The insidious character of this
most recent assault on indigenous homelands lies
in the argument from the multinational corporations,
seconded by nation-states, that rampant development
is simply normative rational planning. The counter-arguments
raised in this volume indicate that indigenous
peoples have alternative development models that
value homelands differently than capitalist sustainability
models can adequately present. Even as native
peoples use those lands and living beings for
food, habitat, and trade, they embody alternative
models of sustainable life.
The effort to subvert indigenous
lifeways by development agendas has been the subject
of a broad-based analysis called political ecology.
The dynamics of this perspective have been much
more receptive to considering indigenous religions
and other cultural knowledge systems as contributing
more to production than earlier Marxist-oriented
political economy analyses conceded. Political
ecology has shown interest in the ambiguity of
knowledge-based terms without necessarily rejecting
them. This mode of exploration has given close
attention to understanding the social fabrication
of society and nature, along with the ways in
which images of nature also construct self and
society.
This focus on the imaginative act
in all societies, whereby local environments become
central to ethnic identity, connects directly
to considerations of indigenous religions. In
their study entitled Liberation Ecologies,
Richard Peet and Michael Watts expressed their
understanding of these issues in this manner:
Each society carries what
we refer to as an “environmental imaginary,”
a way of Imaging nature, including visions of
those forms of social and individual practice
which are ethically proper and morally right with
regard to nature. . . . this imaginary is typically
expressed and developed through regional discursive
formations, which take as central themes the history
of social relations to a particular natural environment.
Environmental imaginaries are frequently, indeed
usually, expressed in abstract, mystical, and
spiritual lexicons. However, they contain some
degree of the reasoned approaches which display
or “work out” the consequences of environmental
actions referred to earlier as “prior knowledges.”
Liberation ecology proposes studying the processes
by which environmental imaginaries are formed,
contested, and practiced in the course of specific
trajectories of political-economic exchange. .
. . perhaps most importantly, through the concept
of environmental imaginary, liberation ecology
sees nature, environment, and place as sources
of thinking, reasoning, and imagining: the social
is, in this quite specific sense, naturally constructed.6
This volume, and the series,
Religions of the World and Ecology, can be said
to be sympathetic with this call for the study
of “liberation ecologies.” Many of the
essays here explore environmental imaginaries
in ways that expand this concept to include interior
spiritual perceptions of the natural world actively
shaping indigenous thought and personhood in different
regional traditions.
While leaving specific case
studies and examples to the essays below, it is
helpful to isolate ways in which the study of
indigenous religions activates environmental imagination
both in those communities and increasingly in
mainstream societies. First, indigenous religions
as lifeways that have strong ethnic identity attractors
in the local ecology continue to resist intruding
ways of life that seek to colonize and erase them.
Whether considering the historical “Cargo
Cults” of the Pacific region, the “Ghost
Dance” phenomenon of the North American plains,
or the “Mau- Mau” uprisings of East
Africa, each of these social movements manifested
strong religious expressions whose inner dynamics
connected deeply into the local ecology. The sharp
critique by native spokespeople and scholars to
the appropriation of indigenous religions is directly
related to this role of “religion” as
at the core of indigenous cultural identity. In
the long history of colonial and neocolonial theft
of material and cultural life, indigenous lifeways
have remained the source of deepest resistance
to dominance by outsiders.
Second, indigenous religions continue
in many settings to be the primary source of numinous
experiences that initiate creative life in indigenous
communities. This continues apart from, and often
in relation to, resistance-oriented agendas of
community and self-preservation. This heightened
intimacy with the world is variously expressed
in the following essays, sometimes in the language
of spirits as “persons,” or in seeing
the world as “vital,” or in describing
the lifeway as “animist.” It is this
deepened connection with the natural world that
is described as the cosmological perspective of
particular lifeways.
Third, study of environmental imaginaries
among indigenous religions opens contemporary
dialogues between indigenous traditions and contemporary
intellectual currents in ways that may be mutually
beneficial. Intellectual currents, such as postcolonialism,
poststructuralism, legal and literary theories,
gender studies, critical theories of science,
environmental history, political economy and political
ecology, have been fortuitously linked to indigenous
movements. In several essays below, the roles
of indigenous intellectuals and activists detail
how ideas and conceptual systems were integrated
into indigenous resistance. Finally, it is crucial
that these interpretive discourses not be simplistically
used to make native epistemologies palatable for
non-indigenous readers. Indigenous peoples are
not well served if a term such as “environmental
imaginaries” becomes a language-oriented
reinscription that writes over their authentically
lived and experienced world.
Fourth, the interdependent effects
of traditional governance systems, economic markets,
and social movements often find overt expression
in the organizational and institutional expressions
of religions. Thus, the study of indigenous religious
organizations and institutions provides extraordinary
insights into the ways in which traditional environmental
knowledge has been encoded, negotiated, and contested.
Directly challenging views that see traditional
knowledge as static or unchanging, this view emphasizes
the dynamic character of indigenous lifeways as
individuals and communities image themselves in
relation to local bioregions.
One classic example of this type
of revisioning that both affirmed traditional
knowledge and challenged it with new insights
is the North American Plains Indians affirmation
of the dream or vision quest.7
Sent alone to a place often acknowledged as sacred
to tribal, familial, or personal memory, an individual
fasts for a vision according to traditional canons.
In reporting a vision, an individual follows time-honored
procedures, and the visionary is, in turn, subject
to the authenticating critique of traditional
symbols and patterns of visions. These interactions
often involve topographic features, such as sacred
sites, and possibly animals and plants experienced
as “persons.” The traditional frames
for understanding provide stability for the visionary,
yet new insights and experiences are common. The
vision accommodates transmitted views of visionary
exchange, but it also provokes creative symbolic
thought and novel ways of interpretation. In the
historical and mythical narrations of native peoples,
some visions initiated migrations to new lands,
or legitimated a people’s movement into a
region.8
Finally, it is evident that several
of the essays in this work do not overtly address
“religion.” To some extent this is a
function of the manner in which the conference
from which these essays derive was organized.
This volume emerged from a November 1997 conference
at Harvard University’s Center for the Study
of World Religions. Unlike the nine other conferences
that focused on one particular intercultural religion,
the “Indigenous Traditions and Ecology”
conference involved indigenous participants from
every continent. The intention was to assemble
a diverse group of indigenous and non-native scholars
and environmental activists sensitive to indigenous
issues who could speak insightfully about the
environmental implications of indigenous peoples’
religions. It was also hoped that some of the
participants would actually give voice to indigenous
environmental perspectives rather than presume
scientific ecology was the only paradigm for discussing
human-earth interactions. The organizers presumed
that any discussion of homelands by indigenous
peoples would involve questions of sovereignty,
political economy, and political ecology. They
also assumed that neither the conference nor the
volume of essays would be exhaustive but that
both would be suggestive of further work to be
done.
The thematic organization of
the essays lays out some of the observations of
these introductory remarks. The opening section,
“Fragmented Communities,” draws attention
to both the intense development pressures that
threaten to fracture indigenous communities and
the intense symbol systems that foster commitment
and creativity. Articles by Darrell Posey and
Tom Greaves shed light on traditional indigenous
environmental knowledge and technique as intellectual
property. Posey describes field experiences of
shamanic initiations among the Kayapo peoples
of Brazil to highlight the nonlineal and mythic
character of indigenous environmental knowledge
and the manner in which those ways of knowing
are largely unavailable to Western categories
of linear, historical analysis. Posey also explores
the possibilities and inadequacies of arguments
to protect indigenous knowledge from the standpoint
of “intellectual property rights.” These
efforts to protect indigenous communities have
floundered both conceptually and legally, largely
because of the individualistic and entrepreneurial
orientations in copyright law, but also because
of the complex and costly procedures for filing
cases nationally and internationally.
Greaves draws out the struggles
over indigenous lands, resources, and values by
examining “five major theaters,” namely,
economic rights, sovereignty, management of intellectual
and cultural property, sacred meanings, and the
struggle by native peoples to control their futures.
The complex examples in each of these “theaters”
subtly accentuate the pervasive and ambiguous
presence of environmental concerns and racism
in native peoples’ efforts to preserve ethnic
identity, cultural heritage, and homeland.
Pradip Prabhu provides the reader
with an overview of the green political storm
raging around India’s “Scheduled Tribes,”
as many of the indigenous peoples are designated
by the Constitution of India. In his historical,
cultural, and economic discussions he analyzes
the contemporary realities of traditional environmental
knowledge among several native peoples of India,
as well as the commercialization of that knowledge
evident in development schemes. Prabhu compares
earlier colonial exploitative laws to the “greenwashing”
national legislation, which promotes protected
environmental areas while disenfranchising indigenous
peoples from power and self-control in their own
homelands.
Stephanie Fried examines the impact
on the adat, native peoples of Kalimantan
Borneo, of linked ideological, material, and political
exploitation by Chinese Christian missionaries,
multinational logging companies, and the politics
of Suharto’s Golkar Party. She describes
the often ambiguous interactions of these exploitative
forces within Indonesian Borneo on the traditional
Kaharingan religion of adat peoples. Embedded
within her remarks is the suggestion that attentiveness
to religions accompanying modernization, such
as Christianity and Islam, is a significant feature
of any study of indigenous traditions and ecology.
The next section, titled “Complex
Cosmologies,” attempts to cut across stereotyping
and romanticizing tendencies in discussions of
indigenous environmental concerns to emphasize
the inherent complexity of these traditions. These
articles suggest the manifold approaches to reality
active among diverse native societies. Jack Forbes
opens this section by investigating the use of
such terms as “nature” and “culture.”
He provides a sampling of both Euro-American and
indigenous linguistic perspectives on these terms.
He presents linguistic considerations from several
Native American languages as parallels to the
nature-culture dualism so prominent in Cartesian
rationality. In his discussion of “nature,”
Forbes translates several linguistic referents
with the phrase “away from people,”
drawing attention to different indigenous understandings
of geographical space determined by forces other
than those stemming from the human. Neither wild
nor undomesticated, the meditative, subsistence,
and solitary implications of being “away
from people” cast instructive light on the
“wilderness” controversies in environmental
thought. This direction of thought also provides
fruitful sources for nuancing the holistic concerns
of indigenous “religions” without losing
the categories for distinguishing difference in
the world so evident in those traditions.
The next article discusses Southeast
Asian environmental concerns in Sarawak, or east
Malaysian Borneo. Mention should be made of extensive
efforts by indigenous peoples in other settings
of this region, such as East Timor, to assert
ecological and political sovereignty. In his article
Peter Brosius questions the appropriateness of
the use of the word “sacred” in discussing
indigenous ecologies. He suggests that the term,
sacred, is linked to the “grammar of conquest,”
and that unexamined uses of the term, sacred,
may actually be counterproductive for indigenous
peoples. Concentrating on the Penan of Sarawak,
Brosius investigates Penan ideas of the sacred
that stand in sharp contrast to Western ideas
conveniently adapted by outsiders for the exploitation
of Penan homelands.
Leslie Sponsel examines the historical
ecology of Hawai’i, identifying four assumptions
operating in this volume. These four positions
regarding indigenous societies are: 1) significant
knowledge of local ecosystems; 2) sustainable
economies; 3) conservation practices; and 4) a
profound spiritual ecology. Sponsel examines the
backlash reaction to the promotion of an indigenous
spiritual ecology and appropriately acknowledges
that the romanticized stereotypes of indigenous
spiritual ecology entirely miss the diversity
of indigenous relationships with local bioregions.
Focusing on the Hawai’ian islands, he discusses
the environmental impact of both Polynesian and
Euro-American settlers. His sobering assessments
of the global trends toward ecological disequilibrium
bring a special force to his understanding that
any practical solutions of the current environmental
crises must take cognizance of approaches by indigenous
societies to the four assumptions mentioned above.
Manuka Henare foregrounds Mäori
cosmological values that have clear ecological
implications. Drawing on the nineteenth-century
speech of a Mäori elder, Henare explores
Mäori terminology for concepts helpful in
understanding native sustainable development.
He draws on the metaphor of the koru, or
unfolding frond of a plant, to liken Mäori
cosmology to a philosophy of vitalism. His presentation
also suggests parallels and connections to process
thought in his analysis of the ecological character
of Mäori thought. As much as Henare amplifies
the intellectual aspects of Mäori thought,
he also emphasizes their pragmatics in linkages
with local lands and environmental values imaged
in the spiraling growth of the fern frond.
The Mayan anthropologist Victor
Montejo reexamines Mayan religiosity as fostering
interconnected realizations. Reaching beyond the
alternating fads for interpreting Mayan religions,
he argues that Mayan spirituality is a quest for
a holistic perspective in which the human, environmental,
and supernatural realms become interconnected.
He reexamines the ecological metaphors in Mayan
mythology for the deeper meanings that ground
economic and political life in ethical relationships
with the land.
The third section, “Embedded
Worldviews,” presents articles that focus
on specific traditions and the ways in which environmental
values are deeply implanted in indigenous cultural
life. Each of these regional studies explores
dimensions of the religious, symbolic life of
particular indigenous peoples. These articles
bring the reader into a diversity of challenges
faced by native peoples, and the ways in which
their symbolic and ritual life provides resources
for addressing those challenges. Ogbu Kalu draws
on worldview analysis to investigate the interactions
of development schemes and traditional values
in West Africa. In turning toward African traditional
religions, Kalu probes ethical and theological
responses to the ecological crises, and the ironies
that flow from inappropriate development strategies.
Kalu assesses the benefits and limits of indigenous
worldviews, such as that found in the Ife divination
system of proverbs, for transmitting cultural
identity in the struggle with modernization.
Simeon Namunu continues this analysis
in terms of his home region of Misima Island in
Papua New Guinea. Namunu develops the ecological
implications of gut pela sindaun, a Melanesian
conceptualization for the traditional knowledge
of life. Likening this concept to the Western
idea of “worldview,” Namunu draws out
the ways in which spirits, body painting, and
traditional symbols manifest an exchange relationship
at the heart of his peoples’ interactions
with the nonhuman world. The diminishment of this
traditional system among the governing indigenous
elite of Papua New Guinea figures prominently
in the growth of extractive enterprises in his
country. Recovery of ecological ideals evident
in the Constitution of Papua New Guinea will not
come from such an elite, according to the author,
but by the reassertion of traditional religious
and aesthetic values that provide openings both
to modernization and indigenous forms of democratization.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz continues
this regional focus on environmental knowledge,
writing of her Igorot peoples of Northern Luzon,
Philippines. Her work explores Igorot lifeway,
or Sinang-adum ay Pammati, as well as colonial
religious attitudes toward those customary indigenous
laws that knit together the human and natural
worlds, spirit beings, and the ancestors. Focusing
on rice cultivation, ritual prayers, and pest
control, Tauli-Corpuz suggests that Igorot religions
wove together a complex system of ecological balance,
which is today breaking apart under extreme pressures.
The Nahua scholar Javier Galicia
Silva demonstrates how rural indigenous agricultural
life has actually been an ongoing field of resistance
to dominant colonial exploitative practices. Maize
agriculture, especially, continues to transmit
core worldview values of the ancient Mesoamerican
indigenous civilizations. Silva describes the
techniques of Nahuatl agriculture and the living
cosmovision in which mythic narratives, gardens,
and mountains interact to fructify those practices.
Continuing the Mesoamerican focus,
María Elena Bernal-García presents a close reading
of the significance of the sacred mountain to
indigenous peoples of the region according to
sixteenth- century myths and histories. Recognizing
the relationships between mythic metonyms, such
as “mountain-plain” in the Popol
Vuh, and the spatial metaphors in the indigenous
landscape, Bernal-García lays out her reading
of the sequence of transformations with which
native Mesoamerican cultures related to the earth
as the sacred mountain of bountiful reality.
Next, Angel García Zambrano discusses
the historical process by which specific flora,
specifically the famous calabash gourd, and cacti
figured in the rituals of settlement performed
by indigenous peoples as recorded in colonial
Mexico. His work underscores the formal and functional
relationships between native peoples and regions
that focused on certain plants known from the
ancient myths as the embodiment of their ethnic
identity.
The final essay in this section,
by Werner Wilbert, focuses on Warao spiritual
ecology. He provides a detailed study of the ethnography
and geography of the Warao peoples of the Orinoco
River Delta. Wilbert’s work describes the
types of soil, plant, and animal knowledge that
has enabled these peoples to live in relative
equilibrium within their riverine delta homeland.
Given recent archaeological evidence, he conjectures
that the Warao have lived in this manner from
an undetermined period well before the historic
period. Most importantly, Wilbert endeavors to
present Warao taxonomies and ecological concepts
so that the reader might understand how the Warao
interpret their environment. His perspicacious
and empathetic presentation enables a reader to
understand the basis on which Warao make judgments
about what levels of pollution and loss of bioregional
life are acceptable in the struggle for economic
gain and political sovereignty.
The fourth section, titled “Resistance
and Regeneration,” presents articles that
detail the clashes, compromises, and modes of
reinventing indigenous communities and their worldviews
in the era of increased market and media globalization.
There is a decided circumpolar focus on North
America in the opening essay, but reference should
also be made to Eurasian Saami and Tungusic peoples,
as well as to other North American Inuit and Athapaskan
peoples, such as the Gwich’in. These peoples
have all drawn on their worldview values to mount
significant environmental resistance to development
projects they have judged harmful to themselves
and their homelands. Several crucial issues in
this section are hydroelectric damming, co-opting
tradition, and indigenous agricultural knowledge.
In his overview of the James Bay
Cree resistance to hydroelectric damming by the
Quebec provincial power company, HydroQuebec,
Harvey Feit details the ways in which Cree leaders
have skillfully translated indigenous cosmological
concepts and subsistence practices into mainstream
metaphors, such as the image of the “garden.”
Juxtaposing such diverse ideas and customs as
Western property ownership and Cree stewardship
of hunting territories, he explores their differences
and brings the reader into the ways that the Cree
have understood and echoed those differences to
educate non-Cree about their way of life. Feit
shows how Cree elders have for some time been
deeply involved in the conversations involving
conceptual analyses and political activities in
international debate about indigenous resistance
to outsider development schemes.
Smithu Kothari’s article deepens
this analysis from the standpoint of indigenous
swaraj, self-rule, in light of the national
development policies of the overtly Hindu governing
party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Kothari
also identifies four central elements that stand
at the core of South Asian indigenous traditions,
namely, the centrality of forests, the primacy
of the collective, the regeneration of language,
and the need for political and economic autonomy.
Threaded through these issues, Kothari maintains,
are adivasi, or indigenous, self- awakening
and regeneration. Though challenged to define
their relations to the modern world, indigenous
peoples, according to Kothari, seek to modernize
in ways that are distinctive-neither simply imitative
of the democratic, individualizing nation-state
nor marred by the self-loathing of traditional
wisdom too often inculcated by successive dominating
states.
Opening her work with a strong
emphasis on ethnographic difference in Australia,
Diane Bell presents a historical analysis of what
happened to the land after European settlement
in Australia and why. Following the legal implications
of the principle of terra nullius in Euro-
Australian relations with Aboriginal peoples,
she also turns a reflexive eye on her own anthropological
community. From her own field experiences she
brings a sharper awareness of the mutual meanings
of kin and country for Australian indigenous peoples.
Her discussions of gender knowledge and confidentiality
in Aboriginal women’s struggles for voice
in the political and legal maze of Australian
justice have striking implications for the study
of religion and ecology.
Tom and Ellen Trevorrow, active
in the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association
and principal organizers of the Camp Coorong Race
Relations Cultural Education Centre, give first-
person accounts of the government inquiry conducted
by the Hindmarsh Island Royal Commission. Their
perspective reorients the placename of the inquiry
to Kumarangk, namely, the Ngarrindjeri
women’s name for this island to which a bridge
has been proposed by outside developers. Their
discussions accentuate the poignant injustice
that indigenous people face when legal experts
use “tradition” itself as a criteria
with which to subvert the claims of a people battered
by centuries of colonial and governmental oppression.
The indigenous Andean agronomist
Julio Valladolid withdrew from his academic post
to work more closely with Quechua and Aymara peasant
farmers. He and anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
describe the work of the indigenous agricultural
organization PRATEC in fostering indigenous agricultural
ritual knowledge and techniques based on ancient
ways of “seeing” and “feeling.”
Apffel-Marglin’s essay critiques the intellectual
position that indigenous techniques based on mythic
cosmologies lack adequate objectivity by affirming
their collective data gathering and concerns for
bioregional health. Valladolid extends this analysis
by critiquing the individualizing, objectivizing,
and homogenizing tendencies of modern agriculture.
He points out the concerns for diversity and variability
in indigenous, community-oriented agriculture
as well as its intellectual foundation in the
“impenetrable” character of all life
as unique beings in the process of change.
Tirso Gonzales and Melissa Nelson
extend this discussion of environmental issues
in North America, or Turtle Island as many indigenous
nations call the continent, by giving an overview
of legacies of “internal colonialism”
on Native North American reservations. Stressing
that “land is everything” for native
peoples, they relate various innovative ways in
which indigenous individuals, communities, and
organizations are involved in environmental issues.
They describe an active Internet organization,
the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), and
its efforts to link up with other grassroots indigenous
groups, especially through its annual “Protecting
Mother Earth” conferences. They also discuss
two case studies, namely, the Mescalero Apache
struggle over locating a nuclear waste depository
on their New Mexico reservation, and the proposed
location of a low-level radioactive waste dump
on a sacred site of five local California Indian
tribes, collectively called the Quechan peoples,
in Ward Valley. The striking differences in these
two case studies stress the underlying political
economic and cultural realities on American Indian
reservations, as well as the ways in which the
marginalization of indigenous peoples from both
local and national markets shadows both of these
case studies. This marginalization results in
degraded reservation environments in which “sovereignty
from above” subverts indigenous efforts to
reestablish ecological equilibrium. The authors
emphasize re-indigenizing activism in which de-colonizing
becomes a spiritual, emotional, physical, linguistic,
and social act.
The final section, titled “Liberative
Ecologies,” presents articles describing
environmental pedagogies flowing from indigenous
thought that have implications for dominant societies.
These contributors offer insights that may help
dominant societies unlearn some things and become
open to other ways of knowing the world. Ann Fienup-Riordan’s
paper on the Yup’ik peoples of Alaska presents
striking narratives of the resentment engendered
among these Inuit peoples by wildlife management
policies in which they have little or no voice.
Her work explores Yup’ik cosmological concerns
for the effects of personal thought on the community-both
human and nonhuman. The Yup’ik affirm the
value of hunting as the human act which initiates
the return of even larger flocks of geese from
year to year. Such a traditional value conflicts
with the material, empirical, and individual concerns
of science-based conservation research. Thus,
scientific wildlife management assumptions about
over-hunting collide directly with Yup’ik
views that geese intentionally return in response
to respectful hunting. Moreover, Yup’ik peoples
avoid the types of direct human-animal contact
that occur in wildlife management tagging, saying
that it diminishes the flocks of geese. Her descriptions
of emerging co-management practices suggest that
some insertion of Yup’ik spiritual concerns
into ecological policies is possible. Perhaps
more importantly, these collaborative exchanges
may also enable the Yup’ik to learn more
about science and “Fish and Game” biologists
to appreciate the human dimensions of traditional
values and the need for indigenous participants
to have significant local control in game management.
In addressing the pressures on
indigenous, or adivasi, peoples of South
Asia, Pramod Parajuli develops the concept of
“ecological ethnicities” in terms of
their communities and their flourishing cosmological
visions, intellectual thought, and political activism.
Parajuli presents a historical model in which
indigenous peoples are seen as becoming more resistant
to national development programs and global economic
schemes. He proposes that in several geographical
settings in South Asia the ethnosemiotics of oppressed
indigenous peoples stand as viable alternative
development models for social action against the
dominant semiotics of market- based capital.
In considering several indigenous
ecological perspectives in Papua New Guinea, Mary
MacDonald emphasizes place, relationships, and
work. Walking with an old friend from the Kewa
peoples of the Southern Highlands, MacDonald notes
the substantial spatial modes of memory active
in their conversation. Linking this “tastescape”
and spatial memory with a “give- and-take”
ethic, she highlights the attentiveness of indigenous
peoples to subtle memories of interaction with
place. The sense knowledge encoded in this ecological
patterning is further developed by the ritual
work connected with gardens. Each of these indigenous
realities-place, relationships, and work-is now
undergoing profound changes in which resource
extraction, the introduction of monetary economies,
and the allure of modernization are creating crises
in the transmission of traditional knowledge.
Gregory Cajete’s overview
article on North America provides the reader with
a personal narrative from his own Puebloan perspective.
His focus on orientation to place highlights the
central purposes of indigenous education as an
experiential quest to know “that place that
Indian peoples talk about.” Emphasizing art,
hunting, and planting as the source of mythic
tribal expressions, Cajete explores the indigenous
ecological education embedded in Puebloan lifeways.
While the plurality of cultural
systems and the diversity of environmental knowledge
within and between cultures mark this volume,
a Western philosophical reflection on the relation
of the many (read: multicultural perspectives)
to the one (read: universal, rational, globality)
is not the central issue posed here. The sovereignty
of indigenous peoples and the conservation of
endangered bioregions with their animals and plant
habitats-the survival of life-are more prominent
issues. These concerns cannot be reduced to a
question of theoretical models in which formalist
rational patterns are used to interpret religious
activities or in which highly specialized sociolinguistic
ethnographies are used to describe peoples as
types to be catalogued. Along with those methods
as perspectives for interpretation of indigenous
life, the imaginative act has been highlighted
as a significant cognitive arena. Here, questions
regarding the indigenous understandings of place,
knowledge, and sovereignty vie with the conceptual
subtleties and power relations posed by the contemporary
intellectual scene. Indeed, the relationship of
such different cognitive acts as dreams to sensory
and sonic ways of knowing in these diverse traditions
challenges scholarly understanding. This is so
because traditional environmental knowledge relates
to animal-plant-mineral life in ways that even
contemporary “co-management” strategies
cannot easily comprehend.
The relationship between the act
of imaging oneself, understanding reality, and
surviving development pressures found recent poignant
expression in the deaths of three environmental
activists in Colombia. Between 25 February and
4 March 1999, three activists, Lahe’ena’e
Gay, Terence Freitas, and Ingrid Washinawatok,
were killed by guerrilla soldiers of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). While these guerillas
killed the activists to make a statement, they
had no idea of the international reactions to
their brutal act, nor did they have a clear sense
of indigenous rights. It was said of the three
murdered activists that “All of them were
defending human rights. They [were] environmentalists,
activists who [were] working on the international
level.”9
Ingrid Washinawatok herself spoke of her understanding
of indigenous rights, saying:
Since the time that human
beings offered thanks for the first sunrise, sovereignty
has been an integral part of indigenous people’s
daily existence. With the original instructions
from the Creator, we realize our responsibilities,
and those are the laws that lay the foundation
for our society. These responsibilities are manifested
through our ceremonies. These ceremonies are not
just motions we go through. It is a process that
reaffirms our connection to the Creator and all
of creation. Sacred is not separate from responsibility
and daily existence. From the mundane to the momentous,
sovereignty is an integral part of the foundation
that anchors our culture, society and organizational
structures.10
By recalling the words of this
heroic woman, and by remembering her companions,
an effort is made here to draw attention to the
imaginative act constellated in “responsibility,”
“ceremony,” and “creation.”
Such a vision of religion and ecology is what
Thomas Berry has called a shared dream experience.
He writes:
. . . only out of
imaginative power does any grand creative work
take shape. Since imagination functions most freely
in dream vision, we tend to associate creativity
also with dream experience. The dream comes about
precisely through uninhibited spontaneities. In
this context we might say: In the beginning was
the dream. Through the dream all things were made,
and without the dream nothing was made that has
been made.
While all things share in this
dream, as humans we share in this dream in a
special manner. This is the entrancement, the
magic of the world about us, its mystery, its
ineffable quality. What primordial source could,
with no model for guidance, imagine such a fantastic
world as that in which we live-the shape of
the orchid, the coloring of the fish in the
sea, the winds and the rain, the variety of
sounds that flow over the earth, the resonant
croaking of the bullfrogs, the songs of the
crickets, and the pure joy of the predawn singing
of the mockingbird?
. . . All of these derive from
the visionary power that is experienced most
profoundly when we are immersed in the depths
of our own being and of the cosmic order itself
in the dreamworld that unfolds within us in
our sleep, or in those visionary moments that
seize upon us in our waking hours.
We need to remember that this
process whereby we invent ourselves in these
cultural modes is guided by visionary experiences
that come to us in some transrational process
from the inner shaping tendencies that we carry
within us, often in revelatory dream experience.
Such dream experiences are so universal and
so important in the psychic life of the individual
and of the community that techniques of dreaming
are taught in some societies.11
Indigenous peoples are among the
last cultural groups to teach techniques of dreams
and visions and ways to activate an ecological
imagination. Our shared experiences are not simply
culturally differentiated dreams, but common cosmological
concerns. Coursing through these essays are underlying
cosmological visions that have been identified
here as lifeways.
The study of these lifeways does
not elevate precapitalist models as panaceas for
today’s complex problems, which are rooted
in global demographies, widespread environmental
crises, and increasing economic inequalities.
Yet, studies of indigenous traditions do remind
us of alternative visions and possibilities that
exist among peoples who have imagined themselves
more intimately into their worlds. Many within
mainstream societies feel the allure of this cosmological
act of dreaming. An aspect of their journey is
the deeper moralization of issues until now understood
simply as political, economic, or religious. By
“deeper moralization” is meant a creative
behavior that not only responds to the concerns
of place, knowledge, and sovereignty of indigenous
peoples, but also collaboratively explores visions
of flourishing life. While it is possible to agree
that “creativity begins with the familiar,”12
it is also evident that creativity flows forth
in the dream of the earth.
The deaths of the three activists
model the depth of their commitments to a dream
they shared with the U’wa people, namely,
that these people might move beyond military oppression
by guerilla or national militaries, and beyond
material exploitation of oil in their homelands
by petroleum multinationals. It is a modeling
that bears on the issue of the “indigenous.”
We are all indigenous to the planet. In this volume
we have chosen to construe the term so that certain
small-scale societies might be emphasized. That
emphasis can easily be misread as ethnocentrism,
or an assertion of what one scholar calls the
“ecological indian.” Just as the activists
shared a dream across their ethnic identities,
so the concern for indigenous homelands crosses
beyond simply political, environmental, or social
justice issues. The articles in this volume speak
to the tensions and ambiguities within indigenous
societies as they encounter, adopt, resist, accommodate,
and transform global forces. What cannot be so
readily communicated is the attitudinal change
emerging from these shared dreams.
1
Winona LaDuke, “Minobimaatisiiwin: The Good
Life,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 16,
no. 4 (winter 1992): 69–71. See also Winona
LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for
Land and Life (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press,
1994) 4, 132.
Return to text
2
Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).
Return to text
3
Eduardo Grillo Fernandez, “Development or
Decolonization in the Andes?” in The Spirit
of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western
Notions of Development, ed. Frédérique
Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (London: Zed Books,
1998) 229.
Return to text
4
Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw, The Spirit of the
Land: The Opening Statement of the Gitksan and
Wets’uwetén Hereditary Chiefs in the Supreme
Court of British Columbia (Gabrola, B.C.:
Reflections, 1987) 7, 26, quoted from David Suzuki
and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred
Native Stories of Nature (New York and Toronto:
Bantam Books, 1992) 158.
Return to text
5
“Report of the Sub-Commission on Prevention
of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities
on its Forty-Sixth Session,” Geneva, 1–26
August 1994, Draft United Nations Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Return to text
6
Richard Peet and Michael Watts, Liberation
Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements
(London: Routledge, 1996) 263.
Return to text
7
See Lee Irwin, Dream Seekers: Native American
Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains (Norman,
Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
Return to text
8
For a vision that initiated the movement of the
proto- Crow/Absaroke peoples, see Joseph Medicine
Crow, From the Heart of Crow Country, The Crow
Indian’s Own Stories (New York: Orion,
1992); and for Tsistsistas views of their Massaum
ceremony, see Karl Schlesier, The Wolves of
Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies, and Prehistoric
Origins (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma,
1987).
Return to text
9 Tim
Johnson, Miami Herald, 6 March 1999, quoted
in Jeff Wollock, “Eclipse Over Colombia,”
Native Americas 16, no. 2 (summer 1999):
10–31.
Return to text
10 Kert
Lebsock, “She Was So Much: Remembering Ingrid,”
Native Americas 16, no. 2 (summer 1999):
42.
Return to text
11 Thomas
Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco,
Calif.: Sierra Club Books, 1988) 197, 201.
Return to text
12
Peet and Watts, Liberation Ecologies, 267.
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