Eurocentric Influence On Native Americans
There has been a longstanding debate over the appropriate way to understand the relationship of Native Americans with the environment and the ecologically noble Indian stereotype that has followed them throughout history. This essay examines the fundamentally Eurocentric attitudes that this very debate entails, thereby rendering any possible conclusions drawn to be meaningless due to its lack of understanding of the basic cultural structure it seeks to define. Because of the radically different way Native Americans conceptualize the universe and nature, attempting to place them on our constructed spectrum of environmentalism is a meaningless endeavor. If the term “environmentalism” itself is examined, it becomes clear that it is by definition
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framed in Eurocentric values and ideologies, rendering it useless in the categorization of Indian beliefs and practices.
The very basis of our knowledge is Eurocentric, intrinsic in the way we think and conceptualize, it is also inherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the disciplines of social sciences, from economics to anthropology, emerged when Europe was formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving the needs and requirements of Western society and promoting its outlook. [Sardar 1999: 51]
This impulse to perpetuate the worldview of the West and ideologies viewing our society as having solutions for the rest of the world have had grave effects on Indian nations.
The European concept of culture presumes a split between individuals and their natural surroundings. “Based on the dialectic between nature that has been ‘improved’ by human agency and that which has not, humans are seen as being able to develop and cultivate nature in some form of cultural pursuit, a certain or preferred aesthetic also becomes detached from social practices” (Battiste 2000: 18). Native Americans, on the other hand, are knowledgeable of their cultures and see things in more than a human-to-human context. It is a perspective that involves humans, animals, plants, the natural environment, and the metaphysical world of visions and dreams. This broader context of perception involves more accountability and responsibility on the part of native people for taking care of and respecting their relationships with all things. They believe that we are “all part of a continuum of energy that is at the heart of the universe…due to the spiritual energy within all things, all things should be respected for their potential” (Fixico 2009: 2).
Donald Fixico argues that for Native American groups, who are closer to their historic traditions, their sense of logic is related to a circular thinking process. Unlike the linear process of Western society, the circular process addresses items as to their interconnectedness within a system.
Reality for Indian people and their communities is very different from the reality of non-Indians. This combined reality of the physical environment and metaphysical environment reflects the people’s belief in a combined reality. Stories convey this reality of spiritual beings interacting with people on a regular basis. It is this idea that nature and its phenomena of metaphysics interact with people in a nonconcrete fashion that Western society usually dismisses. (Fixico 2009: 34)
The American Indian mind thinks inclusively. In their belief that all things are related and interconnected, this natural order is a sociocultural kinship and natural democracy that extends to all animals and plants. The belief that nature can be re-ordered to our liking is responsible for most environmental and human denigration towards each other and our communities.
Eurocentric intellectual isolation of American Indian environmental spirituality and thought is a form of monocultural orthodoxy that excludes Native American wisdom not for its message but because it fails to live up to European norms which involve assumptions about ‘savages’ and other universalizing concepts inherent in the discourse of Eurocentric scholars. [Grinde 1995: 270]
As part of an interconnected biosphere, we cannot continue as if our actions do not influence our lives in some way. Grinde argues that as interacting species on this planet, it is our first and foremost responsibility to exercise our cultural lives in a way that is most highly symbiotic with the environment. This means we must “live lives where every facet of our day has been thought out to analyze our impact on the world and everything in our lives” (Grinde 1995: 273).
Eurocentric ideologies look down upon and relegate indigenous beliefs to the periphery of society. These views must be left behind, drawing upon a “notion of authenticity, of a time before colonization in which we were intact as indigenous peoples, free of the destructive tendencies and disregard for our natural communities” (Smith 1999: 23-24). We must transform current ways of being to “match natural laws and bring about a change from wasteful production and voracious consumption” (LaDuke 1999: 197-198). Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist, argues that these industrial processes of environmental denigration without regard to the soil, water, and air must cease. Eurocentric ideologies are not sustainable; they are in direct opposition to the cultural diversity and biodiversity necessary for a healthy ethnosphere. The balance of the Earth’s ecosystem is damaged as a result of Eurocentric practices using the land for things such as industrialized farming, oil and resource extraction, and war. Linda Smith, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, argues that it is not out of pure ignorance that we act the way we do. She asserts that “because we live in a colonized area, we are basically adopting this disposable Earth mentality … the colonization mentality tells us that all this is here for us and we can use it without regard to anything else, only for our own happiness” (Smith 1999: 25). America is an individualistic society in which the natural world has come to be seen increasingly as a resource for industrial capitalist exploitation. Brunel University professor David Ingram writes:
Ecological thought has provided a critique of some of the central assumptions of the modern scientific project, revealing it as founded upon a destructive and exploitative attitude to nature. As land came to be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold within a capitalistic market economy, so, as Michel Serres puts it, “Our fundamental relationship with objects is summed up by war and property.” [Ingram 1995: 429-420]
The singular underlying message of these perspectives is clear: taking personal responsibility for our resource intake and depletion and an increased awareness of the impact of our everyday actions on the community and environment. Land exploitation for profits and material consumption must change to practices of sustainability and reciprocity within our society. Yellowtail, Sun Dance Chief of the Crow, writes:
Because of money, many people want to accumulate more things than they really need. The machines and material wealth of this modern world allow people to be able to possess more things. Everyone wants the same thing that someone else has and everyone wants to possess something he doesn’t need…some youngsters have so many toys that they do not respect the gifts that they have been given. [Fixico 2009: 55]
Cornell professor Paul Nadasdy argues that rather than dismissing Indian conceptions of the universe and nature as primitive superstitions, they instead must be examined seriously as valid ways of relating to the world. He says that our stereotype of the ecologically noble Indian “denies the realities of native people’s lives, reducing the rich diversity of their beliefs, values, social relations, and practices to a one-dimensional caricature. Worse still, this image of ecological nobility is an unattainable ideal” (Nadasdy 2005: 293). If we hope to understand the relationship between indigenous people and the environment we must refrain altogether from using the Euro-American ideal of ecological nobility to evaluate indigenous people’s actions and instead focus on the specific social relations and cultural beliefs that underlie their actions in particular circumstances.
Nadasdy claims that by selecting isolated beliefs and practices from American Indian society one can always find evidence that ‘‘proves’’ that indigenous people belong at some particular position on the environmentalist spectrum, and because different sets of beliefs are associated with one another by virtue of their position on the environmentalist spectrum, placing them on this spectrum based on a particular belief or practice “necessarily entails making a series of unjustified assumptions about some of the other things that they must also believe and do” (Nadasdy 2005: 301).
Nadasdy uses the Yukon First Nation people’s practice of wolf killing as just one of many examples where environmentalists fail to properly understand Native American beliefs due to their very different conceptualization of nature and wildlife. Rather than measuring their position on the wolf kill against an imposed Euro-American ideal, their actions are more properly understood in relation to their own very different set of cultural ideals, which, when interpreted from a Euro-American perspective, can seem to stand in stark contradiction to one another.
First Nation people’s concept of respect is based on the need to kill animals. As long as hunters behave properly toward wolves and their remains, killing them can be a perfectly sensible and respectful act. Most Euro– North Americans, however, do not understand this and persist in interpreting First Nation behavior according to their own assumptions. [Nadasdy 2005: 320]
Not only are many indigenous practices often misinterpreted due to a lack of understanding on our part of Native American culture, but it is also the case that many current practices that environmentalists ridicule them for are the direct result of European contact. Though not necessarily by design, nearly all groups harvested sustainability until the arrival of Europeans.
With the European invasion of the New World, native peoples were dispossessed of their land, forced into marginal areas or into areas already inhabited by other native peoples, required to share their resources with Euro Americans, witnessed the value of traditional resources reaching astronomical values because of the action of external markets, and acquired superior foreign hunting technology (guns and steel traps). Any of these factors could have transformed a stable system to one headed toward disequilibrium. [Hames 2007: 183]
It seems as though rather than evaluating Native American behaviors on a Western scale of environmentalism it would be far more productive to attempt to understand the conditions under which societies are able to succeed or fail in stable environmental adaptation, and in so doing perhaps even discover what, in our society, created the need for an environmentalism movement in the first place.
The Eurocentric worldview permeates every aspect of our lives, as we are all products of the system of the United States. In both our relationships with each other and nature, each of us participates in and replicates these notions of Western society and culture, as we are all indoctrinated through the education system and socialization. Donald Fixico writes:
America’s educational system robs people of their individuality while training them to accept whatever the authorities dictate. Instead of learning to reason for themselves, children learn to obey – precisely the quality most valued by a society dependent on mass production. It’s no surprise that so many children grow up to be fodder for the industrial machine. It’s all they know how to do. [Fixico 2009: …show more content…
95]
According to Fixico, creating new living experiences and narratives free of these constraining and altered states of being begins with the liberation of our minds and actions in becoming more harmonious in our relations with nature and each other so that we can all join together to work on attaining a more meaningful relationship with our surroundings and close the gap of detachment that separates us from our natural environment. Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux once said of Native Americans, “He loved the earth and all things of the earth…He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew the lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to the lack of respect for humans too” (Stone 1993: 5).
Most Native American people are not environmentalists. This is not because they are antienvironmentalists, but simply because the terms are of a debate that does not apply to them. These people’s beliefs and practices do not fit anywhere on our environmentalist spectrum, and any effort to categorize them in this way has serious political consequences for them. This whole debate only further obscures the complexities of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the environmental movement because any attempt to place Native Americans on the environmental spectrum is to impose on them the terms of a debate that is not their own. In a speech to his people at the Powder River Council in 1877 Sitting Bull said:
Hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They threaten to take the land away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland. [Stone 1993: 25]
Rather than imposing our anthropocentric Western ideologies of nature on Native Americans and judging their beliefs and practices accordingly, it seems that far more can be gained through the examination of their fundamental underlying conceptualizations of nature and respect that cause, whether intentional or not, the majority of their practices to promote ecological sustainability.
This willingness to reevaluate our basic understanding of nature must occur on a far larger scale in order to bring about any real effects in political policy reform and individual practices and overcome the individualistic attitude that pervades our society and has caused a detachment from our environment and its subsequent
destruction.
References Cited
Battiste, Marie and James Youngblood Henderson
2000 Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge. Saskatoon: Purich Press.
Fixico, Donald L.
2009 The American Indian Mind In A Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge.
Grinde, Donald
1995 Ecocide of Native America – Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and People. Santa Fe: Clear Light Books.
Hames, Raymond
2007 The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate. The Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 177-190.
Ingram, David
1995 Thomas McGuane: Nature, Environmentalism, and the American West. Journal of American Studies 29(3): 423-439.
LaDuke, Winona 1999 All Our Relations. Cambridge: South End Press.
Nadasdy, Paul
2005 Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism. Ethnohistory 52(2): 291-331.
Sardar, Ziauddin 1999 Critical Development Theory. London: Zed Books.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai
1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Stone, Jana with Mel Curtis and Bonnie Sharpe 1993 Every Part of This Earth Is Sacred. New York: Harper Collins Publishers
framed in Eurocentric values and ideologies, rendering it useless in the categorization of Indian beliefs and practices.
The very basis of our knowledge is Eurocentric, intrinsic in the way we think and conceptualize, it is also inherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the disciplines of social sciences, from economics to anthropology, emerged when Europe was formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving the needs and requirements of Western society and promoting its outlook. [Sardar 1999: 51]
This impulse to perpetuate the worldview of the West and ideologies viewing our society as having solutions for the rest of the world have had grave effects on Indian nations.
The European concept of culture presumes a split between individuals and their natural surroundings. “Based on the dialectic between nature that has been ‘improved’ by human agency and that which has not, humans are seen as being able to develop and cultivate nature in some form of cultural pursuit, a certain or preferred aesthetic also becomes detached from social practices” (Battiste 2000: 18). Native Americans, on the other hand, are knowledgeable of their cultures and see things in more than a human-to-human context. It is a perspective that involves humans, animals, plants, the natural environment, and the metaphysical world of visions and dreams. This broader context of perception involves more accountability and responsibility on the part of native people for taking care of and respecting their relationships with all things. They believe that we are “all part of a continuum of energy that is at the heart of the universe…due to the spiritual energy within all things, all things should be respected for their potential” (Fixico 2009: 2).
Donald Fixico argues that for Native American groups, who are closer to their historic traditions, their sense of logic is related to a circular thinking process. Unlike the linear process of Western society, the circular process addresses items as to their interconnectedness within a system.
Reality for Indian people and their communities is very different from the reality of non-Indians. This combined reality of the physical environment and metaphysical environment reflects the people’s belief in a combined reality. Stories convey this reality of spiritual beings interacting with people on a regular basis. It is this idea that nature and its phenomena of metaphysics interact with people in a nonconcrete fashion that Western society usually dismisses. (Fixico 2009: 34)
The American Indian mind thinks inclusively. In their belief that all things are related and interconnected, this natural order is a sociocultural kinship and natural democracy that extends to all animals and plants. The belief that nature can be re-ordered to our liking is responsible for most environmental and human denigration towards each other and our communities.
Eurocentric intellectual isolation of American Indian environmental spirituality and thought is a form of monocultural orthodoxy that excludes Native American wisdom not for its message but because it fails to live up to European norms which involve assumptions about ‘savages’ and other universalizing concepts inherent in the discourse of Eurocentric scholars. [Grinde 1995: 270]
As part of an interconnected biosphere, we cannot continue as if our actions do not influence our lives in some way. Grinde argues that as interacting species on this planet, it is our first and foremost responsibility to exercise our cultural lives in a way that is most highly symbiotic with the environment. This means we must “live lives where every facet of our day has been thought out to analyze our impact on the world and everything in our lives” (Grinde 1995: 273).
Eurocentric ideologies look down upon and relegate indigenous beliefs to the periphery of society. These views must be left behind, drawing upon a “notion of authenticity, of a time before colonization in which we were intact as indigenous peoples, free of the destructive tendencies and disregard for our natural communities” (Smith 1999: 23-24). We must transform current ways of being to “match natural laws and bring about a change from wasteful production and voracious consumption” (LaDuke 1999: 197-198). Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist, argues that these industrial processes of environmental denigration without regard to the soil, water, and air must cease. Eurocentric ideologies are not sustainable; they are in direct opposition to the cultural diversity and biodiversity necessary for a healthy ethnosphere. The balance of the Earth’s ecosystem is damaged as a result of Eurocentric practices using the land for things such as industrialized farming, oil and resource extraction, and war. Linda Smith, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, argues that it is not out of pure ignorance that we act the way we do. She asserts that “because we live in a colonized area, we are basically adopting this disposable Earth mentality … the colonization mentality tells us that all this is here for us and we can use it without regard to anything else, only for our own happiness” (Smith 1999: 25). America is an individualistic society in which the natural world has come to be seen increasingly as a resource for industrial capitalist exploitation. Brunel University professor David Ingram writes:
Ecological thought has provided a critique of some of the central assumptions of the modern scientific project, revealing it as founded upon a destructive and exploitative attitude to nature. As land came to be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold within a capitalistic market economy, so, as Michel Serres puts it, “Our fundamental relationship with objects is summed up by war and property.” [Ingram 1995: 429-420]
The singular underlying message of these perspectives is clear: taking personal responsibility for our resource intake and depletion and an increased awareness of the impact of our everyday actions on the community and environment. Land exploitation for profits and material consumption must change to practices of sustainability and reciprocity within our society. Yellowtail, Sun Dance Chief of the Crow, writes:
Because of money, many people want to accumulate more things than they really need. The machines and material wealth of this modern world allow people to be able to possess more things. Everyone wants the same thing that someone else has and everyone wants to possess something he doesn’t need…some youngsters have so many toys that they do not respect the gifts that they have been given. [Fixico 2009: 55]
Cornell professor Paul Nadasdy argues that rather than dismissing Indian conceptions of the universe and nature as primitive superstitions, they instead must be examined seriously as valid ways of relating to the world. He says that our stereotype of the ecologically noble Indian “denies the realities of native people’s lives, reducing the rich diversity of their beliefs, values, social relations, and practices to a one-dimensional caricature. Worse still, this image of ecological nobility is an unattainable ideal” (Nadasdy 2005: 293). If we hope to understand the relationship between indigenous people and the environment we must refrain altogether from using the Euro-American ideal of ecological nobility to evaluate indigenous people’s actions and instead focus on the specific social relations and cultural beliefs that underlie their actions in particular circumstances.
Nadasdy claims that by selecting isolated beliefs and practices from American Indian society one can always find evidence that ‘‘proves’’ that indigenous people belong at some particular position on the environmentalist spectrum, and because different sets of beliefs are associated with one another by virtue of their position on the environmentalist spectrum, placing them on this spectrum based on a particular belief or practice “necessarily entails making a series of unjustified assumptions about some of the other things that they must also believe and do” (Nadasdy 2005: 301).
Nadasdy uses the Yukon First Nation people’s practice of wolf killing as just one of many examples where environmentalists fail to properly understand Native American beliefs due to their very different conceptualization of nature and wildlife. Rather than measuring their position on the wolf kill against an imposed Euro-American ideal, their actions are more properly understood in relation to their own very different set of cultural ideals, which, when interpreted from a Euro-American perspective, can seem to stand in stark contradiction to one another.
First Nation people’s concept of respect is based on the need to kill animals. As long as hunters behave properly toward wolves and their remains, killing them can be a perfectly sensible and respectful act. Most Euro– North Americans, however, do not understand this and persist in interpreting First Nation behavior according to their own assumptions. [Nadasdy 2005: 320]
Not only are many indigenous practices often misinterpreted due to a lack of understanding on our part of Native American culture, but it is also the case that many current practices that environmentalists ridicule them for are the direct result of European contact. Though not necessarily by design, nearly all groups harvested sustainability until the arrival of Europeans.
With the European invasion of the New World, native peoples were dispossessed of their land, forced into marginal areas or into areas already inhabited by other native peoples, required to share their resources with Euro Americans, witnessed the value of traditional resources reaching astronomical values because of the action of external markets, and acquired superior foreign hunting technology (guns and steel traps). Any of these factors could have transformed a stable system to one headed toward disequilibrium. [Hames 2007: 183]
It seems as though rather than evaluating Native American behaviors on a Western scale of environmentalism it would be far more productive to attempt to understand the conditions under which societies are able to succeed or fail in stable environmental adaptation, and in so doing perhaps even discover what, in our society, created the need for an environmentalism movement in the first place.
The Eurocentric worldview permeates every aspect of our lives, as we are all products of the system of the United States. In both our relationships with each other and nature, each of us participates in and replicates these notions of Western society and culture, as we are all indoctrinated through the education system and socialization. Donald Fixico writes:
America’s educational system robs people of their individuality while training them to accept whatever the authorities dictate. Instead of learning to reason for themselves, children learn to obey – precisely the quality most valued by a society dependent on mass production. It’s no surprise that so many children grow up to be fodder for the industrial machine. It’s all they know how to do. [Fixico 2009: …show more content…
95]
According to Fixico, creating new living experiences and narratives free of these constraining and altered states of being begins with the liberation of our minds and actions in becoming more harmonious in our relations with nature and each other so that we can all join together to work on attaining a more meaningful relationship with our surroundings and close the gap of detachment that separates us from our natural environment. Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux once said of Native Americans, “He loved the earth and all things of the earth…He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew the lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to the lack of respect for humans too” (Stone 1993: 5).
Most Native American people are not environmentalists. This is not because they are antienvironmentalists, but simply because the terms are of a debate that does not apply to them. These people’s beliefs and practices do not fit anywhere on our environmentalist spectrum, and any effort to categorize them in this way has serious political consequences for them. This whole debate only further obscures the complexities of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the environmental movement because any attempt to place Native Americans on the environmental spectrum is to impose on them the terms of a debate that is not their own. In a speech to his people at the Powder River Council in 1877 Sitting Bull said:
Hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They threaten to take the land away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland. [Stone 1993: 25]
Rather than imposing our anthropocentric Western ideologies of nature on Native Americans and judging their beliefs and practices accordingly, it seems that far more can be gained through the examination of their fundamental underlying conceptualizations of nature and respect that cause, whether intentional or not, the majority of their practices to promote ecological sustainability.
This willingness to reevaluate our basic understanding of nature must occur on a far larger scale in order to bring about any real effects in political policy reform and individual practices and overcome the individualistic attitude that pervades our society and has caused a detachment from our environment and its subsequent
destruction.
References Cited
Battiste, Marie and James Youngblood Henderson
2000 Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge. Saskatoon: Purich Press.
Fixico, Donald L.
2009 The American Indian Mind In A Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge.
Grinde, Donald
1995 Ecocide of Native America – Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and People. Santa Fe: Clear Light Books.
Hames, Raymond
2007 The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate. The Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 177-190.
Ingram, David
1995 Thomas McGuane: Nature, Environmentalism, and the American West. Journal of American Studies 29(3): 423-439.
LaDuke, Winona 1999 All Our Relations. Cambridge: South End Press.
Nadasdy, Paul
2005 Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism. Ethnohistory 52(2): 291-331.
Sardar, Ziauddin 1999 Critical Development Theory. London: Zed Books.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai
1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Stone, Jana with Mel Curtis and Bonnie Sharpe 1993 Every Part of This Earth Is Sacred. New York: Harper Collins Publishers