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We are the Land: Native American Views of Nature

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Abstract

This is how one Native American presents her interpretation of the indigenous understanding of nature. As we will see in this article, many Native Americans present similar understandings. Their reciprocal relationships with nature permeated every aspect of life from spirituality to making a living and led to a different way of seeing the world, what they might call a more “environmental” way of seeing the world. But is this a true picture? Increasingly there has been debate over the nature of the Native American’s relationship to the land, both past and present. This article will examine this debate and the way in which Native Americans view nature.

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... Much of the world has already been or is soon to be ontologically occupied by Western modernity (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018;Campagna, 2021), an epoch jetting toward solutions-oriented techno-fixes designed from the colonial logics that separate object from subject, humans from nature, mind from body, emotion from reason, inferior from superior, civilized from uncivilized, and on and on (Escobar, 2020). This Enlightenment-influenced dominant "reality", or what John Law (2011) refers to as the "one-world world" describes a (one)-world-making project that is scooping up all other possible realities via practices, technologies, and designs that necessitate exploitation and extraction from the earth and our racialized bodies in order to push forward in the name of "progress", as both a cause to the ecological crisis and its only possible solution (Tsing, 2015). ...
... The Rochdale Pioneers, named by the ICA to be the founders of the modern international cooperative movement in 1844, were not immune to this ontological occupation (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018). The dominant story goes that they were a group of weavers working in poor conditions for low wages who decided to pull their resources together to access goods at a lower price and to form more honest relations with consumers -who could also become members of the cooperative allowing buyers to have a say in decisions that were made and what they were purchasing. ...
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