Colonizing Green? We must remember our roots of harmony, beauty, balance, restoration

While tribal educators rightfully search for ways to address the global warming and climate crisis using sustainability initiatives, we should also be cautious. We risk colonizing, exploiting, or commodifying the “green” dimension of the climate and energy crisis.

After all, the plastic bottled water we consume at powwows or sweat lodges may, in fact, be colonizing water itself, compromising our sacred knowledge and practice by generating social, political, and economic contradiction in our communities. We claim to “walk in beauty” even as we navigate our way through piles of plastic bottle litter at powwow grounds.

Natural world colonization is based on practices of objectification. In boarding school, I learned to diagram English sentences, not knowing I was assimilating the notion of a subject /object split in this world. “Here is the subject; here is the verb; and here is the object,” our Anglo elementary school teacher would say. As a child, I was instructed to employ this subject/ object template to become well educated. After all, we were told, this is the way to a good job and the pursuit of happiness.

Notions of power, control, and conquest do not drive Indigenous understandings of sustainability. Instead, we value the sacred dimension in sustainable principles of restoration, regeneration, kinship, community, and place.

By centering and privileging Indigenous knowing that assumes a nurturing, kinship, conversational, and collaborative relationship with a living earth and sky in learning situations, we can generate culturally appropriate and alternative ways to think and act on the sorts of contradictions that, for example, bottled water engenders. Viewing water merely as a commodity or air as utilitarian violates our sense of the sacred.

By nature, Indigenous knowing is anti-colonial. Decolonization, for me, as a Diné, is rooted in pre-colonial Native wisdom that truly sustains kinship, place, and community.

On the other hand, the English language places power in nouns that classify and name people, places, and “things.” In a sense, English speakers tend to situate nouns atop hierarchies. Thus, humans, self-situated as powerful nouns, allocate themselves a centralized and very privileged position in the world. If we situate ourselves like this, we run the risk of contradicting Native teachings that place humans as collaborative members of a sacred circle made up of other equally important life beings.

If the adjective “green” modifies a noun, what is the noun? Is the noun economics or technology? If so, “green” (or environmental efficacy) merely modifies, or “serves,” economic and technological ends. From this viewpoint, “green” may even be colonizing Native worldview.

In educational practices, there are at least three ways to counter the colonization of green: Indigenization, Indigenous knowledge construction, and critical lens making. Together these practices can provide meaningful and life-sustaining skills and competencies for students. Andean scholars realized that “development” failed because the packaging of ideas, practices, epistemologies, and ontologies was profoundly alien. They awoke to the incredible richness of Andean life and worldview and began to regenerate Andean sustainability practices (PRATEC 1998). Here in the north, we can and are doing similar things.

Tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) are appropriate institutions to focus on such issues. They already incorporate principles of sovereignty, self-determination, social justice, and sustainability through collaborations with other Indigenous nations. They are using concepts of “forest gardening,” rethinking building design, working with wind and solar energy to achieve energy self-sufficiency, and stimulating students to see their educational careers and futures in new ways (see TCJ, Vol. 17, No. 2, Sustainability Issue).

The green movement is a growing political, economic, technological, market-driven force. Thus, Native students need to think about ways to use Indigenous-centered learning to employ knowledge construction methods and modes of critique. The practice of using “Western only” learning processes is inadequate. We need to devise new ways of observation, critique, voicing, and praxis that counter colonization.

So, how does a Native educator engage “green”? Again, in three ways: Indigenization processes, Indigenous knowledge construction, and critical lens-making. These crucial learning tools can safeguard and sustain how we know and engage the world.

The concept of Indigenization relates to processes designed to transform phenomena emanating primarily from the modern world to fit the local Native culture and worldview. In this process Indigenous voice and agency are privileged. Indigenization, framed as part of decolonization methodology, centers cultural and political action in an alternative worldview and set of values that counter the negative discourse and representations caused by settler peoples (Smith 1999).

Indigenization also articulates ways to understand the “double realization” and/or “moral passage” through which we can understand the nature of knowledge required to live first in the Indigenous world and second to understand the so-called modern world (PRATEC 1998). It is the “making something of a place . . . and the active process of making culture in its broadest sense of a place” (Deloria and Wildcat 2001).

Indigenization processes provide the opportunity for thinkers, writers, artists, researchers, and philosophers to form discourse and literacies that counter power, wealth, privilege, racial supremacy, hierarchy, or class that emanate from the modern world.

Indigenous knowledge construction and critique. Our pre-colonized, non-modern, non-market worldview causes us to know this world differently. For example, Indigenous knowing embodies beatitude, harmony, and balance and embraces knowledge construction practices of communal sustainability, regeneration, and restoration. We have found that principles of power, wealth, control, or conquest do not sustain our tribal communities. Instead, our pre-colonized ways of knowing remain a very relevant source upon which to build knowledge.

Indigenous knowledge construction processes embody age-old practices of sustainability, relationality, restoration, regeneration, ceremony, ecology, story, place, kinship, and community, as described by Dr. Greg Cajete (Santa Clara Pueblo). It draws from critical theory (Tyson 1999) and social justice practices that address identity, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and class in order to access the democratic and egalitarian meaning.

The use of an Indigenous critical lens acknowledges traditional knowledge as eternal truths put into motion through ceremony, songs, and prayers (Nasr 1989). These truths form the principles that elders use to manage and sustain community well-being. In this context, theorizing is less of a concern. Instead, using and creating knowledge based in traditional knowledge makes better sense. A critical lens may be specific to a tribal nation and, ideally, should speak the language of that tribe.

An Indigenous critical lens involves a critique of both the settler and Indigenous world since one must also scrutinize one’s own belief systems and practices. One examines the Indigenous world that is laden with conflicts, tensions, and contradictions stemming from modern vs. traditional, Western vs. Indigenous, oppressor vs. oppressed, and colonized vs. decolonized dynamics.

Such a lens can be used to deconstruct the ill effects of modernization or colonization. The lens can also apply or reject Western knowledge domain areas such as psychology, education, economics, ethics, arts, social frameworks, politics, and the like. While an Indigenous critical lens can stand alone, it can also incorporate other knowledge sources (e.g. feminist, modernist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, Afro-centric theory) in order to examine specific phenomena.

Finally, there is an ethical and moral dimension to all of this. For example, it is crucial to understand how positivistic philosophy and protocol fit or do not fit with Indigenous research or critical lens construction.

The “green” movement need not be an adjective that simply serves to modify all-powerful nouns such as economics and technology. Indigenous environmental efficacy is rooted in principles of harmony, beauty, balance, and restoration. Native learning and knowing are rooted in both non-modern and modern worlds but privilege Native worldview and agency. They facilitate an inward look at ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nations and promote an understanding of the outer world as well.

If Indigenization, Indigenous knowledge, and use of an Indigenous lens would cause us to really consider a bottle of water, such scrutiny might determine whether the convenience is truly worth the price.

Larry Emerson (Diné) is an artist, educator, researcher, activist, and writer interested in cultural restoration for healthy Indian nations. He has a master’s in counseling from San Diego State University and a doctorate in education from the Joint Doctoral Program of San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA.

References:
Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the mountain: An ecology of Indigenous education. Skyland, NC: Kivaki Press.
Deloria, V., Jr. & Wildcat, D. (2001). Power and place: Indian education in America. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.
Macedo, D. (2006). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know. Expanded edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Nasr, S. H. (1989). Knowledge and the sacred. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
PRATEC & Apffel-Marglin, F. (Ed.) (1998). The spirit of regeneration: Andean culture confronting Western notions of development. New York, NY: Zed Books.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.
Tyson, L. (1999). Critical theory today. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc.

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