Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice / The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Hanson, Randel D

Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice. Edited by Jace Weaver. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996. xvii + 205 pp. References, index. Paper $i8.oo.

The Tainted Desert Environmental Ruin in the American West. By Valerie L. Kuletz. New York: Routledge, 1998. xxii + 336 pp. References, index. Paper $zz.95.

These two books each address aspects of the complex set of contemporary environmental problems on American Indian lands. Attuned as these writings are to the nuances of cultural perspective and historical context, readers of this journal will find them useful for at least two reasons: they each present detailed understandings of the environmental and social impacts of advanced industrial society on diverse American Indian communities, and they make important contributions to understanding the broader differential benefits and burdens of science and technology in the late twentieth century, particularly as it concerns environmental degradation.

Defending Mother Earth has its roots in an environmental justice workshop held at the Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, in 1995, a gathering which brought together American Indian scholars and activists. The collected articles, exploring contemporary issues relating to environmental degradation, sovereignty, and the importance of American Indian traditional cultural and spiritual values in making the difficult choices reservations face in economic development, can be divided into two groups. First, several articles address more conceptual issues, comparing Indian and white values as they relate to land use, exploring the political and legal context of Indian sovereignty, and staking out an American Indian theological perspective on eco-justice. Another group deals with more specific environmental issues on Indian lands, including the marketing of nuclear waste to Indian tribes, mining issues in Wisconsin, and the James Bay dam project in Canada.

In "The Struggle for Our Homes," historian Donald Fixico (Shawnee/Sac and Fox/ Muskogee/Seminole) reflects on different cultural trajectories of Native peoples and Euro-Americans, probing how these differences have shaped perceptions of the natural world and approaches to economic development and environmental stewardship. In "Triangulated Power and the Environment," lau,yer and scholar Jace Weaver (Cherokee) explores how tribal power is always "triangulated" between the tribe, the federal government, and the state in which the reservation is found, constricting choices that tribes can make. In "Our Homes Are Not Dumps," Grace Thorpe (Sac and Fox), a tribal judge and president of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans, discusses the creation of nuclear-free zones on Indian reservations against the backdrop of governmental and corporate targeting of them for housing nuclear waste as a Faustian means of economic development. George Tinker (Osage/Cherokee), a professor of cross-cultural ministries at the Illiff School, explores the different philosophical and theological foundations which underlie contemporary technological development, economics, and international politics. He maintains that any chance for counteracting contemporary ecological devastation and social injustice rests in a recognition of ethno-ecojustice: the parallel realities of recognizing the interrelatedness of biodiversity and cultural diversity, in creating a sustainable future.

In The Tainted Desert, Valerie Kuletz examines the environmental impacts of nuclear activities in the American West, paying particular attention to the differing ways that American Indian peoples imagine and occupy these lands compared to the ways nuclear scientists and military people use the land. In addition, the book explores the process of determining whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada will serve as a deep geologic burial site for nuclear waste. With this focus, Kuletz clearly lays out the competing claims to these lands by Native Americans, antinuclear activists, EuroAmerican scientists, and government officials.

One of the interesting aspects of Kuletz's book lies in her methodology, a combination of what she terms a "narrative historical and visual mapping" and an ethno-ecological approach which "lends equal credence to both Native and Euroamerican perspectives on the natural world demonstrat[ing] how one cultural view came to dominate the other" (p. xvii). Her book is divided into two sections. "Mapping the Nuclear Landscape" literally maps in both narrative and visual representations how the U.S. military overlaid its nuclear activities onto American Indian homelands. "Power, Representation and Cultural Politics at Yucca Mountain" proceeds with ethnographic data, bringing human voices to the larger struggle over the meaning and practices of both indigenous and scientific communities in the desert region where both nuclear activities have been carried out and American Indians continue to live. Visual mapping and ethnographic discussions combine to provide an environmental history of the region in which American Indian communities have been historically marginalized even as they continue to push for their voices to be heard. These two modes of investigation demonstrate how both American Indian and scientific perspectives are culturally and socially produced.