All Living with the Land Events

For Indigenous peoples, our pasts, presents, and futures involve living and being in reciprocal, consensual, and sustainable relations with the natural world, which includes human relationships to each other as well as with lands, waters, landscapes, atmospheres, and plant and animal nations (for brevity, we will collectively describe this network, imperfectly, with the English word “lands”). In this testimony, we imagine a world that fosters stronger human relationships with each other and with the land—the world that we need. To do so, we must first address the challenging contemporary global and national contexts we find ourselves in and understand the paradigms that have led us here.

As we write, the world is in a state of flux. Human lives across the world are threatened by the novel coronavirus, a global pandemic that has made visible deep structural inequalities, resulting in disproportionate infection and death rates among Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. At the same time, uprisings unfolding across the world demand the end of state violence–for example, in the United States, the end of police violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, experts around the world are sounding the alarm about climate change, warning us about its dire impact on human lives and land, if we don’t act accordingly.

Illustration by Echo Yun Chen.

Each of these pandemics–COVID-19, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and climate change–disproportionately threaten Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Climate change, for example, disparately impacts Indigenous peoples, threatening Indigenous access to knowledge, food and medicine systems as well as water, ceremonial, and sacred spaces. This disproportionate impact threatens the health of the planet, as 85 percent of the world’s biodiversity survives in Indigenous-controlled territories where human relationships with the land are characterized by effective and sustainable land management practices. Capitalism and colonialism threaten this biodiversity and fuel the climate crisis by structuring extractive, consumerist relationships with the land.

The devastating effects of these interrelated pandemics for human and more than human relatives around the globe are demonstrating the urgent need for relational, reciprocal, and respectful ways of living together. In response to the question of how to shift our relational practices, we argue first and foremost that respectful relations with the land and with each other are contingent upon the cessation of colonial harms against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, including ongoing threats to the lands that sustain us. We therefore call for returning the care and governance of our original territories as a primary step in remaking sustainable, just, and thriving futures for all. We advocate, too, for the revitalization of Indigenous educational practices that prioritize preparing young people to tend to the land, community, and one another. Lastly, we argue for a recognition of the value of Indigenous leadership and governance as relevant not only to Indigenous nations but to all people and, in fact, vital to the survival of the planet itself.

Given our expertise as Indigenous educators, as well as the fact that colonialist and capitalist ways of relating to the land and each other are learned, the majority of our testimony focuses on the value of Indigenous educational models and ways of relating with each other and the land. Dominant extractive relations with land are learned everyday by children in schools and continually reproduce the problematic relations between humans and land. Any discussion of education must be viewed within the context of the ongoing colonial violence Indigenous peoples experience, and in concert with broader efforts to return–or, more precisely, rematriate–Indigenous lands and restore Indigenous systems of governance, both of which we believe can benefit all people.

Refuse Further Extraction and Harm

To restore right relations with the land and with one another, we must first resist and disrupt settler colonial forms of harm. The violence perpetuated by settler colonialism, in addition to tangible interpersonal harms, often manifest in “well-meaning” gestures towards the “greater good” at the expense of Indigenous well-being and futures. We must all take responsibility and engage in active steps on both individual and structural levels towards ending harm, as continued harm against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities negates progress forward in other areas. Claims to larger issues or needs (e.g., documenting biodiversity in Indigenous territories) are cloaked forms of violence and reflect superficial understandings of the dynamics that have brought us to where we are. Learning to live without causing harm is central to our collective endeavors.

Restore Indigenous Governance of Our Original Territories

It is no mistake that 85 percent of the world’s biodiversity is located within Indigenous-controlled territories. Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land is characterized by a deep sense of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity for land and life, fundamental values that have sustained the health of lands and Indigenous livelihoods since time immemorial. Restoring Indigenous governance of our original territories, including the ability to caretake our lands with knowledge systems and practices developed over millennia, not only advances decolonization, but might also support broader efforts to sustain all lands and lifeways today. For example, Indigenous peoples have long recognized the value of fire in eliminating invasive species and nourishing plant life. In some communities’ restorative burning practices, dry grasses feed slow-burning cool fires, which in turn create rich environments for the growth of new grasses. These practices regenerate, heal, and nourish the land, leading to new growth. As this brief example illustrates, Indigenous land practices can help sustain the biodiversity that strengthens the health and wellness of the planet. To that end, we advocate wherever possible, for the transfer of Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands, and for the ability of Indigenous peoples to co-manage their territories with those who currently occupy them.

Revitalize Indigenous Models of Education

As educators, aunties, mothers, and grandmothers, we believe that to be in right relationship we must think about the education we offer our children, recognizing that the generations coming behind us will shape our relationships with each other and to the land for years to come. Indigenous societies have long practiced forms of education in which land-based, play-based, intergenerational, and applied learning strategies have helped the next generation learn what it means to live in ethical and sustainable relationship with all living beings. These long-standing systems of education that have helped our children learn the full spectrum of what it means to be human, to live ethically, and to take care of one another have been interrupted by colonial models of education.

Colonial schooling has served as a weapon to erode Indigenous territories and disrupt the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. In a history marked by forced removals from traditional homelands, coerced attendance at federal schools, and persistent racism in public institutions, formal western schooling attempted to incorporate Native students into capitalist networks of consumption that prioritize private property and competition. Colonial schools became models for public education today, schools which center narratives that enable, and even promote, othering, oppression, and exploitation. The majority of public education today emphasizes independence and competition over collective obligations; rationality and progress over care and compassion; and separation from nature over networks of embedded relations. Together, these approaches teach children to view the land as a secular and inanimate set of resources, designed for human-entitled use and economic gain.

These models of colonial schooling have interrupted (but not destroyed) Indigenous practices of land stewardship, knowledge transmission, and kinship. Our history, even as it has been marked by violence and disruption, has also been marked by our resistance, ingenuity, and dedication to creating Indigenous futures in which the responsibilities we have to one another and to the land form the foundation for students’ learning and being. Our embedded ways of learning together with each other and with the land continue to nourish and sustain us, and, we believe, offer a more generative model of education for all children.

What if, instead of the models of colonial schooling that extracted childhoods from land and family, children learned about their place in the world through systems of relationality? What if they had the opportunity to learn in intergenerational environments that cultivated caring forms of learning in relation to place, or that attended to the sacredness of all life and the spiritual dimensions of knowing? What if educators centered Indigenous teaching and learning practices, such as storytelling and story-listening? This approach would help students understand their responsibilities to all their relatives, human and greater-than-human. It would inspire children to work toward inclusive conceptions of justice that account for the well-being of land and all it sustains. It would help children acquire skills in restoring relationships and healing harm, skills that we believe are as important in our relationships with one another as in our relationships with the land. Such a model would foster land-based solidarities and land-centered literacies that situate children within a vast network of relations whose well-being is intimately bound up with their own.

Recognize the Value of Indigenous Leadership for All Peoples and Lands

Just as Indigenous educational models can serve as a basis for fostering healthier relational practices for all children with each other and the land, so too can Indigenous values serve as a basis for a healthier society. Indigenous knowledge systems and systems of governance are not only relevant to Indigenous peoples, but have relevance and implications for all peoples living on Indigenous lands, as well as for the survival of the planet. For example, Indigenous educators and tribal leaders are currently working to address food insecurity in response to the current, unsustainable models of food production and transportation. Investing in local foodways and regenerating ecosystems offer ways to shift the social crises brought on by climate change and to restructure our damaging reliance on fossil fuels. In addition, Indigenous diplomatic traditions that emphasize the values of autonomy and interdependence offer important models for fostering more mutually respectful relationships between all peoples. And Indigenous legal traditions that foreground peacemaking and restorative justice offer meaningful alternatives to punitive notions of justice that are the basis of mass incarceration. These brief examples highlight the value of Indigenous leadership, not just in supporting Indigenous peoples, but in helping transform society from one based on extraction, competition, and waste to one based on mutual respect, support, and sustainability.

Recommendations

Like generations of Indigenous educators who have preceded and will follow us, we believe the answer to the question of how we may come to live in right relations with one another and with the land requires answers deeply connected with education and land stewardship, as the lessons we model and teach to the next generations will shape the world beyond our lifetimes. Living in better relationship with the land and with one another benefits all living beings. To that end, we reiterate our call that as a society we must refuse to engage in practices that further harm Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities and homelands. We must restore Indigenous lands and support Indigenous land caretaking practices; revitalize Indigenous models of education, including language reclamation and community-based models of education that emphasize ecological regeneration; and we must recognize and raise up Indigenous leadership systems for everyone. The vision we have described here is a vision that ultimately focuses on life, that values and prioritizes the dignity and respect of all living beings. It teaches our children how to co-exist in respectful, reciprocal relationships with diverse communities, including lands, waters, atmospheres, plants, and animals, and it believes in and works towards a more honest, just, loving, and sustainable future for all of us.

In developing this testimony, we engaged in conversation with the writings of scholars John Borrows, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Noelani Goodyear–Ka‘ƍpua, Sandy Grande, Daniel Wildcat, Eve Tuck, Bryan Brayboy, and K. Wayne Yang. We are grateful for their ongoing contributions and insights.

Meredith McCoy (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa descent) is an Assistant Professor and Andersen Fellow of American Studies and History at Carleton College where she teaches about Indigenous histories and research methods. McCoy currently serves on the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board for Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Dr. Emma Elliott-Groves is an assistant professor in the Department of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Her work grows from ethical frameworks generated by Indigenous and place-based knowledges and practices to create process-centered approaches that illuminate Indigenous pathways toward collective livelihood.

Dr. Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education and the Co-Director of the Sapsik’walĂĄ (Teacher) Education Program at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on creating spaces to support Indigenous students and Indigenous self-determination in public schools, and preparing teachers to challenge colonialism in curriculum, policy, and practice.

Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang studies dynamics of culture, learning, and development broadly with a specific focus on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education.

“Restoring Indigenous Systems of Relationality” was originally published in the dossier “How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?” edited by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Humans and Nature (How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?) (November 2020).

Many of our biggest challenges in the United States today—from climate change to high rates of violence—have roots in laws that eradicated tribal sovereignty, commodified Indigenous lands, and dehumanized Indigenous peoples. In an effort to conquer Native lands, lives, and nations, the United States created a legal framework to justify all of this, and now, in the twenty-first century, those laws place all of us in jeopardy. As Americans, we will never live respectfully with the land and one another until or unless we restore the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations that the United States has, over centuries, worked so hard to destroy.

On July 9, 2020, the United States took a significant step towards the restoration of tribal sovereignty we so desperately, and collectively, need. Through the historic ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the United States Supreme Court denied the state of Oklahoma’s attempt to erase the Reservation of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Oklahoma used the same arguments that other states, private companies, and non-Native entities have used to undermine tribal sovereignty historically, but this time the court did not buy what the settlers were selling. Instead, the Supreme Court rejected Oklahoma’s argument that its statehood erased the tribal nations whose sovereignty pre-dates Oklahoma. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s seminal ruling begins: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt affirmed far more than the boundaries of a reservation. For many of us in Indian Country, Justice Gorsuch’s opinion confirmed what we have always known to be true: tribal nations have an inherent right to protect their lands as well as the lives who reside upon them. The right to self-govern and exist was promised in the treaties and in the very constitution of the United States. This promise cannot, according to the Supreme Court, be broken.

While this may seem like a simple concept, it is an idea that, since 1492, has constantly been under attack. While no one questions the right of states like California, Maine, and Kansas to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on their lands or within their territories, the Supreme Court has, historically, taken away the sovereign right of our tribal nations to govern our own lands.

This systemic stripping of our sovereignty has had harmful consequences for our women and children who face the highest rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, and murder in the United States. Although the Department of Justice has noted that the majority of violent crimes committed against Natives are committed by non-Natives, in the 1978 Oliphant decision, the Supreme Court declared that tribal nations could no longer exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives who commit crimes on tribal lands. As a result, tribal nations are without the jurisdiction necessary to prosecute the majority of violent crimes committed against their citizens within their borders.

To justify stripping tribes of their inherent sovereignty, the Supreme Court had to go all the way back to its 1823 decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh, when the Court concluded that the rights of Indian Nations “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, [are] necessarily diminished.”[1] In 1823, at a time when non-Indian corporate and colonial interests were demanding access to and ownership of tribal lands, the Johnson Court reasoned that “[c]onquest gives a title [to the Conqueror] which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” a claim now known as the Doctrine of Discovery. According to the Court in Johnson, Tribal Nations could not be left “in possession of their country” because they were “fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.” As a result, “[t]o leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness.”

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson, our “uncivilized” refusal to commercially exploit and abuse the land we live on has been repeatedly used to strip Native nations of our inherent right to self-govern ourselves, our lands, and our resources. Johnson has never been overturned, nor reversed.

For the last one hundred years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly relied on this colonial construct to tell our Tribal Nations “No.” No, we cannot exercise criminal jurisdiction over a non-Indian who comes onto tribal lands and drunkenly assaults a tribal law officer (Oliphant). No, we cannot exercise civil jurisdiction over a bank that discriminates against tribal citizens on tribal lands (Plains Commerce). And no, we cannot exercise our sovereign authority to prevent the breakup of an Indian family and keep a father and his daughter together (Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl).

But suddenly, in 2020, the Court said “yes” to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and “no” to Oklahoma. Yes, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation may exercise jurisdiction over a crime committed within its borders. And no, the State of Oklahoma does not have jurisdiction over a crime committed by a citizen of the Muscgoee (Creek) Nation on the Creek Nation’s lands. Saying “yes” to a Tribal Nation seeking to exercise jurisdiction over its lands and own citizens shouldn’t be a radical notion, and yet somehow in the United States it is. Because of the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant, Tribal Nations today are the only governments in America who cannot arrest or prosecute someone who commits crimes within their own borders.

Illustration by Echo Yun Chen.

And while Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion did not discuss, address, or directly overturn the Court’s 1823 decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh, it might as well have. In 1823, the Court concluded that tribal nations cannot claim legal title to their lands because “[t]o leave [tribal nations] in possession of their country, [i]s to leave the country a wilderness.” In McGirt, the Court did not evaluate whether the Muscogee (Creek) Nation would sufficiently commodify or commercially exploit its reservation lands. Instead of evaluating how or whether a tribal nation would sufficiently utilize land as a capitalist commodity, the Supreme Court began and ended its analysis with the promise the United States made to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in a treaty.

This affirmation of sovereignty has won the praise of tribal leaders as well as advocates for Native women who have survived domestic violence—advocates who saw clearly how the Court’s decision in McGirt will increase safety for those who live within the borders of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Reservation, as well as on tribal lands across the United States. But for those who wish to diminish tribal sovereignty in order to commodify and commercially exploit tribal lands, the decision in McGirt has sounded an alarm.

In response to this incredible affirmation of the sovereignty of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt created The Oklahoma Commission on Cooperative Sovereignty, a commission that does not include a single leader from any one of Oklahoma’s thirty-nine federally recognized tribes. Instead, the commission is comprised entirely of oil and business executives, many of whom have fought the Indian Child Welfare Act, which protects the inherent sovereign right of Tribal Nations to adjudicate adoptive and foster placements of their young citizens, and supported the Dakota Access Pipeline, which destroyed the sacred sites and burial grounds and imperiled the drinking water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. While the Commission contains multiple billionaires and millionaires, it does not contain a single Native person, or anyone who understands the connection between tribal sovereignty and the safety of Native women.

At this very moment, Oklahoma Senators Inhofe and Lankford, both Republicans, are asking for input from corporate entities to determine what kind of legislation Congress should pass to ensure the McGirt decision does not prevent companies from commercially exploiting Muscogee (Creek) Nation lands.

There are bone-chilling historical parallels for tribal nations here. Just seven years after the Johnson Court declared that “[c]onquest gives a title [to the Conqueror] which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, resulting in many Trails of Tears. Now, two hundred years later, Justice Gorsuch has upheld the promise that once lay at the end of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Trail.

Governor Stitt, his friends in Congress, and a handful of billionaires are hoping to, once again, eradicate the tribal sovereignty that the Supreme Court just upheld. These present-day colonists–the inheritors of Andrew Jackson’s bloody legacy–want nothing less than their own Indian Removal Act.

The United States will never be able to tackle the crises of climate change and systemic violence until the commercial interests of billionaires no longer trump the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations or the will of the courts. McGirt signals that day may be here. But, that will depend on what happens next in Congress.

Mary Kathryn Nagle is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and playwright. In 2019, her play Sovereignty was produced at Marin Theatre Company, and the Yale Repertory Theatre produced Manahatta in 2020. She served as the first Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program from 2015 to 2019. Nagle is also a partner at Pipestem Law, P.C., where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault.

“On the Far End of the Trail of Tears” was originally published in the dossier “How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?” edited by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Humans and Nature (How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?) (November 2020).

  1. [1]Oliphant, 435 U.S. at 209 (quoting Johnson, 21 U.S. at 574).↩

I have no idea how to arrive and I’m pretty sure that I’m not the person to weigh in on that, since I’m on my father’s side the granddaughter of refugees who arrived in East L.A. and on the other, the great-granddaughter of immigrants (arguably also refugees) who settled in Brooklyn. They landed on asphalt, in places full of other new arrivals and transients like them, and they set about forgetting where they were from because it was so full of misery. The sense in which they knew where they were was surely not as deep and rich as I’d like to see in people who have the good fortune to stay in one place or even one continent for one lifetime or many. But I do have a few ideas about how people like me and mine, the uprooted, displaced, ungrounded, and lost, might set out.

Knowledge is not love, but it’s the beginning of it: paying attention is everything. When we fall in love with someone we begin by getting deeply interested in them, in wanting to know them and know about them. The very word respect in English has multiple meanings, and in the question we were asked—“How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?”—respect means to regard something or someone as having rights, value, dignity, as deserving of good treatment. What that might consist of is present in the other meaning of respect and its etymology—to look at, regard, consider. The Oxford English Dictionary states that respect comes from respectus, “the action of looking round or back, consideration, regard, in post-classical Latin also respite, reprieve.”

Attention itself comes from attend, which means to not just show up but to stay, and attention is at least the beginning of respect. Disrespect is often coupled with the assertion that there is nothing to know or nothing worth knowing; amplified, it becomes annihilation. I grew up in California—specifically about thirty miles north of San Francisco in Novato, named after a Coast Miwok chief or at least after his baptismal name for St. Novatus, according to the old stories, but maybe it was just the Spanish word novato for novice, inexperienced, which the Spanish would’ve been when they went about flinging names onto places they’d just arrived in, which, like the chief, already had names. It was the era in which schoolchildren were still being taught that California Native people were all “Diggers,” a term of maximum denigration—and that was about all you needed to know. The hundred languages, cultures, and cosmologies of California were thereby erased.

That is, I grew up in a place where the emptiness was palpable and no one was around to fill it with stories. The blankness was in us, not the place. One of my brothers had a teacher who was enthusiastic about botany, and he learned some local plant names from her and somehow I picked up others and read about edible plants, how to leach acorns, and other bits and pieces about the landscape I loved because it was the kindest and most stable part of my childhood. We roamed the hills and got to know the creatures there, though the coyotes and mountain lions hadn’t yet returned to the area, and nor had the elephant seals and otters to the coast. Most of the people around me didn’t have much of an idea of where we were, or a sense of lack, because there were so few people asserting there was more to know, or why you might want to.

I would propose that the beginning of living respectfully with the land comes with knowing it. Knowing it as a place with a human and a nonhuman history and how those two are intertwined, as a place whose rocks, soil, plants, wildlife from the least spider to the largest raptor, seasons and weather, hydrology and maybe agriculture all have something to tell us, all work together to make it what it is, and make it something worth knowing. This might sound academic, but I’m more interested in, for example, hydrology as in knowing where the water coming out of the faucet originated, or what floods in the rainstorms and where it drains to.

In how the rains might bring up mushrooms or how the milkmaids are the first flowers in the Bay Area spring, or how the star-shaped soaproot flowers open in the afternoon and dip under the weight of the bumblebees that land on them in the evening. In a sense, to know the neighbors in the neighborhood (and wildlife and native plants are present even in our urban areas, if you pay attention). That knowledge is like learning the language of the neighbors so you can hear what they say. It’s to see that a place has its order and pattern and sequences. Even if you don’t see much, it’s to know enough to know that something deep and complex and alive is there. To have a sense of the pattern and rhythm of the place, to hear its music. To know that you exist within natural, social, and political systems.

Illustration by Echo Yun Chen.

Bay Area writer Jenny Odell writes about listening in her book How to Do Nothing, and about deep listening as “a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.” She talks about how she realized that she did this as a birdwatcher. “I personally think they should just rename it ‘bird noticing,’” she wrote, since she heard birds more than saw them, and also “the sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech.” She realized that birdsong was very often present outdoors, and each was like a language she could now understand to the extent at least of knowing who was singing. What she says is a reminder that we mostly live in layers of silence that come, not from lack of speech or song or story, but from our lack of listening and learning the languages.

Living respectfully with other people also comes with listening. The mainstream of American society has, from its inception, been built on silencing and strategic exclusion, on not hearing who and what mounts up to the majority of us. At its most intimate it’s this learned non-empathy that says that what happens to you doesn’t affect me, that we are not connected, that you don’t matter. At its most systematic it does this categorically: dictating that these people are not to be believed, not to be admitted as equals or participants; that they are to be laughed at or mocked or roughed up or erased.

One of the noxious fictions of recent years is that this person or that “found her voice,” rather than that she found people willing to listen. There was nothing lacking in the speaker, no voice lost and unrealized, except to the extent that she realized that no one would believe her or she would be killed, mocked, or otherwise punished for speaking up (as women still are when they testify about crimes against them). The same, of course, goes for BIPOC who were excluded from the legal system, treated as less rational, reliable, capable, honest, and deserving. This great majority was silenced by lack of respect, and with it a thinned-out narrative became the official story, of the history of this country, but also our entertainment full of straight white male protagonists, whose travails and woes and victories we were supposed to identify with and care about, more than our own. A conversation became a monologue; a chorus a solo.

I wrote earlier this year, in a piece about how Harvey Weinstein got away with four decades of sexual assaults, even against women who were supposed to be powerful and famous, that “Facts circulate freely in a democracy of information that results from a democracy of voices. We have something else instead, from personal life to national politics: a hierarchy of audibility and credibility, a brutal hierarchy, in which people with facts often cannot prevail, because those who have more power push those facts out of the room and into silence or make the cost of stating those facts dangerously high. That’s how the oil industry turned the science of climate change into a fake debate full of fake uncertainties.” Those who are equally respected have equal audibility and credibility, and their words have equal consequences. We can extend this beyond the human and the auditory or verbal to imagine listening to many kinds of beings and systems and processes and to recognize listening, so often portrayed as passive and receptive, as at its best a conscious imaginative embrace and incorporation of what is heard.

I’m writing this on the day of Congressman and Civil Rights Movement hero John Lewis’s funeral; Barack Obama, there to, as he put it, “pay my respects,” declared: “And despite this storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him
 He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, that in all of us there is a longing to do what’s right, that in all of us there is a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect.” Those two forces, the silencers and the listeners, are counterweights in this country’s history. Respect for listening itself, as an engaged and creative act, even a talent that can be learned and fine-tuned, is part of the project of building respect for the land and each other. And that’s a start.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and sits on the board of the climate group Oil Change International.

“Respectfully” was originally published in the dossier “How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?” edited by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Humans and Nature (How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?) (November 2020).

We arrived at the Provincial Court of Justice, a white and glass building in the bureaucratic modernist style, in Quito, Ecuador on February 22, 2013. It was 8:30 a.m., but since we were only fifteen miles from the equator the sun was already bright above us, intensifying our collective sense of anticipation. Environmental and Indigenous activists, and I, a researcher embedded in those movements, had come to witness the proceedings of a case with the potential to set a historic precedent for Rights of Nature jurisprudence. The Rights of Nature had been established years prior in Ecuador’s progressive 2008 Constitution, a document that was the product of years of social mobilization and a recently elected left-wing government. According to chapter seven of the Constitution, “Nature or Pacha Mama” has the right to existence through the “maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.” In a major departure from liberal constitutional norms, the Constitution regards Nature as a rights-bearing subject. But it is people—any “person, community, people, or nationality,” with the latter referring to Indigenous peoples and nations—that the Constitution empowers to demand the protection of these rights on Nature’s behalf. Nature cannot walk into a courtroom, but its human allies can.

And that is exactly what Nature’s allies attempted that sunny February morning. In the case before the judge, lawyers representing a broad coalition of Indigenous federations, human rights organizations, environmental groups, and directly affected communities had brought a lawsuit against Ecuacorriente (ECSA), a conglomerate of Chinese state-owned companies with a license to develop Ecuador’s first large-scale, open-pit mine, as well as the government ministries responsible for negotiating the contract and regulating its environmental impacts.

Illustration by Echo Yun Chen.

This last point is significant. In my fieldwork, I found that, time and again, the “national” interest in economic development, defined as the promotion of oil and mining projects, outweighed the “particular” interests of protecting local ecosystems and upholding Indigenous rights. The judge adopted precisely this binary in his ruling, issued five days later, which asserted that Nature’s rights were a “private” interest, while development was a “public” one.

The activists didn’t win the case, nor the appeal, and subsequently took recourse to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights where it is still pending. But the questions they posed, and the state and industry reactions they occasioned, continue to reverberate throughout Ecuador as environmental and Indigenous movements strive to defend the rights laid out in the Constitution from the actions of a left-wing government that they had initially, if critically, supported.[1] These included: Who has the power to decide the fate of extractive projects? Who can speak on behalf of Nature, and to what ends? Are flourishing ecosystems and Indigenous rights at odds with “development” or compatible with it? Is the law a tool for liberation or a dead-end route to co-optation? What is the best strategy to resist the resource policies of a socialist administration that enjoyed widespread support among poor and working-class Ecuadorians, including Indigenous peoples? And what are the prospects for a post-extractive transition on the peripheries of a neocolonial world order?[2]

March for Water, Life, and the Dignity of Peoples in Ecuador (March, 2012) by Elisa Levy, used with permission of the author.

These dilemmas are shared by social movements across Latin America and beyond in communities on the frontlines of extraction, poverty, and pollution in the United States, Canada, and everywhere that social and environmental harm is unevenly distributed along ethnic, racial, and class lines. Confronted with this bevy of dilemmas, the activists I accompanied and interviewed experimented with a diversity of tactics. They elected anti-extractive leaders to local government; they marched from the Amazon to the capital, covering hundreds of kilometers; they organized nature walks through the still-verdant sites slated for extractive ruin and occupied the mining camps erected on their dispossessed land; they monitored industrial impacts on water, air, and species’ habitats; and, frustrated with the legal system, they took the enforcement of constitutional rights into their own hands, organizing the very consultations in communities affected by mining and oil projects that the government had failed to implement.[3] In the process, they faced retaliatory violence from police, military, and private guards working on behalf of extractive firms.

On a warming planet, struggles for territorial rights and environmental justice are intensifying—as are risks to activists, with Latin America being an especially deadly region for land and water defenders.[4] But these conflicts aren’t merely the work of fossil-fueled capitalism. They will continue to erupt during the transition to renewable energy. That’s because the infrastructure and technology needed to harness, distribute, and store renewable energy requires a great deal of land and raw materials.[5] Batteries, essential for decarbonizing transit and storing energy on renewable grids, are made of lithium, nickel, graphite, and cobalt—and the cars they power need over 180 pounds of copper, wrested from mines like the Mirador in Ecuador.

In Chile, where I also conducted fieldwork, lithium-rich brine is sucked out of the Atacama Salt Flat. These salares are part of a vulnerable wetland system in the second driest place on earth that provides water for Andean flamingos and vicuñas, as well as the eighteen Atacameño Lickanantay communities that ring the vast, craggy, white-grey expanse. As lithium mining has progressed, so too has organized opposition through groups like the Consejo de Pueblos Atacameños. Sergio Cubillos, the organization’s young president, told me that until there is a clear framework for regulating the impact of lithium mining on water and biodiversity as well as respect for Indigenous territory, there should be “no more companies and no more extraction.” Local resistance to what some activists refer to as “green extractivism” has also been amplified with the formation of a transnational network called the Observatorio Plurinacional de Salares Andinos, which links environmentalists, scientists, lawyers, and directly affected communities across the Andean plateau in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.[6]

The Observatorio is novel not only in its transnational scale, but also its innovative framing, which centers a positive vision for the ecological and cultural values of the salt flats nestled between the towering peaks of the Andes—a watershed in the high-altitude desert, vibrant with diverse lifeforms and ten thousand years of Indigenous history.

Andean Flamingos, Atacama Salt Flats, taken at Los Flamencos National Reserve by Thea Riofrancos, used with permission of the author.

The extractive frontiers of the energy transition present a challenge for advocates of climate justice in the Global North.[7] Does rapid decarbonization require sacrifice zones within and beyond the borders of hegemonic nation-states?[8] I would argue that it does not, but it does require transforming practices of production and consumption. Decarbonization is not enough. We need to transition to less material-intensive forms of abundance, redefining the latter as the collective enjoyment of public amenities—from beaches to theaters—and the free time to cultivate the more-than-material relationships that bring us happiness.[9][10][11][12]

These practices won’t emerge spontaneously, of course. Like our prevailing privatized, unequal, consumerist culture, the behaviors we need to cultivate are shaped by public policy and physical infrastructure. The fact that individual electric vehicles have emerged as a “solution” to the climate crisis—a framing that effaces their environmental impacts—has much to do with our car-centric built environment. Solidarity across supply chains means consuming less, more equally—think an electric bus that can transport thousands of passengers an hour rather than a privately-owned EV that sits in a garage most of the day. It means changing the way we conduct trade to prioritize ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and workers over the flow of goods and capital.[13] And it means learning from Latin American intellectuals and movements, who recognize that a post-extractive, just transition in the Americas is impossible without upending the systems of trade and finance that lock periphery countries into debt and dependency[14] Across the region, calls for a new “ecosocial pact” and a “New Green America” are in dialogue with the Green New Deal, pushing activists in the United States to recognize that the domestic, regional, and global cannot be disentangled.[15][16][17] We can’t achieve climate justice solely within our borders, and to think so only impoverishes our ability to imagine the transformation we aspire to achieve.

From the courtrooms of Ecuador to the salares of Chile to the belly of the imperial beast, I hear echoes of the same question: How can movements transform the relationship between society and nature in the context of an ever-more rapacious capitalism? Some movements center resistance to the state and capital; others recruit left candidates and organize parties to infiltrate liberal democracy on its own terrain; still others practice mutual aid and radical pedagogy. Some groups do all of these. Lessons from Latin America, and radical struggles here in the United States, show us that there is no abstract answer to questions of tactic or strategy. There is only a material calculus that accounts for capacities and obstacles, goals and routes. The state has its pitfalls: the limits of the law and those of national boundaries—to name two. But we need more than resistance. It’s hard to imagine tackling enemies as sedimented as fossil capital or as novel as green extractivism without making use of the state’s capacities to enforce and redistribute. Likewise, it’s impossible to imagine a state confronting the crises of our moment with extraordinary popular organization pushing on all levers of power. The way forward can only be forged through practical experimentation: pushing on the state from the outside, pulling on it from the inside, dismantling its most irredeemable institutions, and establishing more just ones in their place.

Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020–2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020–2021). Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America.

“Field Notes from Extractive Frontiers” was originally published in the dossier “How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?” edited by Julian Brave NoiseCat for Humans and Nature (How can we live respectfully with the land and with one another?) (November 2020).

  1. [1]Riofrancos, T. N. (2020). Resource radicals: From petro-nationalism to post-extractivism in Ecuador. Durham: Duke University Press.↩
  2. [2]Riofrancos, T. (2019). What Comes After Extractivism? Dissent Magazine, 2019 (Winter).↩
  3. [3]Riofrancos, T. N. (2017). Scaling Democracy: Participation and Resource Extraction in Latin America. Perspectives on Politics, 15(3), 678-696. doi:10.1017/s1537592717000901↩
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  8. [8]Sahagun, L. (2019, May 7). A war is brewing over lithium mining at the edge of Death Valley. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-death-valley-lithium-mine-california-environment-20190507-story.html↩
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  11. [11]Aronoff, K., Battistoni, A., Cohen, D. A., & Riofrancos, T. (2019, February 7). A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish. The Guardian. Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/07/green-new-deal-climate-change-us-politics↩
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  16. [16]Nuestra America Verde. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2020, from http://www.nuestraamericaverde.org/↩
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