Rethinking Environmental-First Nations Relationships

The following article was printed in Canadian Dimension, February-March Issue 1995, Vol.29 No.1. The quotations at the commencement of the article were placed throughout the actual text. A number of illustrations accompanied the text. The same article, in a more abbreviated form was also published in the Earth First! Journal, Yule 1994, Vol.XV No.II.

An absolute priority for the environmental and green movement, and Canadian society itself, must be to try and sort out the appropriate relationship with Indigenous peoples in Canada. This is a vision quest all of us who have any environmental and social justice sentiment need to embark on. It is a matter of urgency.

While animal and plant 'nations' or 'communities' predate the arrival of humans, in Canada Aboriginal peoples can be considered the first or founding 'human' nations. In order for non-Native environmentalists and greens to enter into alliances with Aboriginal peoples, non-Native environmentalists themselves should have a realistic perspective or analysis of Aborignal issues and their appropriate resolution.

Aboriginal peoples have visions of the future, as well as views on their historical past in Canada and they are seeking alliances with others from such positions. Major changes in land and water use in Canada are being implemented or discussed. Examples include the Federal Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy (derived from the 1990 Sparrow Supreme Court of Canada decision: "Any allocation of priorities after valid conservation measures have been implemented must give top priority to Indian food fishing") and an Aboriginal Forest Strategy. There are "specific" and "comprehensive" land claims directed at a growing number of existing national and provincial parks across Canada. Land claims will and are affecting the establishment of new protected areas and parks - and also the Endangered Spaces Campaign, initiated by World Wildlife Fund Canada, which has been endorsed by many environmental groups.

Ron Jamieson, of the Bank of Montreal "Aboriginal Banking Unit," is quoted. His statement shows that the corporate class in Canada well understands the ongoing changes in land and water use in favor of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and is positioning to profit from it and to steer the changes so as to extend, not undermine, the existing industrial capitalist system.

Natives must win support in the Non-native, now majority community to successfully bring about desired change and overcome self-centered interests in the majority community. It is obvious that any resolution of Aboriginal issues will, in one way or another, have an impact on all Canadians, not just Native Canadians, and this is already happening. Examples include the Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy here on the East Coast, which is already bringing changes to the non-Native commercial and sport fishery; and the financial settlements that are made as part of land claims, which are now which are now paid for out of the public purse.

The relationship with Aboriginal peoples is an extremely sensitive topic within the environmental movement (more sensitive even than discussions of ecofeminism/gender relations or the relations between workers/the working class and environmentalists); among greens; and in the Canadian Left. Discussion of Amerindian issues among environmentalists seems often restricted to repeating general statements such as, "Natives were/are model environmentalists and it is necessary to unite to defend Mother Earth" or expressing a general support for the right of First Nations to self-determination and the satisfactory resolution of land claims. Realistic public discussion is usually avoided by environmentalists and greens. Avoidance of contentious Native issues is considered good manners.

There are however, two discussion papers which buck this denial trend, and which are helpful in trying to understand the issues related to parks and protected areas. The Land Claims Work Group of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists, produced a document in 1993 called, Putting Nature First: Conservation Principles to Guide the Settlement of Aboriginal Land Claims; and the same year, the World Wildlife Fund Canada released Protected Areas and Aboriginal Interests in Canada, by James Morrison.

The degradation of the fishery and the forests, where many workers have lost and will lose their livelihoods, presents an explosive context. In the Maritimes in 1994, for example, fishers have fought among themselves over existing snow crab, tuna and scallop allocations and access to fish. Boats have been burned and lobster pots cut loose and destroyed in the lobster fishery during Native/non-Native disputes. There are similar conflicts in the West Coast fishery. It is in such situations that racist and anti-Aboriginal attitudes get a hearing and a social base. (Racist organizations are active in some Canadian cities, e.g. the Heritage Front, with a Nazi white supremacist orientation.)

Today, there exist strong mutual interests for Native and non-Native communities. For both, communities are being destroyed and their environments wasted in the name of growth, development, jobs and progress. For both Native and non-Native landowners, mineral and subsurface rights, which if exercised can destroy above-ground environments, usually remain controlled by federal and provincial governments.

However, there is something quite wrong in the existing environmental/First Nations relationship. Conflicting perspectives towards the natural world are smothered over, for example, in forestry groups which are working with Indigenous nations and activists. Just as there is government and corporate 'green speak' or 'green wash,'there is 'Native speak' using seemingly progressive or spiritual rhetoric as a cover to advance a narrow self-interest which is anti-Earth. Corporations and governments can wear Native masks. There is a remarkable absence of any sympathetic yet critical analysis from the environmental or green side.

A couple of issues which need to be discussed openly, are: what are some of the existing models in the environmental and green movements of environmental/Indigenous relations and why are they not satisfactory; and how can we work environmentally and politically with Indigenous people?

Environmentalists and organizations who have come forward as promoting alliances with Aboriginal peoples, e.g. the international boreal forest Taiga Rescue Network (TRN), or Canada's Future Forest Alliance, seem to present an alliance as merely a blanket endorsement of stated Aboriginal positions. Thus, according to a posting in the electronic network, the TRN at their August 1994 Edmonton conference, took the position that:

I disagree with this position, which has been evolving within the mainstream TRN since its formation at Jokkmokk, in northern Sweden in 1992.

One cannot ignore obvious environmental (or social) contradictions within Native communities, just as one cannot ignore contradictions with deeper environmental positions and values (deep ecology) held by non-Native environmentalists. Deeper environmental positions are a minority and radical trend in the non-Native environmental movement. Some of the Native trends being criticized in this article have a strong counterpart in the mainstream environmental movement.

While traditional Natives and radical environmentalists are working shoulder-to-shoulder on a number of environmental issues, generally ignored are such contradictions as:

Probably, in all of the negative examples given above, as in the Micmac Pictou Landing and in two other situations which I am familiar with, there are oppositional deeper environmental voices being articulated that are marginalized by the Native mainstream. The non-Native environmental movement must not forget these deeper Native voices and they must be sought out. Such Native biocentrists are a relatively stronger minority than non-Native radical environmentalists in the mainstream movement, and have more credibility within their context and a base of authentic tradition. Any union activist knows that one often has to fight the union leadership as well as the company. There is perhaps an analogous situation within Native communities, with the leadership often willing to cut a deal with corporations and governments for some immediate, short-term economic benefit.

Theoretically, an Aboriginal-centered social justice perspective (social ecology?) often seems to takes precedence in the non-Native environmental movement over an all-species and ecosystem-derived environmental justice perspective (deep ecology.) In many of the above situations, the abysmal economic situation of most Native peoples in Canada undermines environmental/First Nations solidarity on environmental issues. The economic situation is easily manipulated by provincial and federal governments and corporate partners, who sometimes free up public monies for Aboriginal groups or provide some jobs and very junior partnerships in earth-destroying activities - all to facilitate more industrial growth. Provincial and federal governments, whatever their political complexion and green-wash rhetoric, share a human-centered resource orientation to Nature and are prepared to trade away the environment for corporate growth and short-term industrial jobs.

Also, just as is the case with the non-Native Canadian Environmental Network, government funding of Native organizations reduces reliance on the grass roots and increases dependency on, and subservience to the existing bourgeois legal system - and leads to solutions within the capitalist industrial economy. If a organization becomes too militant, there will be problems with the continuity of funding.

There is an evolution in the general social consciousness in Canada, which is belatedly favoring Native Canadians. This evolution is well underway, notwithstanding the defeat by referendum in 1992 of the Charlottetown Accord and its extensive section of text on self- government for Indigenous peoples. This evolution in social consciousness has its reflection in the green and environmental movements. Unfortunately for the natural world, this change in consciousness, while progressive, remains human-centered and seemingly unaware of either twentieth-century ecological constraints or the development in ethical thinking expressed in the philosophy of deep ecology. If Canada, as a society, has a resourcist view towards nature, then this viewpoint will also define any resolution of Aboriginal disputes. Thus any resolution, even if respectful of the rights of Native peoples, would still be disrespectful of the rights of nature.

The perspective and analysis of Native issues has to be situated in the geological/ecological and human history of this country. Most importantly, it has to be informed also by a historical sense of worldwide environmental destruction and of the migration of the peoples of the Earth. The continent we now call Africa is believed to be the original centre of human life. Early human fossils have never been found in the Americas. Thus most of the peoples of the world we now know, including the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, are historically migrants from somewhere else. Thousands of years ago, people migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait, at that time a land bridge, and eventually populated all of North, Central, and South America. This worldwide understanding, a necessary part of a perspective and analysis of Aboriginal issues in Canada, is shown for example in Clive Ponting's very helpful but somewhat conservative, A Green History Of The World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. This is an important book for both Native and non-Native greens and environmentalists.

Ponting documents for all of us that there are numerous historical examples of the degradation or collapse of the environment which pre- date and are not linked to the voyage of Columbus, that is, not linked to Western or Euro-centered value systems. (This article is not challenging the primary responsibility of these anthropocentric or human-centered Western value systems for the contemporary ongoing destruction of the Earth.) One well-known example, which has nothing to do with Columbus or the trail of death and environmental destruction left in his wake, would be the self-inflicted environmental (and subsequent social and cultural) destruction of Easter Island by Polynesians. Easter Island was first visited by Europeans in 1722, after this destruction and degradation had largely taken place.

In Canada, a class-based industrial capitalist society imprints its value system upon Native communities as well as upon the non-Native environmental movement. It is not helpful to present a romanticized view of the past as the contemporary Indigenous reality. David Suzuki for instance promotes it as some kind of ecological/social model for the present.

Original Native cultures did place dramatically lower demands on the environment. Because they survived within a circumscribed area for long periods of time, they have some real justification for calling themselves sustainable. But, past relationships to wildlife by Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere were not always benign and based on mutual respect. Clive Ponting and some other historians have argued that the historical evidence leads to the conclusion that Aboriginal groups in Australia and the Americas hunted many large mammals to extinction. In the Americas, it appears Aboriginals hunted mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, and American wild camels and horses to extinction.

A romanticized view of Natives in Canada can assume that teaching is only one way, from Native to non-Native. Some Native spokespersons, often prominent on the environmental conference circuit, articulate the same one way position, that is, that non-Native environmentalists are free to endorse but not to question Aboriginal positions. Disagreement by non-Natives is put down as a lack of understanding, e.g. "There are environmental groups who have been very supportive to First Nations issues, however, there are some who do not understand our ways." Or, there may be more heavy-handed comments, and environmentalists may be explicitly told "to tread softly," i.e. to shut up. There is a fear among non-Native environmentalists, which has some basis in reality, of being denounced as paternalistic or even racist, if dissenting views are raised.

I think that non-Native environmentalists who go along with a non- critical and essentially deferential attitude towards the Native peoples of Canada do this out of a genuine sense of wanting to atone in some way for past atrocities and the dispossession of Native lands. This is good sentiment, but liberal guilt is not the foundation for a realistic environmental alliance in the 90's. This alliance has to be built so as to confront and defeat the Earth Destroyers, who are everywhere at work on this planet. We cannot go back, even to a non-romanticized past, although we must certainly learn from such a past. This continent has a lot more people today than when the Europeans first arrived, and its carrying capacity has been severely undermined, as the destruction of the fisheries, forests and wildlife show. We can only come to terms with this and go forward, hopefully on a different path.

Certainly our industrial culture must be dismantled for any long-term ecological and social sustainability. At the same time, all cultures from around the world must today be assessed on their environmental friendliness and compatibility. Whatever is environmentally incompatible in a culture must be thrown out, e.g. use of wild animal parts for traditional medicines or in cultural ceremonies.

There must be a commitment to social justice for Aboriginals within contemporary Canadian society. Progressive people should support and help initiate whatever social changes are necessary for this to be achieved, as long as such changes are just to non-Native Canadians and do not negatively impact upon what remains of the natural world.

However, it is important that there be an atmosphere in the environmental movement which fosters critical thinking and public exchanges between non- Native environmentalists and Native peoples about Aboriginal issues and the assumptions on which they rest. This is not the situation today.

In building alliances with Native peoples in Canada on a basis of equality, everything is up for critical discussion, including basic assumptions. The ecological shortcomings of contemporary Indigenous worldviews need to be discussed frankly and fairly, even while recognizing that our main preoccupation must remain with the sicknesses of contemporary industrial society.

(Nova Scotia Environmentalist David Orton is a frequent contributor to Canadian Dimension. He would like to acknowledge the valuable input to this article made by Helga Hoffmann, Ian Whyte, Philip Fleischer and Tom Holzinger.)

David Orton
R.R. #3
Saltsprings
Pictou County, Nova Scotia
Canada B0K 1P0
Telephone/Fax: (902) 925-2514.
E-mail address: greenweb@fox.nstn.ca