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Andrew Johnson [FXS]
Firaxian
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 552
Shephard Krech, in The Ecological Indian, takes on these arguments, looking at indigenous approaches to nature. There are other books, too, in colonial and postcolonial theory. In the Americas, the indigenous societies, also, are diverse - there's no one blob (to use a term here) that you can put all pre-Columbian or indigenous cultures into, and bear in mind that the Mississippians are co-extant with the European middle ages. We could never represent them outside of a CS owing to the need to have a leader and a language (there's discussion elsewhere on these forums re: having Caddo represent the Mississippians, which is probably a good historical guess).
What's distinctively Western and colonialist is the Lockean idea of land and property. That is to say, this argument:
The land is given to all mankind by God, so that mankind may prosper.
But if you are not plowing the land, cutting the trees, you are not really improving the land.
Therefore you are squandering God's gift. You're not really using the land in its best value.
Therefore you should give your land to people who will REALLY use it.
THAT kind of philosophy, either the more explicitly religious version ("this land is given to us by God") or the secular version (e.g. manifest destiny) is where a real split between indigenous Australians and Americans on one side and European settler-colonialists on the other comes in. So it's not to paint a romantic/Orientalist picture of the indigenous person "at one with nature" versus the wicked colonialist, but it's to see how the English, Lockean philosophy of landscape and technology in the 1700s was a particular kind of gasoline powering the dispossession of indigenous people and the clear-cutting of the New World.
We're still stuck with these ideas, too. Look at calls to "improve" property (or else have it repossessed), to make everything more productive. Optimized for outcome (defined in a limited way by the colonizer). Dare I say it - to increase yields.
