Status Updates From As Long as Grass Grows: The...

“effective partnerships with allies in the environmental movement will provide the best defense for the collective well-being of the environment and future generations of all Americans, Native and non-Native alike. In the long run, environmental justice for American Indians is environmental justice for everyone… and for the Earth herself.” (162)

“In the face of an intensifying climate change crises, relentless land development, and ongoing consolidation of power in the fossil fuel industry, it may well be that organizing around Native land rights holds the key to successfully transitioning from a fossil-fuel energy infrastructure to one based on sustainable energy." (149)

“Predominant among their settler culture frameworks are the pursuit of universal truth and personal edification... Non-Natives couldn’t comprehend that Native spiritual principles evolved over eons based on ancient relationships to place and was reflected in language and specific histories, and... primarily for the perpetuation of particular communities, not personal enlightenment.” (104)

“These tropes, rooted in policies of removal and segregation, she argues, led to to the ideal of an American ‘colonized Eden,’ a ‘controlled, managed garden’ form which colonized Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of colour were systematically excluded and which led to patterns of toxic waste dumping in communities of colour.” (100) (in Carolyn Merchan, “Shades of Darkness”)

“The idea of wilderness as conceived by preservationists and conservationists was a white-settler social construct. It imagined an in people’s, wild landscape as pristine, pure, and unspoiled... and reflected values that equated wilderness with whiteness and, after postbellum black urban migration, cities with darkness and depravity.” (100)

“At the core of tribal sovereignty is food sovereignty. This is significant because we know that our traditional foods are a pillar of our culture, and that they feed much more than our physical bodies; they feed our spirits… They are living links with our land and our legacy, helping us to remember who we are and where we come from” (88)

“Not all traditional knowledge, however, was completely devalued and abandoned; even when Native religious traditions (which invariably involved plants) were banned by the federal government, much of the knowledge went underground. The knowledge was often held within the purview of specific clans or families, and this includes the knowledge of plant medicine." (83)

Large-scale agriculture was unnecessary to the “Lushootseed people (today’s Muckleshoot and their relatives the Puyallup and Duwamish and others on the coast) [because they] survived on the abudance provided by the ocean, rivers, and forest and mountain plains.” (77)

"At the time of first contact, Native peoples in North America were using around two thousand types of plant-based foods, and it was this nutritional diversity that ensured physical vitality. Native North Americans were among the healthiest in the world... Such was not the case in Europe, where nutrition- and vitamin- deficiency-related diseases were commonplace.” (76)

"Adding another layer of specificity to an analysis of settler colonialism, settler industrialism refers to the ways settler societies inscribe themselves on top of Indigenous homelands by means of industrial processes, ‘from military technologies to large-scale mineral and fossil fuel extraction operations to sweeping landscape-transforming regimes of commodity agriculture.’” (75)

“If we understand settler colonialism as a genocidal structure, the health disparities (and virtually all the negative sociopolitical indicators that characterize the American Indian demographic) can clearly be linked as elements of environmental injustice.” (75)

"Our traditional foods are a pillar of our culture, and they feed much more than our physical bodies; they feed our spirits.” — Valerie Segrest, Muckleshoot Tribal Member, 2013 (73)

“The religiously based conquerer model extended to an ideology of human superiority over the natural world; it is an anthropocentric worldview in which the world is there for human taking, manipulation, and exploitation without regard for the consequences to either human or nonhuman life.” (57)

"To state it simply: if settler colonialism is environmental injustice and settler colonialism is a genocidal structure, then environmental justice as an analytic framework must be capable of acknowledging the extent to which historical and environmental disruption structures Native lives today and should factor in to the formation of EJ laws and policies.” (52)

Benevolent Supremacy: "But never has the federal government official acknowledged the term’ colonialism’ to describe the sociopolitical and legal structure that still governs the relationship between the US and Indigenous peoples. When the federal government does acknowledge its depredations, they are invariable sanitized as a simple ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘mistreatment’ consigned to a distance past.” (33)

“So, it is the interruption of the collective continuance of a people that disables their systems of responsibility, which are built upon place-based knowledge accumulated over eons.” (27)

Kyle Powys Whyte "refers to these interconnections as systems of responsibility. Based on his study of various Indigenous philosophies and how Indigenous people relate to land and the environment, Whyte notes that environmental injustice occurs when systems of responsibility between humans and the land are disrupted through the process of colonization:” (27)

“In Indigenous worldviews, there is no separation between people and the land, between people and other life forms, or between people and their ancient ancestors whose bones are infused in the land they inhabit and whose spirits permeate place.” (27)

"Indigenizing [environmental justice] by cantering Native issues means it should conform to principles outlined in decolonizing theories and Indigenous research methodologies, defined as ‘research by and for Indigenous peoples, using techniques and methods drawn from the traditions, and knowledges of those people.’” (26)

"In the US legal system, Native nationhood is expressed as federal recognition and the so-called government to government relationship. In other words, the State has become the sole determiner of Native nationhood, despite the longevity of a people and a community that have been tied to a place since time immemorial and their collective ongoing Indigenous identity.” (24)

"In settler colonialism, which is viewed not just as a historical event but also a structure designed to eliminate the Native via physical and political erasure, the purpose of political control and domination is to gain access to territory.” (24)