gly’s Reviews > As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock > Status Update

“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)