In American history books, Indigenous stories are often ignored. When Indigenous people are occasionally included in American literature and academia, they are repeatedly simplified. Rather than representing Native and First Nations people as the complex, sovereign nations that they are, White American education instills in its pupils preconceptions of Native people as ‘ecologically noble’. I grew up learning about Indigenous people as masters of the land; they were characterized as very simple and lacking societal hierarchies, complexity, and structure. Over the past few weeks in HumCore, Professor Imada has challenged these assumptions, illuminating the many harmful effects of Western oversimplification of Indigenous nations. Her lectures and our discussions in class prompted me to connect these themes and topics to a broader movement that I’ve been following on social media: The Land Back Movement.

Professor Imada introduced us to the work of Paul Nadasdy; his essay Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism served as a basis for Professor Imada’s lectures. Nadasdy wrote that the concept of the so-called “ecologically noble Savage” (coined by Kent Redford) is rooted in colonialism and white supremacy, rather than truth. Non-Indigenous white people are quick to associate Indigenous people and practices with so-called ‘environmentalism’ since they have been so successful in living off their land. What Nadasdy is arguing, then, is that terms such as ‘environmentalist’ are Euro-American terms that are projected onto Indigenous people, creating an impossible standard of environmentalism for them to live up to. Subsequently, when Indigenous people engage in traditional practices such as whaling or hunting, non-Indigneous people scrutinize them for being ‘traitors’ that have failed to live up to white American fantasies of how Native people ‘should’ behave.