Environmental work on Turtle Island uses indigenous people as props, forwarding anti-indigenous scholarship – the investment of the 1ac forwards this rhetoric

Environmentalism and Indigenous Peoples Attention to relationship between peoples and lands is one of the coordinating worldviews common to many Indigenous peoples (Little Bear 2000). Th ese worldviews are nation and place specific, and Indigenous scholars continue to document theories, teachings, and land/water-based practices (Atleo 2010; Basso 1996; Borrows 1997; Fermentez 2013; Hill 2017; LaDuke 1999; McGregor 2004; Simpson 2014; Todd 2014; Whetung 2016) in ways that center sovereignty and relationships to land and water but that are not typically considered within the environmentalist canon. Tsimshian and Nuu-chah-nulth scholar Clifford Atleo argues that environmentalist ideas of preservation and conservation are incongruous with an Indigenous worldview (2010), as the logic of needing to protect the land from humans/oneself is nonsensical within Indigenous teachings and practice. Rather than highlight the differences in worldview, however, we want to stress that these are not ideas about the land existing in parallel. Nishnaabe scholar Madeline Whetung argues that “colonial land relations have settled over top of Indigenous landbased relations, not beside them” (2016: 11). These are layered ideas, with colonial ideas about land, place, and environment emerging on top with the effect of disappearing Indigenous intelligences. Environmentalism contributes to Indigenous erasure and dispossession by perpetuating colonial relationships to land. The mainstream environmental movement has also often used Indigenous people as props rather than engaging as partners. As early as the 1970s, mainstream environmentalist organizations aired ads featuring “the crying Indian” to promote antipollution campaigns (Krech 1999), deploying racialized images of Indigenous people as noble yet powerless victims of environmental degradation. This image of the “ecological Indian,” which simultaneously creates an equivalency of Indigenous peoples with nature and asserts Indigenous nonuse of it (Harkin and Lewis 2007), has been strategically taken up by environmentalists in providing an argument against contemporary Western industrial society and a romanticized view of the past (Nadasdy 2005; Willow 2009). It is within this same trope, however, that colonialism is made invisible and settlers can become the rightful stewards of the land. The “ecological Indian” can only exist in the absence of modern Indigenous people, since it harkens back to a time before the present, implying that Indigenous people and nature are both currently disappearing/disappeared (Ray 2013). Mainstream campaigns have also clashed directly with Indigenous people’s livelihoods, most notably in Canada in the case of the campaign against the seal hunt (Arnaquq-Baril 2016; Kitossa 2000). Understandably, Indigenous peoples have not taken up the frame environmentalism offered. Instead, Indigenous environmental work in Turtle Island has often taken place within sovereignty movements, where returning the land or managing extraction fits within a larger decolonial frame (LaDuke 1999; McGregor 2004; Varese 1996; Whetung 2016). Recent examples of this work include the mobilization around Standing Rock, an ongoing blockade at Unist’ot’en against oil exploration, and opposition to fracking at Elsipogtog First Nation. Indigenous communities are claiming their rights to refuse and rejecting bids for recognition by the settler colonial state. Instead, they are drawing on arguments rooted in sovereignty.