The Noble Savage in the Skyscraper
What the public freak out over a tribe’s high rise development says about the politics of traditional ecological knowledge
Unlike other national parks, the establishment of Yosemite didn’t result in the eviction of local native people, at least not immediately. The Miwok stayed put, and even participated in regular “Field Days” that showcased their crafts and practices. As the decades passed, however, they became increasingly unwelcome. Rule changes eventually limited living in the park to full-time park employees. By the 1960s, the park service burned the last native cabin to the ground and forever expelled Native Americans from Yosemite.
The Miwok’s experience isn’t unique. The establishment of natural protection areas around the globe has entailed the eviction of who we now call indigenous peoples. Books such as Mark Dowie’s Conservation Refugees and Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature provide insightful and often heart-breaking examples of people being chased off the land in the name of the environment. They both show how science has been used to cast rural peoples as inherently backwards and ecologically ignorant.
That practice continues to this day. The Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya have been waging a political battle against these nations’ respective governments for decades. Public officials seem intent on getting the traditional pastoralists off of the lands that they have already or intend to set aside for environmental conservation.
Among those who see themselves as both politically enlightened and ecologically conscious, the going thesis is that indigenous evictions were driven by an underappreciation of these peoples’ actually existing natural know how. Agnes Kalibata, a special envoy to the United Nations, argues that “indigenous peoples…preserve 80 per cent of the [world’s] remaining biodiversity,” a claim that has become cliché in conservation science and politics. Rural people have been transformed from ecological intruders into the planet’s guardians. They can and should have a leading role in protecting the environment, by dint of their unique possession of “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” A politico-scientific arrangement that for so long undermined indigenous sovereignty has finally been put to rest, or so it would seem.
OLIMBYs: Only Longhouses in My Backyard
A proposal for squeezing thousands of apartments into a ten-acre parcel smack dab in the middle of a sprawling suburban neighborhood would be controversial in most North American jurisdictions. What makes opposition to the Sen̓áḵw development noteworthy is that the opponents are largely white, affluent suburbanites, while the developers belong to the Squamish First Nation.
It took decades of court battles for a parcel that once supported cedar longhouses to be returned to the Squamish. But local residents were aghast that the group’s plans for the land seems to look more to the 21st century than the 16th. At public hearings, some of them apparently felt no qualms about trying to leverage ideas about indigeneity against, well, an indigenous group. One woman argued that a late chief would have seen Sen̓áḵw as a “monstrous development on sacred land.” Others wondered aloud how high rises could be compatible with “Indigenous ways of building.”
Some conservatives will want to paint the situation as emblematic of how leftists’ political relationship with minority groups sometimes seems more opportunistic than genuine. I’ve felt uncomfortable myself with my experiences at recent academic conferences, where experts in Traditional Ecological Knowledge deliver keynote addresses that seem only to cater to the leftist politics of everyone in the room. But that is itself a shallow and opportunistic response. The underlying problem is more deeply rooted in the belief that it is knowledge per se that legitimates political decisions.
What Rural and Traditional Peoples Know
Chelsey Geralda Armstong, an ethnobiologist at Simon Fraser University, began researching the ecology of the British Columbian coast upon invitation from a local First Nation’s elder. They wanted to know why hazelnut trees grew where their ancestors once lived, far from the tree’s normal habitat. Her team’s research uncovered that First Nations’ people in the region used to tend to “forest gardens,” patches of silvoculture that not only supplied them with food but increased the vibrancy of the local environment. In former forest gardens, the biodiversity of pollinators, plants, and other species remained higher than the surrounding conifer forest.
There are a lot of cases like this, examples where listening to local people advanced science. Sometimes researchers have had their preconceptions challenged and overturned by paying attention to traditional ecological knowledge. Collaboration with Inuit groups, for instance, showed that conservationists’ methods for counting and modeling bowhead whale and caribou populations were deficient, that populations for both species were more sustainable that they first appeared. People who dwell in places and whose lifeways require a careful understanding of the environment know a lot about local ecologies, even if that knowledge isn’t formalized in mathematical models.
Yet, just like other forms of know-how, Traditional Ecological Knowledge isn’t infallible. And indigenous people, like the rest of us, make mistakes. As Shepard Krech surveys in Myth of the Ecological Indian, native groups hailing from what we now call the American plains often did not act in sustainable ways. Whole herds of buffalo would get run off cliffs, and only the best meat would be taken, with the rest left to rot in the sun. Some tribes believed that game animals emerged spontaneously out of the ground, and in unlimited numbers. Even groups with an understanding of ecological limitations would still occasionally overhunt local species.
And even then, the implicit assumption often seems to be that following traditional ecological knowledge automatically implies a life of non-technological harmony with the natural world. That view is challenged not just by the case of Sen̓áḵw but by simply witnessing the diversity of ways in which indigenous groups actually dwell on the Earth today. Reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia, for instance, are happy to continue their traditional calling with the aid of GPS and snowmobiles.
The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania are as likely to be imperiled as helped by notions of indigeneity and traditional knowledge. They admit themselves that they migrated to their current lands hundreds of years ago, and others can dispute whether their pastoralist lifestyle is really “traditionally ecological” enough for the demands of 21st century conservation.
Even worse, the equation of indigenous living with an image of bucolic, natural harmony can easily become a set of chains. For instance, Adivasis in India have been prevented from chopping down local trees, something that they want to do in order to prevent the incursion of elephants into their villages. But that kind of environmental management would run afoul of laws established with the explicit aim of preserving their indigenous lifeways. Policies rooted in romantic ideals of indigeneity can result in what Anthropologist Alpa Shah calls “eco-incarceration.”
Traditional Ecological Knowledge, like science itself, can get mythologized, turned into something authoritative and ostensibly indisputable. Just as scientific models get transformed into environmental prophecy, indigenous knowledge can become another rhetorical tool to try and quash dissent. Just as science seemed to justify indigenous people’s eviction, ideas of indigenous knowledge can be used to try to make one vision for protecting nature, a seemingly commonsensical understanding indigenous living, or single family zoning appear beyond dispute. But its alluring power is really a trap. It makes the politics of indigenous land disputes no less fraught or imbalanced than it was before.
From Knowledge to Politics
As I have pointed out in previous posts, contemporary politics is often made pathological by the insistence that all we have to do is “follow the science.” The preoccupation with knowledge, with the idea that it can unequivocally tell us the right thing to do, blinds us to what actually drives political conflict. They are, at heart, conflicts about how to live, about what matters to us, and about what makes for a good society.
White Vancouver suburbanites invoking indigenous ways of being in the effort to stop a tribe from building on their land is really no different from when similarly positioned people called upon environmental research to do the same a century ago. The problem isn’t so much a lack of respect for different forms of knowledge than the respect for the people who happen to want something different from the world than they do.
Rural peoples were evicted, because they weren’t treated as fellow citizens. They weren’t thought of as people who deserved the political right to co-determine the laws and regulations that would dictate their lives. Perhaps 19th century environmental administrators might have found some knowledge consensus with indigenous groups—had they looked. Maybe their understandings of how to best steward nature might have fortuitously coincided. But I think that hope is both naïve and, ultimately, at odds with democracy. They would have been far better off had the governing structure forced them to hammer out compromises over how to use the land despite having different knowledge, beliefs, and interests.
It ultimately doesn’t matter if Vancouverites in the neighborhoods surrounding Sen̓áḵw agree with the Squamish First Nation’s evolving ideas about what 21st century indigenous living looks like. Traditional ecological knowledge is as insufficient for telling us exactly how we to ought to live as science is. Oral traditions and models alike can support a wide range of stories about what the future should be.
The tragedy that I see in the case of Sen̓áḵw is not that the Squamish chose high-rises over longhouses, but that the distraction of knowledge-driven politics prevented the two sides from arriving at more mutually beneficial compromises. Perhaps a transition zone, either within the development or just outside of it, could have lessened the stark shift from bucolic suburbia to eco-modern skyscrapers. Regardless of whether mutual concessions could have been possible and what they would have looked like, the fact that the conflict became just another NIMBY dispute is a sign of how far we have yet to go in realizing both a more functional democracy and in genuinely extending political respect to indigenous groups.
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