Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide?: Radical Environmentalism's Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
✍ Scribed by Bron Taylor
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 361 KB
- Volume
- 27
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-721X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The appropriation by non-Indians of Native American religious practices has become a highly contentious phenomenon. The present analysis focuses on the controversy as it has unfolded within the 'Deep Ecology' or 'Radical Environmental' Movement in North America. Taking as its central case study Earth First!, the radical vanguard of this movement, it describes the diverse forms such borrowing takes, the plural American indian and non-indian views shaping the ensuing controversy, and the threats this controversy poses to a nascent and fragile Indigenous-Environmentalist alliance. Concluding reflections address the ethics of appropriation with the aim of reducing the tensions attending these phenomena.
1997 Academic Press Limited
The problem is one of cultural appropriation. Eurocentric intellectuals habitually take the knowledge of indigenous peoples and incorporate it into their own thinking, usually without attribution. In the process they tend to deform it beyond recognition, bending it to suit their own social, economic and political objectives. Unfortunately, this has, with very few exceptions, proven to be as true of professed 'allies' of native people as it has of their avowed enemies. M. Annette Jaimes, Alfred University.