Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit, and the Idea of Wilderness

Joy Porter's nuanced and lucid volume Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit, and the Idea of Wilderness joins texts such as Jace Weaver's Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (1996), Winona LaDuke's All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999), and Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis's Native Americans and the Environment (2007) in examining the often fraught place of Native American peoples and cultures within American environmental thought. Writing against stereotypical representations of Native Americans as “natural” environmentalists and adherents to a simple nature-based spirituality, Porter asks readers to examine the complex relationships among colonial history, environmental degradation, cultural belief systems, and the American land. Porter has divided her slim volume into eight chapters that cover topics ranging from gardening to art and literature, from the environmental justice movement to blood quantum debates, from colonial violence to contemporary film, cogently demonstrating how they are all intertwined and must be accounted for together in order for the picture to be complete. With an emphasis on Indigenous spirituality, Porter compellingly argues for the necessity of “bring[ing] Indian concerns and Indian thinking out of comparative intellectual isolation and into direct relationship with some of the things that matter most to everyone today—how to maintain life on earth, how to manage nuclear energy and toxic risk, and how to grow as a species through understanding ourselves and our history” (xx).