The imperialist roots of federal Indian law present daunting obstacles to justice for American Indians. If American Indians are to experience real en… - Dina Gilio-Whitaker

White liberal environmentalists are who I write to. They are ultimately my audience because they need to understand historical context, and then once they do, this context can re-shape their projects and how they work.

What is it going to take to build a system that affirms life for everyone that’s not built on the death of other people and the death of the environment and other species? This is what’s being asked of us and it means we all have to look at whatever privilege we have and who sacrificed for that.

Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important. Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes.