Replacing Rights with Indigenous Relationality to Reclaim Homelands

Abstract

Indigenous peoples have had and continue to have contested relations with protected spaces of nature, many of which nation states have carved from Indigenous homelands and waters. Usually in the name of the common good, governments and their officials prohibit or limit Native peoples from exercising their rights in these spaces. This gives rise to conflicts and tensions that emerge from a Western rights framework that white settlers and elites have used to prioritize the rights of nature over Indigenous peoples. This chapter seeks to provide some historical context for the way that three problematic and closely related “white-settler social constructs”—wilderness, preservation, and the ecological Indian—came to shape the emergence and management of protected spaces of nature, particularly under a Western rights framework. Overall, the chapter argues that a relationality framework offers an Indigenous-based counterpoint to the rights framework, in which white settlers and elites privilege the rights of nature over those of Native peoples.