Natives, Locals, and “Others”

Ursula Heise emphasizes the importance of being familiar with one’s local environment and reconnecting to local places in an attempt to defy the sense of alienation from nature generated by the modern way of living. The sense of estrangement from one's surrounding feeds this alienation and the ability to connect not only to the local environment, but to the ecological systems in which humans’ actions and decisions are both affected by the environment and affect the surroundings. Heise values the vision of global ecology that manifests itself in the “willingness to emerge physically and psychologically with the environment so as to communicate with it,” a notion that parallels Osden’s experience in “Vaster than Empires.” Osden became part of the environment he intended to study and finally understood the “underlying planetary connectedness” of the ecosystem (18).

This merging of the individual with the surroundings is echoed in bell hooks’ “Touching the Earth,” in which she suggests that the struggle of African Americans stems from their distance from the land. For hooks, restoring this relationship with the land facilities the African American self-recovery from the white man’s racism. Since there is a correlation between environmental matters and different forms of oppression, hooks believes that the farther African Americans are from nature, the more racism and oppression they face. The bond that African Americans and Native Americans have with the land goes beyond the boundaries of the physical to establish a kind of camaraderie with natural elements. hooks quotes Chief Seattle’s reflection on this bond:



“We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man— all belong to the same family” (105).

Unlike the Native Americans and African Americans, the white man (the representative of industrial capitalism) doesn’t understand the connection and the “infusion” that the natives have with the land. The surrounding natural elements are far from being the white man’s brothers and sisters, and his pragmatic perception of the land blinds him from appreciating the underlying planetary connectedness. In a sense, the white man’s sense of superiority makes him feel entitled to disrupt the ecological harmony.



hooks suggests that the African American internalization of white racist assumptions are caused by the estrangement from the land and their migration from the south, where the connection to the land is deep, to the industrialized north, where the white man controls the land and the mind/body split takes place. And because of this mind/body split that the African American experienced, their bodies were abused. She writes, “Living close to nature, black folks were able to cultivate a spirit of wonder and reverence for life. Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul, they were able to make a connection with the earth that was ongoing and life-affirming” (105). This realization led her to start her own garden so as to feel connected to her ancestors who were self-sufficient, “work[ing] with the body to feed the body” (107). Renewing her connection to nature allows hooks to experience and preserve her racial identity and appreciate the historic relationship that her ancestors had with the land.

In Storyteller, Leslie Silko suggests that the white man and the natives perceive the land differently. The narrator describes the unsuccessful attempts of white men (the Gussucks) to penetrate the ice with their heavy machinery and their helplessness in confronting the spirit of Native Americans represented by the land and the people. Silko crafts a harmonious relationship between the land and the people, a relationship the white man doesn’t understand. Unlike the white man, the native is one with the land. Silko emphasizes the “boundaryless” relationship between all natural elements including the physical bodies of natives:



“The tundra rose up behind the rover but all boundaries between the river and hills and sky were lost in the destiny of the pale ice” (18).

And

“The wolf pelts were creamy colored and silver, almost white in some places, and when the old lady had walked across the tundra in the winter, she was invisible in the snow” (21).

Going along with Heise’s global vision that embraces a “complex formal framework able to accommodate social and cultural multiplicity,” (20) the white man and the native can live together in nature harmoniously if the white man abandons his industrial, colonial agenda and becomes, like the Native American, just another element of nature. Momaday reiterates the same theme in “A First American Views His Land.” In his racial memory, Momaday secures the land and celebrates the sacred trust he and his ancestors have with it. The relationship that Native Americans have with the land encompasses both the spiritual and the moral dimensions. For him, language and imagination derive from the land and remain faithful to it.