Description
As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a member of Colville Confederated Tribes, explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle or Indigenous environmental justice. As Long As Grass Grows is an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, Dina Gilio-Whitaker argues that modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future. The table of contents are: Author’s Note, Introduction: The Standing Rock Saga; Chapter 1: Environmental Justice Theory and Its Limitations for Indigenous Peoples; Chapter 2: Genocide by Any Other Name - A History of Indigenous Environmental Injustice; Chapter 3: The Complicated Legacy of Western Expansion and the Industrial Revolution; Chapter 4: Food Is Medicine, Water Is Life - American Indian Health and the Environment; Chapter 5: (Not So) Strange Bedfellows - Indian Country’s Ambivalent Relationship with the Environmental Movement; Chapter 6: Hearts Not on the Ground - Indigenous Women’s Leadership and More Cultural Clashes; Chapter 7: Sacred Sites and Environmental Justice; Chapter 8: Ways Forward for Environmental Justice in Indian Country. Acknowledgments, Notes, Selected Bibliography, and an Index completes this work.