Mahtowin Munro is one of the leaders of United American Indians of New England (UAINE), an organization of Native Americans fighting for indigenous rights and against various forms of ongoing indigenous genocide. Some of Munro’s activism with the UAINE includes working for the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and organizing the National Day of Mourning. This talk, “Sinking Columbus and the Mayflower: Indigenous Struggles, Decolonization, and the Necessity of Solidarity,” was part of the larger series “Global Racism, State Violence and Activism,” organized by Tufts’ department of Anthropology, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Race Colonialism and Diaspora. Amongst the dozens of insightful pieces of knowledge Mahtowin Munro gave during her talk, one of the most interesting points was the link between the forces that perpetuate settler colonialism and those fueling climate destruction. Munro made sure to emphasize the importance of recognizing indigenous resistance as unequivocally necessary to protect our planet.

As Munro highlighted throughout her talk, one of the principles of settler colonialism is the proliferation of capitalism and commodification of living things. Both settler colonialism and capitalism are ongoing processes- the never-ending pursuits of domination or wealth. Both are achieved through the control of bodies, land, and living beings and are based on commodifying people and our planet. Instead of being a living, independent entity, land is turned into property: something to sell and trade, and something from which to extract resources. Instead of being valued equally to white people, indigenous bodies are dehumanized, viewed as barriers to wealth accumulation and in turn disposable, removable, and unimportant. Women and two-spirit bodies, especially, are seen as objects to be used as colonists desire, inherently rapeable in their eyes, as Munro said. This attempted commodification of living beings is central to capitalism, which sees everything in terms of only the wealth it can give to individuals and which underpins settler colonialism. However, it is important to note that capitalism and colonialism attempt to commodify bodies and nature, but indigenous people have always resisted, and it really is impossible to reduce these entities to mere commodities.

Just like settler colonialism, climate change is in part perpetuated by a reduction in the value of land, water and living beings into sources of just wealth and resource extraction. The environment loses the value that it inherently has, instead being seen as a source of production, not a valuable entity itself. Colonists and capitalists exploit the planet to no end, valuing wealth accumulation for individuals over the well-being of the planet for whole communities. Land is so much more than just a physical part of the planet, though. It is a source of life and future, as well as the underpinnings of cultures and ways of life. In Nick Estes’ book Our History is the Future, he chronicles the history of indigenous resistance for environmental justice, more specifically focusing on Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline. At one point, he writes “the protestors called themselves Water Protectors because they weren’t simply against a pipeline; they also stood for something greater: the continuation of life on a planet ravaged by capitalism” (Estes 2010, 15). Water and land are life, and capitalism and colonialism are so destructive because in dominating and manipulating land and water, they threaten everything that is based upon those two entities.

Capitalism and colonialism’s view on land and humans’ relationship with the earth is fundamentally opposed to that of many indigenous communities, as seen in Lisa Brooks and Cassandra Brook’s analysis of the Wabanaki people and their relationship with the Presumpscot River in present-day Massachusetts. As they explain, the Wabanaki people’s relationship with the environment is based on traditional ecological knowledge – “knowledge that humans gain when they share an intimate relationship with a particular environment” (Brooks and Brooks 2010, 14). This knowledge is founded on a long-standing reciprocal relationship with a place and the understanding that they belong to the river, they do not own or control it. Nick Estes similarly writes of the Missouri River, “nothing owns her, and therefore she cannot be sold or alienated like a piece of property” (Estes 2019, 15). The honor of “belonging” to a place comes with “a set of responsibilities in a reciprocal, distributive economy” (Brooks 2010, 15). As Brooks and Brooks explain as well, Wabanaki people know they cannot overexploit the river, for it would lead to severe consequences to the well-being of the environment and the people who depend on it. (Brooks and Brooks 2010, 14). The opposing view that capitalist and colonist structures have – that humans can dominate and exploit the environment- is what leads to destruction versus coexistence. Returning to the understanding of land of, for example, the Wabanaki or the Sioux nations mentioned in Estes’ book, serves to both protect Native Americans and their ways of life as well as protect the planet, ideas that Munro emphasized, though not referring to these specific nations. 

Despite all the ongoing forms of structural genocide, Munro made sure to highlight how just like settler colonialism is ongoing and never ending, so is indigenous resistance. Like her organization, UAINE, indigenous people continue to fight colonialism every day. Unlike dominant narratives of extinct Native Americans or rhetorical “lastings” of their presence in different regions (the declaration of the “last” in a line of Native artists for example), indigenous people are still fighting for their homelands, survival and ways of life. As Estes writes in his book, “if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot possibly understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empires” (Estes 2019, 131). Despite the fact that settler colonialism is still embedded into our society and institutions, indigenous resistance has also never stopped fighting against those systems. Munro articulates the importance of recognizing the work indigenous people are doing and including them in the fight for environmental justice, as well as women’s rights and other issues that inherently intersect with decolonization and indigenous liberation.

Bibliography

Brooks, Lisa T, and Cassandra Brooks. “The Reciprocity Principle and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 3, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 11–28. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v3i2.49.

Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London ; New York: Verso, 2019.