Deep Dive into Earth Diver: Reflections on Indigenous Activism
Scarsdale, NY
2020, Senior, Creative Writing
When the world was first created, legend says the entire earth was enveloped by a great, deep sea. The deep blue stretched infinitely far, long before any other beings began to inhabit the earth. Yet, as creatures began to develop from the ocean, they desired a dry place to call home.
Four animals—a duck, a bullfrog, a muskrat, and a turtle—sought a proper solution. Each brought forth their ideas to build their new haven, but their arguing voices grew by the day. Only Muskrat, despite being the smallest, conceived an answer: to balance the water with the earth. Morning and night, he gathered mud from the bottom of the sea and brought it to the surface, but while doing so, Muskrat passed away. Before dying, the “Earth Diver” managed to spread the mud on Turtle’s back, creating the foundation for the earth that humans now inhabit.
Indigenous folklore like the “Earth Diver” share themes of collaboration and balance, and this deep-found respect for the equilibrium of nature can be found throughout the world in various Indigenous cultures. Because of this awe and reverence for the earth’s natural resources, Indigenous people have emphasized cultural goals that are highly compatible with biodiversity conservation. Those are reflected in their own daily practices and efforts towards advocating for the protection of oceans.
In terms of environmentally friendly practices, Indigenous people have developed several. For example, the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest coast, implemented clam gardens, referred to as loxiwey in Kwak’wala. The project requires the excavation of large areas of sand and clears them out for sustainable clam production. This beach expansion is meticulously carried out, and harvesters never exceed the clams’ regeneration rate. Clams also hold cultural significance within Kwakwaka’wakw culture, where they are “regarded as having families and societies equivalent to those of humans, and with their own abilities and needs” (Deur et al 206).
Other tribes share similar methods of species management. The Kitasoo people, who inhabit the central coastal area of Canada, oversee species conservation by moving small crustaceans and other sea life to places where life has been depleted (Ban et al). Even outside of these specific practices, their entire culture is built around the sustainable use of marine resources: “the hereditary chieftainship, potlatch ceremonies, and the seasonal food and preservation cycle governed resource ownership and extraction” (Ban et al). The tribe avoids the depletion of natural resources by only taking what they need. They are one of many Indigenous peoples who incorporate conservation actions as part of their worldview.
Nevertheless, the long history of sustainable practices and cultural systems were quickly dismantled with the arrival of settlers perpetuating colonization, who eliminated key parts of Indigenous culture to gain free reign of the land. Thus, the previously prominent Indigenous management of the oceans and other resources have declined, contributing to the environmental degradation that is continuing today. The to-and-fro of these adverse effects inevitably place the Indigenous tribes in a “socio-ecological trap,” which refers to situations where “feedback between social and ecological systems lead toward an undesirable state that may be difficult or impossible to reverse” (Cinner 2011).
The trap evidently affects both Indigenous cultures and marine health. Even in terms of fishing, Indigenous management is key to regulating and overseeing sustainable fishing practices, like fish traps and weirs. After the government allowed modern industrial-scale fishing while prohibiting long-standing Indigenous practices, the ocean saw a stark decrease in marine species after permitting people to take more than what the ocean could naturally replenish. In comparison to 1918, when Indigenous tribes still had stewardship over the area, the Yelloweye Rockfish populations in recent years experienced decreases in both size and abundance, dropping to just 18% of the 1918 levels. Other key species of importance, like salmon, eulachon, herring, halibut, and abalone, have faced similar declines in biomass (Eckert et al).
From a quantitative standpoint, global statistics prove that Indigenous people are more effective conservationists. According to a UN report released in the past year, “about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions.” Within areas held or managed by Indigenous peoples, however, these trends have been much less severe, or even actually avoided (UN).
It is definitely fortunate that ocean conservation has become more of a mainstream concern. However, even if our efforts to “Save the Turtles!” and abolish plastic straws have slowed the destruction of this aquatic biome, it is clear that the general population still has much to learn from Indigenous knowledge. We risk framing our arguments around “generalized human mismanagement of the Earth’s natural resources,” rather than around fixing our flawed perspective on our resources (Bacon 3). Instead of solving the root cause of the issue—our callous disrespect for the environment—we may just slap a Band-aid on the festering wound that is our oceans’ deterioration.
That does not mean that all hope is lost, however—we can still escape these traps. But in order to escape these traps, we have to address the negative feedback coming from both the social and ecological systems. Approaching this by first correcting our own epistemology, we should begin by educating ourselves on Indigenous culture and by bringing their voices and protests to the forefront of the movement (Ballantyne). Today, there are many Indigenous groups and tribes trying to raise awareness about ocean conservation and resist against the effects of colonial oppression. One tribe, the Xiai’xais, are currently protesting to obtain the legal recognition of their authority over their own territory. Additionally, they use their own Indigenous laws to close bays to fishers and risk becoming arrested to enforce those laws (Frid et al). There also are intertribal alliances that also focus on promoting these issues, like the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance, fostering strong unified relationships between local tribes in the region.
By acting as supportive allies for our Indigenous peers in their fight to gain governmental recognition of their stewardship over their tribal lands, we can begin to decolonize the ocean conservation movement. Even if the process of learning and listening to our Indigenous neighbors might be an arduous one, it could be key to allowing for ethnoecological restoration and the revitalization of the environment. We do not necessarily have to look for brand-new or flashy solutions to our problematic mindset, as long as we listen to the solutions that we do have already.
Within the “Earth Diver” legend, even if the muskrat was the clear hero of the story, the actions of all the animals still are significant: they represent the Native American belief that all living beings always come together in the ever-evolving act of life. Everything has a part to play in this equilibrium, and thus, they all deserve respect.
These words are ones that our society as a whole would do well to heed: “The spiritual wisdom… has taught generations that the waters of creation are the waters that still flow and surge on earth and are the nexus connecting not only people to people and people to Mother Earth, but as well the present time to the sacred past, the infinite return to the Great Spirit.” (Josephine Mandamin of the Anishinabe tribe)
Works Cited
Ballantyne, Erin Freeland. “Dechinta Bush University: Mobilizing a Knowledge Economy of Reciprocity, Resurgence and Decolonization.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2014, jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22238.
Ban, Natalie C, et al. “Historical and Contemporary Indigenous Marine Conservation Strategies in the North Pacific.” Conservation Biology: the Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, John Wiley and Sons Inc., Feb. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7027820/.
Bacon, J. M. (2018). Settler colonialism as eco-social structure and the production of colonial ecological violence. Environmental Sociology, 1–11. doi:10.1080/23251042.2018.1474725
Cinner, Joshua. “Social-Ecological Traps in Reef Fisheries.” Redirecting, Aug. 2011, dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.gloenvcha.2011.04.012.
Deur, Douglas, et al. “Kwakwaka’wakw ‘Clam Gardens’: Motive and Agency in Traditional Northwest Coast Mariculture.” Human Ecology, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 201–212., www.jstor.org/stable/24762795. Accessed 16 June 2020.
Eckert, Lauren, et al. “Linking Marine Conservation and Indigenous Cultural Revitalization: First Nations Free Themselves from Externally Imposed Social-Ecological Traps.” Ecology and Society, 2018, ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss4/art23/ES-2018-10417.pdf.
Frid, Alejandro, et al. “Rapid Recovery of Dungeness Crab within Spatial Fishery Closures Declared under Indigenous Law in British Columbia.” Global Ecology and Conservation, Elsevier, 23 Feb. 2016, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198941630004X.
Greeley, June-Ann. “Water in Native American Spirituality: Liquid Life—Blood of the Earth and Life of the Community.” Digital Commons, Sacred Heart University, 2017, digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1124&context=rel_fac.
Mathews, D. L., & Turner, N. J. (2017). Ocean Cultures. Conservation for the Anthropocene Ocean, 169–206. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-805375-1.00009-x
Reflection
Reflection
While observing the ocean conservation movement grow on social media through teenagers showing off clear plastic-beaded bracelets and touting their collapsible metal straws to “#SaveTheTurtles,” I began to feel disconnected. My own experiences with ocean pollution were limited to insignificant encounters, or so I thought, like tripping over a plastic water bottle at the beach. It never occurred to me to consider my own relationship with the ocean until I wondered why I supported the movement. However, as I came across Indigenous protests for ocean conservation, I had to pause. These movements held a dimension that I never considered before: the Indigenous people are motivated to resist out of their cultural respect for the water, rather than just because of the harmful impact of a polluted ocean. As I wrote this article, I realized I wanted to learn more, and I tumbled down a rabbit-hole of research, following the works cited in articles that I read. In doing so, I discovered a deeper, more relatable cause for me to fight for that wasn’t based just on random statistics I found on social media. As Indigenous voices in general are being heard more often, I hope that we can learn to recognize the intersections between the social justice movements and the eco-justice movements, and create a coalition to promote a stronger resistance to both of these issues. To do so, however, we must take initiative and spread awareness of ways to act in solidarity with our Indigenous peers.