Borrowing the Earth: Postcolonial Ecologies

Abstract

‘We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.’ This widely quoted Native American proverb embodies an epistemology that resonates with contemporary ecological thinking, bridging the gap between the world-view of the pre-Conquest inhabitants of the Americas and those forms of postcolonial praxis that challenge unsustainable versions of ‘progress’. In the face of climate change, the mining and burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, hydro-electric projects that have inundated vast swathes of land, and the threats to endangered animal species and botanical biodiversity posed by anthropocentrism, it should perhaps seem self-evident that the instinctive respect for the environment that has traditionally characterized the beliefs of the vast majority of Indigenous peoples offers a superior wisdom. Yet practices that were once unquestioned in their cultures now find themselves in conflict with majoritarian national and global interests and any idea of putting the clock back to the imagined ‘purity’ of a pre-colonial past is an idealized fantasy. Nevertheless, discourses of the past remain an invaluable source for Native authors, along with many other writers from societies affected by colonialism, whether historically or in the contemporary world; they function as a font from which they can draw to evolve new narrative strategies that will help them to combat the attenuation of their culture in the fissured and ever-changing present and to protect the environment for future generations to inherit.