Doug sent us the following excerpts from David Harvey's work: >[from David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, pp. >188-191] > >...that they were and continue to be somehow "closer to nature" than we are >(even Guha, it seem to me, falls into this trap). <snip> >Luther Standing Bear prefaced the thoughts cited >above with the very political argument that "this land of the great plains >is claimed by the Lakota as their very own." Native-Americans may well have >strong claims to land rights, to the use of the landscape as a mnemonic >upon which to hand their sense of historical identity, but the creation of >an "ecologically conscious" rhetoric about a privileged relation to the >land to support them is, as we have already argued, an all-too-familiar and >dangerous practice. While I am sympathetic to David Harvey's pro-urban + anti-primitivist strain of thought (and distrustful of the rhetoric of the "noble savage"), does it really matter (to marxists as political activists, that is) whether Native Americans were ever or are really now "close to nature," "ecologically conscious," etc? What's wrong with Native Americans performing "Native Americans" if such performance helps them make a stronger claim to their land rights in a war of positions? Native Americans may well decide that under the present circumstances, benefits of this rhetoric far outweigh its dangers. In the past, abolitionists, in their agitation, appealed to and grounded their claims upon God, morality, natural rights, etc., mainly because those were powerful ideological resources that were available to them. The same can be said about "nature" for Native Americans: a useful political resource. Yoshie
