As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Beacon Press. 224 pages.
If you’re a white person who didn’t grow up on the edge of an Indian reservation, like I did, you might not pick up As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. If you weren’t brought up eating fry bread and going to powwows, if you didn’t listen to a drum circle at the graduation ceremony of every senior class, you might wonder why—in a country where American Indians now comprise just 1.3 percent of the population—you even should.
“It’s super obscure,” someone told me after reading a years-in-the-making piece I’d written about the Menominee tribe, on whose ancestral land, in what’s now northeast Wisconsin, I was raised. Alarmed, I fought the urge to argue. Next time, I’ll just hand over this book.
What Gilio-Whitaker contends in this slim, accessible volume is that, in fact, Americans cannot separate our most pressing crises—the criminalization of migrants, the policing of communities of color, the escalation of climate change—from our nation’s original sin.
In the United States, she writes, “Slavery and capitalism are the two cornerstones made possible by colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands.”
The book takes us first to the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, outlining in stark detail one of the clearest modern examples of environmental racism. Then Gilio-Whitaker steps back in time, showing us how what happened in North Dakota in 2016 is a direct extension of America’s colonial history—making the robust case that it’s not really history at all. Well-known examples of our atrocities, like the Trail of Tears, are contextualized among the extensive web of forced removals of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands that criss-crosses this country.
Importantly, Gilio-Whitaker, herself a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes and a scholar of American Indian studies, roots her arguments in indigenous wisdom.
“The very thing that distinguishes Indigenous peoples from settler societies is their unbroken connection to ancestral homelands,” she writes. “Their cultures and identities are linked to their original places in ways that define them.”
As I was told during my own reporting, “Menominees believe generally that man is part of the land. The rest of society believes man owns the land.”
The forced removal of people whose knowledge of their ancestral territory spans millennia, Gilio-Whitaker says, has had disastrous consequences not just for them but everyone else, too. Throughout this book, the author draws on the work of her fellow indigenous academics to make this point.
For instance, she cites the work of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, who writes that “environmental injustice occurs when systems of responsibility between humans and the land are disrupted throughout the process of colonization.”
Here we find the root of American society’s own disconnection from nature. Given the logic of colonialism, of violently divesting the dominant culture from worldviews that value the land and human life as one, is it any wonder we now face the existential threat of climate change?
Likewise, once you’ve read the author reframe the dam and railroad construction of Western expansion lore as efforts that advanced the project of Indian removal, it is no surprise that America is building a border wall to keep other indigenous peoples and their descendants out.
Central to the book is Gilio-Whitaker’s effort to imagine what environmental justice might look like for American Indians. It’s a tricky question because, as she notes, indigenous peoples most often experience Western law as “an enforcer of oppression.” She traces the establishment of policies attempting consideration for tribes within the Environmental Protection Agency that have had, at best, limited success. The EPA, after all, is an agency of the colonizing State.
In the end, the author identifies multiple strategies: creative organizing, forming community partnerships, working at all levels of government to push policy that prioritizes tribal sovereignty. But ultimately, she argues, there must be dialogue, and action, toward decolonization, for everyone’s sake: “Decolonizing the colonizers is necessary so that they can once again learn how to respect themselves and others.”
There is no more urgent prescription for America than this. After all, Gilio-Whitaker writes in her author’s note, “we’re all on the reservation now.”