For generations, Indigenous Peoples have identified that our well being is intertwined with the well being of our earth. Their worldview acknowledges that being wholesome means making certain the pure sources that give us life are properly cared for.
In distinction, Western mindsets are inclined to view the pure world as a listing of helpful commodities—separate from, and current solely in service to, humanity. Overusing, polluting, and extracting with out contemplating the long-term impacts has created situations that gasoline well being inequities in our nation: contaminated consuming water, food scarcity, air pollution, and extreme heat are contributing to poor well being and driving up illness, notably in low-income neighborhoods and communities of colour.
Remodeling our relationship with nature is vital to constructing a sustainable, equitable, and wholesome future for all. By the forcible elimination, violence, oppression, and different injustices Indigenous Peoples have skilled, they’ve remained highly effective stewards for a lot of of our pure sources. Their values, practices, and insurance policies can present us the best way to heal and reclaim the well being of our earth and humanity.
Listed below are just a few examples of Indigenous management in apply:
Tó éí ííńá át’é. Within the Navajo language, which means water is life. As sacred as Earth, fireplace, and air, the ingredient can’t be taken without any consideration on the Navajo Nation lands in northwest New Mexico, the place one-third of the tribe lacks working water at residence.
A extreme underinvestment in infrastructure within the Navajo nation—pushed by structural racism—and mismanagement of the Colorado river by government agencies has left the Navajo Nation confronting main water useful resource issues. Cindy Howe, undertaking supervisor on the Navajo Water Project, helps to catalyze therapeutic by addressing the quick want to extend entry to water with the DIGDEEP water system—plumbing that attracts on a buried 1,200-gallon tank powered by photo voltaic panels to supply for a household’s primary wants.
“My hope is that sooner or later the properties of each Navajo individual might be hooked as much as a water system, with indoor plumbing, a very nice bathe, a commode, and a sink,” says Howe. “That’s what I want for my tribe and certainly for all in America.”
Horses have lengthy been integral to Native cultures, a supply of each abundance and non secular connection. Indigenous Peoples have many stories to inform about how horses entered their lives and a wealthy custom of artwork that honors the animal as a fellow creature of the Earth. For Charlie 4 Bear, an elder on the Fort Peck Indian reservation in Montana, horses additionally grew to become a method to attain younger individuals who felt disconnected from their roots: a sense many Native younger individuals share because of our nation’s colonial historical past and assimilation insurance policies which have led to the erasure of Indigenous tradition.
His Youth Mentor Equine Program helped to rekindle a way of id because it taught girls and boys the best way to forge a relationship with horses. Sadly, Charlie 4 Bear handed away in 2017, on the age of 59, however his efforts stay an inspiration. A narrative in Take Us to a Better Place, an RWJF-developed assortment of fiction that encourages dialogue a couple of Tradition of Well being, attracts on his work.
Dams, diversion strategies, and allotments for crops and electrical energy that deal with water as a commodity somewhat than an ancestral reward are doing nice harm to the nation’s rivers. Coupled with rising temperatures and drought, tributaries in Arizona that have been as soon as perennial sources of a life-sustaining elixir now move intermittently and headwaters are working dry.
New Zealand is displaying how issues may be achieved in another way, because of laws championed by the Māori peoples and handed by parliament. By these efforts, the Whanganui River was granted “personhood,” recognizing its proper to be wholesome and shielded from hurt. In 2020, tribal leaders from Arizona travelled to New Zealand to immerse themselves within the tradition and customs of their Indigenous kinfolk and draw blessings from the Whanganui. In connecting with the non secular authority of the waters, the guests deepened their understanding that rivers can solely be reinvigorated by altering the methods by which we relate to them.
