[PEN-L:7231] Re: jim o'connor on harvey review

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It would be difficult to prove which culture and tradition definitely has the best practice regarding living and using the earth in North America and elsewhere in the long run of the future. But overall, in the historical larger picture, the methods of the indigenous peoples are closer to modes and means of production that have DEFINITELY not destroyed the human habitability and rehabitability of the earth for 200,000 years and more. Harvey comes from a culture and tradition that has invented in the last 500 years nuclear waste and weaponry and other means of production (fossil fuel industry) and destruction that are impacting the earth in new orders of magnitude. We have probable cause to believe (that is ,a lot of preliminary evidence) and to take pause to consider that this is more destructive than the life ways of the original inhabitants of this continent. Anecdotal evidence of how some Indian  here or there may have had a practice that European-ecologists-come-lately thi!
nk might be "dangerous" does not rebut the prima facie case against the dystopic nature of the capitalist mode and means of production relative to the indigenous.


Charles Brown


>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx> 05/25/99 10:11PM >>>
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