Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
48. Are Indigenous peoples inherently environmentalists?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Dennis Kelley [+]
University of Missouri, Columbia
Dennis Kelley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research area is the intersection between religious, ethnic, and national identities, specifically in how they are negotiated and maintained through embodied practice in contemporary American Indian communities.
Description
The term “indigenous” implies an inherent connection to nature, and that indigenous people uniquely relate to the natural world in some way. However that connection may not specifically conform to “environmentalism,” a term used by non-indigenous cultures that tend to relate to the natural world as separate from the realm of sentient humans. Indigeneity derives social systems from a natural world seen as teeming with other sentient beings–plants, animals, weather phenomena–as well as with the spirituals worlds inexorably connected to those places.