This blog and podcast series is created by students enrolled in Vassar College’s ANTH/ENST 213: Indigenous Environmental Activism. This is an intensive, or a group independent study, during which students learn directly from Indigenous authors and activists with minimal guidance from a non-Indigenous professor. The main textbook in Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock.
After 6 weeks of studying Indigenous Environmental Activism, the students formed groups to explore some of the ideas and issues that they most want to share with the Vassar College community. These ideas may be challenging to those who consider themselves environmentalists within the mainstream American definition of that term. We hope readers and listeners will be inspired to learn more about other ways of viewing what needs to be done to heal our relationship with the planet.