Do indigenous peoples help preserve nature?
Even though they are not ‘naturally ecologists’, Indigenous people should be seen as historically capable of having managed natural resources in a rather non-destructive way, causing very little environmental disturbances up until the arrival of the European conquerors. Those who think of the Indians as ‘natural’ beings, innate defenders of nature, ‘naturalists’, are just a step away from seeing them as mere extensions of the environment: for them Indians should be ‘preserved’ and kept apart from the ‘civilized’ world. This vision derives, however, from a conception of nature that is proper to the Western world: the idea of nature as something that should remain untouched, away from human action. What Indigenous peoples themselves have to say about that is very different though. The conceptions about nature certainly vary considerably according to the Indigenous people we look at. However, if there is anything common to all of them is the fact that nature is always interacting with hum
