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Medicine patch. Photo courtesy of Linda Black Elk. Moderator’s Note: It is our joy to present this reflective decolonial essay on Earth Day 2018. It was shared on Facebook by Linda Black Elk (Catawba Nation) and she granted us permission to repost here. Black Elk is a highly respected ethnobotanist with deep ties to family, community, the land and water, environmental justice, and indigenous food autonomy movements. Her research, writing, lecturing and most important, mentoring of native youth and young adults, inspires many activists to integrate food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and the protection and restoration of the land and water of our sacred homeland commons. Black Elk was a major positive presence at the 2016-17 Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance where she played a vital role supporting elders and mentoring youth. She continues the good work there and serves as Director of Traditional Medicine at the Mni Wiconi Clinic, which is a fully integrative clinic focusing...

Below there are women and men who study science, who study scientifically, who do good science. But the wicked capitalists come along and use this science to do harm to the very people who discovered that science. What kind of harm? They use science to make the rich richer. The rich use it as they choose, for a destiny other than that for which it was created. They use it to kill and destroy. - Zapatista Plenary Declaration on ConSciences Moderator’s Note: In a recent conversation with a close friend, the issue of how different people conceptualize “nature” came up in the context of a discussion of the March for Science. First of all, I suggested that this does not involve a “binary” problem (e.g., pro- or anti-nature; pro- or anti-science); instead this is a spectrum with a spectral cast. There are several paradigms operating in different cultural communities (with distinct political projects) and these differ markedly in how they define “nature” or the “environment”— be mindful, all...