Winona LaDuke
South End Press
2000

This is an inspiring and frightening book. We are more aware than ever, as we unlearn schoolbook history, of the incredible devastation the settling and expansion of the United States had on the indigenous peoples of this continent.

But that is a general understanding, and based in the past; in All Our Relations, Winona LaDuke makes it more specific and ties it tightly to the present and future. The devastation is still happening now, and is well beyond the point where Native Americans are the only people affected.

The structure of the book is simple but effective—each chapter discusses the history of a tribe from the time before white settlement to now. In particular, LaDuke goes into some detail about each tribe's understanding of their native ecosystem and their place in it, and constrasts that sharply with the attitudes of the European settlers who claimed and colonized it. From the Seminole to the Cheyenne, the pattern is distressingly similar: white colonization of native lands (usually by military force), Native Americans killed or moved to reservations, and extreme environmental destruction of their former lands through industiral development and its subsequent pollution.

It's not hard to see how LaDuke can make the case that the disregard for the Native Americans and for their land went hand-in-hand. And that disregard continues now not just for them, but for anyone who would suggest putting limitations on the almighty corporation. That's the frightening part. The inspiration comes from her accounts of how many tribes are fighting (and have historically fought) to keep their lands unpolluted. Tribe after tribe is putting itself ont he line all over the country to hold industrial polluters and the government accountable to environmental standards, and in some cases there have been victories.

As LaDuke says in conclusion,

There is, in many indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.

[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #80, Fall 2000]