US Environmental NGOs and the Cree: An Unnatural Alliance for the Preservation of Nature?
Author(s)
Roue, Marie
Abstract
This article will attempt to understand the complex relations between indigenous peoples and environmental NGOs in the context of conflict caused by a hydroelectric development mega-project in James Bay in subarctic Quebec. There is an ambiguity in the mediator and spokesperson role that NGOs take on in defending the cause of indigenous peoples, in so far as they oscillate between acting as mere middlemen, as brokers, and as patrons. Even beyond the tangle of multiple and conflicting interests, however, environmentalists are torn between their own conceptions of nature and those of the people they defend. Environmentalists are heirs to the notion, characteristic of the pioneers who discovered America through the prism of the Bible: a wild and threatening “wilderness”, to this, they have now added the objective of protecting nature against threats posed by humans. In both conceptions, which have successively haunted Western imaginations, nature offers to humans, when lost in its vastness and far from their fellows, a direct relation alongside God. How then might it be possible to work with the Cree, and indigenous peoples generally, to protect a nature that they do not regard as separate from humankind, but of which they are an integral part? How long will it remain possible to do without an analysis of the concept of nature conservation which, in the context of shared environmental causes, establishes our relation to others even as we exclude them?
