Ethno-Ecological Education: Aboriginals Teaching Nature at a Winter Camp in the Canadian Arctic‪.‬

For too long, environmentalism has ignored the contributions that can be made by aboriginal peoples. Granted, one does see an occasional poem or chapter by an aboriginal expert in an edited volume, or hear an opening invocation by a 'medicine person' at an environmental conference. Such instances are certainly laudatory. Yet, while not meant to be tokenistic, they certainly appear so. Few environmentalists, if truth be known, have lived for any amount of time in face-to-face interaction with aboriginal peoples, doing the traditional daily tasks of surviving on a sustained basis in a sustainable way, in their natural milieux. Instead, a 'whitecoat bias' has pervaded the environmental movement, on the assumption that the modern is more effective at preserving the land than the traditional. This assumption, though, is not merely questionable on grounds of social prejudice; it has little empirical basis at all. Whereas aboriginal peoples protected the land for millennia, modern ones have managed to despoil it in a few centuries. Indeed aboriginals, while preserving the land, have not only survived but thrived at the same time. At the least, they may be able to offer a needed dimension to caretaking the earth.