Indigenous environmental organizers rejected white-hierarchy governance models outright

Evidence

During the year after Bear Butte, several organizational meetings were held to develop by-laws and an organizational structure. “It was a little slow,” says Goldtooth, “because people said ‘yes, these are by-laws, but we want to have our own language, where we will be able put together something that we can say reflects traditional values. And there was no other model at the time—most of the things that were developed were based upon white folks’ hierarchy systems: board of directors, structures, and this is something that the constituents of IEN did not want.” — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 623

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect echo for the legal-systems course: formal legal/institutional forms themselves carry cultural assumptions. — connects to: Anticolonial constitutions explicitly rejected race as a basis for hierarchy — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 579; Colonial conservation legacies made anticolonial leaders justifiably hostile to environmentalism — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 798; Environmental racism includes exclusion from ecology movement leadership — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1232 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Contrasts IEN’s network-with-own-language model against standard board-of-directors nonprofit structure.

Broader Connections

• Environmental racism includes exclusion from ecology movement leadership #expands (0.85) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1232
• Anticolonial constitutions explicitly rejected race as a basis for hierarchy #exemplifies (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 579
• Colonial conservation legacies made anticolonial leaders justifiably hostile to environmentalism #expands (0.75) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 798
• Some late-colonial officials publicly rejected the racial hierarchy of ruler and ruled #exemplifies (0.72)