Greetings from Stolen Land
Harm reduction efforts in indigenous communities must center Indigenous Knowledges and histories in order to adequately address the systematic deprivation of resources and separation from the source that has been united states indigenous policy. Rather than only thinking about what happens after substance use, harm reduction efforts must also look to what inspires using in the first place. Harm reduction is a community-driven, people-centered practice…this includes centering population-wide structural inequities as the root of (inter)personal harms in the community.
“Indigeneity” (in-dij-in-ay-it-ee) usually refers to an endangered cultural identity that is oppressed by European colonization & the settlement of their ancestral homeland. Claiming “indigeny” (cultural embodiment by geographical place) asserts a political right to their homeland and rejects the hegemonic (dominating) settler-colonial culture. Indigenous coexistence with the land is quite different from settler-colonial views on land ownership. By definition, “settler colonizers” systematically occupy, dominate, and destroy indigenous peoples in order to overthrow them, then they claim to be rightful inhabitants of that land. Settler colonizers impose European values on the land and its indigenous peoples with the assumption that their white ethnic (read: moral) superiority is natural and undeniable. In addition to exploiting the natural environment for economic resources and the colonized peoples for labor, settler colonizers displace the inhabitants through settlements. Settler colonialism is a tool of the dominant culture to normalize continuous settler occupation of indigenous land.
In contrast to settler occupation, indigenous relationships with the landscape of Turtle Island (now called the united states) is similar to that of Medieval European monarchs to their nations: there is an inherent responsibility to care for the land and its people. The land is a conscious subject that feels and perceives, rather than a thing or object to own. This view showcases an intimate relationship that cannot be understood or properly interacted with within the institutions that they have formally defined. A settler-colonial relationship with the land is detached and unbalanced. This allows for mental and emotional freedom to exploit surroundings and culture. For example, the tobacco used in spiritual Ceremony pre-colonization is a far cry from the tobacco on the market today. Its origin in the united states economy was as a highly toxic cash crop grown by slaves–the complete opposite of a respectful offering during a spiritual experience. Now, many Indigenous peoples don’t have access to traditional tobacco, even though tobacco companies often use Native imagery to advertise their toxic products at a higher rate to people of color. Because of histories like these, it is important that we accurately understand what the harm is before we can begin to reduce it.
Indigenous Harm Reduction
Biopiracy is one of many White Supremacy-maintaining & promoting entitlement practices. Other practices of this sort include the joint efforts of cultural appropriation efforts, strategies, and schemes alongside cultural criminalization and separation from its source. The mass, coordinated, and forceful displacement of indigenous populations by and through settler-colonial violence separated the people and so their culture from their source: the land they are indigenous to. Political domination, through an expanded, forcefully imposed, and insincere bureaucracy–which only serves as an unneeded barrier, a measure of separation, between indigenous populations and the services and resources they need– a need created by governmental bureaucracy through the forceful separation of people and land.
The separation and destruction of the land whose memory of a mutual relationship of care and sustenance with those who inhabit her is a part of a settler-colonial engineered exclusion from its economy. The s-c narrative paints this very engineered impoverishment of indigenous populations and their land as a personal problem, as resultant from individual choice. The settler-colonial narrative about indigeneity discusses a traditional or ‘primitive’ society, rather than exploited and intentionally impoverished.
