Last week I began my official journey into Landscape Architecture, and the first few readings I was required to do reminded me that Hierarchy in the Native City—or, rather, a distinct lack thereof—is a massive part of the discussion.
You see, the Native City stands against most, if not all, forms of hierarchy. Right now, it appears to be against binaries, against conformist classifications, and against imposed organization. This anti-hierarchical stance applies to all living things, be they human or otherwise. With further examinination, perhaps we will even find that it is impossible to prioritize the living above the non-living.
There are several reasons for this, the first being inherently anti-colonial and actively decolonial.
Colonialism in the United States, more broadly,the Atlantic Slave Trade, created a racial hierarchy with European at the top and Native, Black, and other groups beneath. As this is not a history blog and agreeing with any part of my blog’s thesis necessitates at least some background knowledge regarding the colonization of the Americas, I’m going to assume that you are relatively familiar with this history.
Along with the racial hierarchy, colonialism created a knowledge hierarchy, asserting that western forms of knowledge—primarily empirical knowledge—were superior to other ways of knowing. These alternative ways of knowing (**NOT “ALTERNATIVE FACTS,” PLEASE!**) were often rooted in generational practice and cultural knowledge. They became second to western science and enlightened reason.
In Critical Analysis of the Production of Western Knowledge and Its Implications for Indigenous Knowledge and Decolonization, author Francis Adjanga Akena describes this phenomenon:
The production of “legitimate” knowledge has been closely related to the context, class affiliation, and the social identity of the producers. Knowledge producers, politics, class affiliation, and group identity symbiotically influence each other in a complex manner, creating a hybrid knowledge that is a product of such interactions. The hybrid knowledge remains a controversial issue within the study of Western knowledge, Indigenous knowledge and decolonization, since colonial knowledge is a hybrid of local context, class, and ethnic interactions. European colonizers have defined legitimate knowledge as Western knowledge, essentially European colonizers’ ways of knowing, often taken as objective and universal knowledge. Arriving with the colonizers and influenced by western ethnocentrism, Western knowledge imposed a monolithic world view that gave power and control in the hands of Europeans. It delegitimized other ways of knowing as savage, superstitious, and primitive.
Akena, Francis Adyanga. “Critical Analysis of the Production of Western Knowledge and Its Implications for Indigenous Knowledge and Decolonization.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 43, no. 6, 2012, pp. 599–619.
Akena goes on to define Indigenous knowledge in opposition to Western knowledge, describing it as “a lived world, a form of reason that informs and sustains people who make their homes in a local area […] it is a bridge between human beings and their environments.” Importantly, Akena also describes Indigenous knowledge as requiring ancestral knowledge, saying that Indigenous knowledge “is a complex accumulation of local context-relevant knowledge that embraces the essence of ancestral knowing as well as the legacies of diverse histories and cultures.”
The Native City recognizes that this cultural knowledge is crucial for the preservation of many different Indigenous groups worldwide and it therefore cannot be excluded from the narrative. While we are not interested in disavowing science and reason as legitimate ways of knowing, this paradigm shift seeks to challenge the idea that those should be the only valued ways of “knowing,” as opposed to Indigenous ancestral knowledge.1 The Native City is built on this ancestral knowledge!
ON PEOPLE AND ANIMALS, or perhaps better put, ON RECOGNIZING OUR PLACE
Colonialism does not care about the health of the environment, only about resources. It even treats humans as resources to be exploited, and it steals them, degrades them, and makes them less than human. The racial hierarchy imposed by colonialism consequently degrades people by comparing them to animals. In Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Chen discusses how human superiority has “biopolitical ramifications” stemming from how “‘humans’ are not all treated one way and ‘animals’ are not uniformly treated another way.” Being treated as an animal when one is a human is considered an indignity, made clearer by the fact that a common racist quip is to compare a person to a beast.
Indigenous have often been likened to animals in their homelands; this comparison is commonly aimed at delegitimizing their suffering or any injustices committed against them. This, while itself incredibly concerning, reveals a key weakness of the colonizer and of Western thinking as a while: the idea that animals and humans are different, that humans are in some way not innately animals themselves.
In Indigenous relationality, particularly those traditions held in North America, it is commonly believed that everything is equal. Not just humans to humans, but humans to animals, humans to the land, humans to the spirits. It is all equal, and one’s relationship with THING A is entirely weighted the same as one’s relationship to THING B. This stands in direct opposition to the (again!) hierarchical thinking imposed by colonizing forces. It opposes environmental exploitation and senseless killing; it asserts that all humans and animals are equal. We are not above or below.
Indeed, when one does not see something as equal, this serves as a justification for exploitation. Just as those interested in combating racism stand against racial hierarchies, those interested in combating the root cause, colonialism and its ideals, wish to give spirit back to the land and our non-human relatives.
Part of social justice is environmental justice. It is a prerequisite. It must exist within the projects we set forth, and Indigenous thinking does not exist without it.
IN LANDSCAPE
This week, I read an article by Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister called Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies. The authors discussed hierarchy with regard to landscape design, saying:
With the dual rise of ecosystem ecology (concerned with large spatial and temporal scales, made possible by new observational technologies using remote sensing and geographic information systems to map and model complex data) and applied field ecology (oriented to solving urgent environmental problems, from biodiversity loss to resource depletion), there has been a steady paradigm shift in ecology as a discipline over the last quarter century. As scientific research and published evidence on whole ecosystem function mounts, ecological thinking across the scales of inquiry and application has moved toward a more organic model of open-endedness, flexibility, resilience and adaptation, and away from a mechanistic model of stability and control. In other words, ecosystems are now understood to be open systems that behave in ways that are self-organizing and that are to some extent unpredictable. In effect, change is built into living systems; they are characterized in part by
Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister, “Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies,” Places Journal, April 2014.
uncertainty and dynamism.
Within ecology and landscape, there has been a gradual acknowledgement that instead of looking at components, we are looking at entire systems. The landscape, and every being in it, is a gigantic system. Even we humans are responsible for our part. By creating hierarchies we appear to distance ourselves from this reality, discounting (or disavowing?) our role as active participants in the grand scheme of our shared existences.
This perspective has profound implications, from the humanities to management applications to design, as it rests on the recognition that humans are not outsiders to the ecosystem — rather, we are participants in its unfolding. This perspective also fundamentally challenges the Western Judeo-Christian ideology that humans are the dominant species and therefore have a responsibility (even a moral obligation) to manage or control other species and resources.
Perhaps decolonizing our mindset is eschewing the idea that we are God, or even that we are humans. Maybe we are all animals. Perhaps we are all creatures. The Native City wouldn’t mind that so much… perhaps it would even enjoy it…
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1 For those interested, the International Baccalaureate program, which I completed in high school, has a course called Theory of Knowledge. The course posited that there were eight ways of knowing: memory, sense perception, emotion, reason, imagination, language, intuition, and most surprisingly, faith. It is on faith that some of the hardest-to-grasp cultural beliefs stem from, but this does not make faith less valid amongst its peers. Merely more interesting. For more information on the course: https://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/dp-core/theory-of-knowledge/
Native City Girl 
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