Important, Not Important

There’s no word for “conservation” in many Indigenous languages.Some come close, but mean something more like “taking care of” or “looking after.”And that’s probably because the very idea of conservation, to “prevention the wasteful use of a resource”, would have been, and continue to be, foreign to many of North America’s Indigenous peoples, who lived in an entirely different, co-dependent relationship with nature.That is to say, to have had a relationship at all.A relationship with the very same nature of which we’re inextricably part of, of which we rely on for clean air, food, and water – or it’s game over.And now, if we’re not facing game over, we’re certainly up against the final boss.We live on stolen lands that were tended for thousands of years by Indigenous and Native peoples have been dried out by mostly white settlers in what seems like the blink of an eye.Land now covered in cities, in suburbs, in industrialized agriculture, desperately and even controversially conserved as national and state par