Native lands

This essay makes the case for decolonizing and indigenizing the way conservation is conducted in the US. It outlines the need to recognize Native American rights and responsibilities to ancestral lands and waters, and thus better care for and manage "public" lands in the US.  It provides examples of Indigenous land stewardship and guardianship through Native land trusts and comanagement.

A 12-credit experiential learning course designed and implemented at Randolph College.

The American West is a tangled web of myth and reality—a region that has been enshrined in American movies, art, and popular culture as the site of rugged individualism and wide-open spaces. Underneath this veneer lies a constant and bitter struggle to define and claim the landscape. Natural resource extraction, ranching, U.S. government agencies, conservationists, recreators, and diverse Native communities all have contested and overlapping claims about how the landscape should be used and memorialized. In this program, we will explore the historical and contemporary struggle to claim and define western landscapes and the intersection of environmental justice with questions of religion, economics, and race in American culture.

This course is designed thematically, which allows us to use each aspect of the course—speakers, travel, seminar and images—to fully immerse ourselves in the weekly topics. We will explore the history and diversity of Native America and cultural landscapes, engage the ongoing process of settler colonialism, and move forward examining natural resource exploitation and Native displacement. We will investigate the pressing questions of environmental racism, as well as environmental justice movements and Native resistance. We will explore American sacred spaces, including wilderness areas and National Parks, as well as Native American sacred lands. Additionally, we will look at federal policies and court cases, popular myths and representations of the Wild West and Native Americans, and the politics of recognition and citizenship.

Throughout the semester we will read and discuss a variety of primary and secondary sources to help better illuminate the historical struggles and contemporary realities of Native American life, and the impact that these struggles have had on shaping American culture and society. We will view and analyze films and documentaries, art, poetry and literature to better contextualize how the media constructs and represents the American West and Native America. Through meetings with weekly guest speakers, we will directly engage with the conservationists, policy makers, historians, and Native leaders involved with these issues. Lastly, the best way to learn about a landscape is by moving through it. We will take several short trips around Virginia and to Washington, DC, and one weeklong trip to Utah to immerse ourselves in different topics related to the program.

Our Native American culture has been strip-mined by the European's Judeo-Christian ethic. It is clear to indigenous peoples that we are dealing with a desperate society trapped inside a crumbling mythology.. .. Indians know how to play games with nature. Europeans-Whites-have been at odds with nature for many centuries. The Man vs. Nature argument is a contrived dichotomy with ancient roots in Christianity, Descartes and Francis Bacon. What you end up with is a race of people trapped by myth, striving to claw its way back to Eden against ever-growing odds. The project of nature is ongoing, we are part of it, yet the Europeart continues to set himself outside of it.. .. Non-Indians will never have Western eyes so long as they cling to the Man versus Nature dichotomy.'

Peony, harmonic correlation of vowels and consonants in the word, rich poetic rhyme and melodic, chilling rhythm of stanzas - the main features of poetry from Oleksii Dovhiy's collection «Rodensky melodies». The poetry of the author is filled with son's love for Ukraine, a civic position of the artist. The native land for Oleksii Dovhiy's lyrical hero is a sacred image. All the realities of the environment are united in this image – from plants to heavenly bodies, from reflections on their purpose to conscious responsibility. For the lyrical hero of the poet, his native land is a state, and the mentally-spiritual essence, and the people, and his history. Oleksii Dovhiy's lyrical hero is also a worthy descendant of the family, and a faithful son of the Fatherland, and a caring father in his poetry. The understanding of the eternal ideological origins – the causes and consequences – is presented in author's poetic language. The imaginative system of his poetry is filled with such concepts as «love», «patriotism», «responsibility», «destiny», «duty». The peculiarity of Oleksii Dovhiy's poetry lies in the fact that the lyric hero is represented in the texts as a patriot, a father, a descendant of a glorious family, and a lover. Images of the native land, the genus, the beloved woman are inextricably linked and immersed in the national color in the conceptual view of the world of Oleksii Dovhiy's lyrical hero.

Oleksii Dovhiy's poetic word is filled with numerous symbols, images, artistic hints and accents. The lyrical hero of Oleksii Dovhiy is deeply integrated into a range of such philosophical problems as «eternal and temporary», «to be or not to be?», «Glory and destiny». Oleksii Dovhiy's poetry presents a wide range of nationally significant realities – from the instructions to «protect and love his country» to the complete admiration of the world of «simple and dear people», which fill the country with their intentions, actions, call of the heart and move it into the future.

The article clarifies that Oleksii Dovhiy's artistic and poetic world is entirely symbolic. It is proved that, thanks to the symbol in the polyphonic structure of poetic text, the reader can see the secret – the most intimate features of the author's creative work, his artistic search. The research proves that there is a large number of words for the designation of individual symbols, nationally-marked and universal human ones in the individual speech of the poet. A special place in the poet's work is occupied by numerous linguistic images of the realities associated with his lyrical hero with his native land, the Motherland and Ukraine. As the research shows, in Oleksii Dovhiy's poetic language the image of the native land, Ukraine in some poetic contexts is the opposite of the destructive image of the strange / hostile land.

Words that express these images consist mainly of the following lexical-thematic groups: units for the designation «Culturally Marked Concepts», «Mental-Spiritual Essences», «Birds», «Plant World», «Objects of Inanimate Nature» «Social stratification» and «Natural phenomena and seasons», etc.

It is found out that in most cases the poet uses the words of several groups in order to express the fullest possible and complete transmission to the reader of the state, emotion, opinion or intention of the lyrical hero.