ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that behind the global spread of movements such as Idle No More and NoDAPL lies thoroughly transcultural history of ecological thought that is expressed with special clarity in select works of art. It highlights several ways in which Indigenous and colonial environmental knowledges were imbricated in the reservation era. The chapter focuses on scholarship that locates the origins of American environmentalism in the colonial displacement of Native people and the emergence of ecology in biological sciences that studied “nature” apart from humans. A different set of possibilities emerge from a reassessment of the well-documented Indian craze, an art market fueled by Euro-American nostalgia for handmade Native American objects that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elbridge Ayer Burbank’s portrait of his uncle specifically reveals how disparate cultural approaches to land collided amid westward expansion and its art historical corollary, the Indian craze.
