ABSTRACT
This chapter explores case studies of environmental justice alliances across cultural lines of race, ethnicity, and nationhood. It focuses on “unlikely alliances” of Indigenous nations and rural whites (particularly ranchers, farmers, and fishers) in the 1970s–2020s. The study explores how and why certain groups of Native peoples and rural settlers joined to protect a natural resource that had been a source of conflict between them, when an outside threat endangered the common resource. The case studies concern mining and sacred places in the Northern Plains (Montana and the Dakotas), military projects in Nevada and southern Wisconsin, fishing and mining in northern Wisconsin, and fish, water, and dams in the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon). The alliances redrew perceived community boundaries to define neighboring “outsiders” as “insiders” in a common natural region, based on a cross-cultural “place membership.” The “particularist” assertion of tribal sovereignty and identity had not contradicted a “universalist” project to bring together the communities. In fact, the alliances were ironically more successful in areas that had experienced the most intense Indigenous-settler resource conflicts. Intercultural unity strategies based solely on universalist commonalities (such as environmental protection) succeed by respecting particularist differences (such as Native treaty rights).
