African American & Native American Perspectives

This symposium foregrounds the voices, histories, contexts, and critiques that have been left out of many, if not most, discussions of the place and value of nature in American society. Specifically, it focuses on a sampling of histories of African American and indigenous Native American communities. It raises the question of whether environmentalism is fundamentally a conceit of those who are well off, in power and have choice; how our growing global environmental crisis is perceived by those with different histories, beliefs, and relationships to nature; and how environmental activism across the different subsets of our society may be driven by fundamentally different concerns.