9.6 Indigenous Versus Colonial Worldviews
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For over 12,000 years Indigenous cultures around the world have held the earth as sacred. They have understood themselves as stewards of the earth, responsible for its welfare. Within Native American worldviews, all of nature’s elements and creatures are conceptualized as being alive, and all lives are believed to have souls, whether they are animate or inanimate. Undoubtedly, variability exists among Native American beliefs, languages, and ways of being. Nonetheless Native American worldviews overlap in many important ways. As Emily Cousins of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative explains:
certain similarities emerge in the way Native American cultures relate to the land. Perhaps one of the most pervasive concepts is the belief that land is alive. Every particular form of the land is the locus of qualitatively different spirit beings. Their presence gives life to and sanctifies the land in all its details and contours. In many traditions, the beings who inhabit the land are not thought of as gods and goddesses who rule over the mountains or rivers. Rather, they are the mountains and rivers. (1996/1997, p. 500)
Because Indigenous peoples around the world understand creatures and elements of nature to be spiritual kin, they have no word for nature, as no separation exists to be named.
Each geographical place has agency, as it is filled with living entities, both animate and inanimate. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes the importance of place for Native Americans, explaining that for Indigenous peoples:
the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think. Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s community. (1996, p. 34)
Places not only hold the past but their features likewise have agency. Rather than perceiving and treating rivers, rocks, and trees as objects for use as human resources, for example, Indigenous cultures conceptualize them as containing spirits and distinct identities rooted in and determined by their unique composition, growth, mobility or stasis, geographical location, the other natural elements that surround them, and the creatures who live and interact with them. Indigenous relations with a given place, as Basso explains, remains “closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth…. We are, in a sense, the place-world we imagine” (1996, p. 7).
Ancient Greeks perceived the Earth to be a living goddess. They called her Gaia. Like Indigenous peoples around the world, Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Celts perceived nature to be populated by deities with distinct personalities. These deities were honored with reverence and rituals. Whereas Indigenous peoples held onto their understanding of earth as a sacred being, European thinking underwent a shift beginning in the late Roman Empire as monotheism began to take root, eventually overturning Greek, Roman, and Celtic beliefs in the divinity of nature. The separation of humans from nature became firmly embedded in Western thinking during the 16th and 17th centuries when Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and, after him, the René Descartes (1595–1650) conceptualized the study of humans as separate from the study of nature.
Bacon and Descartes introduced the idea that nature’s mysteries could be decoded and controlled by humans. This shift in thinking toward nature as an object of study, which could be mastered by humans, eventually took hold and spread throughout Europe. As Europeans began to colonize foreign lands, they understood and approached nature as a “wild” entity to be tamed and controlled. By the time Europeans began to colonize the Americas, they likewise perceived non-Western peoples as “wild” or “savage” creatures. Contemporary Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the impact of the settler worldview on Native Americans and their lands:
Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.
At the same time that the language of the land was being suppressed, the land itself was being converted from the communal responsibility of native people to the private property of settlers, in a one-two punch of colonization. Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. (2017, paras. 7-8)
Indigenous languages house an alternate worldview, one that clashed with colonialist thinking, in part, because it embraces the environment as comprised of dynamic living systems. In Native American cultures, place and language are co-created, and the past remains present through storytelling. Kimmerer’s grandfather was among the hundreds of thousands of Native American children taken from their families and placed in schools run by the U.S. government and churches from 1869 up through the 1960s. Because their languages and their beliefs ran counter to those of settler colonists, these children were forbidden to speak in their native tongue or to express their cultural heritages and traditional beliefs. Part of today’s turn toward regenerative systems in tourism aims to recover and amplify Indigenous stories and Indigenous traditions, beliefs, ways of being, and the socio-cultural heritage of tribal nations and communities.
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Key Takeaway
Indigenous worldviews see land and nature as alive, sacred, and interconnected with human identity and community, whereas colonial worldviews, shaped by thinkers like Bacon and Descartes, separated humans from nature.
Significance to Regenerative Tourism
The fundamental difference between Indigenous and colonial worldviews underscores why regenerative tourism draws so deeply on Indigenous knowledge, as it prioritizes reciprocity and respect for living systems.
Significance to Tourism
Merging Indigenous worldviews with contemporary scientific understanding of living ecosystems has helped tourism professionals design experiences and development models that honor local cultures, protect natural resources, and resist the extractive tendencies of traditional tourism, paving the way for more ethical and regenerative practices that restore both ecosystems and community wellbeing.
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Design Lab 2: Create a Design Inspired by Haeckel’s Muscinae (Mosses) Drawing
Examine the image of Haeckel’s Muscinae, or mosses, and brainstorm why the different species depicted are shaped the way they are.
Note any shapes in the image that remind you of human-made objects or structures.
Take one or more of the shapes in the drawing and design an object or structure from it.
Envision functions for the object or structure and think about how its design might solve an existing problem.
Tip: If nothing comes easily to mind, use your imagination to think like a science-fiction writer.
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