Why should Indians have a right to land when they don’t produce anything on it? –a Brazilian quoted in Before the Bulldozer by David Price
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Price recommended that lands for a reservation be set aside for the Nambicuara before the road was built, and he also made specific recommendations–none very expensive–for medical care and schooling. The medical care was needed because the road would expose the Indians to a host of diseases from the outside world that they would have no defense against.
And they did all this in the face of increasing criticism from environmentalists about the effects of the dam on the river and on the sublimely beautiful canyon. Glen Canyon turned the Sierra Club from a cozy little group of rich, white Californians into a national organization with an overtly political agenda. Opposition to the dam–and to two other proposed dams in the Grand Canyon area–produced the first grass-roots lobbying effort by conservationists. All the principal tactics of the environmental movement–the letter-writing campaigns, the trips to Washington to lobby members of Congress, the propaganda efforts to sway public opinion–had their first tryout over the issue of dams on the Colorado.
But that’s not the way we humans are. The people who lived on the plains before the ranchers would have been amazed at such an attitude. Imagine asserting the right to kill anything you think is in your way. The Nambicuara wouldn’t get it either. And that may be why the destruction of nature always starts with the destruction of the people who have learned to live with nature, instead of in a constant war with it.
