Ecofeminist Perspectives

Chicago, Ill.— At the 2007 Modern Language Association Convention, Panelist Elizabeth McNeil of Arizona State University defined the goals of ecofeminism using the words of Greta Claire Gaard and Patrick Murphy. Gaard and Murphy argue in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, and Pedagogy that “ecofeminism is a social movement for social change arising out of the struggles of women…waged against the ‘maldevelopment’ and environmental degradation caused by patriarchal societies, multinational corporations, and global capitalism.” McNeil argued that countercultural, non-corporatist approaches valued a “different type of knowledge,” and that Leslie Silko’s Gardens in the Dune celebrated a kind of knowing “of the sort that has been devalued by the western [objectivist] orientation.”

The readings presented by the panelists encompassed a strange synthesis of Marxism, feminism, environmentalism, and lesbianism, which they argued were in ideological continuity. Professor Jeremy LaRochelle quoted another ecofeminist’s writings, who wrote that “not only are women’s bodies controlled by a male-dominated imperialistic society [limiting] sexual freedom, but they also suffer the direct consequences of the institutional destruction of the land and occupation.” The University of Mary Washington professor added that “Moraga…and other Chicana…writers breakdown long-standing dichotomies between nature and culture and environmental and gender studies.”

Quoting from Chicana and ecofeminist authors such as Cherríe Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Susan Griffin, the professors seemed to argue that land holds a sacred, transcendental value, and equated hating the environment with racism or bigotry.

Neocolonial Post-Nationalism

“Land remains the common ground for all radical action. But land is more than the rocks and trees, the animal, and plantlife…For immigrant and native alike, land is also the factories where we work, the water our children drink, and the housing project where we live. For women, lesbians, and gay men, land is that physical mass called our bodies,” Professor LaRochelle read, quoting Moraga. Moraga also wrote that “Throughout ‘las Americas,’ all the ‘lands’ remain under occupation by an Anglo-centric, patriarchal, imperialist United States.” In other words, this platform for “radical action” and self-realization involves a war against the “patriarchal” and “imperialist” United States.

Another Chicana writer cited by LaRochelle, Gloria Anzaldúa, characterized the “U.S.-imposed” border as an arbitrary, painful scourge upon the earth. “The poem is particularly poignant speaking in the present context of the wall of border security, which began more officially in 1994,” said LaRochelle, noting that Moraga argues that the number of border crossing deaths since 1994 exceed 10,000. The official number of border crossings is around 5,000, he said. In her poem, Moraga describes the border fence as a “1,950 mile-long open wound/dividing a pueblo, a culture,/ running down the length of my body,/staking fence rods in my flesh,/ splits me splits me/ me raja me raja.” “This is my home/this thin edge of/barbwire.//But the skin of the earth is seamless./The sea cannot be fenced,” she continues. LaRochelle observed that Moraga “experiences the U.S.-imposed border as a physical wound in her own body” (emphasis added).

Female Bodies, Hating Whitey, and the Earth

“Indigenous women and ecofeminists would agree, however, that as [Susan Griffin] puts it in “Ecofeminism and Meaning” that ‘the racist mind, the misogynist mind, the mind afraid of nature and which denies natural limitation and mortality are often the same mind,’” argued Professor McNeil. Griffin’s original passage concludes that the “historical convergence of these attitudes” betrays a “pattern and a pyschology” of these opportunistic, evil attitudes.

Ironically, McNeil also argued that Native Americans and ecofeminists share a “fundamental principle” by believing in the “interconnectedness of all life” while tearing up over a fictional scene in which Native Americans perform the Ghost Dance. McNeil and many scholars agree that the Ghost Dance was intended to promote peaceful resistance among the Native Americans, and unlike many other dances, eschewed metal and weapons. (As an exception, James Mooney describes in his 19th century book, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, that some Sioux dances incorporated “sacred arrows and a sacred bow,” and other southern tribes accused the Sioux of making “the ghost shirt an auxiliary of war.”)

The Ghost Dance incorporates profoundly racist doctrines at its core. Tim McCoy recounted his time spent with the religion’s aging founder, Wovoka, saying that Wovoka told him “he had this vision…went up to heaven and he met the great spirit.” The great spirit’s instructions were that “one time he’d sent his son down on the earth to tell the white men to live at peace…but the white men put his son to death. Now, he was going to send another messiah down to the injuns [sic], and that he would be the one,” McCoy said.

The adherents believed that if they continued to dance the Ghost Dance, God would wipe the earth clean of whites and resurrect the death Native Americans. Then, living in a paradise with abundant buffalo and deer, the Native Americans return to their traditional, pre-colonial ways.

Other Indians, such as Sitting Bull, spoke openly of bloodshed between Indians and whites. “My father has shown me these things… if the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you, on whom I have put holy shirts, will sing a song, which I have taught you, around them, [then] some of them will drop dead,” preached Sitting Bull at the Red Leaf camp in 1890. He continued “Then you can do as you desire with them. Now, you must know this, that all the soldiers and that race will be dead. There will be only five thousand of them left living on the earth” (emphasis added). Professor McNeil argued that a similar apocalypse faces the world as the result of 200 years of industrialization, a “slow-burning, unstoppable change” which will sweep the Earth.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.

Correction: I originally reported that Cherie Moraga wrote the poem cited by LaRochelle. The author of the poem is Gloria Anzaldúa.