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Given the importance of consent within many Indigenous traditions, what is the best way to characterize the lack of consent in the relationship between nations like the United States and Indigenous peoples?

One way in which environmental injustices are made possible is when societies and relationships between societies do not value consent. For many Indigenous peoples, I would argue, one way of understanding environmental injustice is as the systematic undermining of the consent relationships of one society by another society. The undermining is “systematic” when the perpetrating party, such as the U.S. government or a corporation, fulfills two conditions. First, a key reason why the perpetrator harms certain people is because of the afflicted persons’ identities, such as their ethnicity, indigeneity, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age, among other identities. Second, the perpetrator creates a false reality in its own mind that such harms are (a) negligible concerns, (b) morally acceptable situations, or (c) even deserved by those who are harmed. In the cases of environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples that have been discussed so far, nations like the United States, and many of their citizens, see the denial of Indigenous consent as (depending on the case) a negligible concern, a morally acceptable situation, or deserved (by Indigenous peoples). The actual cultural, social, and political systems of the United States and many other nations have as fundamental features the disrespect of Indigenous consent and dissent. Consider some examples.

Bruce Duthu’s study of U.S. Indian law shows that the United States justified its own sovereignty in North America by the doctrine of discovery (Duthu, 2008). The doctrine refers to the idea that by virtue of landing in North America, Europeans and eventually the United States are sovereign over the continent (and for no other reason). In the 1830s, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall established that, by virtue of “possession,” that “discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by those authority, it was made.” Interestingly, Duthu writes, “Only Christian colonizers in their encounters with non-Christian peoples could invoke the discovery doctrine. An Indigenous seafaring tribe, by contrast, could not plant a flag in the British Isles or on the beaches of Normandy and make comparable claims to England or France under the doctrine” (pp. 70–71). Today, the United States believes that it is able to choose which tribes it recognizes as Indigenous peoples. The U.S. Congress exercises “plenary power” over tribes, which means that the U.S. Congress believes it can even decide who counts as a member of a tribe. In these ways, Indigenous consent to invasion, colonialism, and U.S. sovereignty was considered to be negligible.

Another illustrative case is how the United States endorsed the breakup of Indigenous territories into private property. The allotment policy sanctioned by the 1887 Dawes Act made individual Indians own land in fee simple as a way to get them to organize into nuclear families that made income from farming. Religious groups, such as the Quakers, saw this as a great moral mission. Of course, the great moral mission of doing this made advocates of the policy feel it was legitimate to break up Indigenous kinship systems to force nuclear family formations. A second way is to cast violent military, containment, and other colonial practices as ways of saving Indigenous peoples. For example, the liquidation of Indigenous lands into private property in the 19th century, which also involved the breaking up of Indigenous kinship networks and families, was cast as helping Indigenous persons become independent “competent” farmers and was advocated by settler organizations that often called themselves “friends” (Royster, 1995; Stremlau, 2005). Even institutions as assimilative and violent as boarding schools were also seen as civilizing Indigenous peoples (Archuleta, Child, & Lomawaima, 2000). The dispossession of Indigenous lands was considered to be a morally acceptable situation (Mascarenhas, 2012).

Violent confrontations and forced land dispossession are also often cast as inevitabilities of progress. Thomas Morgan (1889), a U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, wrote in the late 19th century,

The Indians must conform to the “white man’s ways” peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.

Across these examples is an important truth about U.S. imperialism, namely, that integral to its formation as a modern nation-state, the United States set up an entire system and tradition of denying Indigenous consent in an effort to justify the violence of its colonial legacy.