Indigenous Culture and Nature Relatedness: Results from a Community-Led Study

Abstract

Indigenous social movements and environmental policy for just transitions to sustainability often draw on the claim that indigenous cultures are more closely related with nature and, thus, indigenous governance of resources will lead to better environmental outcomes. But neither this assumption, nor the details of a presumed indigenous-nature relationship, have yet been examined quantitatively. We use a collaborative community-designed survey to examine indigenous culture and nature relatedness, finding a strong positive relation between Anishinaabe culture of Central/Southern Canada and nature relatedness. This relationship is not simply driven by repeated interactions with nature associated with certain cultural practices, but by communicated elements such as ceremonies, stories, and songs. Findings support the suggestion that indigenous governance and cultural revitalization programs may improve environmental policy outcomes. This may happen through direct Indigenous governance, or through knowledge/cultural transfer from Indigenous to non-Indigenous people – both of which may promote the normalization, capacity-building, and coalition building required to support effective environmental policy. Since the general cultural elements that are found to be significant in this study are common to indigenous populations worldwide, there is a possibility that these findings are generalizable amongst indigenous cultures globally. The paper advances a quantitative decolonial research method that may be used to investigate this further.

Keywords: Environmental policy, Indigenous environmental governance, Nature relatedness, Indigenous development, Decolonial research, Environmental politics, Environmental psychology