The Prairies and the Ethics of Complementarity

The fundamental message of social ecology is that our ecological problems are social problems, and more deeply, that the idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human. Human beings have always projected our own forms of social organization onto nature. Much like how today we view the natural world as a market-like realm of competition and a realm of "natural resources" to be exploited and commodified, the tendency of human beings to project their own social structures onto nature existed within egalitarian societies as well. Murray Bookchin explains the way that this manifested itself in his book Remaking Society:

However, as I have suggested elsewhere, there were rituals — especially group rituals—that may have preceded in time the more familiar, cause-effect magical activities; rituals that were not coercive, but rather persuasive. Wildlife was seen in a complementary relationship of "give-and-take" in which game gave itself to the hunter as a participant in the broad orbit of life—an orbit based on propitiation, respect, and mutual need. Humanity was no less a part than animals in this complementary orbit in which human and nonhuman were seen to give themselves to each other according to mutual need rather than "trade offs." 

This complementarity in rituals apparently reflected an active sense of social equality that viewed personal differences as parts of a larger natural whole rather than a pyramid-structured hierarchy of being. The attempt of organic society to place human beings in the same community on a par with each other, to see in each an interactive partner with others, yielded a highly egalitarian notion of difference as such.(49)

 Put simply, it was a recognition of the "Other" which was harmonious rather than domineering and antagonistic. An example of this phenomenon which is local to Calgary, or Moh’kíns’tsis in Blackfoot, is the iniskim or "buffalo calling stones".

Early ethnographic reports on the iniskim illustrate the nature of the extent to which these stones reflected a projection of mutual aid onto the natural world. The Northern Blackfoot version of the origins of the iniskim tells us of a woman rubbing fat on the rock and the rock beginning to sing. The woman and her people kiss the rock, they sing, they dance, and the iniskim helps to call buffalo into the hunt.(87-8) This clearly reflects a way of thinking that is mutualistic, a "give-and-take" relationship rather than a coercive one.

If we want to heal the our relationship with the natural world, we need to stop thinking of the relationship between human beings and the natural world in a dualistic way. The history of the iniskim shows how we can think of the "Other" as a part of a harmonious whole instead.

We can learn an enormous amount from Indigenous ways of knowing. Adopting an ethics of complementarity, as we can see with the iniskim, will be necessary in healing our relationship with the natural world. But if our society projects its own social organization onto nature, then it follows that we must remove hierarchy and domination from society before this can be accomplished. ONly in a world free from colonialism, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any form of domination of human by human, can we rid ourselves of the idea of dominating nature.

Works Cited

Bookchin, Murray. Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future. Boston: South End Press, 2009. Print.

Clark, Wissler, and D.C. Duvall. Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Print.