How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Parallels the Conquest of Nature

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

Blending social history with an ecological perspective, John Mohawk is able to draw the parallels among various cultures, from the ancient Greeks to the Spanish conquerors to the Nazi Germans. Each of them essentially believed in a Utopian idealism in which certain people are destined for greatness and other people, along with their environments, are to be destroyed or ignored. This is now the philosophy underlying global capitalism and its institutions—and the reason why the world is in such trouble. Indigenous people understand that, and it is by connecting with their wisdom and their way of thinking that we can begin to ask serious questions about where we are heading and at what cost.