Article Summary

What Other Americans Can and Cannot Learn from Native American Environmental Ethics

            This article introduces the idea that Americans are dealing with a moral crisis related to spirituality and the environment. It then discusses the idea of looking back at the ways of the Native Americans in order to solve the crisis. There is a good chance that a lot could be taken away from studying Native spirituality, morals and ways of life. These studies could then be easily applied to and improve Americas’ current culture. The article tells two sides to the argument. The first side is that we can in fact learn from the natives, but the second side is that the natives’ culture can’t easily be applied to ours. Natives may not have intentionally been environmentalists and in some cases they may have been harmful to the environment just as Americans are today. The article discuses these opposing views in order to show that no matter how much we criticize, there are still many things we as Americans can learn from the Natives.

            This article is relevant to my paper because it helped me define my focus. I want to discuss what can be learned from Native Americans to improve our environmental crisis today. After reading this article I decided that I want to take the same approach of telling the two sides of the issue in order to create a compromise or prove my side more worthy.