RT Article
T1 Sacred Sites as a Threat to Environmental Justice?: Environmental Spirituality and Justice Meet among the Diné (Navajo) and Other Indigenous Groups
JF Worldviews
VO 23
IS 2
SP 132
OP 153
A1 Cladis, Mark Sydney 1958-
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2019
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1685402534
AB I explore the intersection of environmental spirituality and environmental justice with special attention given to indigenous ecologies. Indigenous communities often employ the language of discrete "sacred sites" to protect portions of their lands from environmental harm. However, the concept of the sacred in Western traditions is typically accompanied by its binary opposite, the profane. Do protected sacred sites implicitly license harm to such "profane" sites as low-income sacrifice zones? Is environmental spirituality in tension with environmental justice? After explicating this problem, I resolve it by exploring indigenous notions of the sacred—notions that are not binary. Indigenous notions allow for treating some discrete lands as places of special power and healing while still maintaining that all lands are sacred and worthy of environmental protection. These are not hierarchical notions of the sacred but variegated ones (or what I call hózhó sacred weaves).
K1 Native American and indigenous religions
K1 Environmental Justice
K1 environmental spirituality
K1 indigenous ecology
K1 Religion
K1 sacred geography
K1 sacred mountains
K1 Sacred Sites
DO 10.1163/15685357-02302001