It is anti-Indigenous, and presents layers of ecofascism that targets the Indigenous human as problematic.

Indigenous hunting is land based and is an integral part of a healthy ecology. Our relationship to beavers, deer, moose, bear, and all other mammals, birds, fish, and other hunted relations is held in a balance, a sacred law that goes deeper than the concept of “conservation”.

Here lies a concept that most settler, European, and non-Indigenous people cannot seem to grasp – that a truly balanced and deep relationship with the land is not one of modern agriculture and husbandries. While denying the brutal histories and impact of this myth of the “family farm” that no longer exists, modern conservation mechanisms invalidate Indigenous law and relationships to land that maintained biodiversity and ecology in ways that provided abundance for tens of thousands of years, and  still do.

Within settler ecologies, and even within settler languages we have the notion of Game. The fodder of hunted relations, the meat, is gamey, the hunt is a game. This relationship hard coded in the very languages spoken illustrate the nature of the relationship – one of predatory behaviour, of conquest, of dominance and ignores the deep and integral relationships we hold within ecological containers that include humans as a level relationship with all else on the land.

This is a function of something called Fortress Conservation. The idea of ReWilding is meant to challenge fortress conservation – it is an appropriation from global Indigenous cultures that is meant to restore some kind of balance. But once again, the euro fascist mindset pits Indigenous existence into a marginalia through establishing harmful rhetoric even when it tries to do better.

In this article: Why Hunting Isn’t Conservation, and Why It Matters – despite a veneer of a solid argument against settler based hunting and hunting organisations not being “conservation,” author Kevin Bixby does the typical – he invisibilizes and erases Indigenous peoples, values, laws, lives, and our place in the ecologies that we maintained since time immemorial in ways that created the most extensive and rich biodiversities on the planet. This is a wanton ignorance.

As Europeans stripped their lands of trees, forests, animals, indeed created biodiversity nightmares on their own continent, they hold the pretence that they can present themselves a the most capable and informed arbiters of what natural systems can look like in ways that bolster ecologies.

Fortress conservation

Fortress conservation is a model based on the belief that protecting biodiversity is best done by the removal of humans from ecological areas. Fortress conservation relies on some guiding principles:

• The best way to create biodiversity is through the creation of protected areas
• Humans are external to nature and are the perpetrators of ecological degradation
• Excludes humans and closes off land to
  • subsistance harvesting
  • cultural use
  • ceremony
• Prioritizes the perception of a local ecosystem at the expense of Indigenous rights

The result is a subtext of patriarchal heavy hand, a politic created by the colonial face of fortress conservation, and is the case of the Rewilding concept and article above. This provides a driving reason for a defense mechanism and violence embedded in conservation practices: It assumes that Indigenous people are irrational and destructive to ecosystems,  that we drive biodiversity loss, and create environmental degradation.

This is a neocolonial force trying to look like a benevolent feature.

In Rewilding:

• Fortress conservation sets up dichotomies – Animal VS Plant VS Human VS…. so does Rewilding
• It insists on the human as the Apex Species, with all else arranged in a hiearchy below
• It is explicitly about removal, control, and termination of relationship
• It is based on Western and European supremacies, white supremacies, and Western ideologies and objectives
• It removes the Indigenous person from their sacred role in the interest of capital and exploitation

All western conservation systems, including rewilding, view land and all our relations as “resource,” our mammalian kin as “game vs non-game species” while window dressing with some veneer of greater spiritual abundance in relationship with land. This is not possible without Indigenous law, Indigenous world view, Indigenous peoples, and an end to western modalities in how we envision integrated ecologies where humans are not the exception or exceptional, but integral within the systems in which we exist.

Rewilding is still an underpinning of colonial notions of Fortress Conservation when it comes to Indigenous lives – it requires the most harmful and genocidal concepts experience by global Indigenous peoples:

• Doctrine of discovery (non-Christian, non-white people are not fully human)
• Terra Nullius (empty land belongs to no one so can be taken)
• “Unused” lands are subject to conquest and ownership of the colonial claim

Rewilding creates a settler move to innocence. It creates a condition where the settler conscience escapes the culpability in the destruction of Indigenous lands, water, ecologies, relationships, and both human and non human people. This is reified through individualism, the single human as a driving force for the effect on ecological abundance while the real force of colonial systems continue to exploit, extract, and create massive violence against Indigenous people and the land. Settler use is prioritized as land use is prescribed as superior and separate from Indigenous lives.

Rewilding does not have space to include or address Indigenous Sovereignty. It remains a settler driven, a settler ideal still working within a colonial framework, blind to the relationships where we do not position our kin above or under us, but function within a balance where we are integral and held within a natural law.

This is a neocolonial force trying to look like a benevolent feature.

Indigenous Sovereignty is paramount to ecological integrity. There is no amount of colonial will that can undo the harms caused by colonial methods. There is no kinder, softer, gentler form extraction and industrial economies, no kinder or gentler form of settler conservation. Rewilding presents itself as something better or different from fortress conservation whilst upholding its most problematic values – those of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples.