As Long as Grass Grows

The title As Long as Grass Grows evokes treaty language meant to promise permanence, then asks how governments repeatedly broke such promises. Dina Gilio-Whitaker moves from colonization and land incursions through struggles over food, water, and sacred sites to Standing Rock, developing what she calls an Indigenized environmental justice. This is not an extra chapter of Indigenous examples added to an existing framework. It changes the starting point: for Native nations, environmental injustice begins with dispossession, treaty violation, and the denial of political sovereignty, not only with the unequal distribution of pollution.

U.S. environmental-justice movements have often begun by documenting how toxic facilities disproportionately harm low-income communities of color. Gilio-Whitaker values this tradition but argues that its legal and policy language tends to recognize racialized individuals or neighborhoods, not tribes as political nations with treaty relations, territorial rights, and jurisdiction. Cleaning one contaminated site, allowing public participation, or improving a health measure matters. Yet colonial relations can remain intact if control of land does not change. Sovereignty, jurisdiction, cultural continuity, and land return therefore belong at the center of environmental justice.

The book also challenges mainstream environmentalism’s fantasy of pristine “wilderness.” National parks and protected areas were not empty landscapes; many became natural shrines only after the peoples who had long managed those ecosystems were expelled. Cultural burning, gathering, hunting, and food cultivation were prohibited, Indigenous practice was labeled destructive, and settler recreation or state management became conservation. Environmental protection that refuses this history can continue colonization in green language. Ecological repair requires restoring both land-based knowledge and the political authority to practice it.

Women appear here not as symbolic guardians naturally closer to the earth but as organizers, knowledge holders, and maintainers of kinship. Gilio-Whitaker traces Indigenous women’s leadership in water and sacred-site protection, food systems, and cultural transmission, as well as the gendered violence surrounding extraction and militarized policing. Colonial governance altered gender power through Christian family norms, property and inheritance rules, and federal definitions of identity. Bodily autonomy, freedom from violence, and territorial sovereignty are therefore connected. The feminist question is who performs ecological care, who is excluded from decisions, and who faces state force while defending land.

Standing Rock brings these histories together. Outside media often framed resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline as a protest that suddenly appeared in 2016. Gilio-Whitaker places it within centuries of treaty struggle and Indigenous organizing. Water protectors contested more than the probability of a spill; they challenged why governments and corporations could route infrastructure through ancestral lands and water without meaningful consent. Intertribal solidarity, youth and women’s leadership, prayer, and direct action made environmental politics a struggle over material resources, law, memory, and renewed relation.

The scope of this synthesis also demands care. Native nations do not share one uniform ecological philosophy, and communities contain disagreements about gender, class, extraction, and development. “Traditional ecological knowledge” can be extracted again when outsiders detach it from a specific people, protocol, and right to withhold knowledge. Celebrating women’s leadership can likewise romanticize an unequal burden of unpaid care. The book offers a history and policy framework for relocating environmental justice; it cannot replace each nation’s account of its lands, laws, and strategies.

For FemRes readers, the book supplies a discipline for evaluating every “green” proposal: who holds the land, who can consent or refuse, who defines conservation, and who profits from energy or tourism? A climate policy may reduce carbon while mining, transmission lines, or protected areas occupy Indigenous territory again. Read with Indigenous feminist work, Land Back campaigns, the movement for missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the treaty history of the place concerned. As Long as Grass Grows moves ecofeminism away from an abstract woman–nature bond and toward the linked seizure—and linked recovery—of land, bodies, and political authority.