Environment Sustainability through the Lens of Indigenous Ecofeminism: A Study on Select Indian Indigenous Communities

The lives of the Adivasis (Aboriginals), more particularly their women, have been less projected in academic discourses as articulators of sustainable life. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in their groundbreaking work Ecofeminism subject the indigenous women as stakeholders of indigenous identity in third world like India. The inherent skills of indigenous women namely Santal, Munda, Shabar, Lodha, Ho etc. in the Eastern India, in nurturing environment sustainability, drastically diverges from both the Androcentric and Eurocentric models of bio-conservation. Indigenous women and the indigenous flora are both objects of genocidal violence, identity dissolution, and cultural extinction as their contribution to conservation of nature remains unacknowledged by the policymakers. From being tagged as ‘doubly displaced’, justified in Spivak’s comments “subaltern as women are even more deeply in shadows” in her groundbreaking book Can the Subaltern Speak, their care-giving to nature from earning livelihoods to observing festivals, give them subject positions in scholarly discourses. Ecofeminism being a springboard forms Indian indigenous ecofeminism and creates an emergent berth in intersectional feminist discourses.