Part of The Cottonwood Collection — a public reference library on harm, care, and stewardship.
Indigenous Philosophies of Care, Harm, and Intergenerational Responsibility: A Comparative Survey
Human civilizations have long grappled with the ethical dimensions of harm and the obligations owed to those who cannot advocate for themselves—whether the unborn, the non-human living world, or the voiceless vulnerable. While Western philosophical traditions have often approached these questions through frameworks of individual rights, contract theory, or utilitarian calculation, Indigenous philosophical traditions across multiple continents have developed sophisticated systems of relational ethics that understand harm not as an individual violation but as a rupture in the fabric of relationships. These traditions emphasize duties of care that extend across generations and species, grounding moral responsibility in the recognition that existence itself is fundamentally interdependent. This survey examines how specific Indigenous traditions—the Haudenosaunee Seven Generations principle, Southern African Ubuntu, Andean Buen Vivir, Aboriginal Australian concepts of Country, Māori tikanga, and Native Hawaiian values—have articulated frameworks for protecting the vulnerable through the cultivation of sustained, reciprocal relationships.
The Haudenosaunee Seven Generations Principle: The Great Law of Peace and Duties to the Unborn
Among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, whose democratic governance system influenced constitutional thought in the United States yet remains distinct in its ethical foundations, the concept of Seven Generations constitutes a central moral imperative within the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. This oral constitution, which established the Confederacy of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and later the Tuscarora nations, requires that deliberations consider their impact “to the seventh generation,” thereby establishing a fiduciary duty toward those not yet born. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca scholar who documented these traditions in the early twentieth century, noted that the Great Law demands that chiefs “look and listen for the welfare of the whole people, and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations.” This temporal extension of moral consideration challenges the anthropocentric and presentist bias of Western ethical frameworks by recognizing the unborn as rights-bearing members of the community whose welfare must be protected by current decision-makers.
The application of this principle to environmental stewardship and collective decision-making illustrates how the Haudenosaunee framework conceptualizes harm as intergenerational theft. When contemporary actions degrade the land, water, or climate, they constitute a violation of the covenant between generations, effectively stealing from the inheritance of the seventh generation. As the Haudenosaunee environmental statement declares, “We must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” This framework thus establishes the vulnerable not merely as the poor or marginalized within the present generation, but as the entire continuum of future existence, which cannot speak in council but must be spoken for by those currently empowered. The ethical obligation emerges not from a social contract to which future generations have consented—they cannot consent—but from a recognition of continuity and the reciprocal duties that bind the living to the unborn through the medium of the earth itself.
Ubuntu: Southern African Philosophies of Relational Personhood and Communal Care
Moving to the African continent, the Nguni Bantu concept of Ubuntu—often translated as “I am because we are” or “a person is a person through other persons”—presents a philosophical anthropology fundamentally at odds with Western liberal individualism. Documented through oral traditions and later articulated by philosophers such as Mogobe B. Ramose and theologians including Desmond Tutu, Ubuntu posits that human existence is inherently relational, and that moral personhood is achieved through participation in community rather than through the possession of autonomous rights. As John Mbiti observed in his seminal work African Religions and Philosophy, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” This ontological premise generates an ethics of care in which the vulnerable are protected not through institutional charity but through the recognition that their wellbeing is constitutive of the self.
The implications of Ubuntu for understanding harm and protection become particularly evident in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which Archbishop Desmond Tutu explicitly framed as an application of Ubuntu ethics. Unlike retributive justice models that focus on individual guilt and punishment, the TRC emphasized restorative justice grounded in the restoration of broken relationships and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Tutu explained that “Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language… It speaks to the very essence of being human… We say ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ It is not ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong.’” In this framework, harm to the vulnerable—whether political victims, orphans, or the impoverished—constitutes a tear in the social fabric that diminishes everyone. The duty of care emerges from the understanding that one cannot be fully human while others suffer; protection of the vulnerable is thus simultaneously self-preservation and moral obligation.
Buen Vivir and Sumak Kawsay: Andean Relational Ontologies and the Rights of Nature
In the Andean region, particularly among Quechua-speaking peoples and related cultures in Ecuador and Bolivia, the concept of Buen Vivir (Spanish) or Sumak Kawsay (Quechua)—meaning “living well” or “plentiful life”—offers a philosophical framework that challenges both developmentalist economics and anthropocentric ethics. Unlike Western notions of well-being that often emphasize individual accumulation or utilitarian calculation, Sumak Kawsay conceptualizes the good life as achieved through harmonious relationships within the community, with nature (Pachamama or Mother Earth), and with the cosmos. As Eduardo Gudynas and Alberto Acosta have documented in their scholarly analysis of these traditions, Sumak Kawsay implies “a communal life in which the individual is not the center, but rather the community, which includes nature.” This ontological stance generates a care ethics in which the vulnerable include not only marginalized human populations but the earth itself and its constituent beings.
The constitutional enshrinement of these principles in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution represents a unprecedented translation of Indigenous philosophy into state law, specifically through the recognition of nature’s rights. Article 71 of the Constitution declares that “Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” This legal innovation, driven by Indigenous movements and intellectuals including Acosta, who served as president of the Constituent Assembly, reconceptualizes environmental protection not as a matter of human property rights or resource management, but as a duty of care owed to a vulnerable subject. Harm to the environment thus constitutes a rights violation against Pachamama herself, with the state serving as guardian or amigo de la naturaleza (friend of nature) to enforce these protections. This framework extends the concept of vulnerability beyond the human to encompass entire ecosystems, requiring that decisions regarding development, extraction, and land use prioritize the regeneration and wellbeing of the earth as a living entity.
Aboriginal Australian Traditions: Country, Dreaming, and Custodial Ethics
For Aboriginal Australian peoples, whose philosophical traditions have been maintained through oral transmission across millennia, the concept of “Country” transcends Western notions of landscape or property to denote a living, sentient entity with which human communities exist in relationships of mutual obligation and care. As anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose documented in her work with the Yarralin and Lingara communities, and as Bill Gammage has elaborated in his historical analysis of Aboriginal land management, Country is understood as “a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.” This ontological framework, grounded in the Dreaming or Tjukurrpa—the sacred law and creation period that continues to animate the present—establishes that humans do not own the land but belong to it, inheriting duties of care that extend across generations.
The custodial relationship between Aboriginal people and Country generates a distinctive ethics of harm in which environmental degradation constitutes not merely resource depletion but a moral injury to a living kin. As Rose observed, “People and country are linked in an obligatory, caring relationship, with country understood as a living, breathing entity.” This means that harm to the land—whether through mining, deforestation, or climate change—represents a failure of care toward a vulnerable entity that cannot protect itself through human legal mechanisms. The concept of “standing” thus expands to include the land itself, with human communities serving as guardians responsible for maintaining the health of Country through practices of controlled burning, sustainable harvesting, and ritual maintenance. This framework challenges Western distinctions between human and non-human, subject and object, by recognizing the land as a subject of care with inherent worth and agency. The protection of vulnerable populations within this tradition necessarily includes the protection of Country itself, as the wellbeing of human communities is understood as inseparable from the wellbeing of the land.
Māori Tikanga: Kaitiakitanga, the Treaty of Waitangi, and Legal Personhood
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori philosophical traditions articulated through tikanga (customary law and correct practice) offer sophisticated frameworks for understanding guardianship and the protection of vulnerable entities through the concept of kaitiakitanga. This principle denotes stewardship or guardianship, but within Māori ontology it implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between humans and the natural world, grounded in genealogical connections (whakapapa) that link all existence. As Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has documented, and as legal scholars such as Jacinta Ruru have analyzed, kaitiakitanga “involves the protection and preservation of natural and physical resources for future generations,” but it also recognizes that these resources possess their own integrity and agency derived from their divine origins.
The Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi), signed in 1840 between Māori chiefs and the British Crown, provides a constitutional framework for these care ethics, establishing a relationship of mutual obligation that extends to environmental protection. While the Treaty has been historically violated, its principles of partnership (rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga) have been interpreted by the Waitangi Tribunal and subsequent legal developments as mandating the protection of Māori environmental interests as a matter of national obligation. This framework was spectacularly realized in the 2017 settlement granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua), which recognized the river as “an indivisible and living whole” possessing rights, duties, and liabilities. As the settlement legislation declares, “Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” This legal innovation translates kaitiakitanga into statutory recognition that the vulnerable entity—the river—possesses standing not as property but as a subject of care, with human guardians appointed to speak on its behalf. The framework thus extends protection to non-human entities through the recognition of their inherent worth and the genealogical relationships that bind them to human communities.
Native Hawaiian Values: Malama, Aloha Aina, and the Ahupuaa System
In the Hawaiian archipelago, Indigenous philosophical traditions preserved through oral history (moʻolelo) and customary practice (kānaʻwai) articulate an integrated framework for care and protection through concepts of mālama (to care for, protect, and sustain) and aloha ʻāina (love of the land). As historian Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor and philosopher Manulani Aluli Meyer have documented, these concepts emerge from an ontology that recognizes the land (ʻāina) as familial elder—literally, that which feeds—establishing a relationship of filial obligation rather than resource extraction. The concept of mālama implies a reciprocal relationship: just as the land sustains the people, the people must sustain the land, creating a “circle of reciprocity” that extends protection to the land itself as a vulnerable entity requiring care.
The ahupuaʻa system, the traditional land tenure and resource management system of Hawaiʻi, operationalized these ethical principles through an integrated ecological and social framework. An ahupuaʻa typically ran from the mountains (mauka) to the sea (makai), encompassing all necessary resources for subsistence and requiring cooperative management across social strata. As McGregor explains, this system “ensured that all people had access to the resources necessary for life,” while maintaining the ecological health of the entire watershed. The konohiki (resource managers) and kāhuna (experts) enforced kapu (restrictions) not as arbitrary prohibitions but as necessary protections during spawning seasons, growth cycles, or resource depletion, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of sustainability as moral obligation. Harm within this framework constituted not merely individual transgression but a disruption of the pono (balance/righteousness) between humans and ʻāina, threatening the wellbeing of the entire community including future generations who would inherit the land. The protection of vulnerable populations—children, the infirm, and the land itself—was thus embedded in a spatial and ecological ethics that refused the separation of social justice from environmental stewardship.
Relational Ethics Across Traditions: Harm as Rupture of Relationship
Across these diverse philosophical traditions—despite their geographical separation and distinct linguistic and cultural contexts—a common thread emerges that fundamentally reconceptualizes the nature of harm and the foundation of ethical obligation. While Western frameworks often conceptualize harm as an individual rights violation or a utilitarian calculation of suffering, Indigenous traditions consistently understand harm as a disruption of relationships—between humans, between generations, between species, and between the human and the more-than-human world. This relational ontology shifts the locus of ethical concern from the autonomous individual to the network of connections that constitute existence itself.
In this framework, vulnerability is not a temporary condition of specific human populations but a fundamental characteristic of all existence, including the earth and its systems. Protection therefore requires the maintenance of right relationships—kaitiakitanga, mālama, kaitiakitanga, or the Seventh Generation perspective—rather than the extension of charity or the enforcement of abstract rights. As Deborah Bird Rose observed in her work with Aboriginal Australian communities, “Country is not a place or an object, but a living entity with which one is in relationship.” Similarly, the Māori concept of whakapapa (genealogy) extends personhood and moral standing through networks of relationship that include mountains, rivers, and seas. This relational ethics challenges the Western assumption that moral status requires rational autonomy or the capacity to enter into contracts; instead, standing is conferred by relationship and the fact of interdependence.
The Tension with Western Frameworks: Rights, Property, and Human Exceptionalism
The Indigenous philosophies surveyed here present fundamental challenges to the assumptions underlying dominant Western ethical and legal frameworks, particularly regarding individual rights, property ownership, and human exceptionalism. Western traditions, stemming from Enlightenment philosophy and Roman legal traditions, typically conceptualize rights as possessions of autonomous individuals, property as alienable and exclusive, and the non-human world as res nullius (belonging to no one) or resources awaiting human appropriation. Indigenous care ethics invert or transcend these categories, offering alternative foundations for protecting vulnerable populations and the living world.
The Western framework of individual rights, while protective in many contexts, struggles to accommodate the collective, intergenerational, and ecological dimensions of Indigenous ethics. When the Haudenosaunee consider the Seventh Generation, or when Māori assert kaitiakitanga over the Whanganui River, they are not claiming individual property rights or even collective human rights in the Western sense, but rather fulfilling obligations within a web of relationships that includes non-human entities. As legal scholar Christopher Stone argued in his seminal work Should Trees Have Standing?—which influenced the legal recognition of nature’s rights in Ecuador and New Zealand—Western law has historically treated nature as objects rather than subjects, rendering them vulnerable to exploitation precisely because they lack standing to sue or be represented in their own right. Indigenous frameworks, by contrast, recognize the inherent vulnerability of the non-human world and assign human communities the duty of guardianship, effectively granting nature standing through human trusteeship while acknowledging its intrinsic value independent of human use.
Furthermore, the Western distinction between public and private property fails to capture the custodial relationships described in Aboriginal Australian, Hawaiian, and Māori traditions. The ahupuaʻa system, for instance, was not communal property in the socialist sense nor private property in the capitalist sense, but a system of reciprocal obligation between people and land. Similarly, the recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person (Te Awa Tupua Act 2017) represents a statutory acknowledgment that the river is not property but a subject with its own rights to health and wellbeing, protected by appointed guardians who must
Primary source: kimi (19063 chars). Cross-referenced against 4 provider(s). Generated 20260228-020111.