This essay examines how environmental activists in northern Europe relate to indigenous peoples in their political activism, focusing on the role of visual culture and the performance of identity in resource conflicts. I analyze the use of images of the noble and ecological Indian in environmental campaigns, and the images help me to think more broadly about translation, imitation, and cultural appropriation in campaigning. The examples—the international Yasuní campaign aimed at generating support for a proposal of leaving oil in the ground under the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador and German anti-mining activism in the Rhine-Ruhr district—are drawn from a larger project on comparison in activism and ontological conflicts over forests in contexts of resource exploitation. My recurrent fieldwork in both Ecuador and Germany between 2014 and 2017 revealed how German anti-mining activists constantly compare themselves to indigenous peoples as part of their political strategizing, and that “caring for the...

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