Indigenous people aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.
Do you rely on the surrounding plants and animals in your area for sustenance, creating tools, daily life, etc? You do not, that's what I mean by living above/apart. Living in this way does not lead to an ecological society or a shared knowledge base of the surrounding ecology. Do your spiritual and cultural practices involve or integrate that reliance in some way? That's what I'm getting at.
Europeans did that a few hundred years ago, almost everyone did all over the world, that is not unique to anywhere.
Not true, there are obviously other ways. There is an intuitive distinction between living in harmony with natural systems and simply dominating them with technology. That is all you have to believe, it doesn't have to be grounded in ethnonationalism.
Humans are unquestionably part of the environment, and everything humans do bends the environment to their will, but it would clearly be at odds with how we use words to argue that say a nuclear power station is just as much "part of the ecology" as cultivation of soil.
No? There's a rhetorical distinction, there isn't a physical distinction. It's like holistic medicine vs modern medicine, or wellness vs health, or human-centered design vs regular design, or chemical-free food vs regular food
Any given thing is one or the other of these soley based on your perspective of it. Im sending this message to you right now by performing a ritual on a object made of rocks some guy found in the ground
Other animals such as orcas also have been shown to have societies, language, culture, and history that is passed onto children. You could perhaps say that is also second nature.
Call it what you want, but clearly modern human society is distinct in that it stands above (quite literally in the form of cities) and uniquely has the ability to threaten the rest of life on the planet. While at the same time being part of nature.
Humans are part of the surrounding ecology whether we recognize it or not, as others have noted in this thread. The difference is many indigenous societies have tended to recognize it and integrate it into socio-cultural practices as a necessary part of survival in their local ecology, while our modern human society mostly does not.
Consider the Kucadikadi people of now-Mono Lake , whose autonym literally means "eaters of the brine fly pupae". That is how closely their society, culture, and language is related to their local ecology, which "evolved" (in the 2nd nature sense) out of thousands of years of human society development and survival in that place. Notably their society has not developed to threaten or extinquish the brine flies on which they depend.
What exactly are you doubting? Is the word "harmony" meaningless gibberish in your opinion? Are there any nonphysical words you admit are meaningful?