Western conservation often creates protected areas by removing Indigenous peoples from their lands, treating human presence as a threat to 'pristine' nature. This frames conservation as a form of displacement that severs the relationships through which land was historically maintained.
Indigenous ecological knowledge positions land, plants, and animals as kin with reciprocal obligations rather than as resources to be managed or preserved for human benefit. This kinship relationship produces stewardship through responsibility and care rather than through control or extraction.
Environmental restoration cannot be separated from the restoration of displaced peoples, because ecological damage and colonial trauma are the same wound. Viewing land degradation and human dispossession as linked reframes conservation as a justice project rather than a purely biological one.
Hernandez argues ecological knowledge should be transmitted and validated through Indigenous women, elders, and community practice rather than through Western scientific credentialing. Whose testimony counts as expertise determines which solutions get funded, so shifting the locus of authority changes the outcomes.