The assumption of the Ecological Indian myth by Mattapoisett is disappointing because of how optimistic this depiction of the future is, especially in contrast to the dystopia that Connie comes across later. The utopia should have been able to dispel the old stereotypes of Native Americans, namely the Ecological Indian, but doesn’t because they are more interested in preserving the earth over preserving culture. This balance of the environment and identity is wholly unfamiliar to Connie, where suddenly she is in opposition to Mattapoisett, acting as the ecological other. Connie’s first trip to the utopia happens shortly after she is admitted to the mental institution.


Connie, with no other frame of reference, can only think of this pristine wilderness within the qualities of the urban areas she is familiar with. Comparing the sizes of buildings to a “supermarket in any shopping plaza” emphasizes this, where she doesn’t immediately understand what she is seeing but thinks of it within her time. The manmade bird objects “were scarcely higher than some of the pine trees,” but aren’t tall enough to replace the skyscrapers that Connie was expecting, of which she would have had a stronger connection to. She notices that there aren’t these hallmarks of what is thought the future is made of, with “spaceports” and a “traffic jam in the sky,” where what Connie is noticing is not how clean this wilderness is, but rather how it lacks the pollution she was expecting. Immediately, Connie is set apart and primed for misunderstanding within Mattapoisett because her preconceived notions of the future were that of bringing modern times forward with technology, and not getting rid of the environmental problems that Connie would have been experiencing in New York. 
	This confusion of the rural and urban is also informed by the ecological othering Connie is experiencing, something Ray demonstrates was a product of environmentalism. Ray, in discussing how Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead criticizes environmentalism because it allows those who ruin the environment to deflect the blame of what they’ve done to marginalized communities, such as the poor and Native Americans. Instead of fixing the numerous environmental issues they’ve created, these corporations that pollute opt to fix these marginalized communities that they blame, which often means making them unable to connect to the wilderness. 

 Brown skinned in this case applies to Native Americans who don’t subscribe to the Ecological Indian in Silko’s novel, but this othering is happening to Connie as well, where her brown skin is a part of her poor, urban background. Within Mattapoisett she represents the broken, polluted environment of the American 1970s, one that she hasn’t been able to escape simply because she can’t or doesn’t want to. Not only this, but as a fat, mentally unwell, poor, Chicana woman in New York city, Connie is allegedly taking up resources; part of why she is subjected to the mind control experiment is because the scientists want to eliminate those who they feel use more than their fair share of resources by “fixing” their perceived mental illness. In the utopia as the representation of that polluted past, Connie’s body is taking up space in a pristine wilderness, expressing and understanding that wilderness in a way that opposes the Ecological Indian. Because of how Connie brings the urban pollution she is used to into the new space she inhabits, she becomes aware of how she is the ecological other. 
