	In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time the story follows Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman from New York City who is committed to a mental institution and is labelled as mentally unwell and excessively violent. This results in her being subjected to a mind control experiment that is being done by doctors within the mental institution, removing Connie’s autonomy entirely. However, Connie experiences the ward differently because she discovers she can travel through time, experiencing a utopia in the year 2137 found in the village Mattapoisett, Massachusetts while at the mental institution. The story moves between Mattapoisett and Connie’s time, America in the 1970s, through Luciente, Connie’s sender, who connects Connie to the future and Mattapoisett to their past, Connie’s present. The utopia is significant because they rehabilitated the earth, both focusing on environmental issues and social structure, eliminating all chances for discrimination. Mattapoisett is one of presumably many villages that value the environment over industry, paying close attention to land use and management, as well as consumption and waste. Socially, men and women both care for children, which are scientifically made, and there is a privileging of the communal over the individual, in all things including use of the land. In order to prevent racially based discrimination, racial identities are assigned where Luciente reveals “we’re Wamponaug Indians”. This changes how Mattapoisett connects to the wilderness around them as well as how Connie connects to them. 
	Mattapoisett, however, acts out their identity as Native American in a way that shows them as the ecological subject, as defined by The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture by Sarah Jaquette Ray. Ray compiles a history of environmentalism that values the wilderness over the bodies that live within it, especially the treatment of Native American communities, relevant because Mattapoisett thinks of itself as a Native American community. Ray demonstrates how the ecological subject, “whose aim is to save the world from ecological crisis,” discriminates against ecological others, who are in contrast “often those from whose poor decisions and reckless activities the world ostensibly needs to be saved”. These kinds of defiant ideologies are embodied by people with disabilities, Native American, and immigrants according to Ray because their ideas about the environment and how they relate to it don’t align with the motivations of traditional environmentalism, which wants to preserve the wilderness in order to recreate “the experience of the frontier encounter”. In application to Native American communities specifically, the ecological subject wants them to adhere to an environmentalist agenda, created by non-native environmentalists. This agenda changed what it meant to be Native American to those who were not Native American themselves, splitting Native Americans into the Ecological Indian and the ecologically other. 
	As discussed by Shepard Kresch III in The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, the creation of the Ecological Indian first appeared as the distinction of the noble and ignoble savage, where the first “emphasized the rationality, vigor, and morality of the nature-dwelling Native,” and the second linked Native Americans to being animalistic savages. With the social and political turmoil of the 1970s, the definition of the noble Indian shifted to the Ecological Indian, so that they were “the Indian in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt”. It is this image of the Ecological Indian that Ray’s ecological subjects relies upon because they constructed it, appropriating so-called Native American tradition so that it places the environment above all while suggesting the only way to connect to nature in this way would be to play at being Native American. 
