Cross-cultural communications between Indigenous knowledge-holders and Western ecologists typically flounders on the Western nature-culture dichotomy. This is not just a philosophical impasse. Cultural misunderstandings can have serious real-life negative consequences for Indigenous peoples. Historically, forced dispossession of Indigenous homelands was—and still is—justified by the assumption that Natives were doing nothing to enhance the productivity of their lands. Today, removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands to make way for conservation reserves is justified by the assumption that their continued presence is inimical to conservation. Both views assume Indigenous ecological incompetence and marginalize Native peoples. Too often, traditional peoples with centuries-long sustainable cultural practices are lumped together with non-traditional commercial poachers. Indeed, most ecologists unconsciously conflate Indigenous cultures with negative human activities in general, to give just one example of a philosophical chasm. This view results in large part from the Western separation of culture from nature and the artificial separation of “pristine” nature from its degradation by any human activities. It is reinforced by classical succession theory and the Western cultural bias that stable climax states are ecologically optimal. Current discussions about “novel” ecosystems assume the same separation of “wild” from human-dominated landscapes. In contrast, traditional Indigenous cultures are in the middle of a gradient ranging from wild autogenic nature to destructive human activities. Indigenous peoples with a long record of sustainable cultural practices have been so intertwined with nature for so long as keystone players in ecosystem dynamics that, when they are evicted from their homelands or marginalized, unanticipated negative cascading ecological events can occur that cross critical thresholds and flip ecosystems to unstable states, e.g. the suppression of Native burning has left ecosystems vulnerable to unstable states caused by catastrophic fires completely outside of known natural ranges of variability in their severity, frequency, and extent. We should view Indigenous cultural landscapes in much of the world as historical while viewing our recently degraded ones as novel—the opposite of the conventional views that consider novel ecosystems to be in the middle of the culture-nature continuum instead of traditional cultural landscapes. European settlement patterns were imposed on cultural, not natural landscapes, creating abiotic and biotic stresses to Indigenous cultural landscapes instead of to pristine nature in most biomes. Cultural landscapes require ongoing periodic human intervention while purely autogenic terrestrial systems are as rare as long-lived climax states. Ecosystem-based adaptation for Indigenous peoples requires maintaining historical cultural species through arrested succession.