This article describes the dialectic opposing the rights of indigenous peoples and the nature’s protection standards. It defends the hypothesis according to which these standards are an instrument of biopower. By designing a new philosophical archeology, it argues and overthrows Foucault’s periodization by distinguishing three major biopolitical forms, which have punctuated history and western expansion: the slavery-supporting biopolitics, the sanitary biopolitics and the environmental biopolitics. This new periodization, combined with Philippe Descola’s anthropology of nature, allows a fresh and strong interpretation of the power measures in place since the beginning of the modern era. Laying within a long-term perspective, environmental standards appear as a major tool in the modern West anthropological base’s establishment. But the historical clash or synergy dynamics between customary law systems, sovereignty juridical systems and biopolitical governmentalities also reveals that the indigenous peoples’ dawning law resists both to the power of states and neo-liberal environmental standardization.