As someones who've been put off from interacting seriously with the otherkin/nonhuman/therian communities for over a decade for this exact reason, we could fill several pages with ranting on this subject. Maybe we will, someday, but for now I'll offer some reading that I strongly recommend to anyone trying to unlearn these toxic patterns.
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, is a brilliant and hopeful read about the ways that indigenous peoples learned from and related to the land, and the ways that the rest of us today can draw from that knowledge to realize kinder, more reciprocal ways of living with the world. Check your local library for it if you can't afford a copy; if mobility is limited, check to see if your library offers ebooks via Libby.
For a shorter read (but honestly do read Braiding Sweetgrass if you at all can), The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans is an article that addresses a number of the same topics.
Some additional context: one of the most subtle but insidious forms of racism that we see in the community is this attitude that Humans Are Inherently Bad For Nature (which then often generalizes to Humans Are Inherently Bad). People so often treat this as Obvious Fact, when... it's really not! The idea that humans and nature Can't coexist, that they are Fundamentally Separate, is a myth constructed by an exploitative and imperialist society, which erases all of the indigenous cultures that have very different ways of relating to the earth and its beings.
Racism is a many-faceted beast, and to be clear, this is only one facet of it, but it's one that's so pervasive and so unquestioned in the community that I wanted to call attention to it in particular.
