My post was directed to the thread in general, not just you. It was a question, not a criticism.
Modern weaponry was more efficient of course, without any room for dispute. Far greater returns with less resource waste. What exactly is your point?
What a blatant red herring.
Your claim was that running buffalo off a cliff was “very efficent”. The fact that it may have been more efficient than nuking the herd from orbit does not justify that claim.
Your claim was that, since Indians failed to exterminate one buffalo species out of eight, the technique could not have been wasteful. That claim is based on ignorance of the facts and a logical fallacy. Even if it were logically and factually sound then the fact that Indians wasted less than some other groups that hunted buffalo by nuking the herds from orbit still wouldn’t support the claim.
The claim that the OP wanted information on was not that some Indians were more thrifty than some other group at some point in time.
The claim was that all Indians were less wasteful than modern culture. Since then a claim has been made that Indians produced less waste than all modern abbatoirs.
But let’s see what your assertion above is based on. There is absolutely no evidence that any modern hunter ever killed a buffallo without utilising the carcasse. We have evidence that Indians killed thousands of buffalo and left the carcasses to rot. So how exactly can you claim that the Indian hunters made better use of the carcasse?
What does that even mean? It’s a total non sequitur, it refers to nothing and it isn’t even English. What ecology did I ever refer to? How does it not add up.
- The Indians could only be the first conservationists if we assume that Indians were the first people in America. That claim is considered highly doubtful and pre-Clovis people seem to have been conservationists in America for thousands of years before Indians ever arrived. So on the face of it the claim is spurious.
but if we accept it at face value…
- All aboriginal people were the first conservationists. It could not help but be otherwise. Of course Indians conserved some resources, they wouldn’t be human if they did not. I fail to see what what relevence that has to the discussion. What is your point?
That isn’t even English.
I assume you are trying to claim that we might owe the current abundance of wildlife in North Am to Indians. If that is the case it is a bizarre claim to make. The American biota today is extremely depauperate compared to what it was when the Indians arrived. Huge numbers of species have been exterminated through Indian activities. I can therefore only assume that your point is that since Indians didn’t actually exterminate all wildife that we owe the current abundance of wildlife in North Am to Indians.
If that is your point then it’s a pretty strange debt you’re feeling. The local pyromaniac didn’t burn burn down his own house or his kids house last night Therefore we owe the existence of the town to the local pyromaniac. Do you not see how bizarre such a feeling of indebtedness is?
No. I’m not bieng obtuse, I’m stating the facts as science knows them to be.
I have before never heard anyone claim that “Americans”, by which I assume you mean European immigrants, killed off or even made contact with the extinct bison species of North America. I look forward to to your references suporting this claim. Since it is so well documented I am sure you will have little trouble providing such references.
I am not being obtuse, you OTOH appear to have bought into some myth without a shred of evidential support. Of course if you can provide evidence to support.
Edit:
And devilsknew can you posisbly see your way to answering my specific questions? I can’t help but notice that you ducked every single one of them.
Pre-contact Native Americans used buffalo jumps because it was beyond their ability, in the absence of horses or guns, to kill more than one or two buffalo at a time. Buffalo are stupid, but they not so stupid that they don’t move off, sometimes at great speed, when one or two or three of their members are picked off and there’s blood in the air. But as winter approached, it was imperative for the Native Americans to kill enough buffalo to perform a single slaughter of a significant amount of meat in order to put away food for the coming winter. The means they found to do this was to herd the buffalo over a cliff. This required exploitation of the herd mentality, because a single buffalo isn’t stupid enough to jump off a cliff but a buffalo pushed from behind by a hundred other buffalo has no choice but to do so.
Now, you seem to be fixated on the Native Americans having killed more buffalo than they actually needed as being inherently wasteful. What you are overlooking, of course, is that the hunting method did not allow the Native Americans to select how many buffalo they killed. They had to kill enough to feed themselves, but it’s not like they could magically turn off the spigot once they had enough. However many went off the cliff is however many went off the cliff. Were they concerned with the overage? I imagine not. But if the excess is an unavoidable side-effect of the hunting method, and especially if you don’t have any other effective hunting method, then the excess is not inherently wasteful. You condemn them for not putting the overage “to any use whatsoever.” Keeping in mind pre-contact hunter-gatherers were limited to what they could carry or drag, what, exactly, would you have liked them to do with the overage? And for the bison the pre-contact Native Americans slaughtered, they did in fact put every bit of the bison to use because it was their chief source for pretty much everything. Meat, hides, muscles, tendons, sinews, organs, horns, hooves, they used it all. They wasted no part of the animal because they did not have the luxury to. Given that any overage created was both unintentional and unavoidable, there was nothing “wasteful” about it.
The decimation of the bison prompted by whites, OTOH – and I include in this the encouragement of Native Americans to slaughter bison for furs to sell for money – was of a completely different kind. The bison were killed for their hides and their tongues, and that’s it. The rest of the animal was left to rot in the grass. It’s not like we can point to Evil Whitey as the sole cause of bison decimation, but it is clear that the vast majority of underlying factors (the booming fur trade, the settlement of the West, the advent of the railroads) were created by European Americans, and it is clear that the slaughter was extraordinarily wasteful.
So on the one hand you have pre-contact subsistence hunter-gatherers killing bison for meat to eat and for resources to make shelter, clothing, and tools. These people you call “wasteful.” On the other hand, you have hunters with horses, wagons, Sharps rifles and ammunition, killing thousands of bison to take only a fraction of the carcasses to sell for others to make luxury items and delicacies from. This is “a white man killing buffalo to earn money to feed his family.”
The contrast you are drawing is unnecessarily perjorative and patronizing, and is especially indefensible because you have so very little to prove it. That is what it actually is, but what it sounds like, to be frank, is racism (those wasteful Natives contrasted with those noble family-feeding whites). I due you the courtesy of assuming that is not how you intend to sound, but you might keep in mind that nevertheless, that is how you sound.
And I would like to see some cites, please, for the assertion that pre-contact Native Americans “exterminated” between three and seven bison species.
I withdraw my request for cites on the bison extinction assertion because I’ve poked around and found a few myself. This isn’t to say that I concede your point, and you have an irritating way of stating theory as uncontroverted fact when it isn’t, but I was able to find the information.
Are you saying that if I were a native indian faced with 1000 dead buffalos from a buffalo jump, I would take the tenderloin and lips and assholes (etc…) from 12 buffalos rather than just taking the tenderloin from 100 buffalos? Or are you saying that indians only used “every part” of the buffalo when killing them individually but, when they had an overage would selectively choose the choicest parts which was limited to what they could carry?
Because in the second case, the only difference between the indian and the white man would be that the white man could cause overage to happen every single day instead of once a year.
The halal butcher in my home town does chicken sausages. I can’t certify what eeeevery single mass-producer uses, but the brand of Frankfurters Mom bought before being told to switch to chicken ones was pork; the sausages made by the non-halal butchers are pork or pork-with-some-veal.
Sorry.
I have remembered a usage for cow intestines, but it’s one I’d never do myself so maybe that’s why I hadn’t remembered it. If you don’t want to eat cow guts, don’t ask for callos, it’s stewed guts.
I’m saying – for about the 30th time – that the saying that the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo has never meant they used every part of every buffalo. So given a plethora of buffalo to choose from once a year or so, it seems reasoanble they took (a) what they needed (this many more hides for clothes and tents, this many more sinews for stringing bows and sewing) and then (b) the choicest parts of the meat. So?
IYO, you mean. To me, cruicial differences are the facts that (1) in the Natives’ case the overage was largely an unavoidable result of the only hunting method they had that would allow them to bring down several bison at once and (2) in the Anglos’ case (including Native Americans prompted by the Anglos), the motivation for the slaughter was not to keep body and soul together but to make money by an intentionally decimating and intentionally wasteful practice. How the two can be compared is beyond me, much less going a step further, as Blake has done, to condemn the Natives but defend the whites. That makes no sense to me at all.
How many buffalo were ran off the cliff at one time? I would guess tens, maybe. The only number I’ve seen here is thousands, but I’m sure that was an exaggeration, for effect.
Also, I think we’re spending a lot of discussion on what had to be a very limited practice, considering that not a lot of the indians had both buffalo and cliffs.
Also, this is a practice that always rankled me, although I’m not sure of the truth of it. I do, though, know some hunters who are not apalled.
Well, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. “Thousands” would imply a herd so large it is difficult for me to see how Natives on foot could successfully drive them towards the cliffs. But it would not have been “tens.” Hundreds would be my guess, maybe many hundreds.
Limited, but maybe not as limited as you might think. Buffalo jumps have been found from Southern Alberta to Texas. Certainly the jumps were not the only means pre-contact Natives had for hunting buffalo, but it seems clear it was the most effective and successful means for killing more than one or two at once.
Here is an informative pamphlet on the practice from the Head-Smashed-In World Heritage Site in Alberta. (PDF file.)
Well, one of the motivations of the buffalo slaughter encouraged by the US government was to get the Native Americans to settle on reservations. There was the attitude that as long as the buffalo herds existed, the Native Americans on the plains would maintain their way of life. So in that sense, being “wasteful” was the intention, and not just a side effect.
Apropos of not very much, I came across a Gutenberg project release of a book from the 1880s on the destruction of the buffalo. The part on The Extermination is truly eye-popping, particularly the numerical tables.
I don’t think anyone is claiming thousands at a time. I’m sure I would have noticed that. It was certainly many hundreds.
If you read the references I supplied you will note that:
“Bone Bed 3 could represent a single event in which as many as 800 animals died. Others think it more likely that it represents several events, but even so these were massive kills”.
And
“8,500 years ago some 200 Bison occidentalis were stampeded into an arroyo only 5-7 feet deep. The injured animals were killed by projectile points generally of the Scottsbluff type. About 75 percent of the animals were then systematically butchered”
IOW kills of hundreds of animals with 50-200 animals at each event was occurring on a regular basis. Assuming the average Indian lived around 50 years and such events were occurring with each harvest then any individual Indian was responsible for slaughtering thousands of animals that were left to rot.
It’s being discussed because it bears so directly on the OP and there is such a walth of evidence that it occurred.
Did Indians utilise all parts of the buffalo? No, they didn’t, they killed thousands of buffalo and left them to rot without taking even an ounce of meat or a strip of hide from the carcase.
It is incontrovertible evidence of Indians wasting buffalo.
But of course there is vast evidence of other wasteful Indian practices such as poisoning streams or burning forests.
Oh I see, we’re playing this game. A practice wasn’t wasteful if it wasn’t undertaken by a white man.
Tell us Jodi, why was it wasteful if a white man kills a buffalo to trade to another white man to get food for his family, but it isn’t wasteful if an red man kills a buffalo to trade to another red man to get food for his family?
What is the difference here?
They are being compared on the basis of both being wasteful. Simpel as that.
Gee, did anyone miss this blatant strawman. :rolleyes: Nowhere have I made any attempt to defend the whites. I have been stating repeatedly that both were wasteful. Only Jodi has been arguing that reds were not wasteful and only whites were.
Now let’s look at what the actual historical facts are:
Flores, D. 1991
Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850
The Journal of American History 78:2
So by the 1850s the Indian’s utilisation of bison was probably not sustainable or ecologically attuned. Indians didn’t even have a concept of conserving bison because they didn’t even understand they were natural creatures that could be exterminated. It took Europeans to actually discover the ecology of the bison. This goes a long way to explaining how Indians managed to exterminate so many species of bison.
Most bison were being killed for trade, not for meat. Bison were exterminated from the Canadian plains without any white hunting.
To try to argue that the Indians were in any way different to Europeans in terms of waste or conservancy is a blatant double standard and smacks of racism.
Please cite where I have said this, in this thread or ever.
Because the white man isn’t starving if he doesn’t do it. If it were a matter of “feeding his family,” he’d eat the buffalo, and a lot of it, not sell the buffalo tongue and hide and leave the rest. This isn’t that hard.
As I’ve already said, it is unnecessarily perjorative, bordering on inaccurate, to describe the largely unavoidable overage created by bison jumps as wasteful. Why? Because the overage was unintended in the first place and then could not be used. Do you argue that once a white or Native American hunter in 1870 shot a buffalo, he had no choice but to only take the hide and tongue? Do you argue that any single buffalo killed by the 1870 hunter was killed unavoidably?
So having had your assertion of “wastefulness” of pre-contract Natives pretty well refuted, you’ve now retrenched to arguing about the wastefulness of Native Americans participating in the 19th century bison decimation. Of course, I never said anything about Native Americans in that role not being wasteful – in fact, I very clearly said, “The decimation of the bison prompted by whites, OTOH – and I include in this the encouragement of Native Americans to slaughter bison for furs to sell for money – was of a completely different kind.” So I guess at this point you’re just making up your own argument for the dubious satisfaction of knocking it down. What’s the word for that again? Oh yes, I remember because you like to use it so frequently: Strawman.
Oh, this is hilarious. It’s a quote from Dan Flores, from the University of Montana, my alma mater. Dan’s a great guy; you should read more of what he writes or read it with a better eye for context. Dan’s analysis of Native American participation in bison depredation centers on two facts: (1) The relocation of Native Americans west, specifically the Cheyenne resettlement in Oklahoma, added immensely to the population of Natives preying on bison herds and, (2) Native Americans also greatly stepped up their rate of bison hunting to satisfy the fur trade (something I already said). (Incidentally, here is a pretty good synopsis of Flores’ analysis of American bison history that won’t require you to dig up a hard copy of The Journal of American History.) Who forced the Native emigration westward? Whites. And who created the market and the demand for fur? Whites. So if I were inclined to make an argument about ultimate responsibility for the bison decimation, I could still pretty well pin it on Anglos. As it happens, that’s not an argument I’m much interested in making, because it devolves to a paternalistic removal of responsibility from Natives for their own actions. The paternalistic and insulting judging of Natives is your thing, not mine.
Of course it wasn’t! They were killing bison to support the European fur trade! No one has said anything about the sustainability of bison given 1850s behaviors of either whites or Natives. No one but you, that is. Shall I just leave you alone so you can finish both sides of your argument without interruption?
Or, right, as opposed to the whites’ deep understanding of the risks of extermation, so amply demonstrated by their careful husbandry of the dodo. And the passenger pigeon. And the bison. Your ethnocentric arrogance is showing as you presume to bloviate on what Natives “had a concept of” or “didn’t even understand.”
This would be amusing if it wasn’t so horrifyingly arrogant. What on earth makes you think the bison-centered Plains Indians didn’t understand the ecology of bison? Do you think it was sheer luck the Natives managed for thousands of years – most of them afoot – to create a subsistence largely dependent on bison without any understanding of their ecology? Do you have a cite for Native ignorance of bison ecology? Of course you don’t.
I’ve already pointed out that your assertion of Native American extermination of bison is a theory, not a fact – cite – so it would be great if you would stop stating it as if it’s incontrovertible, since that tendency does not reflect well on you. I"m not holding my breath, though.
At that point, certainly, so you’ve sure scored a point off yourself here.
I’m not sure what extermination you’re talking about here, you jump so freely between 30,000 years ago and 500 years ago and 150 years ago.
You’ve managed to poke some mighty fine holes in arguments of your own making – which, hey, contratulations – but you haven’t addressed mine. The differences between European (your term) and pre-contact Native American “waste” of bison were: (1) the unavoidability of the overage in the Natives’ case and (2) the unavoidability of failing to maximally exploit the unintended overages once they occurred, also in the Natives’ case. IOW, the Natives actually needed the bison to survive (unlike the whites); the Natives could not help but kill more buffalo than they actually needed at one time (unlike the whites); and the Natives realistically could do nothing with the excess that was unintentionally created (unlike the whites). All of this I’ve already said, and you’ve addressed none of it. But feel free to keep arguing with yourself if that’s easier or more fun that addressing yourself to the substance of my posts.
Oh yes my friend they’ve tried in the past ,god knows they’ve tried.
Poor desperate fools with more courage then sense they’ve found out the hard way that you might just as well try to tame the soul of the West Wind as tame the noble Haggis.
It was in the spring of 93 0r 94 I believe ,some friends and I were out on a hunt for a rogue sporran (turned pie eater and the local highlanders had asked us to track it and shoot it like a mad hamster) when we ,spotted a pack of starving Bagpipes stalking a haggis with young when…
No ,that stories for another time ,when the wind rattles the shutters and the night is black as satans heart…
For now I wish you Adieu mes amis!
Tell us, granpapa, tell us!
See post number four and then post seventeen to see how resourceful Native Americans were.