This might better be suited to Great Debates. Maybe a mod can move this if it goes in that direction.
Is the Wasteless Indian a myth? If you want a clarification of what I mean by wasteless Indian, all I can offer is the idea of native North Americans living in harmony with nature, maintaining a delicate balance, etc.
I recently talked to someone who was complaining about revisionism in history texts, and unlike some people I hear talking about this, he wasn’t accusing a political wing of getting away with their agenda. He sounded knowledgable, but his only example (I asked) of a wasteful Indian was when they ran buffalo herds off of a cliff and took one or two of them.
I have never heard of a single example of stampeeding a herd of buffalo over a pishkin, just to harvest a couple animals.
Think about it a bit. If your life depended on buffalo, year around, what would be the sense of destroying a herd for a few days meat? The hides were used to make their lodges, bedding, clothing, shoes, travois, lacing, the meat was eaten or preserved by drying. The intestines cleaned and used to make containers, or eaten, sinews for bow strings or more lacing, bones for fashioning tools, horns for cups, teeth for decoration… Probably wasn’t anything left for the coyotes.
Folks with little make do with what is available to them and those living closer to the land waste little, if anything.
Bare, it’s all relative. If the supply of buffalo is effectively endless, why not stampede them over a cliff if that is the easiest way to get a few burgers? There will be another herd along tomorrow.
I don’t see that the American Indians were any more conservation-conscious than anyone else. They were a product of their time. You don’t need to conserve if stuff is plentiful.
A couple of questions:
Are there a lot of cliffs in regions where buffalo lived? I always invisioned the plains as fairly undramatic.
Also, what exactly was this knowledgable person argueing, that Native Americans did live in perfect harmony with nature or that they didn’t?
In my very unqualified opinion, I’ve always felt that Native Americans lived as in tune with nature as any pre-industrial people living in smallish groups. Yes, they used whatever was around for what they needed. Sure, they didn’t open strip mines, but that doesn’t mean they never did anything environmentally untoward.
I don’t have any examples for North American Natives, but I do know that native peoples of South America would keep half-plucked parrots around as pets (not very environmentally nice when you have to keep plucking the bird) and that natives of Hawaii would use slash and burn to clear land for farming and would alter bits of shoreline to make aquacultur ponds.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of distinct Native American cultures. I imagine that there was a continuum of relative wastefulness depending on circumstances and past history.
By our standards a potlatch seems pretty wasteful. A potlatch was a Northwest Pacific Indian ceremony of feasting, giftgiving…and destruction of one’s own property to demonstrate superiority in social standing. Canoes burned, robes burned, jewlery destroyed, that sort of thing.
That is a total myth. There were lots of different types of ‘Indians’ but most were fairly standard agriculturalists, and most were as wasteful as contemporary agricultural people in Europe or Asia.
The single most compelling example to debunk the myth of Indians “living in harmony with nature, maintaining a delicate balance” would have to be the Anasazi and the moderately famous Chaco canyon disaster.
Bolding mine. It’s always impossible to ascribe a single cause to any ecological disaster that concerns humans. They are always a combination of human factor and natural pressure. However as far as we can be certain that humans deforested western Europe the NW US and upset ‘the balance of nature’ (whatever that is) we can be certain that Indians did exactly the same thing in the SW US.
This environmental destruction and collapse extended well into Central America, and is evidenced in the collapse of numerous Mayan cities as well. It is also probably a major cause in the collapse of the Mayan empire. Whether you wish to call Mayans Indians is your own decision, but the people of Chaco certainly were.
Chaco is however only the most dramatic example of Indians ‘upsetting the balance’. A brief review of the work of Steven Archer (http://rangeweb.tamu.edu/archer/ ) will show the huge effect that the removal of Indian fire regimes has had right across the US. Far from living in harmony with the natural world, even the most ‘naturalistic’ Indians were promoting massive ecological change and maintaining their favoured modified ecosystems. The most dramatic example of this is that between 40 and 90% of the prairie ecosytem in North America is not natural. They are areas that have been deforested by Indian activity.
Paragraph to apost it is. This could take a while.
Mike Williams has produced an excellent book enitled ‘Americans and Their Forest’ of which a large part is devoted to pre-Columbian forest in the US. The evidence is conclusive. Even in the NE of the US and Eastern Canada the forest cover was neither natural nor in balance. Closed forest was exceptional. Most of the area was widely spaced trees with shrub and grass understorey; in effect an artificial temperate savanna and no more natural than a cornfield. This system still persisted even when settlers arrived, although the decimation of Indian populations by disease had allowed partial recovery and the thick oak and hemlock understorey described by the settlers. However the dendrochronolgical data shows this recent recruitment spike quite clearly.
This article - although it misinterprets the function of brush-burning - has a number of historical references to wasteful hunting practices, such as Native Americans killing large numbers of buffalo just for the tongues (a practice normally ascribed to white hunters).
I grew up north of Buffalo Jump and obviously knew that they jumped herds of buffalo off of a cliff, but just the way the guy phrased something caused my hamsters to click, “Hey, that is wasteful. I’ve known that for fifteen years.”
Thank you kindly for the responses, Blake. You seem to have fought Hell to answer my question.
In The Ecological Indian, anthropologist
Shepard Krech III argues, much as Blake has,
that the American Indians were no better
conservationists than any other peoples of that time
period. The myth of an “ecological indian” was
perpetuated by European immigrants who felt the need
to classify their new acquaintances into one of two
popular stereotypes of the time: the “noble savage”
and the “ignoble savage”.
I began reading the book after attending a lecture
given by the author at my college last year, but the
exposition was too dry to keep my interest for long.
If you feel comfortable wading through information-dense
pages of dry prose, you might want to check out the
book and learn more.
Well, the historical record suggests that MOST primitive hunter-gatherer humans were rather wasteful. That’s one reason humans eventually started socializing with the wild canines who eventually became our boon companions.
Wild dogs followed primitive humans around precisely BECAUSE humans generally left behind a lot of good eats after a hunt.
Why should North America’s aboriginal peoples have been different?
Also, remember that North America used to have lions, cheetahs, camels, and horses, not to mention megafauna like mastodons, smilodons (saber-toothed cats), giant sloths, giant vultures, and so on. Evidence exists that point to the disappearances of these animals as occurring at around the same time humans first moved into North America. Granted, correlation is not causation, and the evidence itself can be argued, but still, humans have obliterated animal species in other parts of the world, so I see no reason to doubt that they did the same in the New World. Which is to say that the ancestors of the Indians were probably as environmentally destructive as humans elsewhere.
North America’s aboriginal peoples were different–different from Eurasia, anyhow–by accident of geography, biology, and quite possibly a very unharmonious relationship with nature in the prehistoric past, according to Jared Diamond.
Last point first. Most of the very large animals of North America went extinct by about 10,000 years ago, coincidentally or not shortly after the first solid evidence of human migration into that hemisphere.
The remaining large animals were not easily domesticated (some, like turkeys, have since been domesticated with time and effort). There were also few high-nutrition crops to be exploited, save maize and the sunflower, and a few others. Most were not overabundant in protein.
The result was wild animal husbandry. This included the encouragement of the buffalo herd throughout much of the midwest and even the east coast, other migrational game hunting everywhere. Fixed societies which socialized and began to develop into more advanced civilizations invariably collapsed when whatever local advantage the area offered was extinguished. Various approaches to agriculture which certainly did include oak-forest harvesting and migrational plantings were attempted. But for protein you needed game, and the game wasn’t gonna roll over for you like pigs or cows were going to do with modest effort on the other side of the world.
When you stake your existence upon the wild, you necessarily have a harmonious relationship with the wild. Sure, you can screw it up, and plenty of people did as shown by the examples above, but the fact of the matter is that there would have been far fewer people here in the new world if they had not had a sophisicated understanding of how the ecosystem worked and how it could be manipulated in their favor.
Potlach wasn’t necessarily a “wasteful” festival. See Marvin Harris’ writings on the subject (especially, IIRC, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches). The notion has become so well-known that I have seen it casually eferred to without attribution in popular press.
As for “non-wasteful”, I note that Indians were efficient users of their materials – as any “low tech” society would be. They used as much of the animal as they could, and complained that Europeans built huge and wasteful fires.
On he other hand, that doesn’t make them ecologically perfect. They did on occasion produce “buffalo falls” (and other animals stampeded over th cliffs). They very well may have caused the emise of the American Megafauna (see Harris, again, and other anthropologists, as well as Diamond). I’ve read reports that regions of he Hudson Valley were “polluted” by campfire smoke (can’t recall the cite – and I’m sure it was worse with the Europeans later).
But what do you expect? People make an impact on where they live. It would be hard to imagine how they could live with any degree of civilization – even the bare minmum – without doing so.
Maybe not a lot, but some. A cliff isn’t necessary; just a high hill. If you are stuck in a stampede, and suddenly stumble over a steep slope, you may become part of a pile. Here’s one Buffalo Jump in South Dakota.
The native Americans did not have the technology to produce much waste and pollution. The problem now is the stupid use of technology with a much larger population. A book I’ve seen indicates we don’t have an accurate idea of the preColumbian population. Estimates range from 2,000,000 to 18,000,000. What does that say about how much historians care about accurate history?