If that is directed at me I am not aware of this burning.
That would alter the vegetation environment but it is not like poisonous chemicals that would hang around for centuries. Natural phenomenon like volcanos and glaciers do equivalent kind of things.
Dal Timgar
Well, it’s long been a blessing to archeologists that humans are such wasteful slobs, since what we study is their litter and garbage piles. The Indians left behind plenty to study.
Let’s see how the hmasters are feeling today.
Thanks for cleaning up my mess ** bibliophage**.
The population is probably true. However form all I’ve seen Indians were about as wasteful as modern Americans. Our production is much higher, and so our waste is much larger. But in terms of waste: production ratios there is no reason to assume waste was any less.
Those are unusually low estimates. Most estimates these days seem to think the figure was about 20 million including Mexico, with numerous higher figures bandied about.
It doesn’t say much one way or another. You’re blaming the wrong people. Historians study history. Without a written language the only Indian history we have is that of the Europeans, and oral traditions. Both of these have major problems when dealing with Indians because the population was decimated by disease after the arrival of Columbus. This meant that with the exception of Columbus’ accounts of the small area he visited the only history that historians can work with is Indian oral tradition. The problem is that oral traditions are shaky to begin with. Add to this the fact that most oral traditions would only have been written down more than 150 years after the great plagues swept the continent, and you can see that there is nothing for historians to work with to gauge population sizes. The population sizes that historians can work with, those that were present after history was recorded, are within a reasonably tight band.
That is left to anthropologists, archaeologists and others to try to ascertain, and it is difficult to do for all the obvious reasons.
In what way won’t it hang around for centuries? The effects are still being felt now, 150 years after Indians ceased managing much of that land. There is no reason to believe that without human intervention the forests will even encroach on much of that land for another couple of centuries, and it will be another hundred years at least before something approaching the original vegetation re-establishes. Of course the original ecosystem will probably never re-establish because such massive and sustained deforestation Is always accompanied by extinctions.
Completely deforesting huge swathes of country is certainly altering the vegetation environment. It is not a chemical, but then modern Americans don’t use persistent chemicals to deforest huge swathes of country. It’s not like a nuclear explosion or a meteor strike either. I can’t quite see where the point of comparison is. The point is that the natural environment was radically altered, and numerous species of plants and animals were exterminated over huge areas and some species almost certainly driven to extinction. That is not in any way ‘in harmony with nature’.
Can I suggest you do some research on New Zealand, where people who staked their existence upon the wild drove most of the large vertebrates to extinction, deforested huge areas of land and then resorted to cannibalism to survive? Or the Bass Straight Islands, where people who staked there existence upon the wild exploited the land to such a degree that all but a tiny few mammals were exterminated and the people starved to death? Or Easter Island where every last tree on the Island was cut down and the people died in their thousands because they could no longer make fishing boats and all the edible fruit trees had been destroyed?
Suggesting that people who stake their existence on the wild necessarily have a harmonious relationship with the wild is not in any way supported by historical and archaeological fact. The truth is that people who stake their existence on the wild either reach an equilibrium with it or they themselves become extinct. There is no harmony there beyond what is imposed. Whenever people arrive in an unexploited land we see the same pattern. The population surges as they exploit the resources to the full, then it crashes as the environment is radically altered and the system can no longer support them. Sometimes as in the case of Bass Straight and probably Easter Island the population continues to decline and the people vanish. Mostly the population declines and behaviour changes until an equilibrium with the environment is reached. It’s not a harmonious relationship. Having destroyed or at least raped ‘the wild’ the people then make do as best they can with whatever they can. The land reaches an equilibrium with humans and humans with the land. It happened with the Indians in North America and it happened with the Europeans in Europe. Just as Europe was deforested and then the population crashed and stabilised, so it did in North Am. No one suggests that a medieval French peasant was harmonious with the land. The population and agricultural productivity had simply reached an equilibrium. No more country was being destroyed and the population was stable. The same occurred in North AM and elsewhere in the world. It’s not harmony, it’s an enforced carrying capacity. Any time the population could grow it did so, and altered the natural environment in the process.
That is true of everywhere in the world. It seems obvious. The modern US wouldn’t support many people if we didn’t have a sophisticated understanding of how the ecosystem worked and how it could be manipulated in our favour. Our understanding is far more sophisticated and detailed than anything possessed by the Indians and our ability to manipulate much more powerful and fine tuned. You could call that harmony I suppose, but to me it just seems like practicality. Like the Indians we seek to exploit the land, and we use all our intelligence to do so.
They didn’t though. Most accounts show that Indians used exactly as much of the animal as the needed. The plains Indians living are classic examples. When the buffalo first arrived there would be an orgy of feasting in the best tradition of the harvest celebration. Large numbers of animals would be killed and only the choicest cuts would be taken, The rest would be left to rot. This has been interpreted later as leaving them as an offering to the gods, but there is nothing in contemporary accounts to support this. It was just that these people had been living on small game, corn and biltong for 8 months. Now they were making merry. I would too after 6 months of boot-leather and cornflour. There were so many animals that they could kill hundreds and it wouldn’t make a difference.
Compare this to Europe, where literally all the animal but the hooves was used. Bones, head and intestine included. Waste is of course a comparative thing, but suggesting that all Indians always used al the animal is jut plain wrong. I’m sure some were as frugal as the people of Europe, but some were not.
But the European fires weren’t wasteful. The fire served a purpose of heating and comfort as well as being easier and safer to cook with. I’m sure the Indians did complain, people are like that. But something isn’t wasteful if it serves a purpose, even a pscychological one. If we are to deny that then the Indians were wasteful when they painted their houses or wore jewelery or made carvings. With the decimation of the Indian population the forests of America had a superabundance of woody debris. There was no way that the population of humans could have any impact on the litter, much less the trees.
I would think a fairly comfortable lifestyle in a technological society is necessary before people even start to think about ecology. If there’s any chance of starvation, they’ll worry about their own survival, and the buffalo and passenger pigeons can go fuck themselves.
The Indians didn’t cause that much damage because it wasn’t in their means to do so. It’s not that they had some magical empathy for nature or were just better people than us modern types, as the popular conception is, but rather that they simply didn’t have the tools to be all that ecologically damaging.
There’s a big deal made of the fact that they used every part of the animal they killed, as if it were respect that they were showing, rather than simple utility. Of course you’re going to use everything practical you can from something you kill.
My understanding is that Indian tribes were very limited in size before the introduction of horses to the continent. They couldn’t support a large population off the small area they lived and traveled in. Once horses were introduced, however, tribes became larger, more mobile, and more harmful to the environment. Without horses, they were limited in their area of effect and their population, and when they got them, they began plundering the continent of its natural resources more quickly. Because they weren’t limiting their usage of resources before out of some magical empathy for nature, but lack of ability to do otherwise.
So, I’m extrapolating from what I read, it would seem that the Indians themselves would’ve wiped out the buffalo among other things on their own in a few centuries without europeans helping them along if they only had horses.
So, in answer to the OP, yes, it’s a myth. Usually repeated by the crowd who thinks the western world can do no good - all along there were magical, friendly Indians who were at peace with nature and all was well and beautiful and then suddenly Europeans came over and there was a smog cloud over every flower.
Here is where I have a problem in communicating/debating/discussion.
To me history is not what historians write, it is what happened. How often did certain events occur because of population density? If only 1 historian in 100 wrote about it and you don’t know about that historian then do you know the history. If no historian wrote about it doesn’t that mean the historians got it wrong.
I don’t have a problem with thinking outside of anybodies box. People “debating” me insist I stay in some stupid box. Reality doesn’t fit in a box.
I can’t find every book that talks about the indian population so I told you about one book I’ve seen. I think its specifying that range was an honest but instructive thing to do. The experts disagree. My years in stereo and computers tell me experts disagree deliberately to keep the ignorant confused. I presume some people that want to rationalize the genocide of the Indians want to minimize the number.
Dal Timgar
That would be a pretty liberal definition of history. The Big Bang happened, and although it is technically history I think most people would believe a historian to be stepping well outside her field of expertise if she commented on it. The same goes for the extinction of the dinosaurs and so on. It’s blurry, but usually anything that happened before writing is deemed to be archaeology/pre-history and not history.
History is not just what historians wrote. It’s what has been recorded. Newspapers and letters comprise most of our historical documents, but I don’t think most people consider journalists to be historians per se. If something is written it’s history whether historians acknowledge it or not. It may be erroneous history, but history nonetheless. If no historian wrote about an event that doesn’t mean the historians got it wrong. It means history is an incomplete art. More evidence comes to light constantly. Old evidence is reinterpreted. Historians aren’t wrong by virtue of accidental or unavoidable omission any more than anyone else. They are human, they can’t know everything.
It certainly doesn’t. But I am not insisting you stay in some stupid box. I am insisting that you either speak common English or else make it clear when you are using jargon if at all possible. Anything else simply results in confusion and misunderstanding. I’ll happily work with whatever terminology you care to define, but until you do define it we use English by default.
History
a. A chronological record of events, as of the life or development of a people or institution, often including an explanation of or commentary on those events: a history of the Vikings.
b. A formal written account of related natural phenomena: a history of volcanoes.
Until you present an alternative definition, that’s what history means.
The experts disagree for the same reasons layman disagree. Sometimes that may be obfuscation. Mostly it’s genuine disagreement based on variant information sources. You and I disagree. I don’t believe either of us is doing it to confuse.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in southern Alberta is a pretty interesting place to visit, actually.
Yes, the Blackfeet certainly couldn’t use all the buffalo products that became available to them, and that does seem wasteful. To us. Now. But, before the coming of the white man and his fire sticks, buffalo were an inexhaustible resource, so what did “waste” mean?
Only inexhaustable at pre-horse society - unless you’re meaning to view it strictly from their perspective. Once they got horses and mobility and the ability to expand their area of influence, they were doing a fine job of wiping out all the buffalo themselves.
You’re right, the Great Plains are just a big, flat seemingly endess slab of land (actually, the vista of flatness extending for hundreds of miles IS dramatic, in an understated sort of way… ) But you don’t need a lot of cliffs - just enough cliffs. Rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, and forth are bordered by cliffs that are tall enough to kill if you fall off (and there are state parks in the Great Plains that have a number of tourists fall off cliffs and die every year)
Prior to the (re)arrival of the horse in North America, the plains tribes did not live year round on the open prarie - they hung around the edges where timber and wild foods suitable for humans were more readily available, or traveled in the river valleys where, again, there was timber and people food as opposed to horse or bison food. So there were vast tracts of land where people seldom if ever went, and in those areas the buffalo were seldom hunted by humans.
During that time period, yes, the natives DID run herds off cliffs. A buffalo is a big, dangerous and aggressive animal. You could either try to sneak up on one - and hope that it doesn’t see you first and charge, or that the herd doesn’t turn on you, then worry about wolves and coyotes challenging you for the kill - or take adbantage of a stampede. It’s not that they wanted to destory more than they could use, it’s just that it’s a heck of a lot safer, on average, to run a bunch off a cliff than to pick them off one-by-one on foot. The resulting pile up not only provided the natives with more than enough for their needs, but also led to a feast for the local predators/scavengers who would happily go for the easy pickin’s rather than challenging an armed human for dinner.
When the plains tribes acquired the horse it allowed them to exploit the open prarie - they now had the means to travel long distances and haul the plant foodstuffs, timber, and other items they required the necessary distances. They no longer needed to run herds off a cliff - they could use horses to drive a buffalo off from the main herd and kill it. They could transport meat and other animal parts farther and faster, and in greater quantities.
So there were fewer “buffalo-jumps”, but with the high praries opened up for human exploitation probably just as many animals were killed. The buffalo lost their human-free refuges.
The natives weren’t too proud to take advantage of the dead and dying left by a natural stampede, as well.
It had little to do with being “in tune with nature” or mystical mumbo-jumbo - it was a matter of the most efficient way to keep yourself fed in a harsh environment, with the least physical risk to yourself (they didn’t have trauma centers back then). Same reason the natives liked guns - sooooo much easier to kill the buffalo from a distance, minimizing your chances of being gored or trampled.
When there was an over-abundance of a resource, when there were more dead buffalo than the tribe could possily use and/or preserve - yeah, they took their favorite bits and left the rest to rot. Because they didn’t have much choice. You can carry only so much pemmican and buffalo jerky. Conversely, when times were hard they ate everything - and there were times of famine on the Great Plains. These folks were at the mercy of their environment much more than we are right now.
Would the Plains Tribes have driven the buffalo to extinction in time, even without the arrival of the Europeans? That I don’t know - the environment itself was pretty darn harsh and killed quite a few. I’m most famillar with the tallgrass prarie environment in Indiana and Illinois, and even today it can get pretty nasty. Temperatures range from 40 C in the summer to -35 C in the winter. Winds range from calm up to 115 kph (and the winds can get that high even in a cloudless sky - we call it a “windstorm”) More tornadoes than anywhere else on Earth. Very little natural shelter - it’s flat land, after all. River valleys flood in the spring. In summer some years you have a lot of rain, some years it may not rain for two months. On the eastern praries, the grass grows over 2 meters tall - try navigating through that when you’re on foot! Even from horseback, the vegetation may exceed the height of a tall man. Further west, in the shortgrass prarie, obtaining water may be almost as difficult as doing so in a desert. Although there are some edible prarie plants, most of the vegation is inedible to humans or edible items present only in small amounts. The Plains Tribes had a meat heavy diet because there wasn’t a lot else out there to eat. Sure, there were rabbits and birds - but running down a rabbit yields little meat for the effort, and birds are hard to catch without nets. Tribes really deep into the Plains had to trade for the tent poles for their tipis, flint or obsidian to tip their arrows, plants for food and dyes and medicines.
Out on the Plains, natives froze to death in winter, died of heat stroke in summer, drowned in rivers, were carried away by tornadoes, struck by lightning, probably got caught by an occassional grassfire, trampled in stampedes, attacked by predators (wolves, bears, the big cats), broke legs and arms, some years starved to death (in really bad winters the elders were “encouraged” to go for long walks in blizzards), and that’s not even considering diseases. Before the Europeans showed up the natives didn’t have a lot of diseases and plagues were largely unknown. There is some evidence that the Plains tribes suffered large die-offs from European diseases transmitted along trade routes from Central America before they ever saw whites.
In short, the low technology of the tribes limited the damage they could do, and natural hazards limited their numbers. With the arrival of European “crowd” diseases, their numbers would be further limited for quite some time to come. So even if they would have eventually driven the bison to the brink of extinction it would have taken many more centuries than it actually did with the arrival of the white man.