I was watching a video preview for Pocohantas, and it got me thinking: Were the Native Americans really that much more in touch with nature than other civilizations? Or were they simply less industrialized? Were the Europeans, way back when they were around the same level of industrialization and urbanization on the same level of respect for nature?
Simply put, no. American Indians were responsible for the extinction of many native species. There’s no way to reconcile this with theie supposed regard for nature and the environment.
Several American Indian tribes also practice extensive slash-and-burn methods to acquire farmland. When these lands were spent, the Indians simply moved on and did the same thing in new locations.
[sup]1[/sup]—Martin, Paul S., 1968. Prehistoric Overkill. In Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause
[sup]2[/sup]—Baden, John, Richard Stroup, and Walter A. Thurman, 1981. Myths, Admonitions, and Rationality: The American Indian as a Resource Manager. Economic Inquiry 19(1): pp132-43.
[sup]3[/sup]—White, Richard, and William Cronon. 1988. Ecological Change and Indian-White Relations. In History of Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4.
Wow.
I don’t know about the content, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a post here with footnotes.
Wow.
To back up Unclebeer, I would also note that recent study seems to indicate that part of California’s ecology was carefully fire-managed for thousands of years in order to maximize the acorn harvest. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble identifying the source for that. Scientific American, c. 1998?
However, many North American Indians did have a different philosophical outlook than many post-Renaissance Europeans did. Compared to the high population density and limited resources of Europe, the Americas must have really seemed to be vast beyond exhaustion to Europeans. Some Indians saw things differently.
I don’t want to sound overly crass with this statement, but in very general terms Europeans appear to be more concerned with subduction and exploitation while Indians were more concerned with conservation and management.
Wait! Before you barf in your lap or call me a tree-hugging pinko (or take that sentence out of context), let me explain.
European society by the 1500s was almost universally an agrigultural society; farming and animal husbandry were the norm. Subduction and exploitation of nature is required to successfully farm and keep animals, and I’m not complaining about it. I like my Wheaties, and my ribeyes.
The Indians of North America–actually, let me narrow that down to the Indians of the Atlantic Coast–were primarily hunter-gatherers. Therefore, Indians had to be acutely aware of the wild populations of animals, and also had to be closely attuned to the natural cycle of plant growth. It’s a different way of subsistence entirely and it is by definition more in touch with “nature,” because it is more about management of natural resources than it is about the creation of the sort of artificial environment which farming and animal husbandry requires.
Notice, however, that the hunter-gatherer style of living is all about the exploitation of nature, just of a different sort, one which requires careful management and an eye to conservation. And, as UncleBeer points out, American Indians did not universally subscribe to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The difference between Indians and Europeans is probably just a matter of degree, but there is a large degree of difference.
Sofa King,
The Indians of the East Coast were mainly farmers and fishermen, who hunted to supplement their diet. Most of the tribes of New England cultivated corn, squash and cucumber, for example, and all down the coast, corn was cultivated.
So I guess the next question is, how did this, likely mythical, trait come to be broadly attributed to Native Americans? Or are there some tribes that indeed practiced conservation? How old is this legend?
Perhaps it’s not “conservation” in the sense that we use it today, but conservation in a more general sense of not trying to squeeze every last iota of feed/cattle/grain from every square acre. There’s a big difference between (say) following the bison herds and hunting the oldest/weakest ones, and building a cattle ranch and cramming cows into pens all day long…?
There are also such basic issues as the differences between European and Native American religious myth and theology, technological development, expressed sense of kinship with other animals, etc. etc. etc. I think UncleBeer is right that Native Americans didn’t have any kind of “innate wisdom” that safeguarded them from making major ecological impacts on their environment—in fact, they seem to have made several such major impacts in the course of millennia.
But that doesn’t mean that on a small scale, they weren’t indeed much better able to adapt to their environment, instead of needing to adapt their environment to them, than Europeans. (So I can’t agree with UB that their extinction of some species is necessarily “irreconcilable” with a genuine “regard for nature and the environment.” They didn’t necessarily realize all the destructive consequences of their actions, but that doesn’t mean that they were equally indifferent to destruction.)
A big part of that, IMHO, is due to the fact that Europeans had a market society, in which the point was harvesting resources not just for subsistence but for capital: consumer capitalism is very resource-intensive. Check out Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter, an admittedly partisan but nonetheless largely convincing account of the destruction and sheer waste that consumer capitalism inspired, on the part of a relatively small number of colonial and pre-colonial Europeans, of resources that had nourished thousands of Native Americans abundantly for centuries. Whale oil for lamps, whalebone for corsets, feathers and furs for decoration, etc. etc. etc., and most of the unmarketable parts of the carcasses simply piled up to rot. That was indeed pretty wasteful by the standards of a lot of Native American societies.
I’d say it dates to the 1960s. The first movie I can think of which deferred to the supposed moral superiority of Indians (and not only in the area of environmentalism either) is Little Big Man. Prior to that, Indians had either been two-dimensional villains or “faithful sidekicks.” Are there any earlier media representations (in print or in film) of the spiritually/environmentally superior Native American?
After Little Big Man, on into the 70’s and 80’s, there was a flood of images of spiritually-attuned indians, living “in harmony with nature.” Billy Jack, the anti-littering campaign Indian, Dances with Wolves, Pocahantas, and countless TV images reinforced this stereotype.
Only in the last ten years or so has the pendulum begun to swing to the middle so that we begin to get images of Indians as normal people with normal faults.
Kimstu, pardon me for saying so, but I think you may be buying into the romanticized image. The Indians were hunter-gatherers, at least in part. OK, so? So were Europeans during the last ice age. Point is, we are all good old homo sapiens sapiens, and no group has any valid claim of any innate moral superiority to any other. Indians were perfectly capable of being just as wasteful as Europeans. (See UncleBeer’s example of the hunting technique of driving whole herds of buffalo over cliffs.) It’s just that the Indians weren’t technologically advanced in their capacity for destruction.
Hand any given tribe of hunter-gatherers the keys to a bulldozer, and I bet they’ll use it enthusiastically and without regrets.
Oops. Missed the disclaimers in Kimstu’s post, so I retract my comments to the extent they were “directed” at Kimstu, but stand by them otherwise.
Spoke,
I agree with you (which feels really weird to say after that Sherman thread) about when that attitude got popularized, but the attitude itself is older, I think. I think you can date it back to Rousseau, and his “noble savage”, living in harmony with the people and the world around him.
spoke: *Are there any earlier media representations (in print or in film) of the spiritually/environmentally superior Native American? *
Heck yes. See, for example, this account or this one written in the early twentieth century by men who spent their childhoods in/with Indian tribes and were later more or less assimilated to Euro-American society. From the latter work:
So apparently the idea that Native Americans were particularly concerned with and aware of the characteristics of wildlife and nature in general goes back much earlier than the 1960’s, and was shared by many of the Native Americans themselves, not just imposed on them by “romanticizing” whites. And considering the differences in their civilizations, it’s a notion that makes a lot of sense. Stands to reason that Stone-Age-society hunter-gatherers—whether that meant Pleistocene Europeans or nineteenth-century Native Americans—would need to know more about life in the wild than would the literate, technologized, agriculturalist or urban Euro-Americans.
As for the idea that this superior familiarity with nature implied some kind of innate moral or spiritual superiority, I think that goes back at least as far as the eighteenth century, to the “noble savage” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
[Note added in preview: Just as Captain Amazing said! 
]
Respect for nature on the part of American Indians is definitely not something that popped out of nowhere forty years ago:
“Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our animal neighbours the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.” --Sitting Bull
And yes, I can pull that sort of stuff out of the hat until there are no dry handkerchiefs left in the room.
It’s also important to note that this sort of attitude is not by any means unique to American Indians. Rather, it seems to be the attitude shared by many peoples around the world who lived in the land instead of off of it. As an entertaining example, check out Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala.
Captain Amazing, I think we may both be correct. The way I understand it, many Atlantic tribes grew corn and beans and the like, but did not necessarily tend to their plants as one would a European-style farm. Often times they were planted in one place and only returned to at harvest time.
I don’t know if you’d consider it conservation, but the “three sisters” system of growing corn, beans, and squash in the same field can be seen as a sort of friendly farming. I believe one of the benefits of this is that the crops require less day-to-day tending, so that the agriculture of the Native Americans wasn’t really the same as the European system of spending many hours out in the fields each day.
I think Spoke- is correct that the mass market image of nature loving Native Americans did become widespread in the 1960s. However, I think that idea has been around longer than that. Back when the Indian was the perpetual sidekick, it was still acknowledged that they were useful as scouts and guides because they could do such things as listen with an ear to the ground and report that there were 47 horses on the way, one of which had thrown a shoe, and was named Old Paint. Sacajawea was held up as an example of how useful Native Americans could be if they applied their knowledge of nature to civilized pursuits, and this image appears by the mid 1800s.
In 1856, we have Hiawatha, who is living a very natural and environmentally aware life, albeit one that was completely made up by Longfellow.
I agree with Captain Amazing - It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who really articulated this concept of the superiority of the “savage state” with his Discours sur les sciences et les arts**, published in 1750.
In North America, the probably the best-known popularizer of the Indian as the “noble savage”, was ( probably even more than Longfellow ) the quite rightly maligned James Fenimore Cooper 
.
UncleBeer: Just as an aside, slash & burn farming is actually pretty efficient and not intrinsically devastating to the environment, as long as the population density of the group doing it isn’t too large. Where it becomes a problem ( as in some third-world nations today ) is when the available land isn’t sufficient to support slash & burn plots in a normal regenerative cycle.
- Tamerlane
Kimstu wrote:
I dunno. The “nature lessons” you relate do not strike me as anything that would have been unique to Indians. I grew up on a farm, and I could tell the same sort of story about the things my father taught me. Reading tree bark, knowing where the fish are, identifying birds…these are all things my father taught me as well. We used to go for walks in the woods, just like those described in your post, and he would point out different plants, and talk about their uses. I’m quite confident that pioneer families, who relied on what nature could provide much more so than did I as a lad, were taught similar hand-me-down lessons about nature.
Now of course, I do have a bit of Cherokee in me, so maybe that accounts for my mastery of nature lore…
By the way, has any one else seen the movie Smoke Signals? Really refreshing film, because it shows Indians as fully human, warts and all. In fact, the writer/director made a point of having a “nerdy” Indian be a central character to belie the “noble savage” stereotype.
spoke: I dunno. The “nature lessons” you relate do not strike me as anything that would have been unique to Indians.
Certainly they need not have been. All I’m saying is that there was a widespread perception that in general the Native Americans were more knowledgeable about, and/or “attuned to”, the workings of nature than the “civilized” white people. There are dozens of remarks indicating that perception in the works I linked to:
Of course plenty of white pioneers and hunters/trappers developed a similar degree of knowledge and skill, sometimes learning them from Native Americans. But the overwhelming number of comments like these and the ones other posters have quoted make it clear, I think, that it was widely believed (and not without reason) that the average Indian was much more knowledgeable and sensitive about such things than the average white person. And that attitude long predated the 1960’s.
By the way, I loved Smoke Signals too, but I didn’t think it was meant to “belie” the stereotypes as much as to show real human beings struggling with them and the opportunities/limitations/images they represented: the nerdy kid taking on the “medicine man’s” traditional role as a storyteller, the moody kid trying to exploit the notion of the “ruthless savage” to intimidate a couple of rude white guys, the two boys embarrassed in a confrontation making up a sort of “lodge song” to dissipate their humiliation, the boy desperately summoning up the endurance of the “fleet and tireless young buck” when running to get help after a car accident, the grandmother’s “wise woman” prophecies…wow, I didn’t realize how much I remembered of that film. I agree that a lot of our identifications of such images are merely modern mass-culture romantic enthusiasm, but I don’t think that means that the images themselves can’t reflect some actual truths about Native American cultures.
With all due respect to my favourite moderator
I don’t believe there is any hard evidence for this claim that native americans were responsible for these species disappearing. The mammoth went extinct in asia as well. I thought the temendous impact of the last ice age, a climactic upheaval was more likely the main culprit.
And every last bit was used by nature, from the bacteria on up to the “more precious mammalian scavengers”. They didn’t burn the carcasses like we would, so no other species could enjoy the bounty.
Thus allowing nature to regenerate the land, without the need for chemical fertilizers. A very nature oriented agricultural process.
One of the common perceptions amongst the general population in Canada is that homes built to modern standards on Native reservations quickly fall into disrepair. Particularly up north in the subarctic regions where natives are more culturally isolated this is quite true. As I understand it these Native-Canadians are still stuck in their culture of the past, when they pulled up the teepee and moved it when it was time for some housekeeping. Their debris was biodegradable and they allowed nature to make use of it. Everything was used. All one needs to do is look under the modern sink today to see how we fight agianst nature, and try to kill the microbes that even dare to eat our garbage!!
When herding over cliffs were done, it wasn’t done so that other species could eat what was left. If the Indians wanted to do that, they could just as easily kill the buffalo one by one and leave what was left of the corpses. The rationale for herding buffalo over cliffs was more, “Hey, there are sure a lot of buffalo! Hey, it would be a lot easier to stampede them over that cliff than track them and kill them.” The only time white Americans burned buffalo carcasses was during the great buffalo slaughter near the end of the 19th century, and that was done for political reasons (The Plains Indians hunt the buffalo, we want the Plains Indians on reservations, therefore, if we kill all the buffalo, the Plains Indians will starve if they don’t go onto reservations). While I’m not justifying the policy, of course, it’s not like the slaughter was done because of some hatred for buffalo, or because the killers were ignornant of the role the buffalo played. On the contrary, they killed them because they were aware of their importance.