In recent years, controversy has raged in academia as to whether there has ever been such an ideal as the 'Ecological Indian' - that is, were and are Indians natural ecologists or conservationists?
The following two quotes each presents a different perspective on the view that Native Americans were or are inherently ecological. The first is by writer J. Donald Hughes:
"Long before the first European ship dropped anchor off the shores of the New World, the western continent was the home of the American Indians. They had lived here for twenty, thirty, forty thousand years. There was not a section of land unknown to some Indian tribe, and there was nowhere, from the slowly shifting arctic ice shelves to the blowing sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, where they did not go. Indians hunted buffalo on the plains and deer in the eastern forests. They planted corn in rich river bottomlands and near springs in the high desert. They caught salmon in the northwestern streams and set their boats on the Pacific waves in search of the great whales. Everywhere they went, they had learned to live with nature; to survive and indeed prosper in each kind of environment the vast land offered in seemingly infinite variety.
"And they did all this without destroying, without polluting, without using up the living resources of the natural world. Somehow they had learned a secret that Europe had already lost, and which we seem to have lost now in America - the secret of how to live in harmony with Mother Earth, to use what she offers without hurting her; the secret of receiving gratefully the gifts of the Great Spirit.
"When Indians alone cared for the American earth, this continent was clothed in a green robe of forests, unbroken grasslands, and useful desert plants, filled with an abundance of wildlife. Changes have occurred since people with different attitudes have taken over."
This next quote is by the anthropologist Shepard Krech III:
"Prior to the arrival of Europeans some Native Americans actively changed their environment; some wasted part of their kill at buffalo jumps; and some caused environmental deterioration through deforestation and salinization, either inadvertently or because they ignored warning signals that their actions would have systemic consequences. The conclusion that some Native Americans were neither conservation-minded nor ecologically aware is inescapable.
"After they arrived, Europeans were quickly joined by Native Americans in exploiting buffalo, beaver, deer, and many other animals for a commodities market, unhesitatingly killing off local populations. […] In the centuries of the fur trade, many Subarctic Crees exterminated beaver, and some who did believed that the beaver they killed would regenerate spontaneously or be reincarnated as fetal animals. Until there was an erosion in this belief, the Crees were not, and perhaps could not be, conservationists. The Southwest Alaskan Yupik may have shown respect to belugas (so-called white whales) by treating their bones in a prescribed manner, but they also slaughtered them in large numbers. They did not give a thought to the implications of carnage for beluga populations because they defined this sea mammal as an infinitely renewable resource. In short, their respect for belugas had nothing to do with western notions of conservation. […] [O]nly the idea of the Ecological Indian prevents us from considering pre-industrial man as a factor in radical habitat change or species extinctions."
Both quotes - which I term the harmonious and the destructive models respectively - present extreme and antithetical positions. The harmonious model depicts Indians as lovers of nature, living in unending harmony with it, whose subsistence activities caused no or minimal changes to the North American natural environment. The destructive model presents the Indians as exploitative despoilers who ravaged the natural world and changed it irrevocably.
© 2002 by Bornali HalderSite, Page and Article © Copyright 2002 by Bornali Halder