What happens when the warden becomes the criminal in the eye of the public?
As we explored instances of enfreakment, Othering, and animalization in American history during this last unit of winter quarter, I found myself particularly drawn to Paul Nadasdy's article “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism.” In the journal article, Nadasdy reconsiders the disagreement over whether American Indians are radical environmentalists, moderate conservationists, or entirely non-environmentalists. He explains how this debate only confines them and their complex motives to a simple spectrum based on Euro-American culture. The article touched on the subject of the "noble savage," a topic I've been wanting to explore more deeply, especially since some of the topics of focus this quarter in Humanities Core related to it.
After reading Nadasdy's article, I began to think more about what kinds of effects this ecological form of the noble savage could have, even more so when I considered the public reaction to the Makah whale hunt and Kluane support of wolf kills. I was even taken back to the beginning of the quarter and the Spanish Conquest as I thought about how the ecologically noble Indian has a role in Pekka Hämäläinen's "The Politics of Grass."
I think the noble savage is a concept that, once you've tuned into, you can't stop seeing it everywhere you look. The same goes for the the ecologically noble Indian aspect. The idea that Native Americans are always in tune with nature and animals and that they are some sort of protectors of Mother Nature is so deeply embedded in North American culture that you can see the association every day in all types of media, from cartoon characters to paintings like the one in this page's header. American Indians are practically seen as kin to animals if not animals themselves. At first glance, this seems like a compliment considering how harshly people view Western industrialism and its effects on the environment, but as we've examined this quarter, animalization is a type of dehumanization and it's had terrible effects on the people it calls "noble."
For me, the backlash from the Makah whale hunt and Kluane First Nation's support of wolf kills are two of the biggest examples of how the ecologically noble Indian is a more harmful than helpful idea. When these Native Americans seemed to be on the side of killing wild animals and "harming" the beauty of nature, both the American and Canadian public were outraged. I was surprised learning of this reaction since I was able to enter the situation with context from the tribes themselves and their reasoning. With the Kluane situation, I could understand that in the end, the wolf kills were, in a way, even ecologically beneficial. Although some portion of those who felt betrayed likely also understood the Makah and Kluane's motives, the intense anger that was thrown their way nonetheless truly demonstrates the dangers of turning an entire people into one-dimensional spokespeople of an environmental movement they didn't claim to represent.
The video above shows how outsiders were disgusted with the Makah for infamously deciding to kill a whale in 1999. These feelings were so strong because, as I said before, people felt betrayed. But you can't be betrayed by someone unless you expected something very different out of them. North Americans see Indians as always on the side of nature, so when they're faced with acts like these, it's akin to watching the Makah and Kluane kill their own siblings. There are countless issues with this kind of view, but one of the biggest is that Native Americans have different beliefs and values than those of Euro-American environmentalists. But when they act independently based on these values and do something that happens to be outside of the binding stereotype of the ecologically noble Indian, it becomes much more shocking and horrifying because it is so out of character — the problem is that this character is really inaccurate. This kind of thinking punishes Indians for acting according to their own agency if that agency means defying how they're "meant to be."
The ecologically noble Indian shows up everywhere; one interesting place it appears is in the article "The Politics of Grass" by Pekka Hämäläinen, which describes the rise, success, and fall of the Comanche Indians. They were a large Native American tribe in the Southwest United States that achieved great success in the nineteenth century while balancing the ecology of their homeland.
While at first glance, it might seem like yet another misrepresentative picture of the noble savage, I don't mean to say Hämäläinen furthers this stereotype. In fact, my mind went back to this text from earlier in winter quarter because it was his anti-ecological Indian message that stuck with me. The article explains not how Comanches maintained the land because they were righteous keepers of the earth but rather how they did so because it was economically favorable. They simply needed enough grass in the region to raise their horses and keep buffalo around. And Hämäläinen even describes how they initially took full advantage of the resources in the Southwest such that it nearly reached a point of no return where the buffalo would be eliminated and the landscape would be dramatically altered.
The "Politics of Grass" is really a rebuttal of the ecologically noble Indian. Native Americans were never just a representative of nature that always knew best how to manage the land and animals. They were just groups of people who did what worked and avoided what didn't; it happens that in the case of American ecology, what worked was also generally beneficial to the environment — or at least, it was minimally detrimental, something that sharply contrasted with many Euro-American practices and only seemed to further support the noble savage trope. Oftentimes, Indians actually even failed to use natural resources well, as was the case of the Comanche Empire during its early years. If that occurred today, the deeply ingrained ecologically noble Indian model would likely lead to some of the most intense feelings of betrayal yet. The point is really that there is nothing inherent to American Indians that binds them as environmentalists, but the popular concept that such a connection does exist only limits Native Americans when they are only doing what they always do.
Now that I'm more aware of how much the stereotypes of the noble savage and ecologically noble Indian are featured in so many places around us as well as the harms that these ideas bring to Native Americans, I'm really interested in looking into other examples of their presence in modern times and how that affects and reflects public perception. I think some instances of these two tropes are more subtle and fade into the background but other times they are strong enough to influence viewers and confirm their beliefs about entire peoples. This is something that I'm now definitely considering as a central concept to explore in my research project next quarter. It would be a great opportunity to examine how these restrictive stereotypes persist to this day and how they become integrated into popular forms of entertainment.
Works Cited:
“A Look Back at the Makah Whale Hunt of 1999.” YouTube, KING 5, 13 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watchv=lOAPVaK2FU8.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 67, no, 2, 2019, pp. 173–208.
Nadasdy, Paul. “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism.” Ethnohistory, vol. 52, no. 2, 1 Apr. 2005, pp. 291–331.