Guarded By and Guarded From

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.

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.