Since the Industrial Revolution, we have lived in a world in which we counterpose the natural with the “man-made”. The former represents the good, the later the evil. First growth forests on the one side and cars on the other side. Today we live with this polarity even as (natural) viruses take lives, and (unnatural) vaccines save them. As (natural) drought kills children, and (unnatural) water pumps prevent deaths. As (natural) tsunamis can drown hundreds of thousands of people, and (unnatural) ocean sensors can give notice to move inland. And so on and so forth.
But on this picture where do Native Americans fit in? The famous image of the crying Indian, featured in the 1971 anti-litter campaign comes to mind, even if it featured an Italian American actor, playing the role of the American Indian as the exemplar of how to live in harmony with and respect nature.
That is an idea we have inherited from Thoreau that was amplified by Native Americans themselves in the 1970’s in the interplay between their rights movement and the rise of environmentalism. As Richard Fleck writes in Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Native Americans:
For Thoreau, the Penobscots [a tribe] in the woods of Maine served as “guides” not just in the physical sense of the word … . The primal human being of a natural environment can lead the “civilized” human back to realities which only lurk somewhere in the modern conscious mind subdued by the complex material concerns of industrial society.
Back to a “home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian” writes Thoreau in the Maine Woods. And even today, the American Indian Movement, almost 50 years after its founding, speaks of “Our Vision is to restore human-kind’s relationship with the center of the universe.”
On this picture, it was the coming of Europeans that destroyed nature as it was — a land of first growth forests in which the native population lived in harmony. But this is a fanciful story. Of course, the Europeans wreaked destruction on the nature they found. But, especially on the East Coast, the nature that they found had already been destroyed once before.
The story of the European introduction of pathogens, and their devastating effect in the New World on its native population, is well known. The intentional introduction of horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, and cats along with the unintended arrival of rats and earthworms had far reaching effects, displacing both native animals and plants.
The story of how Native Americans transformed the land is less well known. But the two prongs of their effects arose from over-hunting and deforestation.* The arrival of homo sapiens in the Americas coincided with the extinction of mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths and buffalos. But what is even more surprising is that native peoples were far from the hunter gatherers we think of when we imagine Native Americans. Instead, they were a keystone species that “modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways.” Of these, the most dramatic was the use of fire to clear land for settled agriculture over most of what is now the East Coast and the Mid-West as well as large sections of inland California.
It was this environment, not a virgin environment, that was disrupted by the coming of Europeans, who produced ecological collapse of the status quo by the displacement of the native population.
The very idea of a virgin environment, an environment untouched by man, has a powerful grip on the imagination — notwithstanding that humans have been changing the environment for over 12,500 years since the invention of settled agriculture. So strong, that for some, instead of romanticizing native peoples as caretakers of nature, they too were to be excluded from it. Indeed, nothing is more emblematic of the fantasy of nature before man than John Muir’s decision to evict the indigenous (Miwok) people from Yosemite to render it pure.
Sources: Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.