Who can forget the poignant pictures of Iron Eyes Cody shedding a tear for the Keep America Beautiful campaign against litter? It’s a memorable image of the noble Indian who is one with nature. But is it true? Were Native Americans protecting their environment?
Brown University anthropologist Shepard Krech III tackles the question beginning with the first Americans who may have been responsible for the extinction of the large Pleistocene mammals (woolly mammoth, giant sloth, saber-tooth cat, etc.) at the end of the last Ice Age. Krech presents the evidence both for and against in a highly readable account of the impact of Indians on their environment.
He goes on to examine the irrigation practices of the Hohokam in southern Arizona that may have led to increased soil salinity and their own demise. The problem plagues desert irrigators even today.
The economic and spiritual relationships between Indians and the animals they hunted are of special interest. Vast numbers of buffalo were wasted by running whole herds off cliffs; but if one animal escaped it would warn all the others, and the people would go hungry. The extensive intentional fires of native people throughout North America were aimed at taming the natural environment to better exploit the plants and animals they desired.
The Ecological Indian ably documents the history of environmental relationships in pre-Columbian America. Archaeologists armed with sophisticated, new techniques are gathering more evidence all the time. Like preindustrial people everywhere, Native Americans sometimes overexploited the resources that sustained them. Krech explodes the myth of the ecological Indian, exposing it as a fiction of modern white society that “masks cultural diversity.” He hopes that destroying the myth will allow reality to emerge. This volume is a good beginning.
