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ECOLOGY, CONSERVATION,AND NORTH AMERICANINDIANSby Shepard Krech IIIIn the late twentieth-century it was commonly as-sumed that the lives of indigenous people were tra-ditionally more rooted in nature than the lives ofpeople who spread from Europe across the globe. Na-tive Americans were seen, therefore, as closer to naturein an ideological and emotional sense. Indeed, it wasbelieved that the Indians were always a kind of "natu-
ral" people, the original ecologists and conservationistsand no doubt also the first environmentalists.But this received wisdom remained mostlyunexamined until the 1990s, when it was profoundlyunsettled by analyses of the historical relationship be-nveen humans and their environments, as well as by ac-counts of more contemporary man-land relationships.The goal here is to explore some of this more recentwork pertaining to North American Indians, who serveas the archetypal Ecological Indigenous People, rivaledtoday only by South American tropical forest Indians.The Ecological IndianThe image of indigenous people as the original ecolo-gists, conservationists, and environmentalists^in NorthAmerica, the Ecological Indian—is an ideal type, merelythe latest in a 500-year history of imagery of indigenouspeople of the western hemisphere. From the momentthey encountered indigenous people in the western hemi-sphere, Europeans classified them in order to make themsensible. They made the exotic understandable by usingfamiliar categories, and in the process reduced men andwomen to stereotypes, to caricatures, noble or ignoble,benign or malignant, rational or irrational, human orcannibal.For centuries two polar images of Indians inthe New World, one noble and the other ignoble, haveclashed. They are surely familiar. The Noble Indian (theEcological Indian is an example) lived an innocent lifein a golden world of nature. He was peaceful and care-free, eloquent, dignified and wise, sympathetic and in-telligent. The Ignoble Indian was portrayed as bestial,savage, violent, and unintelligent (Berkhofer 1978).
Ever since Columbus wrote that he had foundthe Islands of the Blessed and its natural inhabitants,Europeans have crafted noble images of aboriginalpeople. Columbus readers were not surprised—at leastnot those who held to the existence of mythic placesoriginating in pagan or Christian thought, such as theIslands of the Blessed, Arcadia, the Garden of Eden, orthe Golden Age. Collectively these places expressed ideasof earthly paradise, eternal spring, or innocent life re-moved in space or time. These images remained potentfor centuries after Columbus, especially in France, wherewriters coupled a critique or even a condemnation, oftheir own society to the contrasting image of indigenous
nobility. As one historian remarked, many used the NewWorld as a stick with which to beat the Old (Krech1999:18).In nineteenth-century America, this image ofnobility developed further in James Fenimore Cooper'sLeatherstocking books
—
hast of the Mohicans is the bestknown because of the film—where all manner of Indi-ans can be found. The most famous are dignified, fault-less, wise, graceful, sympathetic, and intelligent. ThroughErnest Thompson Seton, the charismatic founder of theBoy Scout movement and first chief scout in America,Cooper's influence lasted beyond his time. A rivetingspeaker and fluid writer, Seton tried to reproduce inAmerican youth the skills and nobility in the best ofCooper's Indians. He swayed millions in the early twen-tieth-century with a message emphasizing Indian skill innature or woodcraft, which was very much in tune withthe practicalities of that era's progressive conservationmovement. Seton also reflected the influence of his con-temporary Charles Eastman or Ohiyesa, a Sioux Indianauthor of best selling works, who was also active in scout-ing circles and on the lecture circuit.The image of Indians as skilled in nature en-dured through the late 1960s and early 1970s. This pe-riod witnessed the first celebration of Earth Day; therediscovery by environmentalists of key texts by BlackElk and Chief Seattle, although Seattle's speech had overtime gone through much re-invention; and the emergenceof the full-blown image of the Ecological Indian.The Ecological Indian is the original ecologist,conservationist, and environmentalist, who possessed anintuitive, natural attitude toward the living world. Hismost famous representation was Keep America
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Beautiful's 1971 rendering of Iron Eyes Cody, a self-as-cribed Cherokee actor (he was later revealed to be ofSicilian descent), in an anti-litter advertisement. Iron Eyeswas pictured with a tear tumbling down his cheek, anAmerican Indian weeping because pollution is "a cryingshame." Quickly dubbed the "Crying Indian," Iron Eyesriveted viewers with his direct gaze and soon becameone of the most effective and far-reaching advertisementsof all time.The Crying Indian stands not alone but against,against the Non-Ecological White man. Weeping for his-tory, the Crying Indian shed tears for America shatteredby European settlers and their successors; for animalshunted to extinction by people of European descent;for trashed, even burning, rivers; littered and scarred land-scapes; oil-slicked and tarred seas; and other environ-mental horrors. As an American Indian, he was free fromblame, but non-Indians in his gaze were not. From thattime forward, the Iron Eyes image became iconic, andAmerican Indians as ecologists, conservationists, andenvironmentalists became widespread symbols for envi-ronmental attitudes and the conservation cause.
Indians as Ecologists and ConservationistsBut is the fit between image and behavior a good one inNorth America? This question takes on added impor-tance today in the throes of global climate change, pre-dicted extinctions, and other environmental disasters. Inrecent years a great deal of research has shed light onglobal human-environment relations, past and present,and the antiquity of man's role in environmental changein North America and elsewhere should no longer be indoubt.
FireFor example, human-induced fire is at least as old as ourspecies, Homo sapiens, and might have evolved even ear-lier as one of the earliest hominid tools. Because firetransforms ecosystems, landscapes or culturally modi-fied environments, one can argue, it is as ancient as hu-mankind. North America was not a pristine, primevalland imagined in canvas or text when Europeans arrived,rather it was a continent (as an early-seventeenth-cen-tury Dutch mariner off the East Coast remarked) "smeltbefore it is seen."
In many areas, Indians torched the land. Theyburned to improve subsistence, to create favorable eco-logical niches, to drive animals from one place to an-other, to increase production of crops or berries andother gathered foods, to set the stage for new plant growththat would attract herbivores and, in turn, carnivores inanother season.They knew what would happen to the land andto plants and animals as a result of their burns. It wasnot simply that Indians possessed a formidable depth ofknowledge about their environment, or that they distin-guished by name literally hundreds of species of plantsand animals. Rather, their use of fire revealed keen aware-ness of the systemic interrelationships that are at the coreof the conception of an ecosystem. Indians possessedtheir own theories of animal behavior and made ecosys-tems cultural in ways that did not necessarily appear in awestern conservation biologist's ecosystem. They wereecologists, but they did not always burn with ecologicalconsequences in mind. Some used fire as an offensive ordefensive weapon, driving enemies before them or cov-ering their escape. Many lit fires to signal each other,communicating a variety of desires and plans. Otherswho lived in forests set them ablaze to ease travel. Manyof these fires, as well as others, raged beyond control,deeply scorching the land beyond short-term utility, kill-ing animals, and burning natural growth until extinguishedby rain or halted by rivers.Determining the precise causes and conse-quences of fires known archaeologically is daunting. InNorth America, humans caused some fires, and naturalforces like lightening sparked others. Certain ecosystemsare fire-succession ecosystems, in the maintenance ofwhich human agency played a role. When Europeansgazed upon North America for the first time and manyimagined an untouched Edenic wilderness, they actuallywere looking upon a cultural, human-modified landscape,many parts produced and maintained by fire. For instance,ponderosa pine forest requires periodic fire to eliminatecompeting understory, else it will launch into succession.The western scrub community known as chaparral is alsofire-induced and will endure as a robust ecological com-munity only if managed by fire (which many Indians did,to the benefit of useful plants in this community and theanimals attracted to them). In the Southeast, longleafpine forests require regular fires to remove competing
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plants and destructive fungus. These pines are fire-adapted. In the absence of fire, they fail to reproduce orsurvive, and the forest changes to one dominated by otherpines and deciduous trees. Finally, the eastern sectionsof the vast plains and prairies—where moisture allowednatural succession by oaks, aspens, and willows—weremaintained and quite possibly induced by human fires.Animal ExtinctionsMan has been implicated in animal extinctions long be-fore the highly publicized ones of today. One famousepisode occurred at the end of the era known as thePleistocene in North America, where the decimation ofmany species followed closely on the heels of the arrivalof many hunting-gathering Paleoindians some 13,000-14,000 years ago. At least 35 mammalian genera disap-peared, many in the millennium beginning 1 1 ,000 yearsago. Many of these animals were large in size—the socalled megafauna, like tusked mammoths and mastodons,slow-moving giant ground sloths, a kind of giant arma-dillo, one ton armored glyptodonts, single-hump camels,300-pound beavers, hyena-like dire wolves, short-facedbears, scimitar-toothed and great saber-toothed cats, andothers. Animals familiar and unfamiliar, widespread andlocal, and large and small vanished.Debate is sharp over the reasons for these ex-tinctions. One opinion cites climate change that can belinked to six other extinction episodes in the last ten mil-lion years in North America. At the end of the Pleis-tocene, temperatures warmed markedly and winters be-came colder and summers hotter. Entire habitats changedovernight. Grasses, plants, and invertebrate and verte-brate organisms flourished or died. Were the conse-quences dire for key herbivores with the potential to trans-form the environment, and, therefore, for species linkedto them? Currently there are more questions than an-swers about the consequences of climatic and vegeta-tional changes on specific species or about the precisemechanisms involved in the impact of climate on par-ticular species.Another explanation for extinction points to thePaleoindians. Unlike earlier extinctions in North America,men and women with a distinctive hunting technologyand definite taste for species now extinct were presentduring the Pleistocene extinctions. Despite the paucityof evidence, the impact of early hunters cannot entirely
be ruled out. Perhaps climate change left some speciessusceptible to a Paleoindian coup degrace. One way to thinkabout what happened in North America is to considerMadagascar, where, in the wake of human arrival some1500 years ago during a long dry spell in a fluctuatingclimate, the extinction of birds, tortoises, hippos, lemurs,and other animals took place. This confluence of effects,one can argue, doomed more species than humans, des-iccation, or vegetation changes alone could have de-stroyed. It makes sense to regard preindustrial humansas efficient predators capable, under the right conditions,of depleting animal resources. For example, the peoplewho colonized the Pacific from 1600 B.C. to A.D 1000induced widespread environmental change and extermi-nated thousands of species of birds through fire, irriga-tion projects, the transformation of forests into farmsand grasslands, and mudflats into fishponds, as well asthe introduction of new animals. By the time Europeansarrived on these islands, over one-half of endemic species were extinct in Hawaii alone, and elsewhere birdsand other animals almost completely disappeared. Evenon large New Zealand, Polynesian colonizers deforestedvast sections of the land and hunted many species ofmoas—ostrich-like flightless birds—to extinction beforeturning their attention to the small birds, shellfish, fish,and seals that remained.
Assiniboine man on horseback driving buffalo into a corral. SmithsonianDibnerUb.: U.S. Military Academy, West Point Coll., N.Y.: 568.
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Food Production, Population Size and Density,and Village LifeFrom 8500 B.C. to 2500 B.C., a potent combinationemerged independently in at least five different parts ofthe world, including Eastern North America: permanentvillages occupied by more people living more denselythan before, with economies based on domesticatedplants and animals. This way of life, anchored in foodproduction, spread to other parts of the globe and rsultedin population densities from 10 to 100 times greater thanin most foraging societies. According to some scholars,this crowding left people susceptible to diseases origi-nating in domesticated animals and unsanitary conditions(Armelagos et al. 2004). Demography was not the onlyimportant determinant in this changing relationship be-tween humans and the land (acquisitive intentions, re-source abundance, impact of technology, and preciseenvironmental understandings played important roles),but it was nevertheless significant. Everywhere, this newway of life contained potential for significant environ-mental change—in villages and especially in the mostdensely settled areas where urbanism emerged.In North America, there were probably no morethan 4-7 million people on the eve of European arrival(equal to the population of Colorado or Virginia in theyear 2000). One can argue that no matter what people'sbeliefs or attitudes might have been, there were too fewAmerican Indians, too thinly spread out, to have mademuch of a lasting difference on lands and resources. Yetpressures could be sensed in regions like the Southwestand along the Mississippi. Here densely settled societiesemerged, flourished, and (from the eleventh through thefourteenth centuries) disappeared for as yet unclear rea-sons. Perhaps these societies declined as a demand forwood for fuel, construction, and other purposes over-taxed the forests. Or did people fail to foresee the long-term consequences of delivering, through irrigation ca-nals, saline waters to salt-sensitive crops planted in saltyfields where the water table was high. Elsewhere in theworld, canal siltation, water logging, and salinizationdoomed urban life despite shifting to salt-resistant grain;people denuded forests to satisfy the demand for wood,especially for domestic consumption; and domesticatedanimals grazed and browsed their way to defoliation anderosion. Productive strategies often left people vulner-able to unexpected events, like adverse climate change.
Reincarnation, Ethnoecology, CommodificationWhenever objects, or goods, have value in relation toother goods, they become subject to new pressures withsometimes unforeseen consequences. The most perva-sive commodification is associated with the rise of capi-talism in seventeenth-century Western Europe, and theglobal spread of Europeans affected the environmentalhistory of all continents. In North America, Europeansarrived armed with microbes and unleashed horrific epi-demic diseases, which killed many indigenous people and,in the short run, lessened pressures on ecosystems. ButEuropeans also turned up with an unrelenting and ex-pansive commodification, a demand for marketablegoods and primary producers, which, with increasinglycapital-intensive industrial designs, ultimately proved pro-foundly transformative. Indigenous people responded toEuropean appetites for goods by becoming primary sup-pliers of pelts and skins in exchange for a range of de-sired, highly valued consumer goods. The most famouscommodities from the sixteenth through nineteenth cen-turies were white-tail deerskins and beaver pelts, willinglysupplied by indigenous people to the point of the exter-mination of local populations of these animals; and buf-falo skins, robes, and meat, supplied mainly by non-in-digenous market hunters.Might North American Indians simply haveabandoned an early conservation ethic as they began toparticipate in Western systems of trade andcommodification? If twentieth-century hunting people,who made choices maximizing their efficiency and rarelypracticed restraint in harvest, provide any guide, the In-dians probably acted similarly. Moreover, Indians heldto certain understandings that fit awkwardly at best, ornot at all, with assumptions underlying western conser-vation. For example, some Plains Indians made sure thatanimals wandering away from the base of cliffs thatserved as buffalo jumps did not escape. Why, if they hadmore than they were going to use—which they oftendid, given the abundant evidence of waste—would theybother to track down dazed animals wandering off? Onereason apparently was the belief that as animate beings,buffaloes that escaped would warn others of the exist-ence of the jump, which no longer would be effective.Furthermore, some Indians believed that buffaloes thathad not returned as expected from their annual migra-tion remained on the lake-bottom prairies to which they
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&$%>*£,
Kiowa eventsfrom 1840-1842 as depicted in pictographs on a
"winter count. " Left, man covered ivith spots, representing the smallpox-epidemic of the summer of 1840, which spread throughout the SouthernPlains. Smithsonian NAA: ms. 2531, neg. 92-11 1444.
stood bird and mammal populations to be infinitely re-newable and unaffected directly by human predation.It is very difficult to reconcile such beliefs or thebehavior based on them with western-style conservation.It is not that respect gets in the way but that its contentneeds to become compatible with certain tenets of con-servation biology. Indeed, at different times and places,one can see a new "rationality" coming to bear. For ex-ample, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century east-ern Subarctic, Crees started to leave beavers in lodges tobreed, and in twentieth-century Alaska, Yupiit hunterssigned onto a co-management plan for geese that pre-sumed a relationship between their kill and the goosepopulation. As long as reincarnation remained centralto the American Indian belief systems, it loomed as anobstacle to sustainable hunting practices.
had gone. They would soon appear in certain cave mouthsproviding access between the lake-bottom and above-ground prairies. With such theories of animal behaviorin a native ethology and indigenous ecology, why expectAmerican Indians to hold to western-style conservationpractice or ecological thought?Another conceptual impasse occurred with thebelief in reincarnation. Indigenous people thought thatthe hunt should properly be governed by culturally de-fined respect for animals that, rightly approached andtreated in thought and deed, gave themselves up for sus-tenance and use. In this way, many reasoned further, ani-mals would be reborn to be killed another day. For ex-ample, Cherokees believed that a deer hunted with re-spect would return again to be killed at least three andperhaps as many as six additional times. Crees imaginedthat if they took care not to think or speak ill of beavers,and if they respectfully placed beaver bones gently inwater and followed other rules of etiquette, then beaverswould willingly continue to make themselves available tobe killed in potentially infinite series of reincarnations.Other Native people believed in reincarnation, includingNorthwest Coast Gitksan, who held that all that is re-quired to renew salmon is to return their bones to thewater. Arctic Inupiat and Inuit believed that the size oftheir kill and the availability of prey were unrelated andthat the supply of seals, belugas, caribou, muskoxen, andother animals was unlimited. And the Yupiit also under-
ConclusionsThe antiquity of environmental change should not be indispute even with the difference in scale between an-cient environmental changes, which for the most partwere local or regional, and contemporary ones, whichpossess global potential. One conclusion specifically con-cerning the relationship between North American Indi-ans and their environments stems from demography, asexplained earlier: in the fifteenth-century and before, therewere too few people too thinly spread out to have madea lasting difference on land and resources, lasting, that is,compared to environmental change in the twentieth cen-tury. Another conclusion is based in culture: whileecological or systemic thought was in evidence, conser-vation as it came to be understood in the West was for-eign and even senseless for people who believed in rein-carnating prey, and, moreover, difficult to put into prac-tice given certain ethnoecological assumptions. The storyis far more complicated than simple stereotypes (theEcological Indian) would suggest.In recent years, the image of the Ecological In-dian is alive in public culture, yet non-Indian people arequick to react when American Indians behave at oddswith this image. Environmentalists approve of Indianswho protect bird nesting sites, offer sanctuary to buffa-loes leaving Yellowstone, refuse transport of radioactivematerials across their lands, remove logging roads, orreject overtures for waste sites. These same environmen-
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talists clash furiously with other Indian groups who wishto store toxic or radioactive waste, advocate construc-tion of dams, clear-cut temperate rain forests, or wastewhat they kill. Some of the tensest encounters result whennative people act on their perceived rights, such as theright to kill animals that may be symbolically importantto all, or when the cases are especially high profile suchas the controversy surrounding oil drilling in protectedareas. These political and cultural clashes might beavoided if the image of the Ecological Indian were un-derstood as the latest in a five-hundred year lineage ofnoble images in the Western imagination. Indians shouldnot be held to standards that, with rare exceptions, nei-ther they nor others have met. Unshackled by receivedwisdom, environmentalists and conservationists, whetherthey are Indian or not, can more effectively address theirgoals of environmental protection and care by drawingon traditional environmental knowledge, western con-servation biology, and the environmental advocacy ofindigenous and non-indigenous people.Yet often American Indians cannot afford posi-tions staked out by environmentalists (or are not inter-ested in them). For many in Indian Country, economicconcerns trump green issues. Many Native people wantjobs and disposable income. Many are interested in casi-nos, which provide the ultimate payoff. They do not wantto sacrifice their Indian identity or sense of belonging toplace. They do want power over the exploitation of natu-
ral resources within their territories, or over the use oftheir own environment, but there is no forecastingwhether these positions will lead them toward behaviorconsistent with the ideology of respect for the natu'ralworld. Prediction is difficult because of the differencesin Indian Country, at almost every level, over industrialdevelopment. Not uncommon is a pro-economic devel-opment tribal leadership opposed by tribal members whoconsider the land's sacredness to be its most importantquality or who take up environmentalist positions con-sistent with the image of the Ecological Indian. The mostimportant cases today are those in which Native peoplepress for mega-projects with profound transformationalcapacities: nuclear waste disposal sites, hydroelectricpower, natural gas pipelines, and a liquefied natural gas(LNG) terminal. Each has its own story. The most re-
cent to emerge involves the Passamaquoddy of Sipayik(Pleasant Point) in Maine and is unfolding as I write. Inthe summer of 2004, the tribal leadership narrowly votedin favor of a LNG terminal, as did the tribe in a referen-dum, over the objections of tribal members who con-sidered it neither traditional nor environmentally appro-priate. The fate of this and other projects is undecidedand at the mercy of political and global economic forceslike the price of natural gas. Where they will end up isanyone's guess.
For Further ReadingArmelagos, George J., Kathleen C. Barnes, and James Lin. 2004.
"Disease in Human Evolution." In Ruth Osterweis Selig, MarilynR. London, and P. Ann Kaupp, Anthropology Explored, Revised andExpanded, pp. 115-125. Smithsonian Books.
Berkhofer, Robert F.Jr. 1978. The White Man's Indian: Images of theAmerican Indianfrom Columbus to the Present. Alfred A. Knopf.
Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of HumanSocieties. W W. Norton.
Fisher, Christopher T., and Gary Feinman. "Introduction. Indig-enous Ecologies and Sustainability: Humans and Landscape, Pastand Present." American Anthropologist. In press.
Krech, Shepard III. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History.WW. Norton.
Krech, Shepard III. 2001. "Buffalo Tales: The Near Extermina-tion of the American Bison." Nature Transformed: The Envi-ronment in American History. Teacher Serve. National Humani-ties Center" http://www.nhc. rtp.nc.us:/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/buffalo.htm
Krech, Shepard III. 2003. "Paleoindians and the Great Pleis-tocene Die-Off." Nature Transformed: The Environment inAmerican History. Teacher Serve. National Humanities Center.http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/pleistocene.htm
Krech, Shepard III. 2003. "Human environmental impact," inThe Encyclopedia of Population, vols. 1-2, eds-. Paul Demeny andGeoffrey McNicoll (New York: Macmillan Reference USA), 1:298-302.
Krech, Shepard III. MS. "Reflections on Conservation,Sustainability, and Environmentalism in Indigenous NorthAmenta"American Anthropologist. In press.
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Krech, Shepard III, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, eds.
2004. Encyclopedia of WorldEnvironmentalHistory, 3 vols. Roudedge.
McNeill,
J.
R. 2000. Something New Under the Sun: Environmental
History of the Twentieth Century. W W Norton.
Redman, Charles L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments.
University of Arizona Press.
B. L. Turner II, et al., eds. 1990. The Earth as Transformed by Hu-
man Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past
300 Years. Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Michael. 2003. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to
Global Crisis. University of Chicago Press.
ShepardKrech III isprofessor of anthropology and environmental
studies and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropol-
ogy at Brown University.
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