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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-AMINDIAN@... (April, 2001)

Sheppard Krech III. _The Ecological Indian. Myth and History_. New
York Norton, 1999. vi + 318 pp. Notes, index. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-393-04755-5.

Reviewed for H-AMINDIAN by Adrian Tanner <atanner@...,
Department of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Indian History and Environmental Myth.

Recently a student told me he thought he was of aboriginal descent.
I asked what group he was from, but he said he did not know, since
none of his relatives identified themselves as aboriginal. However,
he said he had always felt particularly close to nature, and so
concluded he must be Native. As it happens, he could well have been
since, starting about a century ago, some Newfoundland Mi'kmaq hid
their ethnicity, even from their own children, to avoid
discrimination. But what of his idea that being 'close to nature' is
a mark of being of Native descent?

Sheppard Krech III's book _The Ecological Indian_ sets out to probe
the basis and historical validity of the idea that people of native
descent are, and always have been, caring towards the environment, a
characteristic commonly claimed by or attributed to them. With a
series of empirical case studies he investigates whether their ideas
and actions were always those of ecologists and conservationists. He
finds that the Ecological Indian proposition is of doubtful
validity, concluding that, for example, Indians needlessly killed
many buffalo, set fires that got out of control, and over-exploited
deer and beaver for their skins.

This book is handsomely produced, and well-written by a respected
scholar who draws on an enormous quantity of interdisciplinary
sources and diverse lines of thought. While, as will become clear
below, I am sceptical about its thesis, the work covers many
important issues and I, at least, found it instructive to trace the
author's endeavour, despite the shortcomings, on which my review
will concentrate.

In his Introduction, Krech examines the beginnings and development
of the notion that Indians are by nature 'ecological'. Most of these
sources are not aboriginal people, but the likes of Baron de
Lahontan, James Fenimore Cooper and Ernest Thomas Seton, all drawing
upon the 'Noble Savage' ideal. In fact only two aboriginal people
are cited in this section -- the nineteenth century Dakota Sioux
author Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) and the Lakota holy man Black Elk
(along with a cursory footnote allusion to Chief Seattle). Not until
the book's Epilogue does the author turn his attention to
self-attributions of the image by several native authors, most
appearing after 1970, and often in the context of political
disputes.

The bulk of the book consists of seven self-contained test cases,
each of which deals with different groups, three of them involving
prehistoric situations, and the other four historical ones. Each of
these cases is well known to specialists, having been the subject of
much scholarly controversy. Krech provides a detailed and generally
even-handed review of these debates, along with additional data and
his own conclusions.

In the first chapter Krech asks if over-hunting by Paleo-Indians was
responsible for the extinctions of various large mammals during the
Pleistocene era. He presents the position of Paul Martin, who
concludes Paleo-Indian hunters caused these extinctions, along with
that of his critics. However, both arguments seem to me based on a
great deal of unwarranted speculation. While Krech is unconvinced by
Martin's position, he is not sure that Paleo-Indians were entirely
free of any responsibility. But, given the very distant lineage that
may connect Paleo-Indians with modern aboriginal people, one wonders
about the relevance of this case to the issue being addressed in
this book.

The next case also seems to me to be of questionable relevance.
Krech asks if the prehistoric Hohokam's irrigation practices caused
salination of their fields, leading to their disappearance. He
offers the contrasting views of two authors, Bernard Powel and Emil
Haury. The issue between them is whether the Hohokam should be
condemned for the ecological problems arising from their system of
irrigation agriculture, or admired for its achievements, which are
compared to the negative effects of more recent settlement by
non-natives of this region of southern Arizona. Krech delves into
the considerable complexities of the case, but does not resolve this
unanswerable question, acknowledging that it is not known what
finally happened to the Hohokam.

One aspect of _The Ecological Indian_ is based on the notion that
North American aboriginal people looked after their environment, so
the first Europeans found the continent in an unspoiled condition.
Krech's next chapter questions this. He notes that several authors
have revised upward earlier prehistoric population estimates and, as
a consequence, have increased their assessment of the post-contact
population decline. Krech suggests that, apart from along the East
Coast, many initial European reports of a pristine environment came
after the aboriginal population had declined, so that the newcomers
would have arrived in an environment that was no longer supporting
its previous larger population. The land would have thus by then
returned to the more natural state that the newcomers described. (In
the next chapter he further discredits the idea of a 'pristine'
proto-contact environment, suggesting that Europeans were
predisposed to find the wilderness they described, regardless of
evidence to the contrary.) But in the end his convoluted argument
fails to offer any real indication of a pre-contact environment that
was other than the pristine one the newcomers described.

In the next chapter, Krech asks whether the Indians were acting with
environmental responsibility in their deliberate setting of forest
and brush fires. The extensive literature on this topic shows that
Indians in all parts of the continent used fire to modify their
environment, serving a wide variety of purposes. While in some
instances this was done to improve hunting, he shows that fires were
also set during wars against trespassing groups, both whites and
other Indians, and for communication with other Indians. Many
authors believe they did so with sufficient skill that fire
generally benefited the environment. But Krech refers to several
settlers' anecdotes about Indian-set fires that got out of control.
However, it does not seem to matter to Krech if such mistakes were
by Indians in unfamiliar territory, due to post-contact dislocation.

In the last three chapters the author examines whether Indians
over-hunted, respectively, the buffalo, the white-tailed deer and
the beaver. All these species were used aboriginally for
subsistence, and after contact they continued to be sources of
subsistence food at the same time as they provided market
commodities. Krech thinks the commercialisation of deer and beaver
hides lead to their overexploitation, but he also believes Indians
were wasting buffalo even when the species was being hunted only for
subsistence.

For me, this chapter provides the book's most serious challenge to
_The Ecological Indian_. While Indians had uses for every part of
the buffalo, their practice of slaughtering whole herds, at a
buffalo jump or in an enclosure, sometimes produced more carcasses
than a group could possibly use. As a result, waste occurred. He
documents instances of Indians leaving animals to rot, utilising
only the cows, or taking only the tongues and the humps. However,
the overkilling did not cause the extermination of the species,
which only came after non-Indians and Metis hunted them commercially
for fresh meat, pemmican and hides.

Krech proposes two 'religious' reasons for the earlier over-killing.
It was believed (by the Piegan and Cree) that any buffalo that
escaped while being rounded up in the hunt would warn other buffalo,
who would then avoid hunters, so that it was necessary to chase and
kill these escapees, whether they were needed or not. Other Indians
(specifically the Cheyenne and Arapaho) believed that when hunters
were unable to find buffalo it was because the animals had retreated
to a land underneath a large lake, from which they would eventually
reappear in endless numbers. Krech concludes that, given these
beliefs, the Indians did not see overhunting as a cause of any
shortage of animals or the need to conserve.

The next chapter concerns the white-tailed deer. Between about 1670
and 1800 the skins of these animals, previously the major
subsistence species for Indians in the Southern and Eastern United
States, became their main item of trade with Europeans. Deer were
hunted in increasing numbers, in part, according to Krech, to
satisfy the Indian's craving for alcohol. By the end of the period
deer were scarce or locally absent, which Krech concludes was due to
overhunting by Indians. The population did not recover until many
years later.

While Krech acknowledges the trade in deer skins occurred during a
period of intense disruption, he does not see that dislocation and
warfare resulting from European settlement may have rendered the
Indian's conservationist practices ineffective. Instead, as with the
buffalo example, he explains the willingness to overkill deer by
reference to the pre-Christian spiritual beliefs of the tribes of
the region. He notes, for instance, that the Cherokee believed in
the reincarnation of deer, some of them believing this could recur
four or seven times. From this he concludes that conservation would
have made no sense to them.

The final substantive chapter is about the beaver, an important
subsistence food source for prehistoric northern Indians, and later
a mainstay of the fur trade. Their sedentary existence made the
species especially vulnerable to overhunting, particularly with the
introduction of steel traps. Beaver eventually did become extinct in
some regions such as New England, although generally in areas where
they were never particularly numerous. For the subarctic Indian
Krech blames overhunting for causing reported declines in beaver
populations.

However, there were other factors Krech does not sufficiently take
into account, like incursions by foreign Indians and cutthroat
competition, that would have undermined local conservation efforts.
Also, since beaver meat was eaten, they were harvested more
intensely if other game were at the low end of their cycles of
abundance, something neither Indians nor traders could control.
Beavers were also subject to epidemic disease.

Krech explanation of the overhunting focuses on ideology, saying
Northern Algonquians (i.e. forest Cree, Ojibway and Innu) only
showed interest in "today's conservation ethics and practices" in
the nineteenth century (p. 206). He notes that in this recent period
Indians used family hunting territory to conserve beaver, while
traders' tried to influence their ideas of conservation. However,
Krech does not take adequate account of the evidence that Indians
made their own strategic decisions.

Krech thinks Indian spiritual ideas account for their purported
failure at beaver conservation. He says Algonquians believed the
bones of animals were set aside to be reincarnated, so that they
could not be over-hunted. Algonquian non-Christian religious ideas
"apparently had nothing to do with waste and conservation of animal
populations until recently" (p. 204). I, however, contend that
Algonquian religious ideas support conservation strategies, by
providing a moral basis for human-animal relations, beyond the
pragmatic one. But these strategies also depend on their ability to
control their lands.

Initially, the target for Krech's book seems to be the use by
Madison Avenue and Hollywood of the Ecological Indian image. But in
the Epilogue he sets his sights on modern Indians, both those who
attribute to themselves ecological sensitivity, mainly in the
context of political fights over resource issues, and those who in
his view engage in environmentally questionable activities, despite
the image. He sees a disjunction between the Indian's
environmentalist image and their historical practices. "Their
actions, while perfectly reasonable in light of their own beliefs
and larger goals, were not necessarily rational according to the
premises of Western ecological conservation." (p. 212).

In his analysis Krech privileges Indian religious ideologies over
their environmental knowledge. Virtually any game shortage is used
to challenge the Ecological Indian, as if, for the image to be
genuine, they would have had to avoid all environmental uncertainty.
Anthropologically, Krech's view of Indians seems curiously
old-fashioned, presenting them as poorly adapted, without practical
knowledge of sustainable production, motivated instead by irrational
beliefs. By contrast, most ethnographic field studies of non-western
peoples by scientifically trained participant-observers conversant
in the local language reveal adaptations that involve rigorously
empirical knowledge of the environment, however nonrational their
other beliefs may appear.

There is unintended irony in the author's evaluation of Indian
actions against "the premises of Western ecological conservation".
As Krech himself notes, the modern rhetoric of aboriginal
environmentalism involves a critique of North American society over
environmental issues. From the start the image of the Ecological
Indian entailed a (sometimes-implicit) comparison and criticism of
non-Indians. From the Noble Savage to the Ecological Indian, these
are indictments of non-native society, particularly its treatment of
the environment. In the societies where the premises of ecological
conservation originated and where they are paid lip service, the
record of successfully following them is less than inspiring. If
Indians lacked these ideological principles, it is questionable if
they fared any the worse without them. Given the comparative aspect
implicit in the Ecological Indian image, I wonder why Krech did not
frame the image's empirical tests by means of comparisons with the
equivalent impact on the environment by the activities of the
newcomers? Then he would not have just asked whether Indians were
environmentally sensitive, but whether they were more or less
environmentally sensitive than non-Indians.

Whether or not Indian groups historically acted with environmental
responsibility, the contemporary claim that they are, by their
nature and heritage, 'ecological' is also part of their
counter-hegemonic political ideology. Another study that has looked
for the origins of 'Mother Earth', a concept related to that of the
Ecological Indian, concludes it first appeared in the context of
nineteenth century aboriginal political discourses with whites (Gill
1987). Krech's data seem to concur with those of Gill that it was
relatively recently and by comparison to whites that they began to
explicitly attribute 'closeness to nature' to themselves.

Krech questions the Ecological Indian as a particular interpretation
of the past. A more useful approach would show it to entail an
essentializing of a socially constructed primordial identity. As
such, it is an assertion of the group's collective self-identity
based on a common past, real or imagined (or both), and serves to
unite and unify. These are all features characteristic of ethnic
group nationalist movements in general, found today in innumerable
and multiplying discourses around sub-state ethnic identity (see,
e.g. Wilmsen and McAllister 1996).

Krech gives this perspective passing recognition and acknowledges it
is an illusion to privilege any one version of history as objective.
Yet despite these admissions he thinks it more important to
discredit the claim, asserting that "it seems unwise to assume
uncritically that the image of the Ecological Indian faithfully
reflects North American Indian behaviour at any time in the past."
One of the reasons he gives for challenging the image is that it
denies variations between Indian groups (p. 26). However, throughout
his book he accepts at face value the idea of the homogenised
pan-Indian as the subject of the image that he wants to test.
Otherwise, he would have limited the results of each of the seven
case studies to only the modern descendants of the respective tribal
groups.

The test cases each draw on prehistoric or historic data from times
when North American aboriginal people's most important identities
were diverse among themselves and tribal. However, the image of the
Ecological Indian is part of a more recently constructed unified
pan-Indian identity. Today pan-Indian unity exists alongside tribal
diversity, the one emphasising commonality while the other continues
to recognize difference. Krech's test cases only take account of one
side of this complex reality, and ultimately hardly seem relevant to
the issue of invalidating a pan-tribal conception.

The kinds of claims made about ethnic identity are not appropriately
treated as hypotheses put forward as historically verifiable, which
is how Krech deals with the Ecological Indian. Whatever their
self-conception, simply by being non-industrial Indians were
comparatively 'ecological', at least if left to their own devices.
However, this study missed the chance to contribute to an
understanding of the image, for instance, by showing that if the
Ecological Indian is a social construction, it was constructed
partly by, and by reference to, the colonizers, as part of an
ongoing political dialogue. The image of the Ecological Indian also
asserts moral superiority, an understandable response of a
relatively powerless group in the political context of struggles
over land and resources. Unfortunately, Krech's failure to
adequately take account of the political context of Indian
environmental discourse means his book may play into the hands of
reactionary and racist interests and prejudices opposed to
aboriginal rights.

References

Gill, Sam D. 1987, _Mother Earth. An American Story_. Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press.

Wilmsen, Edwin N. and Patrick McAllister, 1996, _The Politics of
Difference_. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Copyright (c) 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
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Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
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