Etrange destinée, étrange préférence que celle de l’ethnographe, sinon de l’anthropologue, qui s’intéresse aux hommes des antipodes plutôt qu’à ses compatriotes, aux superstitions et aux mœurs les plus déconcertantes plutôt qu’aux siennes, comme si je ne sais quelle pudeur ou prudence l’en dissuadait au départ. Si je n’étais pas convaincu que les lumières de la psychanalyse sont fort douteuses, je me demanderais quel ressentiment se trouve sublimé dans cette fascination du lointain, étant bien entendu que refoulement et sublimation, loin d’entraîner de ma part quelque condamnation ou condescendance, me paraissent dans la plupart des cas authentiquement créateurs. (…) Peut-être cette sympathie fondamentale, indispensable pour le sérieux même du travail de l’ethnographe, celui-ci n’a-t-il aucun mal à l’acquérir. Il souffre plutôt d’un défaut symétrique de l’hostilité vulgaire que je relevais il y a un instant. Dès le début, Hérodote n’est pas avare d’éloges pour les Scythes, ni Tacite pour les Germains, dont il oppose complaisamment les vertus à la corruption impériale. Quoique évoque du Chiapas, Las Casas me semble plus occupé à défendre les Indiens qu’à les convertir. Il compare leur civilisation avec celle de l’antiquité gréco-latine et lui donne l’avantage. Les idoles, selon lui, résultent de l’obligation de recourir à des symboles communs à tous les fidèles. Quant aux sacrifices humains, explique-t-il, il ne convient pas de s’y opposer par la force, car ils témoignent de la grande et sincère piété des Mexicains qui, dans l’ignorance où ils se trouvent de la crucifixion du Sauveur, sont bien obligés de lui inventer un équivalent qui n’en soit pas indigne. Je ne pense pas que l’esprit missionnaire explique entièrement un parti-pris de compréhension, que rien ne rebute. La croyance au bon sauvage est peut-être congénitale de l’ethnologie. (…) Nous avons eu les oreilles rebattues de la sagesse des Chinois, inventant la poudre sans s’en servir que pour les feux d’artifice. Certes. Mais, d’une part l’Occident a connu lui aussi la poudre sans longtemps l’employer pour la guerre. Au IXe siècle, le Livre des Feux, de Marcus Graecus en contient déjà la formule ; il faudra attendre plusieurs centaines d’années pour son utilisation militaire, très exactement jusqu’à l’invention de la bombarde, qui permet d’en exploiter la puissance de déflagration. Quant aux Chinois, dès qu’ils ont connu les canons, ils en ont été acheteurs très empressés, avant qu’ils n’en fabriquent eux-mêmes, d’abord avec l’aide d’ingénieurs européens. Dans l’Afrique contemporaine, seule la pauvreté ralentit le remplacement du pilon par les appareils ménagers fabriqués à Saint-Étienne ou à Milan. Mais la misère n’interdit pas l’invasion des récipients en plastique au détriment des poteries et des vanneries traditionnelles. Les plus élégantes des coquettes Foulbé se vêtent de cotonnades imprimées venues des Pays-Bas ou du Japon. Le même phénomène se produit d’ailleurs de façon encore plus accélérée dans la civilisation scientifique et industrielle, béate d’admiration devant toute mécanique nouvelle et ordinateur à clignotants. (…) Je déplore autant qu’un autre la disparition progressive d’un tel capital d’art, de finesse, d’harmonie. Mais je suis tout aussi impuissant contre les avantages du béton et de l’électricité. Je ne me sens d’ailleurs pas le courage d’expliquer leur privilège à ceux qui en manquent. (…) Les indigènes ne se résignent pas à demeurer objets d’études et de musées, parfois habitants de réserves où l’on s’ingénie à les protéger du progrès. Étudiants, boursiers, ouvriers transplantés, ils n’ajoutent guère foi à l’éloquence des tentateurs, car ils en savent peu qui abandonnent leur civilisation pour cet état sauvage qu’ils louent avec effusion. Ils n’ignorent pas que ces savants sont venus les étudier avec sympathie, compréhension, admiration, qu’ils ont partagé leur vie. Mais la rancune leur suggère que leurs hôtes passagers étaient là d’abord pour écrire une thèse, pour conquérir un diplôme, puisqu’ils sont retournés enseigner à leurs élèves les coutumes étranges, « primitives », qu’ils avaient observées, et qu’ils ont retrouvé là-bas du même coup auto, téléphone, chauffage central, réfrigérateur, les mille commodités que la technique traîne après soi. Dès lors, comment ne pas être exaspéré d’entendre ces bons apôtres vanter les conditions de félicité rustique, d’équilibre et de sagesse simple que garantit l’analphabétisme ? Éveillées à des ambitions neuves, les générations qui étudient et qui naguère étaient étudiées, n’écoutent pas sans sarcasme ces discours flatteurs où ils croient reconnaître l’accent attendri des riches, quand ils expliquent aux pauvres que l’argent ne fait pas le bonheur, – encore moins, sans doute, ne le font les ressources de la civilisation industrielle. À d’autres. Roger Caillois (1974)
Il y a des gens qui ont un profond et constant respect pour la beauté naturelle qu’était autrefois ce pays. Et des gens qui ne l’ont pas. C’est les gens qui commencent la pollution. C’est les gens qui peuvent l’arrêter. Campagne Gardez l’Amérique belle (Jour de la Terre, 1971)
The global extinction pattern, which Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History terms « a deadly syncopation, » convinced me. Near-time extinctions [those that occurred within the past 50,000 years] of large animals swept Australia over 40,000 years ago, peaked in America 10,000 to 13,000 years ago and ended historically with the settlement of remote Pacific islands, which saw within the last two millennia the elimination of many rails [a family of birds] and native land snails. (…) Of the many revolutions over billions of years in the history of life, humans appear to be agents of extinction in just the last 50,000 years. Many vertebrate paleontologists consider climatic change a satisfactory explanation in most of the last 65 million years. The cause of extinction may be less well understood than the origin of species. (…) I suspect that the reason for the dispute would trigger as much disagreement as the dispute itself. [Historian and activist] Vine Deloria’s trashing of overkill reflects (in my view) his lifelong war against anything that he believes might reflect badly on Native Americans and/or upset those who do not believe that Native Americans were always here (in the New World). I doubt he was ever seriously interested in the extinctions during near time or in the problem of what caused them. (…) In Eurasia the extinctions struck early in the Pleistocene in the southern part of Europe and advanced slowly toward the pole. The very last woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean only 4,000 years ago. The last woolly mammoths in Beringia were still alive on St. Paul’s island in the Pribilofs just over 5,000 years ago. Both Wrangel Island and St. Paul’s Island were apparently unknown to prehistoric hunters until thousands of years after the spread of Clovis hunters into North America. In Africa, extinctions of large animals—especially of taxa of proboscideans, large primates and suids (pigs)—may span a million years or more. I know of nothing like this in South America, where large mammal extinction in the Pleistocene appears to have been concentrated only 11,000 radiocarbon years ago or later. (…) I did not expect to find so much resistance among some anthropologists and vertebrate paleontologists. The resulting debate has been stimulating—what would new research on prehistoric extinctions reveal next? (…) As Ross MacPhee said, the pattern indicates a deadly syncopation on different land masses. As humans first arrive (« ka! ») they rapidly increase in numbers and trigger megafaunal extinction (« tunk! ») in a few thousand years at most: 50,000 years ago in Australia (ka-tunk!), 11,000 years ago in America (ka-tunk!), 5,000 years ago in Cuba and Haiti (ka-tunk!), and less than 1,000 years ago in New Zealand (ka-tunk!). (…) The attitudes, no less than the training, of those investigating evolution and extinction are crucial. Conservation biologists have long sought to restore wild places to what America allegedly was like in 1491, with no awareness that natural baselines may be at least 10,000 years older. (…) Ten million years ago would put us into the Miocene with primates but no hominids as yet. Many Miocene extinctions did (of course) occur, but not because of hominids. (…) Aware of the ravages of extinctions in the late Holocene, zoologists in New Zealand have begun to restock lost species with living relatives. The idea is gaining traction in the United States (see, for example, the article « Re-wilding North America, » by Josh Donlan and others in the August 18, 2005, issue of Nature). (…) I would like to see free-ranging elephants in secondary tropical forests of the Americas. Until the end of the Pleistocene, forest and savanna in the New World tropics supported three families of elephants. Observations of free-ranging Indian or African elephants in a reserve of secondary forest should reveal much about fruit dispersal and forest tree ecology under conditions more like those that prevailed before the megafaunal extinctions. (…) To thrive outside Africa and Asia, elephants need sizable reserves like the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Ecologists would like to learn more about elephant behavior in dispersing fruits in tropical and temperate forests. Conservation biologists are beginning to consider the importance of sizeable tropical reserves in the New World, which once harbored mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres, for the only surviving species, Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants we need tropical American equivalents of Tsavo or Amboseli National Park, popular African elephant reserves in Kenya and Tanzania. Paul S. Martin
The Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and other Indians ‘firmly believed that the buffalo were produced in countless numbers in a country under the ground; that every spring the surplus swarmed, like bees from a hive, out of great cave-like openings to this country.’ . . . It is easy to see how a belief of this nature would not encourage conservation or management of a declining resource under conditions like those obtaining increasingly on the nineteenth century Plains. . . . If buffaloes returned each year from the earth because they were of the earth, how could they possibly go extinct? Shepard Krech III
Depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, les ethnologues nous ont accoutumés à voir dans l’Indien un être rivé à sa communauté fermée au reste du monde. En privilégiant la vision d’informateurs censés préserver la tradition ancestrale, ils excluaient de leur champ d’observation tout ce qui faisaient des Indiens des êtres pareils à nous – c’est-à-dire inauthentiques, avides de changements et d’innovations. La vulgarisation … a fait le reste (…) l’Indien est devenu le dépositaire d’un savoir millénaire miraculeusement préservé; il entretiendrait avec la nature des relations d’une harmonie parfaite; figé hors du temps et de l’Histoire, il échapperait aux mélanges et aux contaminations qui seraient notre sort … Serge Guzinski (Télérama, 19/6/96)
D’après Denys Delâge, historien de l’université Laval, les Amérindiens n’étaient pas plus écologiques que nos ancêtres paysans. Les pigeons sauvages étaient pour les Amérindiens ce qu’étaient les poules ou les vaches pour les Canadiens, c’est-à-dire des animaux domestiques. Les tourtes faisaient «partie de l’ordinaire», de leur vie de tous les jours. Les tuer était donc l’équivalent pour le colon de voir un Amérindien abattre une de ses vaches. L’habitant de la Nouvelle-France, tout comme ses descendants vivant dans les campagnes québécoises jusqu’au milieu du XXe siècle, possédait aussi ses propres habitudes écologistes. Selon Delâge, les habitants comprenaient bien qu’il ne fallait pas exterminer tous ses animaux durant une même année, au risque de mourir de faim l’année suivante. Pas question non plus de gaspiller les restes: tout était récupéré. On salait, on congelait ou on mettait en conserve les surplus. Les restes de table servaient de nourriture aux chiens et aux chats, on n’utilisait ni emballage de plastique ni produit chimique. Les vêtements étaient faits de fibres naturelles, de lin et de laine, et lorsqu’ils étaient trop usés, ils étaient recyclés en tapis et en courtepointes. Le bois servait à construire, à chauffer et à récolter de l’eau d’érable. Aucun habitant n’aurait songé à couper à blanc le petit bois si utile près de chez lui. Presque aucun déchet ne venait donc polluer l’environnement de ces habitants. Même le contenu des «bécosses» était parfois utilisé comme engrais. Lequel vivait alors le plus en harmonie avec la nature: le Blanc ou l’Indien? En fait, chacun adaptait son style de vie à ses besoins et ses croyances. Ce style de vie était marqué dans les deux cas par l’autosubsistance, où il fallait gérer habilement ses ressources pour survivre. Les choses ont changé lors du passage à une économie de marché. Pour les cultivateurs, c’est à ce moment que l’agriculture à grande échelle s’est imposée et qu’ils ont commencé à détruire la nature avec la machinerie, la surexploitation des sols et l’utilisation d’engrais chimiques. Pour les Amérindiens, c’est surtout lorsqu’ils ont été intégrés dans un réseau d’échanges international par l’intermédiaire de la traite des fourrures qu’ils ont adopté des gestes jugés aujourd’hui dangereux pour l’environnement. Par exemple, le castor était disparu de plusieurs régions du Québec aussitôt qu’au XVIIe siècle. Le Jésuite Paul Le Jeune, dans la Relation de 1635, s’inquiétait déjà de la surexploitation du castor. Il relate de quelle façon les Montagnais les tuaient tous dans leurs cabanes, alors qu’il leur conseille d’y laisser au moins quelques petits afin qu’ils se reproduisent. Cette surchasse est extrêmement contradictoire avec la vision du monde des Amérindiens évoquée plus haut. (…) Charles A. Bishop par exemple, un historien américain, croit plutôt que malgré le respect voué à la nature, il n’y avait rien dans les croyances des Amérindiens qui les empêchait de tuer beaucoup d’animaux, à condition que leurs restes soient bien traités et que la traite rapporte quelque chose de bénéfique. C’était bien le cas, puisque un grand nombre d’objets utiles étaient échangés contre des fourrures. Il s’agit peut-être là d’une piste d’explication de l’apparente absence de scrupules des Amérindiens à chasser le castor presque jusqu’à l’extinction complète de l’espèce. (…) Bien que la plupart d’entre eux tuait d’abord les animaux pour survivre, ils considéraient aussi que ces animaux se donnaient et venaient s’offrir à eux. «Cela aurait paru mesquin de ne pas prendre tous les animaux offerts: on pouvait, on devait même, en certains occasions, tuer au-delà des besoins», affirme-t-il. Des sacrifices étaient également réalisés, particulièrement de chiens. Le Père de Charlevoix écrivait dans son Journal historique en 1721 comment les chiens étaient parfois immolés ou suspendus vivants à un arbre par les pattes de derrière jusqu’à la mort lorsque les Amérindiens devaient franchir des rapides ou des passages dangereux. Des pratiques qui auraient fait frémir les défenseurs des droits des animaux d’aujourd’hui… Plusieurs autres gestes pouvaient aussi avoir des conséquences assez graves pour l’environnement. Le père Louis Nicolas racontait dans son Histoire naturelle des Indes qu’il avait vu des Amérindiens couper des arbres entiers pour ramasser les noix ou accéder aux nids d’oiseaux. Les autochtones allumaient également des feux pour toutes sortes de raisons. On fertilisait les terres avec des feux, on régénérait les forêts de pins et d’épinettes ou encore on facilitait le transport. Mais les Amérindiens perdaient parfois le contrôle de ces incendies et en plus de la pollution qu’ils provoquaient, ils détruisaient d’autres plantes et animaux qui n’étaient pas utilisés par la suite. Le grand respect des Amérindiens envers la nature répondait donc surtout à des croyances religieuses. On est bien loin des grands principes écologistes du XXe siècle! Pourquoi cette image de l’Amérindien écologiste existe-t-elle aujourd’hui si elle ne correspond pas à la réalité passée? Selon l’anthropologue américain Shepard Krech III, ce sont les Blancs qui ont créé ce mythe durant les années 1960, parce qu’ils avaient de nouvelles préoccupations pour l’environnement. Krech croit que les Amérindiens n’ont jamais été écologistes, mais qu’ils ont peu à peu adhéré à ce stéréotype et qu’ils l’utilisent maintenant eux-mêmes pour revendiquer de meilleures conditions d’existence. Et s’ils n’ont pas véritablement fait de dommages malgré des comportements parfois nuisibles pour la nature, c’est tout simplement parce qu’ils n’étaient pas assez nombreux et qu’ils n’exploitaient pas les ressources dans le but de faire des profits. Sylvie LeBel
Le mythe [de l’Indien écolo] reflète bien davantage les préoccupations environnementales des Blancs des dernières décennies que la réalité historique des autochtones. C’est un stéréotype. Et il fait maintenant partie de l’image que les Amérindiens ont d’eux-mêmes. Depuis les années 60, ceux-ci contribuent d’ailleurs activement à la maintenir. D’abord, je crois que cela va de pair avec une idéalisation nostalgique des anciens modes de vie. Puis, le mythe devient un argument de revendication : si les Indiens sont vraiment en communion avec tous les êtres vivants, conscients des conséquences de leurs actes et soucieux de ne jamais provoquer de déséquilibres dans la nature, ils sont naturellement les plus aptes à gérer les ressources de leur territoire. (…) Dès que naissait un marché pour la fourrure dans une région, le nombre des castors y chutait rapidement, à cause de la chasse intensive. Ainsi, en 1635, ils étaient déjà rares autour de Trois-Rivières et ailleurs le long du Saint-Laurent. A l’époque, le jésuite Paul Le Jeune et d’autres témoins ont déploré que les Indiens, trouvant une hutte de castors, y tuaient toutes les bêtes sans se soucier de laisser un couple pour la reproduction. Plus tard, dans les postes de traite, on a tenté d’introduire des mesures de conservation, notamment en refusant les peaux des animaux trop jeunes. (…) Le commerce entre les Indiens et les différentes régions existait avant l’arrivée des Blancs. Mais, sans l’énorme marché européen, les autochtones n’auraient pas tué autant d’animaux. C’est vrai pour le castor, mais aussi pour le cerf dans l’est des Etats-Unis et le bison dans les plaines de l’Ouest. L’Europe a fait exploser la demande. Je constate simplement que, dans la plupart des cas, les Indiens y ont répondu avec enthousiasme, contents d’échanger des peaux de peu de valeur pour eux contre des couteaux, des vêtements ou des fusils. (…) [ils n’ont pas causé plus de dégâts avant l’arrivée des Européens] parce qu’ils n’étaient pas suffisamment nombreux. Situons leur population, avant l’arrivée des Blancs : entre 4 et 7 millions en Amérique du Nord – les anthropologues ne s’entendent pas sur le nombre. Sept millions, soit la population actuelle de l’Etat du New Jersey, répartis dans l’ensemble des Etats-Unis et du Canada… (…) Les Amérindiens entretenaient avec les bêtes une relation très intime : ils leur prêtaient des sentiments, une pensée humaine. Ainsi, les Indiens des Plaines croyaient qu’il ne fallait pas laisser s’échapper un bison après la chasse – il avertirait les autres de ne plus s’aventurer dans les parages. Ils s’assuraient donc de tuer toutes les bêtes prises au piège, au risque de gaspiller la viande. La plupart croyaient en la réincarnation. Ils pensaient que les animaux tués renaissaient la saison suivante et qu’en conséquence plus ils en tuaient, plus il en revenait. La disparition de l’espèce était à leurs yeux impensable. (…) Je savais que j’abordais un sujet très délicat. Un journal autochtone, Indian Country Today, a d’ailleurs qualifié mon essai de « pure propagande » [anti-indienne]. Cela dit, les Indiens eux-mêmes ne servent pas toujours leur cause. Quand ils s’opposent au transport de déchets dangereux dans leurs réserves ou qu’ils oeuvrent à la préservation d’espèces menacées, ils sont à la hauteur de leur image. Pas lorsqu’ils proposent leurs réserves comme centres d’enfouissement ou qu’ils insistent sur leur droit de pêcher le homard au risque de compromettre le renouvellement des stocks. Peut-on leur en vouloir ? Au-delà du mythe, ce sont des êtres humains comme les autres, avec leurs contradictions, leurs désaccords, et qui font de leur mieux pour tirer leur épingle du jeu. (…) Depuis les débuts de la civilisation, l’être humain rêve d’un retour à la nature. A défaut de réaliser ce rêve, il va acheter une paire de mocassins, dénigrer la technologie, adhérer à un mouvement de protection de l’environnement ou croire à l’Indien écologiste. Shepard Kech
Esclavagistes, nettoyeurs ethniques et maintenant… destructeurs de l’environnement!
Du moins si l’on en croit l’anthropologue révisionniste américain Shepard Krech.
Pour qui, à l’instar de l’acteur italo-américain Espero Corti qui sous le nom d’Iron Eyes Cody se fit passer sa vie durant pour un Cherokee et fit tant pour l’environnement (voir photo ci-dessus), l’Indien écolo est en fait une création des Blancs et donc un stéréotype, mais qui « fait maintenant partie de l’image que les Amérindiens ont d’eux-mêmes » et… de leurs arguments de revendication!
Et que, loin de s’inquiéter pour la destruction des animaux sauvages, ce sont eux (une fois initiés au commerce de la fourrure) qui ont provoqué la disparition de certaines espèces comme le castor de plusieurs régions du Canada.
Mieux encore, c’est les Blancs qui ont dû leur demander d’arrêter le saccage, car, croyant en la réincarnation, ils pensaient que plus ils en tuaient, plus il en renaissait.
Pour en finir avec le mythe de l’Indien écolo
Le « bon sauvage » ? Ne vous fiez pas à cette idée reçue, explique l’anthropologue américain Shepard Krech, spécialiste de l’histoire amérindienne.
D’où vient le mythe de l’Indien écologiste ?
Shepard Krech
Courrier international
20 avril 2000
Selon la façon occidentale de percevoir l’autre, soit on l’idéalise, soit on le diabolise. Dès leur premier contact avec les indigènes d’Amérique du Nord, les Européens ont élaboré une double image de l’habitant du Nouveau Monde : celle du « bon sauvage » qui vit en harmonie avec la nature, dans un monde non corrompu par la civilisation – conception qui trouvera sa meilleure expression dans l’oeuvre de Jean-Jacques Rousseau -, et celle du sauvage ignoble, barbare sanguinaire. L’Indien écologiste, issu de la version positive du mythe, est un descendant du bon sauvage de Rousseau. Le mythe a ensuite évolué, s’est enrichi. Au début du XIXe siècle, dans les romans d’aventures de James Fenimore Cooper [auteur, entre autres, du Dernier des Mohicans], la dignité de l’Indien, sa noblesse, son courage, son intelligence sont exaltés. Au commencement du XXe siècle, Ernest Thompson Seton, premier chef scout, a contribué à mettre en valeur les habiletés de l’Indien : celui-ci est devenu un modèle pour les jeunes qui apprennent à s’orienter en forêt, à construire des canots et à allumer un feu. L’étape ultime est survenue à la fin des années 60, lorsque le bon sauvage est devenu écologiste.
L’Indien écolo est donc une création des Blancs ?
Tout à fait. Le mythe reflète bien davantage les préoccupations environnementales des Blancs des dernières décennies que la réalité historique des autochtones. C’est un stéréotype. Et il fait maintenant partie de l’image que les Amérindiens ont d’eux-mêmes. Depuis les années 60, ceux-ci contribuent d’ailleurs activement à la maintenir. D’abord, je crois que cela va de pair avec une idéalisation nostalgique des anciens modes de vie. Puis, le mythe devient un argument de revendication : si les Indiens sont vraiment en communion avec tous les êtres vivants, conscients des conséquences de leurs actes et soucieux de ne jamais provoquer de déséquilibres dans la nature, ils sont naturellement les plus aptes à gérer les ressources de leur territoire.
Dès le XVIIe siècle, écrivez-vous, les Amérindiens participant au commerce de la fourrure ont provoqué la disparition du castor de plusieurs régions du Canada, et ce sont les Blancs qui, les premiers, ont exprimé des inquiétudes…
Dès que naissait un marché pour la fourrure dans une région, le nombre des castors y chutait rapidement, à cause de la chasse intensive. Ainsi, en 1635, ils étaient déjà rares autour de Trois-Rivières et ailleurs le long du Saint-Laurent. A l’époque, le jésuite Paul Le Jeune et d’autres témoins ont déploré que les Indiens, trouvant une hutte de castors, y tuaient toutes les bêtes sans se soucier de laisser un couple pour la reproduction. Plus tard, dans les postes de traite, on a tenté d’introduire des mesures de conservation, notamment en refusant les peaux des animaux trop jeunes.
Les exterminations ont commencé après l’arrivée des Blancs et le début de la chasse commerciale, non ?
Le commerce entre les Indiens et les différentes régions existait avant l’arrivée des Blancs. Mais, sans l’énorme marché européen, les autochtones n’auraient pas tué autant d’animaux. C’est vrai pour le castor, mais aussi pour le cerf dans l’est des Etats-Unis et le bison dans les plaines de l’Ouest. L’Europe a fait exploser la demande. Je constate simplement que, dans la plupart des cas, les Indiens y ont répondu avec enthousiasme, contents d’échanger des peaux de peu de valeur pour eux contre des couteaux, des vêtements ou des fusils.
Si les Indiens étaient si peu écolos, pourquoi n’ont-ils pas causé plus de dégâts avant l’arrivée des Européens ?
Parce qu’ils n’étaient pas suffisamment nombreux. Situons leur population, avant l’arrivée des Blancs : entre 4 et 7 millions en Amérique du Nord – les anthropologues ne s’entendent pas sur le nombre. Sept millions, soit la population actuelle de l’Etat du New Jersey, répartis dans l’ensemble des Etats-Unis et du Canada…
Vous écrivez que les Indiens tuaient fréquemment plus d’animaux qu’ils ne pouvaient en manger. N’était-ce pas contraire à leurs croyances ?
Les Amérindiens entretenaient avec les bêtes une relation très intime : ils leur prêtaient des sentiments, une pensée humaine. Ainsi, les Indiens des Plaines croyaient qu’il ne fallait pas laisser s’échapper un bison après la chasse – il avertirait les autres de ne plus s’aventurer dans les parages. Ils s’assuraient donc de tuer toutes les bêtes prises au piège, au risque de gaspiller la viande. La plupart croyaient en la réincarnation. Ils pensaient que les animaux tués renaissaient la saison suivante et qu’en conséquence plus ils en tuaient, plus il en revenait. La disparition de l’espèce était à leurs yeux impensable.
Ne craignez-vous pas que votre livre nuise à la cause des autochtones ?
Je savais que j’abordais un sujet très délicat. Un journal autochtone, Indian Country Today, a d’ailleurs qualifié mon essai de « pure propagande » [anti-indienne]. Cela dit, les Indiens eux-mêmes ne servent pas toujours leur cause. Quand ils s’opposent au transport de déchets dangereux dans leurs réserves ou qu’ils oeuvrent à la préservation d’espèces menacées, ils sont à la hauteur de leur image. Pas lorsqu’ils proposent leurs réserves comme centres d’enfouissement ou qu’ils insistent sur leur droit de pêcher le homard au risque de compromettre le renouvellement des stocks. Peut-on leur en vouloir ? Au-delà du mythe, ce sont des êtres humains comme les autres, avec leurs contradictions, leurs désaccords, et qui font de leur mieux pour tirer leur épingle du jeu.
Et pourquoi le mythe est-il tenace ?
Depuis les débuts de la civilisation, l’être humain rêve d’un retour à la nature. A défaut de réaliser ce rêve, il va acheter une paire de mocassins, dénigrer la technologie, adhérer à un mouvement de protection de l’environnement ou croire à l’Indien écologiste.
Propos recueillis par Marie-Claude Bourdon
Voir la critique du WP:
Why stop killing buffalo if you believe they can be infinitely replaced, as long as the hunter demonstrates the proper respect?
On Native Ground
The Washington Post
Jennifer Veech
Aug 29, 1999
THE ECOLOGICAL INDIAN
Myth and History
By Shepard Krech III
Norton. 318 pp. $27.95
Reviewed by Jennifer Veech
In The Ecological Indian, anthropologist Shepard Krech sets off into the dangerous but compelling territory of Native American identity. As the title suggests, Krech is intent on examining the commonly and often dearly held belief in the Indian as ecologist par excellence. He takes on this stereotype in seven chapters that address many of the touchstones of the debate.
The book opens with the familiar image of Iron Eyes Cody’s portrayal of the Crying Indian. This well-known TV commercial, albeit now almost 30 years out of date, still crystalizes for many, both Europeans and Native Americans, the image of the Native American as the preserver of the American landscape. But, Krech argues, preservation and conservation are decidedly Western concepts, foreign in fundamental ways to a Native American world view. Quoting the historian Richard White, Krech explains that « the idea that Indians left no traces of themselves on the land demeans Indians. It makes them seem simply like an animal species, and thus deprives them of culture. » The image of the Ecological Indian, he argues, is a two-edged sword, one that many Native Americans embrace and others reject as a confining caricature.
Following his introduction, Krech takes his theory on the road, so to speak, and travels through a series of seven historical periods and geographical regions. Perhaps, in part, because these chapters cover such a great swath of time and geography they do not build on each other but instead function more as discrete elements, generating a sort of anthology of vignettes on Native Americans and the environment.
Krech begins his survey with the earlier period of human habitation in the Americas, the Pleistocene, which was witness to the extinction of myriad animal species. The debate surrounding the Native American responsibility for this loss was launched in the 1960s by the scholar Paul Martin, who argued that « man and man alone, was responsible. » Krech offers no simple conclusions, though even to raise the questions is to attack a 500-year-old icon. The image of « indigenous nobility, » he writes, « is a rich tradition whereby the Noble Indian . . . is a foil for the critiques of European American society. » Refusing to either endorse or destroy this icon, Krech instead asks that we take the Indian off his pedestal and see him as human, living in real rather than mythic time.
From the Pleistocene the book jumps centuries into the future, first to the Hohokam of Arizona and the mystery of their disappearance and then further still to look at the impact of European disease on native populations. In casting his eye toward the impact of epidemic illness, Krech regards the Indian not as actor but as acted-upon, and asks to what degree the seeming absence of Native Americans predisposed many newly arrived Europeans to view the Americas as an untouched wilderness.
The book’s final chapters are devoted to perhaps more familiar territory, the massive trade in animal skins and meat that developed in the wake of the European arrival. The hunts for buffalo in the West, white-tailed deer in the South, and beaver in the Northeast were enormous enterprises. Millions of animals were slaughtered and, in the case of the buffalo and beaver, driven to the brink of extinction in North America. It is difficult to reconcile these facts with our understanding of the very intimate relationship that Native Americans had with the creatures around them, relationships like that of the Cherokee, who believed « that if they failed to ask forgiveness for the deer that they had killed, then the deer would cause rheumatism » in the hunter. The discordance arises in part from trying to hold a pre-industrial society to the standards of 20th-century science. Many Native Americans did and do live in concert with the physical world; however, it is not a relationship founded on modern theories of ecology. Why stop killing buffalo if you believe they can be infinitely replaced, as long as the hunter demonstrates the proper respect?
This exhaustively re-searched volume is awash in historical information, to which its 86 pages of endnotes well attest. It serves as a good introduction to the question about Native American environmental responsibility, synopsizing the key points of the debate. What I was left wanting, however, was a closer look at the European origins of the myth itself, at the Europeans and European Americans responsible for this image of the Ecological Indian.
Krech leaves us with no easy generalizations. Instead he offers us a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace.
Jennifer Veech is a Washington poet and reviewer.
Voir aussi les critiques:
Dennis Prager and The Ecological Indian
(12/22/99)
Since Native peoples’ issues often and naturally coincide with environmental concerns, Native peoples themselves must be attacked. As environmentalists are increasingly recognizing, interest in Native peoples and causes offers a convergence point where ecological issues can be creatively conceived. Native peoples’ traditions are not made up by counter-culturalists or academic theorists — they are long-standing human ways that speak to the relationship to the natural world and can form the core of a realistic discussion among broad sectors of the population. Native traditional knowledge is sometimes abused or trivialized, but it is now widely accepted as a base on which to develop a true environmental philosophy.
Jose Barreiro, Bigotshtick: Rush Limbaugh on Indians, Native Americas Journal, Fall 1995
Talk (or is it schlock?) radio
Dennis Prager, radio personality and alleged moderate, conducted an interview with Shepard Krech III, author of The Ecological Indian. First, note that Prager is a conservative masquerading as a moderate. Let’s get that straight from the start.
I’d heard of The Ecological Indian but hadn’t read about it, much less read it. Nevertheless, I could tell how the interview would go from the mention of « buffalo, » « deer, » and « beaver. » And I was right.
Buffalo
Krech, a white anthropologist, says Indians killed more buffalo than they needed when they drove them over cliffs. Prager acts surprised by this « revelation. » My response:
1) That’s a fairly well-known fact, despite what Prager thinks 99% of Americans think. To pretend it’s a secret the PC police have tried to conceal is nonsense.
2) The buffalo jumps were carried out by a few tribes out of many that hunted buffalo. For one thing, you had to have cliffs nearby to conduct the maneuver. Vast stretches of the Great Plains had no usable cliffs…which is probably why there weren’t many buffalo jumps south of the Dakotas.
3) So what if some Indians killed, say, 50 buffalo when they needed 10…when there were still a million buffalo extant? Do conservationists use every scrap of wood and bark when they cut down a tree? Every scrap of meat and hide when they kill a cow? Do they never litter or discard a half-eaten meal?
Of course not. We don’t live in that needy a society. Even the best of us wastes a little because we can.
To equate Indians killing an extra 40 buffalo to Europeans killing the remaining 999,850 buffalo (leaving 100 of 1,000,000 alive) is the worst sort of joke. It’s intellectual sophistry and Prager is guilty of it. Does the word « vile » or « reprehensible » suggest anything to you?
Were the Indians comparable to today’s conservationists? Hell, yes. They wasted a little because all humans do, but they didn’t touch the overall supply. Their actions conserved the population even if they didn’t conserve every animal.
Were the Indians comparable to today’s Euro-Americans? Hell, no. The Europeans killed entire speciesas in permanently extinguished them. They also clearcut 90% or more of the virgin forests they found. In no way, shape, or form were the two groups equivalent.
Deer and beaver
Krech claims the Indians of middle America almost wiped out the deer and beaver. My response:
Both these alleged cases of massive hunting happened after Europeans arrived with their colonizing culture a fact Prager the sophist neglected to mention. In the 1700s and 1800s, especially east of the Mississippi, Indians were no longer acting on their original beliefs, uncontaminated by outside contact. They were no longer completely free agents.
The Europeans forced them to adopt a cash economy and so they adopted one to survive. If they wanted to buy guns (to defend their lives) or food (because they were forced from their bountiful homelands) they needed something to trade. The Europeans valued furs, skins, and meat. Can you guess what happened?
That’s right, the Indians got co-opted into the European system. So if Indians decimated species, it was because they mimicked European culture, not because it was inherent in their own culture. If the Europeans hadn’t come, the Indians wouldn’t have harmed the deer or beaver populations.
Again, the conniving Prager didn’t bring up these points, though they seemed obvious to me. The anthro Krech didn’t sound like he had an axe to grind, but Prager sure did. Even if the three examples were validand none were closethey’d cover only a third or so of the continent. So where does Prager get off claiming Indians as a whole were as bad as Europeans?
Because they decimated two animal species while aping Europeans and mildly wasted one species on their own? While Europeans laid waste to flora and fauna like a nuclear holocaust? Who was it, exactly, who wiped the passenger pigeon from the face of the earth? Who came close to extinguishing the buffalo and the bald eagle, our national emblem? Who caused the Dust Bowl, the burning rivers, the eggs laced with DDT?
Native Americans? Don’t think so. Look in the mirror if you want to know who, because we’re still putting profits before polliwogs. Which reminds me of the massive die-off of frog species occurring now, but that’s another story.
Prager’s claims are a pathetic excuse for an argument, if you ask me. It’s why I can’t stand ideologues like him. If I were to debate Prager on these issues, I’d kick his butt all over the map. As I’ve just shown.
Incidentally, I just read a review of The Ecological Indian in the Indian Country Today newspaper (10/11/99). The headline states the book is propaganda. That about sums it up.
Voir également:
CHAPTER ONE
The Ecological Indian
Myth and History
By SHEPARD KRECH 3d
W. W. Norton & Company
PLEISTOCENE
EXTINCTIONS
* * *
Beginning 11,000 years ago, at the end of the period known as the Pleistocene, many animal species that had flourished just a short time before vanished from North America. Men and women had been in the New World for only a relatively short time, and scholars have hotly debated the coincidence of their arrival and the extinctions. Paul Martin, a palynologist and geochronologist, spurred the debate more than any other person. When he proclaimed in the late 1960s that « man, and man alone, was responsible » for the extinctions, he set off a firestorm that shows little sign of abating. Branding the ancient Indians—so-called Paleoindians—as superpredators, Martin likened their assault on Pleistocene animals to a blitzkrieg, evoking the aggressive, assaulting imagery of the Nazi war machine.
Martin could not have made a more apt word choice for grabbing the public imagination. Over the last three decades « American Blitzkrieg » and « Slaughter of Mastodons Caused Their Extinction » have defined headlines, and writers in popular magazines like National Geographic concluded confidently that scientists suspect « man the hunter » as the « villain » in Pleistocene extinctions.
There is no room for the Ecological Indian here. As Martin himself wrote in 1967, « that business of the noble savage, a child of nature, living in an unspoiled Garden of Eden until the `discovery’ of the New World by Europeans is apparently untrue, since the destruction of fauna, if not of habitat, was far greater before Columbus than at any time since. » For Martin, that realization is « provocative, » « deeply disturbing, » and « even revolutionary. » To no surprise, Martin’s findings fed the conservative press who argued that because of the (supposed) sins of their earliest ancestors, Native North Americans today lack authority to occupy the moral high ground on environmental issues. Martin’s ideas have found support and reached a wide audience for over thirty years, but how well do they stand up today?
For well over a century, the consensus in the scientific community has been that Paleoindians, the ancestors of today’s American Indians, wandered eastward into North America from northeastern Asia. But among American Indians outside the scientific community, that idea has not met with universal acceptance. Some have taken issue with the idea that their ancestors came initially from Asia. Asked about the origin of the world and human beings, or about the migrations of their ancestors, Indians have sometimes responded that their communities were never anywhere other than where they were at the moment the question was posed. Their ancestors, they said, came into the present world from worlds preceding and beneath the current one, through mouths of caves or from holes in the ground. Other native people believed they had migrated from the east, west, or elsewhere. Some living in the interior of the continent thought that their ancestors once lived far away on the shores of salty seas. In days before they had incorporated European ideas of their origins into their own, American Indians answered questions about their origin and historical movements in as many different voices as there were nations with separate cultures.
Even today native people do not speak with one voice on these or any other issues. Some adhere to contemporary versions of their traditional beliefs. But not all do. Many instead have long since converted to the position favored by archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scientists, that Indians came to the New World from Asia thousands of years ago. Like all scientific explanations, this one is changing based on the steady accumulation of data. Each year new sites or dates offer fresh insight on how and when people came into and spread throughout North and South America. The nature of science is to debate theories and to test and confirm or falsify hypotheses spawned by theories. As with evolution, a long period of shared understanding may be suddenly punctuated by « fresh » insight fitting more seamlessly both new data and the broader historical context in which all scientific thought exists, and a new consensus begins to build. One recent example of this process is illustrated by debates concerning mass extinctions before the Pleistocene, for which there is growing widespread agreement that asteroids—a radical theory when initially proposed—and climate change spelled the end of major orders of living things.
The scientific community’s consensus is that when Paleoindians wandered eastward from northeastern Asia to North America, they came across a broad and vast land known as Beringia. At the heart of Beringia is a continental shelf that was exposed during lower sea levels of the Pleistocene and is today covered by the Bering and Chukchi seas. In short order, Paleoindians migrated south from Beringia along the west coast or through a corridor between two massive continental ice sheets and spread rapidly to the southern tip of South America.
There was ample time and opportunity during the Pleistocene for Paleoindians to wander from Asia to America through Beringia. The Pleistocene era lasted for two million years, and was marked by periods when temperatures were cool and glaciers advanced and by periods when temperatures were warm and glaciers retreated. During the warmer eras marked by glacial retreats, the sea level was essentially today’s, and Asia and North America were separated by a strait as they are today. But during the cooler periods when glaciers advanced, the sea level was lower, continental ice sheets were more expansive, and Beringia was exposed. A drop in the sea of 150 feet below today’s level was all that was required to remove the obstacle of a strait and expose Beringia as a landmass. At these times, Asia and North America were joined, even if continental glaciers imposed to the east and south.
The general scheme is not in dispute; the details, not surprisingly, are debated. For example, many discuss precisely when climatic and environmental conditions permitted Paleoindians to cross Beringia—how much earlier than the era of Paleoindian sites that have been securely dated (see below). Even though evidence for human occupation of Siberia during very early times is mounting, there is no evidence that human beings moved across Beringia prior to a cool era beginning some 80,000 years ago. Indeed from 115,000 to 80,000 years ago, the sea level was essentially today’s and water blocked movement by land. But from 80,000 to 10,000 years ago there were long periods when temperatures were very cool and the sea level dropped more than 150 feet below its present level, removing the barrier of a strait; at other moments, temperatures were not as cold and a narrow strait remained as an impediment—not, however, if people possessed the technology to cross water or ice. There were two especially welcoming eras during this 70,000-year-long span. The first was from 65,000 to 23,000 years ago, when the strait—if there was one—was even narrower than today and continental ice sheets loomed but evidently were not joined to block passage toward the heart of the continent to the south (for those who headed in that direction). The second was from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago when the sea level was even lower, and a straitless Beringia grew into a broad plain measuring 1,000 miles from north to south.
How inadequate the metaphor of bridge for the landmass that formed between Asia and North America! As a one-thousand-mile-wide plain, the « Bering land bridge, » as it has been called, was surely attractive to generations of animals large and small, as well as to people following them. At different places and separate times, Beringia was probably a cold but productive steppe rich in fauna and a colder more barren tundra marked by much lower biological productivity. From 80,000 to 10,000 years ago, its vegetation changed from being adapted to wetter and milder conditions to being more suitable for colder and drier climate and longer ice cover. At the end of the Pleistocene, wetter and warmer conditions caused a rapid buildup of peat and an explosion in the numbers of birch trees in Beringia. At its greatest extent, this landmass was no doubt marked by different vegetation zones from north to south, and in the late Pleistocene by a mosaic of environments and species. For human predators, the most important characteristic may have been the abundant graze afforded by grassy vegetation for mammoths, bisons, and horses.
For most of the time when Beringia was at its greatest expanse from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago, beyond it to the south and east coastal glaciers loomed and two massive ice sheets covered much of Canada. When they were at their maximum extent 18,000 years ago, the ice sheets encased Canada and the Great Lakes. But as temperatures warmed, they retreated, and waters released from them and from shrinking polar ice caps raised sea levels. After several thousand years, Beringia flooded, Bering Strait re-formed, and human migration between the Old and New World took place henceforth only across water or on ice. For the story of migration into the heart of North America, however, these changes mattered little. Men and women were already in the New World, and the major problem they faced was how to move south. One route was along the coast; some archaeologists argue that this route was the major and the earliest one. Another was through an inland gap or corridor from interior Alaska through the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta—along the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains. The corridor formed some 13,000 to 11,000 years ago as the continental ice sheets pulled back from each other, allowing men and women, when conditions were optimal, to migrate into the heart of North America. Both routes marked the way into environments like today’s but for their location farther south. Bordering the ice sheet was a narrow zone of periglacial tundra, south of which was boreal forest and mixed coniferous and deciduous forests in the East and plains in the West, and desert farther south. Each of these major environments contained grazers, browsers, and predators that would soon be extinct.
The extinctions were remarkable by any measure. Animals familiar and unfamiliar, widespread and local, and large and small disappeared. Some were well-known creatures like lemmings, salamanders, and various birds. But many were not, and they constituted a fabulous bestiary. The mammals, especially the ones that were unfamiliar and large, have attracted great attention. How many mammalian species disappeared will probably always be unknown because of uncertainty over species boundaries, but at least thirty-five mammalian genera vanished.
Mammals weighing more than one hundred pounds that became extinct have drawn intense interest partly because of their assumed attractiveness to human hunters. For one familiar only with today’s North American fauna, these so-called megafauna (literally, large animals) were exceptional. They included exotic hulking tusked mammoths and mastodons that roamed prairies and boggy woodlands, respectively, towering elephant-like over almost all else. Several types of slow-moving, giant ground sloths ranging in size from several hundred pounds to twenty feet long in the same weight range as the mammoths also vanished. So did rhinocerous-sized pampatheres, a kind of giant armadillo, and armored two-thousand-pound, six-foot-long glyptodonts resembling nothing known today.
Many herbivores disappeared, including single-hump camels, stocky six-foot-long capybaras, five-hundred-pound tapirs, three-hundred-pound giant beavers, four-horned antelopes, horses, bison-sized shrub oxen, and stag-moose with fantastic multiple-palmated and tined antlers. Carnivores also died out, including dire wolves whose large heads and powerful jaws made them resemble hyenas and huge fearsome fifteen-hundred-pound short-faced bears that were slim and possibly very quick and agile. Two large serrated-toothed cats vanished: scimitar-toothed cats that fed on mammoth young, and great saber-toothed cats that could gape, shark-like, opening their jaws to a one-hundred-degree angle before stabbing or ripping open prey with their enormous canines.
All vanished. The end for many came between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, a watershed millennium that opened with the disappearance of many members of the amazing bestiary and closed with the demise of the remaining camels, horses, mammoths, mastodons, and other megafauna.
These species entered oblivion in a geological blink. The big question is why, which returns us to Martin’s proclamation, « Man, and man alone, was responsible. » Can we accept this? In his search for proof, Martin marshaled the power of simulation to his side. On the basis of assumptions about when Paleoindians arrived south of the continental ice sheets, population growth and movement, and kill rates, he and his co-workers simulated the rapid human movement and killings—the « blitzkrieg. » In one scenario, one hundred Paleoindians arrived on the Alberta prairies some 12,000 years ago. Each year, they moved southward just twenty miles and killed only one dozen animals per person. They also reproduced, doubling their population every twenty years. Except for the reproduction rate, the assumptions underlying these figures seem fairly modest. Yet based on them, Paleoindians in only three hundred years numbered 100,000, spread two thousand miles south, and killed over ninety million one-thousand-pound animals. Using more conservative assumptions in other simulations, Martin and others argued that it still took relatively few years to reach first the Gulf of Mexico and then Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, and to hunt megafauna to their doom.
The thesis has proved seductive—and resilient. Granted, the overwhelming image one gets from Martin’s blitzkrieg is of restless Paleoindians constantly on the move. Hunting people, they were always on the go along a « front » (as in a military campaign). They expanded methodically, killing a mammoth here, a mastodon there, a glyptodont one day, a dim-witted giant ground sloth or cumbersome giant beaver the next. Martin argued that men (and women) arrived in the New World with knowledge of hunting large animals, but these same animals lacked experience with human predators and thus did not fear them, and so hunters left megafaunal extinctions in their wake. They ate little but megafaunal meat and wasted up to half of what they killed. Singularly focused on big game, they ignored fish, shellfish, plants, and other less dramatic sources of food. They moved fast, killed efficiently, and were fecund. Critics, scoffing at overly generous assumptions about kill rates, population growth, and population movement that depart from cautious, reasonable inferences from twentieth-century hunting-gathering peoples, complain that Paleoindians were too successful.
Martin speculated that Paleoindians were successful in part because they were newly arrived in the New World, and animals lacked fear of them as predators and did not develop an awareness of how fatal their encounters with them would be until it was too late. When Martin first proposed his thesis some thirty years ago, archaeologists generally accepted that humans were in the New World 10,000 to 11,000 years ago but not much earlier. Today, as a result of a flurry of activity on early sites, it appears likely that Indians reached southern South America some 12,500 years ago, and a new consensus is emerging over an arrival date in the New World of 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. An arrival time of any earlier is sharply disputed. The lines are clearly drawn between most archaeologists, who are uncomfortable with dates earlier than roughly 14,000 years ago, and a vocal, persistent minority asserting that Paleoindians reached the New World 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. While linguistic, dental, and genetic theories lend support to the older dates, it is currently doubtful that a precise chronology can be derived from these theories. In the meantime, the earliest dated sites are plagued by various methodological problems. This debate will not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction anytime soon, but at this stage it seems prudent to remain skeptical of dates earlier than 14,000 years ago.
Animals like slow-moving, sluggish ground sloths must have been especially vulnerable to human predation, but animals with far more presumed agility than gigantic sloths disappeared too. Martin’s argument that the superpredators killed them all easily and quickly because they lacked time to develop fear is weakened both by the likelihood that Paleoindians arrived 1,000 to 3,000 years before the watershed millennium when most megafaunal animals vanished and by the fact that prey do not always fear human hunters (animals like buffaloes or pronghorn antelopes survived into the modern era alongside humans, despite a reputation of being so bold or so intensely curious that hunters rather easily killed them). It is as reasonable to suggest that Paleoindians played a greater role in the extinctions the longer they were in North America.
If only there were numerous archaeological sites with associated extinct megafauna to test Martin’s thesis of overkill. But there are only fifty or so sites—a mere handful. At them, Paleoindians killed and butchered mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, four-horned antelopes, tapirs, and a couple of other extinct species. Amazingly, Martin used the paucity of sites to help buttress his claim that a blitzkrieg marked the onslaught: « Perhaps the only remarkable aspect of New World archaeology is that any kill sites have been found, » he once remarked, reasoning from the assumption that Paleoindians killed animals whenever they came across them and therefore the kill sites were scattered and ephemeral. For Martin, a negative (the absence of sites) proves a positive (man killed fearless animals in a blitzkrieg). Martin’s unequivocal certainty that man alone was responsible seems remarkable in light of this alone.
For Martin’s image of restless, relentless Paleoindians to ring true and for the overkill thesis to work, Paleoindians had to be everywhere, required to focus energy and time on megafauna. Unfortunately for Martin, this simply does not fit our most sensible speculations today about Paleoindian adaptations. For too long, archaeologists interested in this period focused myopically, if understandably, on one type of technology referred to as Clovis, whose archetypal artifact is an impressive spear point from three to six inches long and supremely adapted to wounding or delivering the coup de grace to large animals. Archaeologists looking for Paleoindian remains have been attracted most often to bone sites where they have found these fluted points and concluded (not surprisingly) that Paleoindians were hunters, and perhaps hunters only.
But we now know that Paleoindian technology cannot be reduced everywhere to spear points used by their makers in an exclusive search for megafauna. And it is inconceivable that in every climate and in every era, the makers of fluted points possessed precisely the same culture or practiced identical gathering and hunting strategies. For some years now the evidence has mounted for very different Paleoindian technologies and adaptive strategies in North America (indeed, throughout the New World). In the West, people used not only Clovis points but also a variety of large and small fluted and nonfluted projectile points. Undeniably, some Paleoindians may have been deliberate or opportunistic hunters of the megafauna that became extinct, but others were probably hunters of caribou, deer, beaver, and small animals. In the tundra, parkland, and mixed forest environments in the East, Indians killed many caribou and some mastodons. But in forested regions, they also exploited species like tortoises—which also disappeared—and other small animals. Many North American Indians were probably generalized foragers whose diet included seeds, roots, shellfish, and fish. In their adaptations they may well have been similar to their contemporaries in Chile, who gathered shellfish and plants and hunted small mammals—and lacked Clovis technology.
Because of inadequate or expensive techniques of archaeological recovery, as well as poor preservation, much remains unknown about Paleoindian life, including how near the fit was to our contemporary understanding of hunter-gatherers as people with extensive and variable interest in seeds, fish, roots, shellfish, birds, and other such foods. In the twentieth century, people who gathered and hunted for their livelihood (who provide one way to think about Paleoindians at the end of the Pleistocene) have shown quite extraordinary variation in subsistence and social patterns, especially in environments as different as the various North American ones. Foraging people possess food preferences, but rather than restrict their hunting strategies to single classes of animals, many hunt animals that minimize the cost of their effort relative to their gain. For them, the consequences of hunting for the viability of a species are as likely to be accidental as deliberate. There is no reason to assume that Paleoindians in North America were any different.
Of no help either to Martin’s argument that only man the megafaunal hunter figured in the Pleistocene extinctions is that minifaunal as well as megafaunal animals vanished. Some were possibly relevant to Paleoindian diets or habits if people were generalized hunters and foragers, and some seem completely irrelevant. Relatively little is known about insects and plants, but at least ten genera (and many more species) of birds disappeared. They ranged widely in size and type from a jay to a flamingo. One was a shelduck, which like other waterfowl was probably easily killed while undergoing molt, when it could not readily fly. Another was a lapwing and no doubt tasty. Other birds included a condor, caracara, and vultures, all probable scavengers of grassland carcasses. There were other raptors, including eagles or hawk-eagles, and jays and cowbirds. Martin tried to explain all the extinct birds away by analogy with contemporary scavenging species in commensal or dependent relations with animals similar to Pleistocene ones that became extinct. But the behavior of the extinct Pleistocene genera was not necessarily identical to that of the living birds presumably related to them. Curiously, approximately the same percentage of birds disappeared as megafauna, even though in Martin’s theory Paleoindians were interested only in megafauna. This coincidence alone suggests that we look elsewhere for causes before we conclude that humans alone were responsible for Pleistocene extinctions.
The relevance of climate to these events has at times been too casually dismissed. Climate changes were pervasive at the end of the Pleistocene. Temperatures warmed by roughly thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the climate became drier overall. Affecting animals and plants more than higher temperatures and increased aridity, however, was probably the rise in seasonal temperature extremes. Winters became colder and summers hotter. In these new conditions, grasses and other plants, insects, and other organisms most directly dependent on temperature and precipitation either flourished or did not, as did invertebrate and vertebrate organisms in turn. Entire habitats changed rapidly at the end of the Pleistocene. In the Upper Midwest, spruce forest became pine forest almost overnight in geological time. For animals with firm boreal forest associations, such as mastodons, the consequences might have been dire. In some areas, grasses withered under drier conditions. With climatic and vegetational changes, small animals altered their distribution, retreating to areas where conditions remained tolerable. Through death or emigration, some animals abandoned the southern, desiccating parts of their ranges; herpetiles (snakes and tortoises) in particular changed theirs. At present, there is much we do not know about the consequences of these climatic and vegetational changes. For some species, there may have been less food. For some, grasses may have become more difficult to metabolize, or even toxic. Perhaps gestation changed. Although hypotheses such as a failure of enzyme systems abound, the causal chain between climate change and extinction remains unclear. The sequences are not clear today. Despite the focus on biotic properties and dynamics, we simply do not know enough about the specific properties of particular extinct forms. We may never know enough.
Although much is conjectural, the emphasis on climate and attendant vegetational changes focuses discussion of the extinctions away from communities and on each specific species or genus that changed its range according to its tolerance to the changes. If extinctions are considered on a case-by-case basis, then factors like biomass, reproductive biology, overspecialization, feeding strategies, dependencies, and competition between species come to the fore as being in part responsible for a particular species’s vulnerability. Some species have low rates of increase and others high rates. Some have long gestation periods, others short ones. Some have long lives, others brief lives. Some, because of their reproductive biology or social habits, are more vulnerable to extinction than others in a changing climate. The replacement of wet plant communities by dry plant communities in montane habitats will eliminate certain species. Climate changes might have destroyed a particular patchiness in habitat supposedly enjoyed by species like mammoths (on which human hunters also focused their energies). The timing of extinctions was surely important but has not been adequately worked out. Did large grazing animals, for example, become extinct before smaller ones in the same habitat? In large numbers, herbivores weighing over one ton can transform the environment. Once they are extinct, however, the floral composition of habitats can change to affect smaller grazing animals to the point of extinction. That the answers to these questions are currently ambiguous does not mean that they should not be pursued, on a species-by-species, genus-by-genus, habitat-by-habitat, or ecosystem-by-ecosystem basis.
Climate presents a formidable obstacle to the exclusionary nature of Martin’s thesis. Climate, after all, has been linked to the rapid evolution of mammalian forms. Moreover, in earlier extinction episodes that closely rivaled the late-Pleistocene one but took place long before man the superpredator arrived on the scene, climate overwhelmed plants and animals. Six other extinction events marked the last ten million years in North America. None was caused by Paleoindians, who did not yet exist. But it is a good bet that climate was involved, and there are marked similarities in climatic deterioration and extinctions of the late Pleistocene and the preceding era, the late Pliocene. Even though causation is far from clear, temperature and other climatic and sea-level fluctuations are correlated with these other extinctions, and they and other episodes make extinction seem normal, not abnormal, in the history of life. Indeed, most species that ever lived are extinct.
The climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene alone must have been sufficient to overwhelm certain animals and plants unable to adapt under altered conditions. Desiccation by itself imperiled animals forced to come to the remaining sources of water. Either animals moved to where conditions remained favorable, or they were left susceptible to a Paleoindian coup de grace, or they were weakened to the point of eventual disappearance without helping human hands.
If climate fatally complicates the simplistic idea that humans alone were blamable for the extinctions, there is still too much we fail to understand about climate to ascribe responsibility to it alone. Perhaps we will be able to say one day with near 100 percent certainty that climate change triggered interactions that were ultimately destructive to the majority of extinct Pleistocene species. But that day has not yet arrived. In the meantime, because it is naive to think that any single factor was solely responsible for all Pleistocene extinctions, it is safest not to rule out a role for Native Americans altogether. To deny human agency would be as foolhardy as Martin’s ruling out climate. Only strict adherence to the belief that modern industrial societies alone cause significant ecological change would lead us to that position. It makes as much sense to hypothesize that Paleoindians pushed certain species already heading toward their doom over the edge to extinction. After all, Paleoindians and a distinctive hunting technology were widespread, and the association of their artifacts with animal remains does show a taste for species now extinct.
Another reason for the plausibility of a scenario in which Paleoindians played some role is that preindustrial humans have caused extinctions in other times and places. Throughout the Pacific, indigenous people had a severe impact on birds. They exterminated literally thousands of species well before the arrival of Europeans.
The Hawaiian archipelago presents a classic case. There, native people altered the habitat so that it met their needs and conformed to their cultural expectations—so thoroughly that extinctions followed in their wake. Ancient Hawaiians cleared land with fire and diverted streams for irrigation, and crop plants and extensive grasslands took over what had been forested coastal areas. Fish ponds emerged where there had been mudflats. Hawaiians introduced dogs, pigs, chickens, and—inadvertently—rats and reptiles that had stowed away on their canoes. As a result of these introductions and radical changes in the habitat, over forty species of birds (well over half of all endemic bird species) became extinct. Some, especially those that could not fly, the ancient Hawaiians ate: petrels, flightless geese, ibises, rails, a hawk, and crow. Others like honeycreepers, other finches, and a thrush vanished as their habitats disappeared or as their feathers came into demand to ornament clothing.
New Zealand presents a second compelling case. As in Hawaii, early Polynesian colonizers—the predecessors of today’s Maori—deployed fire to transform New Zealand’s environment. They also hunted at least thirteen species of moas—ostrich-like flightless birds, one of which towered over men and women—to extinction. They killed adult birds in large quantities and gourmandized their eggs. They left necks and skulls unused—wasted parts they discarded. In the end, no moas survived, and these ancient Polynesians turned their attention to what was left—shellfish, fish, seals, and small birds.
The human hand is deeply implicated in the extinction of avifauna in Hawaii, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. Of course, North America is not a small island. Nor were Paleoindian societies organized or structured in the same way as early Polynesian ones. Nor do we imagine that Paleoindians transformed or fragmented habitats, or introduced predators, as early Hawaiians did. Nevertheless, a human role should not be ruled out in any case, and there is no good reason to bar humans from at least a supporting part in North American Pleistocene extinctions.
Perhaps the very large island of Madagascar provides a better model than smaller islands for what happened at the end of the North American Pleistocene. After the Indonesian—East African ancestors of the Malagasy settled Madagascar, large flightless birds, giant tortoises, hippopotami, more than fifteen species of lemurs (some of which were the size of gorillas), and other animals disappeared. Although some have blamed humans alone for this loss, it seems more likely that men and women arrived on this island at a moment of drought in a long-term climatic cycle oscillating from wet to dry, and that this in combination doomed more species than either humans, desiccation, or vegetation changes alone could have.
In view of the evidence that recently came to light to support these island cases, Martin’s theory that humans played a significant role in Pleistocene extinctions in North America may be more readily understood, but his continued assertiveness insisting that theirs was the only role that mattered is not. The evidence for the human role in the late-Pleistocene extinctions is circumstantial, and climatic change was fundamental and potentially far-reaching. There is still much we do not know about how and why animals responded to climate changes, but on Madagascar and Hawaii and other Pacific islands, both climate and human-induced changes played a role in the demise of animals. Multiple causes provide the best explanation.
Vine Deloria, Jr., recently spoke contemptuously of « mythical Pleistocene hit men » (and angrily vilified scientific methodology and authority), preferring in their place earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods of Indian legend. He theorized that such catastrophes not only occurred but somehow had continental reach to cause the extinctions. But the Pleistocene extinctions continue to defy soundbite simplification. Closer to the time when a fuller historical record can significantly inform interpretation, we turn to a case that also involves disappearance, not of animals but of people: the Hohokam, who lived in urban communities where Phoenix and Tucson sprawl today in the Arizonan Sonoran Desert.
Voir de plus:
Ecological Indian Talk
(8/27/00)
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9
Those descended from European stock, and probably from Asiatic as well, still feel a slight unease, the tiny remnant of the old looking-over-the-shoulder anxiety of the strangers in a strange land.
Bill Reid (Haida), quoted in Bill Reid
*****
Cultural attitudes toward nature
In « Ah, Sweet Nature … but Only If You Can Afford a Piece of It » (LA Times, 8/18/02), columnist John Balzar describes the essential importance of nature:
It is the nature of nature to inspire us. It’s our ancestral home, after all. Our DNA was coded by the rhythms of the natural world long before the advent of cars, air-conditioned office buildings and the 40-hour workweek. In fact, there is plenty of good evidence that the pace and accouterments of modern life are the root cause for so many people feeling adrift nowadays: We have, in fact, departed our element.
The human desire, the need, to reengage nature periodically is one of the essential arguments for conservation in this crowded epoch. The stillness, the solitude, the escape, the renewal that one finds in the natural world is our best, and perhaps final, source of balance.
A key question is whether this feeling is universal across all cultures, especially the progress-oriented Euro-American culture. It’s intuitively obvious that indigenous cultures, which lived and still live in close proximity to nature, would cherish it more. But some have questioned whether this truism is in fact true.
One such skeptic is Shepard Krech, author of The Ecological Indian. Krech tries to paint Native Americans as no better or worse than Euro-Americans, but fails. The best he can do is cast doubt on the eco-warrior stereotype his Anglo brethren created.
Some quotes from Indians
Significantly, Krech somehow manages to avoid quoting Indians about their own beliefs. Here are some quotes he missed on Native and European attitudes toward their environment. They refute his suggestion that Indians had the same values as Europeans and didn’t respect or cherish nature.
Note that the earliest views were voiced and recorded before the environmental movement – before it became « politically correct » to portray Indians as eco-warriors. In fact, the eco-warrior stereotype is an exaggeration of Native people’s real love for the land and everything on it.
They are in the Sonoran Desert now, but they speak little of it. They do not tell of the giant cactus, they leave us practically nothing in the way of a description of the land. This is normal for such men at such a time. The world as we now see it, one rich with metaphors for nature and keen for the feel of wild land, that world does not exist in the minds of Europeans in the sixteenth century. It has yet to be born. Europe seemed to hate nature. By the time of the Doomsday Book in England in 1086 less than two percent of the virgin forest remained. Nature seemed to be the enemy to the puny humans confronting it. By the sixteenth century Henry VIII of England would have two or three hundred deer rounded up, penned, and then amuse himself by watching his dogs rip them to shreds. And this attitude let to a verbal emptiness when confronting this new world across the water. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviendo, a contemporary of Cabeza de Vaca, in writing his history of the conquests confessed that he could not describe landscapes: « Of all the things I have seen, this is the one which has left me without hope of being able to describe it in words. » Nor could Columbus, as any reading of his journals will reveal.
Charles Bowden, The Sonoran Desert, on Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s trek through the Southwest, 1535-1536
The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.
Chiksika (Kispokotha Shawnee), elder brother of Tecumseh, speaking to Tecumseh, March 19, 1779
The only way to stop this evil is for all the red men to unite in claiming an equal right in the land. That is how it was at first, and should be still, for the land never was divided, but was for the use of everyone. Any tribe could go to an empty land and make a home there. And if they left, another tribe could come there and make a home. No groups among us have a right to sell, even to one another, and surely not to outsiders who want all, and will not do with less.
Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the Great Sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Good Spirit make them all for the use of his children?
Tecumseh (Shawnee), speech to William Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, August 11, 1810
Every Indian village in the old days had its granaries of corn, its stores of dried beans, berries, and pumpkin-strips, as well as its dried buffalo tongues, pemmican and deer’s meat. To this day all the Fisher Indians of the north and west dry great quantities of fish, as well as berries, for the famine months that are surely coming.
Many of the modern Indians, armed with rifles, have learned to emulate the white man, and slaughter game for the love of slaughter, without reference to the future. Such waste was condemned by the old-time Indians, as an abuse of the gifts of God, and which would surely bring its punishment.
When, in 1684, De la Barre, Governor of Canada, complained that the Iroquois were encroaching on the country of those Indians who were allies of the French, he got a stinging reply from Garangula, the Onondaga Chief, and a general statement showing that the aborigines had game laws, not written, indeed, but well known, and enforced at the spear-point, if need be:
We knock the Twightwies [Miamis] and Chictaghicks [Illinois] on the head, because they had cut down the trees of peace, which were the limits of our country. They have hunted beaver on our lands. They have acted contrary to the customs of all Indians, for they left none of the beavers alive, they killed both male and female. (Sam G. Drake’s Indian Biog. 1832, p. III.)
Hunter says of the Kansas Indians:
I have never known a solitary instance of their wantonly destroying any of those animals [buffalo, elk, and deer], except on the hunting-grounds of their enemies, or encouraged to it by the prospect of bartering their skins with the traders. (Hunter’s Captivity, 1798-1816, p. 279.)
After all, the Wild Indians could not be justly termed improvident, when the manner of life is taken into consideration. They let nothing go to waste, and labored incessantly during the summer and fall, to lay up provisions for the inclement season. (Indian Boyhood, Eastman; pp. 237-8.)
Ernest Thompson Seton, « Chapter II: The Spartans of the West, » The Book of Woodcraft, 1912
Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hill-side, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe.
Even the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people, and the very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred.
Chief Seattle (Suquamish), from a speech, 1854
A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up to the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting; I feel sorry….Has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not eat? When the red men slay game, they do so that they may live and not starve.
Satanta (Kiowa), quoted in New York Times, October 26, 1867
Of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through 1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians. When a group of concerned Texans asked General (Philip) Sheridan if something should not be done to stop the white hunters’ wholesale slaughter, he replied: « Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance. »
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
We love them [the buffalo] just as the white man does his money. Just as it makes a white man feel to have his money carried away, so it makes us feel to see others killing and stealing our buffaloes, which are our cattle given to us by the Great Father above to provide us meat to eat and means to get things to wear.
Bull Bear (Cheyenne), quoted in The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874
Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals; therefore, we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.
Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota), answer to US delegates who wanted him to sign a treaty, c. 1876
Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.
Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.
This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: « First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland! »
Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota), quoted in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, Charles A. Eastman, 1918
...I belong to the earth out of which I came. The earth is my mother.
You white people get together, measure the earth, and then divide it….Part of the Indians gave up their land. I never did. The earth is part of my body, and I never gave up the earth.
Toohoolhoolzote (Wallowa), prophet, 1877
The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was….The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man’s business to divide it….The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same….Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land and accord you the privilege to live on yours.
Chief Joseph (Nez Perce), 1879
You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to be born again.
Smohalla (Wanapum), from a speech, late 19th century
The Great Spirit is in all things, he is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our father, but the earth is our mother. She nourishes us, that which we put into the ground she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise. If we are wounded, we go to our mother and seek to lay the wounded part against her, to be healed.
Big Thunder (Wabanaki), late 19th century, quoted in The Indian’s Book by Natalie Curtis
From Wakan-Tanka, the Great Mystery, comes all power. It is from Wakan-Tanka that the holy man has wisdom and the power to heal and make holy charms. Man knows that all healing plants are given by Wakan-Tanka, therefore they are holy. So too is the buffalo holy, because it is the gift of Wakan-Tanka.
Flat-Iron (Oglala Sioux), late 19th century
The -shi-wi, or Zuis, suppose the sun, moon, and stars, the sky, earth, and sea, in all their phenomena and elements; and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals, and men, to belong to one great system of all-conscious and interrelated life….
Frank Cushing, Zui Fetiches, Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1880-1881 (Washington, D.C., 1883)
The landscape is our church, a cathedral. It is like a sacred building to us.
Zuni saying, quoted in Through Indian Eyes
The work of the white man hardens soul and body. Nor is it right to tear up and mutilate the earth as white men do. We simply take the gifts that are freely offered. We no more harm the earth than would an infant’s fingers harm its mother’s breast.
Unknown Indian, quoted in « The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, » 1896
The Chiricahua, indeed all the Apache, had the priceless inheritance of those who live so close to the natural world that they cannot ever forget that they are a part of it and it is a part of them.
To the Indian mind, a man’s attachment to his homeland was not a romantic nostrum but a vital necessity. A man sickened and eventually died a whole people might die away if cut off from the life-source of the land itself. And so Geronimo, that « bloodthirsty savage, » ends has autobiography with a plea that has the unmistakable dignity of profound conviction: he asks the Great Father, Theodore Roosevelt, to return him and his people to their Arizona homeland.
Frederick Turner, Introduction to Geronimo, His Own Story, 1906
All things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four legged-animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples.
Black Elk (Oglala Sioux)
The Indian loved to worship. From birth to death he revered his surroundings. He considered himself born in the luxurious lap of Mother Earth and no place to him was humble.
Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Sioux), 1868-1937
We do not like to harm trees. Whenever we can, we always make an offering of tobacco to the trees before we cut them down. We never waste the wood, but use all that we cut down. If we did not think of their feelings, all the other trees in the forest would weep, and that would make our hearts sad, too.
Unknown Fox Indian, quoted in Ethnography of the Fox Indians, 1939
More quotes on cultural values
Native and Euro-American beliefs differ
Our self-righteous superiority complex
Longstanding love and respect
Krech suggests the Indians’ love of nature is a recent belief adopted to make them look holier-than-thou. He writes: « Since 1970, Indians themselves have set expectations for their behavior consistent with, and helping to reinforce, the image of the Ecological Indian thriving in public culture. Many write of Indians as ecologists and conservationists who have never wasted and have always led harmonious lives in balance with nature. »
But as these quotes show, respect for the natural world goes back almost as long as people have been recording Indian thought. Non-Indians such as Turner and Cushing also recognized the difference between Native and European values.
Note that Indians don’t deny using nature’s gifts. Obviously they killed, ate, and used plants and animals for food, shelter, and tools. They cleared brush with fire, farmed the land, and built canals, mounds, and towns. The question is whether they did so carefully and thoughtfully or foolishly and wastefully.
Likewise, today’s environmentalists don’t oppose using land for crops, timber for building, or oil for energy. What they oppose is using these resources up. In other words, using them wantonly until they’re gone, and polluting the air and water while doing so. This is the same or similar attitude to that of traditional Native people.
In contrast to the biblical book of Genesis, in which God creates man in his own image and gives him dominion over all other creatures, the Native American legends reflect the view that human beings are no more important than any other thing, whether alive or inanimate. In the eye of the Creator, they believe, man and woman, plant and animal, water and stone, are all equal, and they share the earth as partners even as family.
The Spirit World (American Indians), Time-Life Books
The earth is our mother. We believe that. I’ve met indigenous people from around the world and I’ve yet to find a difference of opinion on that. It’s much more than a saying, it’s much more than a word, it’s a real compassion and a longevity.
Chief Oren Lyons (Onondaga), quoted in Surviving in Two Worlds
The only thing that holds us together is our religion, but I wonder if it will last. It’s not just a religion, like the Catholic religion. God doesn’t mean fear. He means the Creator, the One Above. The mountains over there. The sky above. It’s Mother Earth. The stories we learned as children were about God meaning love and God meaning beauty, just as it is in nature everywhere around you. There is no church because all is a church to us here.
Tony Frank Martinez, quoted in Taos Pueblo, 1986
We believe that all living things come from our sacred mother earth, all living things, the green things, the winged things of the air, the four-leggeds, the things that crawl and the two-leggeds….But the important thing in our philosophy is that we believe we’re the weakest things on earth, that the two-legged is the weakest thing on earth because we have no direction….Now, because we are the weakest things on earth, we do not have license to exploit or manipulate our brother and sisters and we also know, because of our role in life, that the buffalo and all other relatives of ours teach us, and so we built our civilization.
Dennis Banks (Chippewa), Wounded Knee testimony, 2/12/74
I will start by repeating the words of Associate Chief Judge Murray Sinclair of the Provincial Court of Manitoba, himself Ojibway, in an address he gave to a conference on Aboriginal justice in Saskatoon in 1993:
I am not a biblical scholar, but as I have come to understand it, in Judaeo-Christian tradition, man occupies a position just below God and the angels, but above all other early creation … According to the Genesis account of creation … « God said « Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on earth, and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth… » Mankind was told to: « … fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth. » In sharp contrast, the Aboriginal world-view holds that mankind is the least powerful and least important factor in creation … Mankind’s interests are not to be placed above those of any other part of creation. In the matter of the hierarchy, or relative importance of beings within creation, Aboriginal and Western intellectual traditions are almost diametrically opposed. It goes without saying that our world-view provides the basis for those customs, thoughts and behaviours we consider appropriate. » (emphasis added)
Within the Ojibway world-view, then, the hierarchy of creation placed the earth (and its life-blood, the waters) in first place, for without them there would be no plants, animals or human life. The plant world stood second, for without it there would be no animal or human life. The animal world was third. Last, and least important of all, was mankind, for nothing whatever depended on our survival. We were also clearly the most dependent, and therefore owed the greatest duty of respect and care for the other three. Our central duty was not to subdue them, but to learn how they interacted, or connected, so that we could accommodate ourselves to those existing relationships. Any other approach, in the long run, could only result in a disruption of the healthy equilibria which had existed for millennia and which, in fact, created the conditions for our own evolution.
Rupert Ross, Red Jacket and the Right to Rule, 1994
[A non-Indian] said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians, but that there was good reason for it. The continent had to be developed and he felt that Indians had stood in the way and thus had had to be removed. « After all, » he remarked, « what did you do to the land when you had it? » I didn’t understand him until later when I discovered that the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland is inflammable….How many Indians could have thought of creating an inflammable river?
Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), We Talk, You Listen; New Tribes, New Turf
Brothers and Sisters do not be fooled by the wiles of the trickster. This entire argument is a family fight between the Three CousinsJudaism, Islam, and Christianity. All three of them are so off their sacred, ancient path that they fail to recognize or be recognized by Nature herself. They forgot how to be related and mimic the ways of Eya and Iktomi. They bask in their dominance of Nature and revile as less than, those of us who still hold on to our traditional matriarchal ways.
They speak out of both sides of their mouth and still find time to consume natural resources at a disproportionate rate. Truly they are Eya, the great consumer. Grandmother Earth will not continue to allow the Three Cousins to run amuck. Nature has her own ways of ebb and flow.
James Starkey, The World According to the Three Cousins, 9/9/02
« We have always interacted intensively with our environment, » said Ross Soboleff, a member of the Haida and Tlingit nations in Juneau, Alaska. « We’ve never put it on a pedestal and worshipped it. »
Lester, director of the tribal energy group, said conflicts between Indians and environmental groups are born of differing cultural views.
« In the Indian world view, the cosmos is not divided between light and darkness. For the environmental movement, it is. A tribe can be very ecologically minded and very development-minded at the same time, » he said.
Environment, Inc.: Drilling Debate Jolts Old Image of Indians, Sacramento Bee, 12/9/01
« We must renew and redouble our efforts to wage peace, » she said, adding that Americans also need to open their eyes to the social and environmental impacts they cause by being the largest consumers of natural resources in the world.
« We are pretty much pigs, » [activist Winona] LaDuke later told participants at a private fund-raiser. « It means we live in a continuing reality of wanting something that someone else has. »
LaDuke, a member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinabeg, said Native Americans, with their historical ties to the land, must be leaders in the fight to regain a consciousness of caring for the environment. If the natural world is not healed and protected, we will pay.
« We have a predator-prey relationship with our land, and the land is the prey » LaDuke said. « Those issues will plague us in this society as ever-open sores. »
From Parallels Drawn Between Child Rearing and Political Activism, Indian Country Today, 10/4/01
More Native quotes on nature
North American Indians: the spirituality of nature
More evidence for Natives as ecologists
Yellowstone a study in vital role of wildfires
Westerners vs. nature
Some quotes suggest the standard Euro-American view of nature: a dead, unproductive resource waiting to be put to use for the « betterment » of humanity.
In the evening the men in two of the rear canoes discovered a large brown bear lying in the open grounds about 300 paces from the river, and six of them went out to attack him, all good hunters….[One] shot him through the head and finally killed him.
I walked on shore and killed a female ibi or big horn animal.
I saw near those bluffs the most beautiful fox that I ever beheld. The colours appeared to me to be a fine orange yellow, white and black. I endeavored to kill this animal….
Lewis and Clark showing their appreciation of nature, May 1805, as quoted in The Essential Lewis and Clark
Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.
Frederick Jackson Turner, historian, late 19th century, quoted in The American Indian and the Problem of History
In contrast to the Native views expressed above, the modern American view still echoes Turner’s 19th-century view. Many people have noted this. For instance:
Human beings are the most dangerous animals. They’ve gotten so far from nature that they’ve lost their common sense. I have a fascination with modern man’s lack of perspective. We have become enemies of nature.
Peter Beard, nature photographer, quoted in the LA Times, 2/4/01
Why has the leader of the free world opted out? The first reason lies deep in the national psyche. The old world developed on the basis of a coalition — uneasy but understood — between humanity and its surroundings. The settlement of the US was based on conquest, not just of the indigenous peoples, but also of the terrain. It appears to be, thus far, one of the great success stories of modern history.
« Remember, this country is built very heavily on the frontier ethic, » says Clapp. « How America moved west was to exhaust the land and move on. The original settlers, such as the Jefferson family, moved westward because families like theirs planted tobacco in tidewater Virginia and exhausted the soil. My own ancestors did the same in Indiana. »
Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid. They built dams — about 250,000 of them. They built great cities, with skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared barely habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow. « It’s the American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance anything — be it a force of nature, a country or a disease — can be vanquished, » says Clapp. « It’s a country founded on the idea of no limits. The essence of environmentalism is that there are indeed limits. It’s one of the reasons environmentalism is a stronger ethic in Europe than in the US. »
Matthew Engel, Road to Ruin: How America is Ravaging the Planet, The Guardian, 10/24/03
All things considered, it may be the central assumption of technological society that there is virtue in overpowering nature and native peoples. The Indian problem today, as it always has been, is directly related to the needs of technological societies to find and obtain remotely located resources, in order to fuel an incessant and intrinsic demand for growth and technological fulfillment. The process began in our country hundreds of years ago when we wanted land and gold. Today it continues because we want coal, oil, uranium, fish, and more land. As we survey the rest of the world whether it is the Canadian Arctic, the Borneo jungle, or the Brazilian rainforest the same interaction is taking place for the same reasons, often involving the same institutions.
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, 1991
[The emerging and provocative field of eco-psychology] diagnoses the mounting psychic stress, mental illness and social disorder plaguing affluent societies as the consequence of a dysfunctional, immature relationship with nature. They decipher the psycho-historical trajectory of Western civilization from hunter-gatherer clans to agricultural societies and the urban megalopolis as a profound loss of humility and tender sense of earthly limitations once invoked by a harmonious and reverent liaison with nature. Humanity has become disconnected and alienated from a non-human world fallen and debased. Man has become enraptured in a mania of domination and absolute control to worship a hydra of endless consumption and materialism.
John Wickham, Resistance to Makah Whale Hunt Exposes Modern Madness, Indian Country Today, 10/20/05
As a left biocentrist, I have advocated for quite some time, in various publications, the need to return to some form of animism. Like deep ecologists and left biocentrists, Rod Preece in his 1999 book Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities, sees the necessity for a spiritual transformation. The following quotation, which is on my wall for a daily reminder, reveals a deep ecology understanding, particularly the concept of self-realization, even though deep ecology, unfortunately, is not discussed in this book:
All cultures think of their own interests first and only a spiritual education dedicated to a sharing of identities with other peoples, other animals, and nature as a whole can diminish the environmental destruction we face. It can be diminished by our being educated to share our identity with the natural world and thus understand it as a part of ourselves. (p. 230)
David Orton, e-mail, 10/7/01
We are at the crucial moment in the commission of a crime. Our hand is on the knife, the knife is at the victim’s throat. We are trained to kill. We are trained to turn the earth to account, to use it, market it, make money off it. To take it for granted. Logically, we will never be able to reverse this part of our culture in enough time to stop that knife in our hand. But that is the task at hand to cease this act of violence. Everything we love, and everything we think we are, will be gone, will cease to be, unless we manage to change. We will either produce descendants who think a cactus, a rat, an insect, and a snake are as important as human beings, or we will not leave descendants. In the short run it pays to do as we have always done, lest we have less treasure with which to comfort ourselves in the dark and lonely nights. In the short run it might theoretically pay a hungry human being to eat its own liver, as one scientist has put it. But in a slightly longer run such a diet would be fatal.
…[W]e have made a career out of refusing to adapt. We say it is contrary to our custom. One glance at our towns and cities in the region makes this clear. They are all oases, space colonies implanted on what we seem to take to be the forbidding surface of Mars. Even when we try to fit in with our gestures toward natural history, our science, our ecology, our environmental politics we still seem to miss the point. The desert does not need us and in time, given our habits, will crush us and reject us. We do not plan for seven generations, we do not seem to give.
In the past we tended to remain silent while the ground that gives us life was murdered. Now we make studies of it before we kill it. Now we write stories protesting its death. And then we kill it, all of us, and share in the rewards of this act.
Charles Bowden, The Sonoran Desert
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swingin’ hot spot
They took all the trees, put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em
Joni Mitchell, « Big Yellow Taxi »
More on Westerners vs. nature
Bush hates environmentalists: No question, the climate is heating up
Conservation « pays biggest dividends »
Little religious sacrifice
The following quote seems a telling point by itself:
Absent for the most part from the religions of the American Indians was the near universal practice of animal and human sacrifice to placate the gods. « North America had almost no sacrifice, even of animals. Mother Earth did not demand it. »
Lewis M. Hoppe, Religions of the World, 1976 (quote from Ruth Underhill, Red Man’s Religion, 1965)
But let’s not stereotype Indians as perfect paragons. Here’s one of the exceptions:
Near the scaffold I saw the carcase, of a large dog not yet decayed, which I supposed had been killed at the time the human body was left on the scaffold; this was no doubt the reward, which the poor dog had met with for performing the [blank space in manuscript] friendly office to his mistres of transporting her corps to the place of deposit. It is customary with the Assinniboins, Mandans, Minetares &c. who scaffold their dead, to sacrefice the favorite horses and doggs of their deceased relations, with a view of their being serviceable to them in the land of sperits.
Journal of Merriwether Lewis, April 20, 1805, quoted in The Essential Lewis and Clark
To sum up the valid points Krech makes and the valid points he misses, here’s an excerpt from Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (Jace Weaver, editor). It offers a sounder conclusion than Krech’s:
In reality, modern Natives and their ancestors are neither saints nor sinners in environmental matters. They are human beings. The Americas were no Edenic paradise. « People sometimes went hungry . . . ; wars were fought, and people died in them. Occasionally, a native civilization overtaxed its environment and collapsed. » Grinde and Johansen state, « Occasionally, in pre-Columbian times, native urban areas taxed the local environment (e.g., by overgrazing and razing the forests). Like all societies, those in pre-Columbian America faced the question of how to utilize land for purposes of survival. Indians manipulated the environment to improve their material lives. » The general consensus today, however, is that, given pre-contact population numbers, Native peoples could have wrought much more environmental damage than was the case. Again according to Grinde and Johansen, « While mistakes were made, the fact that Europeans found the Western Hemisphere to be a natural treasure house indicates that misuse of the environment was not frequent or sustained over long periods of time. »
Voir encore:
Claim: The actor known as Iron Eyes Cody was a true-born Native Indian.
Status: False.
Origins: Although no one could say exactly when we humans first began to have concerns about the effects our activities have on our environment, most of us baby boomers could pinpoint 1970-71 as the Iron Eyes Cody timespan during which we first became aware of the « ecology movement, » as the era when concern for what humans were doing to the world they lived in ran at a fever pitch. Protecting the planet’s resources by calling upon each person to pitch in and do whatever he or she could do to limit the abuse was seen as the right and proper focus of the times. High schools offered classes in ecology. Public school students painted posters decrying pollution. And television ads worked to remind everyone that the problem was real, here, and now.
Three events which occurred during the year between March 1970 and March 1971 helped bring the concept of « ecology » into millions of homes and made it a catchword of the era. One was the first annual Earth Day, observed on 21 March 1970. The second was Look magazine’s promotion of the ecology flag in its 21 April 1970 edition, a symbol that was soon to become as prominent a part of American culture as the ubiquitous peace sign. The third — and perhaps the most effective and unforgettable — was the television debut of Keep America Beautiful’s landmark « People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It » public service ad on the second Earth Day in March 1971.
In that enduring minute-long TV spot, viewers watched an Indian paddle his canoe up a polluted and flotsam-filled river, stream past belching smokestacks, come ashore at a litter-strewn river bank, and walk to the edge of a highway, where the occupant of a passing automobile thoughtlessly tossed a bag of trash out the car window to burst open at the astonished visitor’s feet. When the camera moved upwards for a close-up, a single tear was seen rolling down the Indian’s face as the narrator dramatically intoned: « People start pollution; people can stop it. »
That « crying Indian, » as he would later sometimes be referred to, was Iron Eyes Cody, an actor who throughout his life claimed to be of Cherokee/Cree extraction. Yet his asserted ancestry was just as artificial as the tear that rolled down his cheek in that television spot — the tear was glycerine, and the « Indian » a second-generation Italian-American.
(The spurious use of Native Americans to promote « save the Earth » messages was not limited to this one instance. A moving exposition on the sanctity of the land and the need for careful stewardship of it is still widely quoted as the bona fide words of Chief Seattle. Though the chief was real, the speech was not — the words came not from the chief’s own lips in 1854 but flowed from the pen of a screenwriter in 1971.)
Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera DeCorti on 3 April 1904 in the small town of Kaplan, Louisiana. He was the son of Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti, she an immigrant from Sicily who had arrived in the USA in 1902, and he another immigrant who had arrived in America not long before her. Theirs was an arranged marriage, and the couple had four children, with Espera (or Oscar, as he was called) their second eldest. In 1909, when Espera was five years old, Antonio DeCorti abandoned his wife and children and headed for Texas. Francesca married again, this time to a man named Alton Abshire, with whom she bore five more children.
As teenagers the three DeCorti boys joined their father in Texas. He had since altered his name from Antonio DeCorti to Tony Corti, and the boys apparently followed suit as far as their surname was concerned. In 1924, following their father’s death, the boys moved to Hollywood, changed « Corti » to « Cody, » and began working in the motion picture industry. It was about this time Iron Eyes began presenting himself to the world as an Indian. Iron Eyes’ two brothers, Joseph William and Frank Henry, found work as extras but soon drifted into other lines of work. Iron Eyes went on to achieve a full career as an actor, appearing in well over a hundred movies and dozens of television shows across the span of several decades.
Although Iron Eyes was not born an Indian, he lived his adult years as one. He pledged his life to Native American causes, married an Indian woman (Bertha Parker), adopted two Indian boys (Robert and Arthur), and seldom left home without his beaded moccasins, buckskin jacket and braided wig. His was not a short-lived masquerade nor one that was donned and doffed whenever expedient — he maintained his fiction throughout his life and steadfastly denied rumors that he was not an Indian, even after his half-sister surfaced to tell the story in 1996 and to provide pointers to the whereabouts of his birth certificate and other family documents.
Cody died on 5 January 1999 at the age of 94.
Iron Eyes Cody wasn’t history’s only faux Indian. Others also falsely claimed this mantle:
* Long Lance, the 1928 thrilling first-person account of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, was the work of Sylvester Long, an African-American who conned the literary world into believing he was a Cherokee, and then a Cree. While the ruse lasted, Buffalo Child Long Lance was a hit on the lecture circuit and one of the darlings of New York society. His spree ended when the truth about his background was exposed in 1930, and he killed himself with a shot to the head in 1931.
* Grey Owl, a noted Canadian naturalist and author, lived as an Indian and claimed to be half-Apache. Only after his death in 1939 did the world discover he was really an Englishman born Archibald Belaney.
* One of the most popular books on Indian life is Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, the story of a boyhood spent with Cherokee grandparents. This « autobiography » was yet another fake, penned by Asa Carter, a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member.
Even if Iron Eyes was not a true-born Native American, he certainly did a lot of good on behalf of the Native American community, and they generally accepted him as one of them without caring about his true ancestry. In 1995, Hollywood’s Native American community honored Iron Eyes for his longstanding contribution to Native American causes. Although he was no Indian, they pointed out, his charitable deeds were more important than his non-Indian heritage.
Barbara « going native » Mikkelson
Additional information:
People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It « People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It » public service ad
(Keep America Beautiful)
Last updated: 9 August 2007
Aleiss, Angela. « Native Son. »
The Times-Picayune. 26 May 1996 (p. D1).
Cody, Iron Eyes. Iron Eyes: My Life As a Hollywood Indian.
New York: Everest House, 1982. ISBN 0-89696-111-7.
Russell, Ron. « Make-Believe Indian. »
New Times Los Angeles. 8 April 1999.
Schmitz, Neil. « The Other Man. »
The Buffalo News. 8 October 1995 (Magazine, p. 12).
Waldman, Amy. « Iron Eyes Cody, 94, an Actor and Tearful Anti-Littering Icon. »
The New York Times. 5 January 1999 (p. A15).
The Boston Globe. « Iron Eyes Cody: Actor Known for Anti-Littering Ad. »
5 January 1999 (p. A13)
Voir enfin:
L’«Indien écologiste» a-t-il déjà vraiment existé?
Troisième article sur la santé et les autochtones du Canada
Sylvie LeBel
Anglefire
2001
Les autochtones du Québec et du Canada clament depuis longtemps que contrairement à la leur, la société occidentale est une grande destructrice de la nature. Récemment s’est concrétisée une occasion de prouver leur affirmation. Les États-Unis ont en effet annoncé il y a trois semaines leur intention de ne pas ratifier les accords de Kyoto sur la réduction d’émission de gaz à effet de serre. En justifiant sa décision par des considérations économiques, le président Bush n’a pas manqué d’invoquer «l’injustice» faite aux pays industrialisés qui doivent faire encore plus d’efforts que les pays en développement afin d’atteindre les objectifs de Kyoto. Le Canada, comme à son habitude, s’est rangé derrière son voisin américain, malgré l’opposition internationale.
Pour les Amérindiens, voilà qui ajoute à cette image de société occidentale pollueuse et ne pensant qu’à l’argent. Ils dénoncent d’autant plus durement le mode de vie des pays industrialisés qu’ils en sont souvent les principales victimes et que la pollution ne fait qu’empirer leur état de santé déjà critique. Par opposition à cette image de l’homme blanc, les autochtones et les environnementalistes utilisent souvent celle de l’«Indien écologiste», vivant en parfaite harmonie avec la nature, et dont les comportements ne lui auraient jamais causé aucun tort. Qu’en est-il au juste? L’Amérindien a-t-il toujours été ce grand défenseur de la nature, l’inventeur des principes écologistes si populaires aujourd’hui?
Il apparaît que oui… et que non. Depuis la préhistoire et jusqu’à récemment, on sait que les Amérindiens avaient une vision du monde et de la nature caractérisée par un respect très grand pour tout ce qui les entourait. Mais ils n’étaient pas les seuls: les habitants canadiens au temps de la Nouvelle-France pratiquaient aussi la conservation des ressources et le recyclage. Les Amérindiens n’étaient pas non plus vraiment conscients que leurs gestes avaient des conséquences, bonnes ou mauvaises, sur la nature et leur santé. Tout ce qu’ils faisaient s’inscrivaient plutôt dans un système de croyances très développé. Un retour dans l’histoire du Québec depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’au XXe siècle s’impose pour démythifier l’Indien «écolo» contemporain…
Un mode de vie en apparence respectueux de la nature …
Plusieurs éléments de leur culture suggèrent que les autochtones étaient les premiers environnementalistes, bien avant l’arrivée des premiers Blancs en Amérique et l’invention «officielle» de l’écologisme au XXe siècle. En effet, en raison de leurs croyances et de leur mode de vie, les Amérindiens ne pouvaient détruire la nature qui les entourait. Pour eux, la nature et tout ce qui la composait étaient dotés d’une puissance spirituelle. Chaque élément, animal, végétal ou animal, était animé et possédait un esprit. La roche, la rivière, le saumon, l’ours et l’arbre avaient tous droit à un grand respect, car ils faisaient partie de ce grand tout qui formait le monde. En respectant le monde visible, les autochtones montraient également du respect pour le monde invisible et véritable qu’ils ne pouvaient voir.
Vivant de chasse, de pêche, de cueillette et de récolte, les Amérindiens dépendaient totalement de la nature. Ils croyaient que les forces surnaturelles des animaux et des plantes devaient être amadouées pour que la chasse et les récoltes soient bonnes. Chez les Amérindiens nomades comme les Montagnais, les chasseurs s’excusaient donc auprès de l’animal qu’ils venaient de tuer, observaient des rituels précis lors du découpage de plusieurs bêtes, tel l’ours, ainsi que pour disposer des restes des animaux. Les arêtes de saumons et les vessies de phoques étaient rejetées à l’eau et les crânes d’ours accrochés à un mât. Tous ces gestes devaient favoriser la régénération des animaux ainsi que les bonnes relations avec leurs esprits. En «mettant de son côté» l’esprit de l’animal, les futures chasses seraient alors aussi fructueuses ou même meilleures.
Ces habitudes étaient encore présentes lorsque les Européens arrivent en Amérique. Pehr Kalm, un Suédois venu en Nouvelle-France en 1749, décrivait dans sa relation de voyage les tourtes, les «pigeons sauvages» de l’Amérique. Selon lui, les Amérindiens ne tuaient jamais ces pigeons lorsqu’ils couvaient ou lorsqu’ils avaient des petits. Ils n’acceptaient pas non plus que d’autres le fassent, menaçant même à une occasion un Français qui avait tenté d’en tuer quelques uns. Pour eux, tuer un pigeon avec des petits «serait manquer gravement à la bonté envers les jeunes, car ils seraient contraints de mourir de faim».
Tout cela laisse donc penser que les Amérindiens avaient des valeurs écologiques et que la conservation des ressources était pour eux le moyen d’assurer leur survie. Mais ces principes n’étaient-ils appliqués que par eux? Sont-ils les véritables fondateurs de la pensée écologiste?
…mais pas unique aux Amérindiens…
D’après Denys Delâge, historien de l’université Laval, les Amérindiens n’étaient pas plus écologiques que nos ancêtres paysans. Les pigeons sauvages étaient pour les Amérindiens ce qu’étaient les poules ou les vaches pour les Canadiens, c’est-à-dire des animaux domestiques. Les tourtes faisaient «partie de l’ordinaire», de leur vie de tous les jours. Les tuer était donc l’équivalent pour le colon de voir un Amérindien abattre une de ses vaches. L’habitant de la Nouvelle-France, tout comme ses descendants vivant dans les campagnes québécoises jusqu’au milieu du XXe siècle, possédait aussi ses propres habitudes écologistes.
Selon Delâge, les habitants comprenaient bien qu’il ne fallait pas exterminer tous ses animaux durant une même année, au risque de mourir de faim l’année suivante. Pas question non plus de gaspiller les restes: tout était récupéré. On salait, on congelait ou on mettait en conserve les surplus. Les restes de table servaient de nourriture aux chiens et aux chats, on n’utilisait ni emballage de plastique ni produit chimique. Les vêtements étaient faits de fibres naturelles, de lin et de laine, et lorsqu’ils étaient trop usés, ils étaient recyclés en tapis et en courtepointes. Le bois servait à construire, à chauffer et à récolter de l’eau d’érable. Aucun habitant n’aurait songé à couper à blanc le petit bois si utile près de chez lui. Presque aucun déchet ne venait donc polluer l’environnement de ces habitants. Même le contenu des «bécosses» était parfois utilisé comme engrais.
Lequel vivait alors le plus en harmonie avec la nature: le Blanc ou l’Indien? En fait, chacun adaptait son style de vie à ses besoins et ses croyances. Ce style de vie était marqué dans les deux cas par l’autosubsistance, où il fallait gérer habilement ses ressources pour survivre. Les choses ont changé lors du passage à une économie de marché. Pour les cultivateurs, c’est à ce moment que l’agriculture à grande échelle s’est imposée et qu’ils ont commencé à détruire la nature avec la machinerie, la surexploitation des sols et l’utilisation d’engrais chimiques.
…et parfois contradictoire avec l’écologie
Pour les Amérindiens, c’est surtout lorsqu’ils ont été intégrés dans un réseau d’échanges international par l’intermédiaire de la traite des fourrures qu’ils ont adopté des gestes jugés aujourd’hui dangereux pour l’environnement. Par exemple, le castor était disparu de plusieurs régions du Québec aussitôt qu’au XVIIe siècle. Le Jésuite Paul Le Jeune, dans la Relation de 1635, s’inquiétait déjà de la surexploitation du castor. Il relate de quelle façon les Montagnais les tuaient tous dans leurs cabanes, alors qu’il leur conseille d’y laisser au moins quelques petits afin qu’ils se reproduisent.
Cette surchasse est extrêmement contradictoire avec la vision du monde des Amérindiens évoquée plus haut. Certains cherchant des raisons pour l’expliquer ont affirmé que les autochtones se sont mis à tuer les animaux parce qu’ils les tenaient responsables des maladies qui les frappaient. Cette théorie a toutefois été vivement contestée. Charles A. Bishop par exemple, un historien américain, croit plutôt que malgré le respect voué à la nature, il n’y avait rien dans les croyances des Amérindiens qui les empêchait de tuer beaucoup d’animaux, à condition que leurs restes soient bien traités et que la traite rapporte quelque chose de bénéfique. C’était bien le cas, puisque un grand nombre d’objets utiles étaient échangés contre des fourrures. Il s’agit peut-être là d’une piste d’explication de l’apparente absence de scrupules des Amérindiens à chasser le castor presque jusqu’à l’extinction complète de l’espèce.
Denys Delâge apporte également certaines nuances aux pratiques des autochtones qui paraissaient en harmonie avec la nature. Bien que la plupart d’entre eux tuait d’abord les animaux pour survivre, ils considéraient aussi que ces animaux se donnaient et venaient s’offrir à eux. «Cela aurait paru mesquin de ne pas prendre tous les animaux offerts: on pouvait, on devait même, en certains occasions, tuer au-delà des besoins», affirme-t-il. Des sacrifices étaient également réalisés, particulièrement de chiens. Le Père de Charlevoix écrivait dans son Journal historique en 1721 comment les chiens étaient parfois immolés ou suspendus vivants à un arbre par les pattes de derrière jusqu’à la mort lorsque les Amérindiens devaient franchir des rapides ou des passages dangereux. Des pratiques qui auraient fait frémir les défenseurs des droits des animaux d’aujourd’hui…
Plusieurs autres gestes pouvaient aussi avoir des conséquences assez graves pour l’environnement. Le père Louis Nicolas racontait dans son Histoire naturelle des Indes qu’il avait vu des Amérindiens couper des arbres entiers pour ramasser les noix ou accéder aux nids d’oiseaux. Les autochtones allumaient également des feux pour toutes sortes de raisons. On fertilisait les terres avec des feux, on régénérait les forêts de pins et d’épinettes ou encore on facilitait le transport. Mais les Amérindiens perdaient parfois le contrôle de ces incendies et en plus de la pollution qu’ils provoquaient, ils détruisaient d’autres plantes et animaux qui n’étaient pas utilisés par la suite.
Le grand respect des Amérindiens envers la nature répondait donc surtout à des croyances religieuses. On est bien loin des grands principes écologistes du XXe siècle!
Un mythe créé par les Blancs et récupéré par les Amérindiens
Pourquoi cette image de l’Amérindien écologiste existe-t-elle aujourd’hui si elle ne correspond pas à la réalité passée? Selon l’anthropologue américain Shepard Krech III, ce sont les Blancs qui ont créé ce mythe durant les années 1960, parce qu’ils avaient de nouvelles préoccupations pour l’environnement. Krech croit que les Amérindiens n’ont jamais été écologistes, mais qu’ils ont peu à peu adhéré à ce stéréotype et qu’ils l’utilisent maintenant eux-mêmes pour revendiquer de meilleures conditions d’existence. Et s’ils n’ont pas véritablement fait de dommages malgré des comportements parfois nuisibles pour la nature, c’est tout simplement parce qu’ils n’étaient pas assez nombreux et qu’ils n’exploitaient pas les ressources dans le but de faire des profits.
L’utilisation de ce mythe est erronée d’un point de vue historique, mais elle peut paraître justifiée par les conditions de vie actuelles des Amérindiens. Ceux-ci sont parmi les principales victimes de la destruction de l’environnement et de la pollution causée par les industries des pays «développés». Une quantité phénoménale de contaminants, de produits toxiques et de polluants de toutes sortes se retrouvent dans leur habitat et nuisent à leur santé. Du cadmium, du plomb, des BPC et du DDT ont été retracés dans la faune, la flore et chez les Cris et les Inuit du Nouveau-Québec au cours des trente dernières années. Les gaz carboniques émis par les industries du nord-est des États-Unis et du sud du Canada au rythme de 1300 tonnes d’oxyde de soufre et d’azote par heure retombent sous forme de pluies acides dans le Nord du Québec. On a également fait état des carences en fer des nouveau-nés inuit, car l’allaitement maternel est abandonné et le plomb contenu dans la nourriture empêche l’absorption du fer. Son absence dans l’organisme provoque des troubles psychomoteurs et d’apprentissage. La construction des barrages hydroélectriques et l’inondation de grands territoires ont également entraîné une hausse des concentrations de mercure chez les Amérindiens pour qui la pêche et la chasse demeurent des ressources alimentaires essentielles.
Les Amérindiens ne sont peut-être pas les véritables pionniers de l’environnementalisme, mais ils ont tout de même apporté au reste de l’humanité, par leurs valeurs et leurs croyances en l’unité des humains avec la nature, un plus grand respect envers tous les êtres vivants et les ressources de la Terre. Monsieur Bush s’en souviendra-t-il?
Bibliographie
A. Document iconographique
Photo de 1971 tirée de The Ecological Indian. Myth and History de Shepard Krech III, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, p. 14. Elle montre le visage d’un Amérindien nommé Iron Eyes Cody versant une larme avec comme titre «Pollution: it’s a crying shame».
B. Sources primaires
CHARLEVOIX, Père de. Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France avec Le journal
historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionnale. Montréal, Éditions Élysées, 1976. Tome 3, p. 348.
KALM, Pehr. Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749. Montréal, Éditions Pierre Tisseyre, 1977, p. 284.
LE JEUNE, Paul. Relation du 28 août 1635. Dans The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Travels and
Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791 : The Original French, Latin, and Italian Texts, with English Translations and Notes. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, New York, Pageant Book Co., 1959, vol. VIII, p. 56.
C. Articles de journaux et de périodiques
FRANCOEUR, Louis-Gilles. «Le Canada et les États-Unis isolés du reste du monde». Le Devoir, samedi
31 mars et dimanche 1er avril 2001, A1 et A12.
HAMANN, Jean. «Anémie sous le soleil de minuit». Le Soleil, samedi 17 mars 2001, E 13.
D. Études et articles spécialisés
BISHOP, Charles A. «Northeastern Indian Concepts of Conservation and the Fur Trade: A Critique of
Calvin Martin’s Thesis». Dans Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game, edited by Shepard Krech III, Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 1981, p. 39-58.
BOURDON, Marie-Claude. «L’anti Grey Owl». L’actualité, 15 mars 2000, p. 20-23.
BRAMLY, Serge. Terre sacrée. Paris, Albin Michel, 1992. 280 p. Coll. «Espaces libres». 24.
Delâge, Denys. «Les premières nations d’Amérique du Nord sont-elles à l’origine des valeurs
écologiques et démocratiques contemporaines?». Dans Transferts culturels et métissages Amérique/Europe XVIe-XXe siècle, Sainte-Foy, Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996, p. 317-345.
KRECH III, Shepard. The Ecological Indian. Myth and History. New York/London, W.W. Norton &
Company, 1999. 318 p.
Stieb, David. Health effects of development in the Hudson Bay-James Bay region. [Ottawa],
Hudson Bay Programme, 1994. 45 p.
COMPLEMENT:
Resumos
En France comme aux États-Unis, les historiens se sont parfois montrés sévères à l’égard de l’ouvrage de Shepard Kretch III The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999). Aussi inattendue que soit sa prise de position pour un public non averti, cette thèse est loin d’être novatrice parmi les scientifiques. Cet article tente de retracer son cheminement. Mashall Sahlins, Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, qui forment aujourd’hui un groupe de réflexion informel et extrêmement fécond avec des points de convergence essentiels et des désaccords considérables, n’ont cessé de s’inspirer mutuellement au cours des trois dernières décennies tout en rendant des hommages contrastés à l’œuvre fondatrice de Claude Lévi-Strauss. Leurs constats et propositions sur l’hybridation des diverses approches scientifiques, sur l’évolution nécessaire des méthodes sociologiques et anthropologiques ont fait florès, ainsi que le coup de force conceptuel qui leur est commun : la reconnaissance de la permanence des ontologies indigènes locales et la rupture de la démarcation récente et étroitement localisée à l’Occident entre nature et culture. Ainsi la réflexion des anthropologues, des sociologues et des historiens actuels nous invite non seulement à repenser la place des indigènes de l’Amérique dans la nature, mais également la place de la nature dans l’homme.
In both France and in the United States, historians have proven to be somewhat critical of the not so recent book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History by Shepard Krech III (1999). They accused Krech of revisionism with regard to the generally accepted idea that Native Americans have always been ecologists and conservationists. Unexpectedly for the lay reader, Krech’s hypotheses were far from being disturbing to every scientist. They originated from the wide epistemological self-questioning which took place in the various anthropological schools during the last half of the 20th century in France and in America –mainly in the US and Brazil– from the works of Levi-Strauss to those of Viveiros de Castro to the essays of Geertz, Sahlins, Latour, and Descola. At the same time similar theories could be found in the New Western History with US ethno-historians Cronon and White.
This paper will comment on the development of these theories. Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among others, have now formed an informal, but extremely fruitful, think tank with several key points of agreement as well as some noticeable differences of opinion in their global theories on anthropology and its methods. They have deeply inspired each other over the last three decades while paying contrasted tributes to founding father Levi-Strauss. Their common understanding of the hybridisation of various scientific approaches and of the necessary development of sociological and anthropological methods has been remarkably successful. Equally in vogue has been their conceptual coup: recognition of the enduring local indigenous ontologies and of the disappearance of the recent, but deeply Western, demarcation between the concepts of nature and culture. If “culture is the human nature” (Sahlins 2008: 104) and if contemporary anthropology eventually acknowledges the theory of the indigenisation of modernity, the peoples encountered by the Europeans are no longer to be presented as innocent victims, unable to cope with the whites and their environment. Rather, they are social groups displaying their own power and history. These conclusions lead us to reconsider not only our understanding of the place of Native peoples in nature, but also the place of nature in mankind.
Shepard Krech III, currently Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, served for ten years as editor of the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory. In 1999, he published The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, which triggered a widespread controversy in the world of Native American Studies and Environmental Studies. Krech asked an apparently revolutionary question: did Americans Indians live in perfect harmony with their natural environment until the Europeans showed up to destroy it, as is commonly accepted? He was questioning the well-known contemporary stereotype of the Ecologically Noble Indian. To him, after having discovered the Cannibal, the Barbarian and the Noble Savage according to their own uncertainties, the Euro-Americans are now defining the Ecological Indian in our times of environmental, social and cultural crisis.
Krech started from the popular cliché of the Crying Indian –from the 1971 Keep America Beautiful campaign, crying over the industrial threat to the planet– using the classical stereotype of the Noble Savage romantically associating rationality, vigour, morality, primitiveness and virtue, various merits in tune with contemporary ecology. He dated this inspiration back to the 1960s when Native Americans started to be seen as prophets of an anti-technocratic critique of the Euro-American industrial society. In the wake of James Fenimore Cooper, it was also a point made by late 19th-century and early 20th century conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and George B. Grinnell supporting cultural ecology. Moreover, Krech demonstrated that the Ecological Indian is a dehumanizing image. The idea that American Indians left no trace of themselves on the land “demeans Indians. It makes them seem simply like an animal species, and thus deprives them of culture”, as fellow ethno-historian Richard White put it (Krech 1999, 26).1
Now, did the 10 million people living in North America2 before the arrival of the Europeans leave any lasting impact on their environment? –given their small numbers and their systemic understanding of their environment. Krech asked various sub-questions:
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Did Paleo-Indians cause the extinction of large mammals during the Pleistocene era by over-hunting them? Recalling geoscientist Paul S. Martin’s accusation (2005), Krech showed that he was unconvinced, whilst acknowledging that Paleo-Indians were not entirely free from responsibility.
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Did the ancient Hohokam destroy crops with growing salinity by building the largest canal system in Native North America? Krech concluded that each age reads different teachings into so-called historical facts, and that history reveals far more about the time when it was written than it does about the past.
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Did Native peoples over-hunt the buffalo, the deer and the beaver? Many nations believed that animals returned after death, and waste, as we understand it currently, was not a Native concept at that time. After contact, these animals continued to be sources of subsistence food and market commodities. Waste occurred, but of course mainly after the Euro-Americans hunted them industrially and put pressure on the American Indians to do it for them. Krech then showed that the Native Americans’ responsibility was more than matched by the Euro-Americans and climatic changes.
Thus, in contrast to European images of an untouched Eden, American nature was not primeval but cultural. In Krech’s view, by the time Europeans arrived American Indians had long since altered the landscape by burning woodland for hunting large animals, for aggression, communication, and travel. But fire was not totally under control and the American Indians did not conceptualize ecological consequences as we see them today. Eventually, both the bacteriological shock and the European invasion stopped the burning in the 19th century and soon trees grew back in significant numbers.
Against all odds, Krech’s conclusions, while introducing the idea of the hybridisation of nature and culture –as developed below– were far less radical than his questions. His point was that ancient Native peoples and contemporary US citizens obviously have separate conceptualisations of the environmental system. The Native Americans possessed a vast systemic knowledge of their environment; they were close to it as well as quite in tune with their spirituality. But their knowledge was not within the parameters of 20th century understanding. In Krech’s view many contemporary Native peoples rely on an ecological imagery, mainly for the sake of identity and sovereignty in the context of political struggle. However, that imagery generally stems more from European self-criticism than from indigenous realities. Moreover, while emphasizing the epistemological and spiritual differences between Indians and non-Indians, making their valorization of nature different, even as both groups harnessed nature’s assets for market purposes, US ethno-historian Sam Gill (1987) and French anthropologist Philippe Descola (2005; 2010; 2011) also argued that most Native Americans are not quite as familiar with the contemporary Western ecological discourse. It seems necessary for them to cling to it for identity reasons (2010, 74). This type of environmentalism sounds surprisingly instrumental. If recognized by several eminent scholars, should it be regarded as a process of indigenisation of modernity? Then, the history of Native Americans as ecologists and conservationists is more complex than the myth. “Does this make them less Indian?” Krech asks (Calloway 1). A 20th-century Choctaw answers: “Just because I don’t want to be a white man doesn’t mean I want to be some kind of mystical Indian either. Just a real human being” (Calloway 1).
In the early 2000s, the controversy was fierce. It was fuelled by debates centred around three main stances:
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The political sensitivity of several Native American activists.
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The moderate stance among Native Americans and Euro-Americans.
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The scientific stance with critiques from Indian and non-Indian fellow US ethno-historians.
Accusing Krech of being ‘politically incorrect’ was well-known writer and historian Vine Deloria Jr. He charged Krech with writing a “revisionist” and “anti-Indian” essay distorting well-established facts: “The Indians did not make any appreciable dent in buffalo numbers in the Northern Plains. It’s anti-Indian stuff.” [Scholars such as Krech] “cook the facts to reach conclusions [cancelling out] what happened to this continent since the whites appeared” (cited by TallBear 2). Meanwhile, an Indian Country Today reviewer took Krech to task for using
twisted logic [to] absolve non-Indian commercial buffalo hunters from all guilt. […] Krech concludes by painting a terrifying picture of how American Indians continue to mismanage resources with terrifying results […] raising the threat of ecological or worse yet, nuclear holocaust, this anthropologist tries to scare his readers into the conclusion that American Indians must be stopped from controlling their own resources at all costs (TallBear 3).
According to those extreme stances–actually Krech did not make any mention of nuclear holocaust in relation to Native peoples–two points were made: Krech was, on the one hand, criticized for apparently trying to play down the whites’ responsibility in the major changes that occurred in America over the last five centuries; and on the other hand, chastised for stating that Indians have never been able to manage their own environment.
There were also more balanced and open approaches. Native author Kimberly TallBear (National Institute for Indigenous Resource Management) disagreed with Vine Deloria:
Krech does not try to ‘cancel out’ White atrocities. […] I don’t see that it is necessary to demonize Krech for challenging a stereotype that, while it may be healing to an extent, helps perpetuate divisive identity politics underway in Indian Country, and de-legitimizes the efforts of tribes to govern ourselves if we are not perceived as traditional according to a narrow, generic, and romanticized view of what is traditional (2).
Her conclusion could be summarized in her statement: “Krech’s attempts to interpret and describe without a hint of moralizing and judgment the religious beliefs that were at the root of tribal practice is a reason to find this book pro-human and within that, pro-Indian” (2). This showed, if necessary, that all Native Americans did not share the same strategies to support their common objectives. The frontline, if there is any, has of course nothing to do with Turner’s now out-dated theory of the Frontier.
A more scientific approach was supported by ethno-historians and anthropologists. Most of them did not condemn Krech for lacking respect towards Native Americans, but for being more polemical than scientific. They knew of Calvin Martin’s theory (1978). Additional –less controversial– pioneers close to that hypothesis had been Rambo and Redford who had previously showed possible environmental damage by Native peoples (1991). Dean R. Snow (Pennsylvania State University Dpt. of Anthropology) definitely sided with Krech, expressing his own willingness to face the uncomfortable scientific truth:
The bottom line is that much of what modern Americans think they know about ecology and the American Indians is firmly rooted in shallow current ideology. Shepard Krech has challenged his readers to look beyond this comfortable but superficial and ultimately ephemeral understanding, and to deal honestly with the contradictions they encounter in the intimate and unexpected relationships of plants, animals, and people in America (73).
Helen Dennis (University of Warwick) acknowledged the strong scientific background of Krech’s research, but she expressed reserves about his oversimplification:
I can’t help suspecting an un-interrogated because unconscious assumption that the norm for ‘a human being’ is that of Western, European or Euro-American man (sic); and that a central premise of Krech’s argument is that Native Americans are far more like us whitemen (sic) than we have previously wanted to believe, because we whitemen (sic) have needed to idealize them. Perhaps the truth is even more complicated than even Krech’s version of it (1).
Adrian Tanner (Dpt. of Anthropology of Memorial University of Newfoundland) was even more critical of the way several historical anachronisms in Krech’s book may endanger the contemporary Native American cause:
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” […] 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 (1).
Obviously, Krech was attacked more on the political and cultural impacts of his essay than on the topic of the environmental impact of the American Indians.
The most elaborate criticism came several years afterwards in Spring 2002 at the 10th annual symposium of the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center. The conference was dedicated to a debate on the impact of Krech’s book and how it triggered emerging scientific scholarship. Most scholars were non-Indian. The symposium was admonished by several Native leaders, among them Vine Deloria Jr. arguing that scientific debates challenging the idea of the Ecological Indian–even if necessary for scientific reasons–undermined the Native self-image and de-legitimized Native communities as sovereign entities and responsible resource managers in the present. As Michael Harkin and David Rich Lewis remarked in a collection of essays bringing together the main papers of the 2002 Laramie Symposium, Krech’s book had a “‘remarkable reception’: remarkable for the penetration into the general media of an academic book, and remarkable for the strength of feeling associated with both positive and negative readings of it” (2007:xix). As Brian Hosmer phrased it “the public discourse […] compels us to think twice about the concept of ‘Indianness’” (Hosmer 2007, xiv). There is in the book a strong feeling of “ethnographic irony” on the ideology of ecology, filling the gap between myth and history (2007:xxi). One of the most critical papers was authored by Darren J. Ranco, Penobscot, (Dpt. of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College), who argued that Krech’s points reveal his neo-colonialism (2007:32-51). In Ranco’s view, Krech’s hypotheses–whatever their scientific value–were invalidated because they undermined Native Americans’ identity and political struggle for self determination and equality–Ranco being that way quite close to Deloria’s stance. Harvey A. Feit (Dpt. of anthropology at McMaster University) argued that Krech’s representations of the Native peoples, while legitimate, eventually oversimplify them (2007:52-92). In the same collection of essays, Krech responded to those attacks by standing firm (2007:3-31, 343-53).
Over the years, we cannot but notice that Krech’s stimulation has triggered powerful and straightforward research programs3. A new generation of ethno-historians and anthropologists is now coming of age, and revisionism in the history of the West is no longer taboo, as demonstrated by the New Western History over the last 30 years. Another example of some hybridisation of points and concepts.
Krech’s methodological heritage and background: the hybridisation of methodologies and concepts
Before and beyond the environmental debate, Krech’s critique is fuelled by wider debates in relation to the sociological and anthropological fields. Over the last 30 years, one of the main discoveries of human and social science is that their separate domains can now overlap and even merge–ethno-history, paleo-anthropology and all neurosciences being examples. Basic concepts can be subjected to hybridisation, eventually challenging the traditional distinction between culture and nature. It is a major step in the long history of the development of humanities. Moreover, the last 30 years have showed that science can gradually eliminate the long-standing so-called Western superiority and is now triggering the discovery of the universality of mankind. In the wake of anti-colonialism and post-structuralism, cultural studies of the 1980s & 90s argued that nature was a phantasm of Western social domination. In the same way, environmentalism was criticized as a romantic ideology. Ethno-historian William Cronon demonstrated that wilderness, “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural”, as we traditionally imagine it, has no relation to nature (1996:7-55). In the Western world traditions, nature is a hunting area, a field for experimentation and research for Man. By standing back from nature, Europeans invented it. It gradually built the unilinear evolutionism–typical of the 19th century and the colonial era–the idea of human progress as the step-by-step domination of the body by the soul. Through three consecutive Western traditional eras–the Savage, the Barbarian, and the civilized man–the Europeans ruled their relationships with the rest of the world until the mid-20th century. Every human being would have then to go through the same sequence of development.
At the same time, we could observe a redemptive cultural critique using other societies as an alibi for redressing what was troubling the Western world since the 18th century. It was in protest against the official colonial vision paving the way for contemporary post-colonial guilt. Either with the Good Savage, mirroring the Western world from La Hontan’s Adario to Voltaire’s Huron, reflecting candidly our faults, or with the wise Indian–related to the more recent romantic Ecological Indian–ancestral experience is supposed to show us the way to respond to racism, sexism, imperialism, etc., according to their own exotic cultural lights.
21Tristes Tropiques was a major step in the anti-imperialistic literature, through which French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss questioned the so-called superiority of Western cosmology. In The Savage Mind he suggested the disappearance of all hierarchies among cultures. He compelled his fellow anthropologists to question their own writing and methodologies, as well as their relationships with their so-called objects/subjects of their study. Levi-Strauss endorsed a new anthropology merging various human sciences, decolonized and free from ethnocentrism. He showed that Native peoples interact among themselves and with nature in a cluster of relationships including what we call humans and non-humans, which are seen differently by them. Native science is built with these hybrids.
22French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour was soon to demonstrate that the world is made of hybrid objects, partly of science, politics, culture and economy, mixtures between entirely new types of beings, nature-culture hybrids (1991). Science is nothing but ideology; nature does not have its own rules, and society is not run by very different principles. Latour’s “principle of symmetry” argues that both nature and society cannot be used to explain things, but have to be explained through networks. The same language can be used to explain human and non-human activities. A road ahead for anthropology.
23As we will see further on, US anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also worked on the hybridisation of concepts. He was an advocate of ethno-history, an ethnography including time and transformation with a possibility of changing the way culture is considered.
Hybridisation within science, a redefinition of anthropology
24Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the father of perspectivism, also called for a profound renewal of anthropology: “if anthropology ‘is’ a science of something, it is undoubtedly the comparative science of the relations that make us human” (2003). Anthropology should not have a doctrine on the nature of social relations. It should place “in relationship different problems, not a single (‘natural’) problem and its different (‘cultural’) solutions. Thus the ‘art of anthropology’ is […] the art of determining the problems posed by each culture, not the art of finding solutions to those problems posed by our own” (2003, 3).
25If anthropology “begins by asserting the de jure equivalence between the discourses of anthropologist and Native”, it also has to reflect “a certain relation of intelligibility between the two cultures” (2003, 3). Viveiros de Castro suggested rethinking the notion of practice: “pure practice exists only in theory; in practice, it always comes heavily mixed with theory” (2003). Through “mind decolonization” (2009, 4), indigenous societies also invent the anthropologist’s understanding. The Native peoples are active and creative partners and Native societies are built in the mind of the anthropological analyst.
26To illustrate this interaction, Viveiros de Castro reported a highly significant anecdote related by Levi-Strauss in both Race and History and Tristes Tropiques. In the early 16th century, the Native Americans thought the Europeans were gods while most Europeans barely conceived of the indigenous peoples as men. Whereas the Spaniards were trying to establish if the American Indians had some sort of soul–the Valladolid Controversy–the Indians were questioning the nature of the bodies of the Europeans. A discovery reported in the West Indies that Native Americans would examine the decomposition of the dead bodies of Spaniards submerged in water. That confrontation of two epistemologies, of two ways of constructing knowledge shows that every single community develops proper intellectual tools and practices in order to know who they are and who the others are, without the help of ethnology.
27Viveiros de Castro stated that anthropology now had to take Native science into account within our own. He recalled that every animal is a man inside the skin of an animal. Under the skin, whatever it is, we all have the same interiority, and he demonstrated that the construction of the subjective identity occurs through the absorption of external points of view, a transformation of cannibalism around which institutions develop. This is the way shamanism functions, through cannibalisation; the shaman being the one who experiments several points of view: human, jaguar, foe or god (2009:129). Shamanism, kinship, politics are various ways of activating more general schemes of the perception of oneself and of the world. Perspectivism then shows us the interconnections and the integration of various institutions that our anthropology traditionally differentiates and separates. Viveiros de Castro invited the anthropologists to examine “the conditions in which the ontological determination operates within the studied communities” (2009:7).
28The objective is then the project of some hybrid combination of that “cannibalistic cogito” with our concept of subjectivity, the Native American concept of a “person” and our individualism, their cosmologies and our philosophies. Considering the savage mind, it was about time for us to redefine our contemporary mind, with more flexibility and variety.
Hybridisation of nature and culture? “Culture is the human nature” (Sahlins 2008: 104)
29Hybridisation of nature and culture is the next step. Recently, Sahlins assembled all the theories, and asserted that these so-called non-human beings are also men. Quoting Viveiros de Castro, he acknowledged that the voice of a bird in the forest can be interpreted by Indians as the voice of a child: “having been human, animals must still be human, albeit in a non-evident way” (2008:96). He also quoted Canadian anthropologist Robin Ridington on British Columbia peoples: “human people are constantly in contact with the non-human persons” [in] “an interpersonal dialogue among people”. Hunting as an example is “integral to the social process of social life” (Sahlins 2008, 92). He explained: “the positive point is that plants and animals of significance to the people, as also features of the landscape, celestial bodies, meteorological phenomena, even certain artefacts, are beings like themselves: persons with the attributes of humanity and sometimes the appearance thereof, as in dreams and visions” (2008:88). All the surrounding elements are kinsmen: the Ojibway ontology–described by Irving Hallowell (1960)–includes the whole environment in the category of “person” (Sahlins 2008, 91). Communication “is achieved through dreams, myths, spells, incantations, shamanic transformations and their like” (2008:96).
30How can the process be explained? US anthropologist Clifford Geertz summarized an explanation:
“Humans evolved biologically under cultural selection. We have been fashioned body and soul for cultural existence”; “Human nature is a becoming […] rather than an always-ready being”; “Born neither good nor bad; human beings make themselves in social activity as it unfolds in given historical circumstances” (Sahlins 2008, 96).
- 4 Similarly, hybrid knowledge systems are being negotiated by contemporary Native peoples with non-I (…)
31All these conclusions were also echoed by Philippe Descola. In the wake of Latour’s works–even if they disagree on various topics (2011:96), he stated that most objects in our environment, including ourselves, are both natural and cultural. In America, the humanity of these objects–stemming from their idea of themselves–is moral: it is not a physical humanity. The various elements of nature “do not exist in the same ontological niche defined by its lack of humanity” (2005, translated by Sahlins 2008, 88). In Descola’s view, the idea of nature took shape only between the Western 17th and 19th centuries in Germany in contrast to the universal vision of the French Enlightenment. It was later exported to the US by one of the founding fathers of US anthropology, Franz Boas (2005). On the one hand, there is a natural world and, on the other hand, there is a variety of cultural worlds which adapt to the natural environment. This component of US culturalism is now widely accepted by most Western populations. But that distribution is far from being universal, while the distinction between body and soul seems to be widely accepted throughout the world. Interiority provides consciousness to the person, and it can be detected among non-humans. Physicality is the biological and material dimension of humans and non-humans. In that view, nature is at the root of “naturalistic” cosmology and we cannot simply apply our cosmology to the rest of the world. For Native Americans, animals, plants and several other non-animated beings harbour some “spirit”, feelings, languages, morals, and eventually a culture, which is not essentially different from human culture4. Are there societies everywhere? We now have to change our way of explaining the world.
32Over the last 20 years we have found echoes of that sensitivity in the New Western History. Patricia Nelson Limerick, William Cronon and Richard White, among its main founders, called for some hybridisation of various historical approaches: listening to the voices of not only conquerors, not only their victims, but also a variety of players in and witnesses to events, considering a variety of possible confrontations and collaborations between contact groups –the Middle Ground (White 1999). These practices have opened the gate to the numerous historical schools which have come to life in the last two decades: cultural studies, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, genre studies, etc., and currently global history. Historians and ethnologists have generated ethno-historians now contributing to a global anthropology, which is today at work on an anthropology of globalisation.
33Thus, beyond the slow merging of Native traditional environmentalism and white contemporary environmentalism into a hybrid global environmentalism, we understand that current processes of hybridisation are now at work in every field. They currently occur in non-Indian science as we saw. They also occur in the Indian mind and science and in the complementarity of Indian and non-Indian scientific approaches for the future. The hybridisation at work in US ethno-history, merging confrontation into combinations has revealed mutual influences among social groups at multiple levels. Sometimes things happen in an unexpected way: when some modernisation of indigenous life is generally expected, it sometimes gives way to an indigenisation of modernity (Sahlins 2000). If Krech’s essay triggered popular reflection on the place of Native Americans in nature, it also resulted from an earlier and wider scientific revolution. It was the visible tip of the iceberg showing that scientific studies should always be ready for revisionism for the sake of science.
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Cronon, William, Samuel P. Hays, Michael P. Cohen, & Thomas R. Dunlap. “Forum: The Trouble with Wilderness.” Environmental History 1 (1996): 7-55.
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Descola, Philippe. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris, Gallimard, 2005.
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Descola, Philippe. Diversité des natures, diversité des cultures. Paris, Bayard, 2010.
Descola, Philippe. L’Écologie des autres. L’anthropologie et la question de la nature. Versailles, Éditions Quae, 2011.
Feit, Harvey A. “Myths of the Ecological Whitemen. Histories, Science, and Rights in North American-Native American Relations.” Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. David Rich Lewis and Michael Harkin, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 52-92.
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Krech III, Shepard. “Afterword.” Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. Michael E. Harkin & David Rich Lewis, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007a. 343-354.
Krech III, Shepard. “Beyond the Ecological Indian.” Perspectives on the Ecological Indian: Native Americans and the Environment, ed. M Harkin & David Rich Lewis, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007b. 3-31.
Krech III, Shepard. The Ecologial Indian. New York: Norton & Company, 1999.
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Martin, Calvin. Keepers of the Game. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Martin, Paul S. Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
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Notas
1 Krech pays tribute to several fellow historians whose writings are related to his: Richard White, William Cronon, Sam D. Gill, William M. Denevan, Karl. W. Butzer, and Calvin Martin—with whom he eventually disagreed.
2 Two to eighteen million according to several contemporary authors (Krech 1999:83; Thornton 1987:15-41).
3 Cf. Borgerhoff Mulder M, Coppolillo P. 2005. Conservation: Ecology, Economics, and Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press; Deloria V. 2000. The speculations of Krech. Worldviews 4:283–93; Holt F. 2005.The catch-22 of conservation: indigenous peoples, biologists, and cultural change. Hum. Ecol. 33:199–215; Krech S. 2005. Reflections on conservation, sustainability, and environmentalism in indigenous North America. Am. Anthropol. 107:78–86; Krech S. 2007a. Afterword. In Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian, ed. M Harkin, Dr Lewis, pp. 343–54. Lincoln, NE: Univ. Nebraska Press; Krech S. 2007b. Beyond the Ecological Indian. In Perspectives on the Ecological Indian: Native Americans and the Environment, ed. M Harkin, DR Lewis, pp. 3–31. Lincoln: Univ. Neb.Press; LeBlanc S. 2003. Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage. New York: St. Martin’s Press; Nadasdy P. 2005. Transcending the debate over the ecologically noble Indian: indigenous peoples and environmentalism. Ethnohistory 52:291–331; Smith N. 2001. Are indigenous peoples conservationists? Rational. Soc. 13:229–61; Stoffle R. 2005. Places that count: traditional cultural properties in cultural resource management; tribal cultural resource management: the full circle to stewardship. Am. Anthropol. 107:138–40.
4 Similarly, hybrid knowledge systems are being negotiated by contemporary Native peoples with non-Indian scientists, policy-makers, and legislators across boundaries that reflect different kinds of knowledge.
Voir par ailleurs:
An interview with Paul S. Martin
American scientist
February 12, 2011
It takes time to overturn decades of accepted scientific thought. For example, Paul Martin has spent 40 years accumulating evidence that humans triggered the mass extinction of dozens of species of large animals about 10,000 years ago in North and South America. His theory—that small bands of human hunters moved south from Alaska across the New World and rapidly hunted much of the large game to extinction—faced strong opposition when first introduced in the 1960s. Some researchers still argue that climate, not humans, caused the extinctions, but Martin now has much of the scientific community on his side of the debate.
Martin, an emeritus professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona at Tucson, recently published a book on the subject, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (University of California Press, 2005). In it, he discusses his many years of research, the reaction to his theory and the implications of his work for future wildlife conservation efforts. « Without knowing it, » he writes, « Americans live in a land of ghosts. » He proposes introducing animals such as elephants to parts of North America where their extinct relatives once roamed.
American Scientist assistant book review editor Amos Esty recently interviewed Martin by e-mail and asked him to talk more about his work and his new book.
In Twilight of the Mammoths, you present a lot of evidence in support of the overkill hypothesis, but you also point out that there are a number of skeptics. What would you say is the strongest piece of evidence linking the arrival of human beings to the extinctions? What really convinced you that you’re right?
The global extinction pattern, which Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History terms « a deadly syncopation, » convinced me. Near-time extinctions [those that occurred within the past 50,000 years] of large animals swept Australia over 40,000 years ago, peaked in America 10,000 to 13,000 years ago and ended historically with the settlement of remote Pacific islands, which saw within the last two millennia the elimination of many rails [a family of birds] and native land snails.
As you make clear in your book, the cause of the extinctions is a hotly debated issue. What makes it so contentious? What’s at stake?
Of the many revolutions over billions of years in the history of life, humans appear to be agents of extinction in just the last 50,000 years. Many vertebrate paleontologists consider climatic change a satisfactory explanation in most of the last 65 million years. The cause of extinction may be less well understood than the origin of species.
Is the dispute primarily the result of a lack of data?
I would say no, and I suspect that the reason for the dispute would trigger as much disagreement as the dispute itself. [Historian and activist] Vine Deloria’s trashing of overkill reflects (in my view) his lifelong war against anything that he believes might reflect badly on Native Americans and/or upset those who do not believe that Native Americans were always here (in the New World). I doubt he was ever seriously interested in the extinctions during near time or in the problem of what caused them.
How do the other continents fit into this debate? Is the matter more settled for Africa and Eurasia?
In Eurasia the extinctions struck early in the Pleistocene in the southern part of Europe and advanced slowly toward the pole. The very last woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean only 4,000 years ago. The last woolly mammoths in Beringia were still alive on St. Paul’s island in the Pribilofs just over 5,000 years ago. Both Wrangel Island and St. Paul’s Island were apparently unknown to prehistoric hunters until thousands of years after the spread of Clovis hunters into North America.
In Africa, extinctions of large animals—especially of taxa of proboscideans, large primates and suids (pigs)—may span a million years or more. I know of nothing like this in South America, where large mammal extinction in the Pleistocene appears to have been concentrated only 11,000 radiocarbon years ago or later.
Did you realize when you first proposed the overkill hypothesis in the 1960s that you would be stirring up so much trouble? What has it been like to be at the center of such a heated debate?
I did not expect to find so much resistance among some anthropologists and vertebrate paleontologists. The resulting debate has been stimulating—what would new research on prehistoric extinctions reveal next?
You also discuss the controversy about whether Clovis people were the first human beings to arrive in North America, about 13,000 years ago. What would the implications be for the overkill hypothesis if harder evidence of pre-Clovis settlements were found? Would it force you to rethink the possibility of overkill?
If many indisputable pre-Clovis archaeological sites were to be discovered, I would have to rethink the « overkill model. » Claims of pre-Clovis invasion familiar to me make entertaining TV shows but do not appear to be robust.
Why is a short overlap between the arrival of humans and the extinctions so important to overkill? How much of an overlap would make it untenable?
If mammoths, mastodons and humans coexisted in America for 10,000 years before the mammoths and mastodons vanished, the overkill model of a super predator entering a virgin land mass and triggering mass extinction of other large mammals clearly would not work.
As Ross MacPhee said, the pattern indicates a deadly syncopation on different land masses. As humans first arrive (« ka! ») they rapidly increase in numbers and trigger megafaunal extinction (« tunk! ») in a few thousand years at most: 50,000 years ago in Australia (ka-tunk!), 11,000 years ago in America (ka-tunk!), 5,000 years ago in Cuba and Haiti (ka-tunk!), and less than 1,000 years ago in New Zealand (ka-tunk!).
The debate about the extinctions, you say, « points to some fundamental differences in methodology, outlook, attitude, and training that could be as illuminating as the final answer to the extinction controversy itself. » Does that mean that differences of opinion about the extinctions are more about how people conduct their research and draw conclusions than it is about the actual evidence?
This is a hard question. The attitudes, no less than the training, of those investigating evolution and extinction are crucial. Conservation biologists have long sought to restore wild places to what America allegedly was like in 1491, with no awareness that natural baselines may be at least 10,000 years older.
What makes 10,000 years ago a more natural baseline than, say, 10 million years ago?
Ten million years ago would put us into the Miocene with primates but no hominids as yet. Many Miocene extinctions did (of course) occur, but not because of hominids.
Have you had much luck convincing conservation biologists that they should take into account the long-term presence in North America of animals such as wild horses that only became extinct about 10,000 years ago? How would it change their approach on an everyday level?
Aware of the ravages of extinctions in the late Holocene, zoologists in New Zealand have begun to restock lost species with living relatives. The idea is gaining traction in the United States (see, for example, the article « Re-wilding North America, » by Josh Donlan and others in the August 18, 2005, issue of Nature).
If you were suddenly put in charge of an effort to repopulate North America with species lost during the late Quaternary, where would you begin? What animals would you most like to see roaming the continent again?
I would like to see free-ranging elephants in secondary tropical forests of the Americas. Until the end of the Pleistocene, forest and savanna in the New World tropics supported three families of elephants. Observations of free-ranging Indian or African elephants in a reserve of secondary forest should reveal much about fruit dispersal and forest tree ecology under conditions more like those that prevailed before the megafaunal extinctions.
So would the benefits of rewilding the Americas be primarily scientific? What do humans stand to gain by reintroducing animals such as elephants?
To thrive outside Africa and Asia, elephants need sizable reserves like the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Ecologists would like to learn more about elephant behavior in dispersing fruits in tropical and temperate forests. Conservation biologists are beginning to consider the importance of sizeable tropical reserves in the New World, which once harbored mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres, for the only surviving species, Asian and African elephants. For Asian elephants we need tropical American equivalents of Tsavo or Amboseli National Park, popular African elephant reserves in Kenya and Tanzania.
jcdurbant 
mi-a placut cum ai postat, tine-o tot asa
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Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Nice post, dude :)
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[…] Depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, les ethnologues nous ont accoutumés à voir dans l’Indien un être rivé à sa communauté fermée au reste du monde. En privilégiant la vision d’informateurs censés préserver la tradition ancestrale, ils excluaient de leur champ d’observation tout ce qui faisaient des Indiens des êtres pareils à nous – c’est-à-dire inauthentiques, avides de changements et d’innovations. La vulgarisation … a fait le reste (…) l’Indien est devenu le dépositaire d’un savoir millénaire miraculeusement préservé; il entretiendrait avec la nature des relations d’une harmonie parfaite; figé hors du temps et de l’Histoire, il échapperait aux mélanges et aux contaminations qui seraient notre sort … Serge Guzinski […]
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[…] Depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, les ethnologues nous ont accoutumés à voir dans l’Indien un être rivé à sa communauté fermée au reste du monde. En privilégiant la vision d’informateurs censés préserver la tradition ancestrale, ils excluaient de leur champ d’observation tout ce qui faisaient des Indiens des êtres pareils à nous – c’est-à-dire inauthentiques, avides de changements et d’innovations. La vulgarisation … a fait le reste (…) l’Indien est devenu le dépositaire d’un savoir millénaire miraculeusement préservé; il entretiendrait avec la nature des relations d’une harmonie parfaite; figé hors du temps et de l’Histoire, il échapperait aux mélanges et aux contaminations qui seraient notre sort … Serge Guzinski […]
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[…] Depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, les ethnologues nous ont accoutumés à voir dans l’Indien un être rivé à sa communauté fermée au reste du monde. En privilégiant la vision d’informateurs censés préserver la tradition ancestrale, ils excluaient de leur champ d’observation tout ce qui faisaient des Indiens des êtres pareils à nous – c’est-à-dire inauthentiques, avides de changements et d’innovations. La vulgarisation … a fait le reste (…) l’Indien est devenu le dépositaire d’un savoir millénaire miraculeusement préservé; il entretiendrait avec la nature des relations d’une harmonie parfaite; figé hors du temps et de l’Histoire, il échapperait aux mélanges et aux contaminations qui seraient notre sort … Serge Guzinski […]
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