Exploring the relationship of America’s first people to the environment, a researcher debunks long-held beliefs
In one way or another, Shepard Krech III has spent most of his life looking for American Indians.
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As a young graduate student, he did so by shouldering his father’s Winchester .30-06 rifle and heading north to hunt with an Arctic tribe. Now in his middle age, an anthropologist at Brown University and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, he looks for Indians in their stories, the stories white people told about them, and the stories both tell today.
In his new book, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W.W. Norton), he is interested most of all in stories about how American Indians changed the land, and how the land changed them.
The “myth” of Mr. Krech’s title is the ecological Indian -- the American Indian who lived in harmony with nature before Europeans arrived. The “history” is in the shards of evidence that survive to tell a different tale: Some Indians may have left few marks on the land, but others may have farmed it to exhaustion, set fires that raged beyond control, and hunted species to local extinction.
When speaking about American Indians before or soon after their first contact with Europeans, Mr. Krech is careful to qualify -- “some,” “may have” and “perhaps” are common terms in The Ecological Indian. His book is a set of nearly exhaustive case studies of research on American Indian land use, but it is also the broadest challenge yet to popular notions about American Indians, and he is well aware of how much evidence he is still missing. More than that, he realizes how far removed he is from the world he attempts to describe.
He learned that lesson during an Arctic winter nearly three decades ago, and the experience was so vivid that he recalls it easily even now, sitting in the sun outside his summer home on the Maine coast, lunching on fresh crabmeat from the channel in front of his house and the season’s first harvest of blueberries from fields not far behind it.
It was February 1972, and Mr. Krech, then a Harvard University graduate student studying the Gwich’in people of Canada’s Northwest Territories, was traveling alone to join a family at its hunting grounds, 50 miles from the nearest town. His four large Mackenzie Huskies were to haul him and his gear up the frozen Peel River. The temperature hovered round 40 below zero and occasionally plummeted, but Mr. Krech was well-prepared: dried meat, dried fish for the dogs, a caribou-skin mattress to sleep on. He was enough of an outdoorsman to recognize a set of tracks that excited his dogs as those of a wolverine.
He spent the night in the tent of a Gwich’in elder. The old man’s ease reassured him.
The second day was colder and whiter. Mr. Krech left the river to cut across the land. But trapping trails veered off the main trail, and as dusk fell, he started to wonder whether he was headed toward a warm cabin or miles more of blank snow. He began to feel afraid.
Mr. Krech stops talking and returns to his blueberries and cream. This reporter stares at him, waiting for the climax of the story. Mr. Krech stares back.
“Oh, nothing happened,” he says at last, realizing that something is expected. His voice is crisp with the inflections of an education at all the best schools, from Groton to Harvard via Yale and Oxford. “I made it to the camp fine.
“What did I learn?” He shrugs. “How thin my own margins are. How little one knows.”
By “one,” he means himself and everyone else who does not live directly off the land. Mr. Krech has great respect for the depth of traditional American Indian ecological knowledge. The “ecological Indian” he’d like to do away with is the one he has never encountered -- not on a snowy trail, nor in his gleanings from the anthropology, archaeology, and history he’s read to find out if such a person ever existed.
The Ecological Indian begins and ends not in the wild but on Madison Avenue. It was in the heart of New York City in 1971 that the most famous image of the American Indian was born: a broad, rough-skinned face framed by black braids, a single tear welling out of eyes that seem to see further than our own. “Pollution,” declared the ad. “It’s a crying shame.”
In the jargon of advertising, the Crying Indian made 15 billion “people impressions.” In the language of cultural studies, Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who portrayed him, became an icon. Created a few months after the first Earth Day, the ad came to symbolize not only the growing environmental movement, but also several centuries of belief about the people it cast as natural conservationists.
Iron Eyes “shed a tear for land and resources,” implying that America’s first people walked so softly on virgin soil that they left no sign of their passing, writes Mr. Krech.
Such has long been the conventional wisdom of the second, third, and following peoples who made the first ones disappear. But look closer -- at tree rings, salt plains, and buffalo bones -- and you’ll find tracks everywhere.
American Indians, Mr. Krech contends, were as capable and often as inclined as Europeans to alter and exploit the land. Much of the wilderness that Europeans stumbled on was paradise cultivated, not found.
That American Indians did not shape their environment more extensively was in part due to their small numbers, says Mr. Krech. Those dwindled further with the onslaught of European diseases. The “primeval” forests encountered by Europeans were in some cases new growth on land that had once been cleared for farming or pasture long before they arrived.
That doesn’t mean the former residents were poor stewards, says Harvey E. Feit, a professor of anthropology at McMaster University, in West Hamilton, Ontario. American Indians were innate conservationists, he insists, using “wildlife and other resources with a view to their needs, not only human needs.”
But to call such practices conservation -- whether they be the ritual burning of beaver bones or the gentle irrigation of a desert -- demands that one examine both the consciousness behind them and their ecological consequences, says Mr. Krech.
Many American Indians who hunted beaver considered it disrespectful of the beaver’s spirit not to kill any beaver they came across, for instance, because the beaver was surely offering itself as a gift. And most hunters were very good at coming across beavers.
“I feel without any doubt that Indians possessed ecological knowledge,” says Mr. Krech. “This means nothing about a concern for the environment.”
Around the time of the Crying Indian, he argues, the political and moral tide of environmentalism subsumed ecology, the study of how ecosystems work, into a crusade to make the environment better or, at least, prevent it from becoming worse.
Such a perspective is “essentially a secular form of Christian teleology,” says Andrew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (under contract with Cambridge University Press), he sums up the thinking that lies behind the use of buffalo -- or the ecological Indian -- as a symbol of purity: "[H]umankind sinned, fell from grace, and was banished from Eden; repentance, however, will bring a return to Paradise.”
Rendering the ecological Indian as a saint does modern Indians no good, says Mr. Krech. “It exposes them to charges of hypocrisy, holds them to a standard they can’t keep because they never could.”
But Mr. Krech’s concern for the well-being of American Indians rings hollow to some scholars. “There is a whole set of people out there attacking Indians in the guise of ecological history,” notes Vine Deloria, Jr., a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Fulcrum, 1997). In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Deloria charges that scholars such as Mr. Krech “‘cook’ the facts to reach conclusions” that are beside the point: “I’m sure some Indians did over hunt, etc. -- but dragging up some ancient incident does not cancel out what has hap pened to this continent since the whites appeared.” Doing so, says Mr. Deloria, smacks of “the old quasi-liberal ‘blame the victim’” approach.
In fact, Mr. Krech worries a great deal that his book could feed anti-Indian sentiment, although he freely admits it is “cooked,” in another sense. When an early version of his chapter on buffalo appeared in the journal Ideas, he says, Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, approached him about adapting it for his magazine. Mr. Krech, concerned that his still “raw” ideas might be appropriated for anti-Indian arguments, declined. He is less concerned with sparking controversy than with the historical record and the dangers of its distortion. The ecological Indian is not far removed from the romanticized noble savage of earlier times, he says: Both views falsely divide Europeans from “wild” Indians, humans from nature.
Mr. Krech prefaces his book with thanks to his many Gwich’in friends, and reveals at the beginning his own perspective as a conservationist, albeit one who “grew up with a gun in one hand and a rod in the other and at 10 was avidly watching and shooting birds.”
Sitting in an Adirondack-style chair by the Eggemoggin Reach in front of his home, he keeps a pair of binoculars handy to get a closer look at the occasional osprey. He wears a white fedora with a found turkey feather in its band. On his kitchen counter sit grouse feathers he recently discovered on the side of the road. Mounted around the room are the heads of animals his father hunted, big-horn sheep and mountain goats from British Columbia.
Born in New York City and raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as a boy he explored the Georgia woods and the Chesapeake Bay with his father, Shepard Krech, Jr., and grandfather, Shepard Krech. “You could argue that I was almost pre-adapted to write a book like this,” he says. “I’ve spent my whole life in nature.”
Mr. Krech first saw the Crying Indian in 1972, after returning from 15 months of fieldwork in a land with more Indians than billboards. “I came back from seeing how these people fished, hunting with them for caribou, rabbits, beaver, and saw this notion of the ecological Indian really taking root,” Mr. Krech recalls. “Iron Eyes Cody and his billions of people impressions. Greenpeace was using the ecological Indian to protest nuclear power, and getting cursed as Communists for doing so by that old Indian fighter, John Wayne.”
The Arctic Indians whom Mr. Krech had been living with were more concerned with practical matters.
“We found a rabbit one morning that was missing its head,” he recalls. “The man I was with said that an owl had the rest of it.”
This observation makes Mr. Krech laugh now, a soft, quick chuckle that wells up from his broad chest. He is a tall man with a slightly forward-leaning stance and sharp eyes that seem to spot every bird on the horizon, most of which he can identify. One can easily imagine him a formidable hunter, even in the deep snows of a forest that was alien to him.
But on the morning he found the headless rabbit, his knowledge paled next to that of his companion’s. “He could see signs in the snow I had not seen. The signs indicated a great gray owl. Feather signs of the threshing of the struggle.”
At the time, Mr. Krech simply admired his host’s understanding of his environment. He didn’t question its purpose -- to find food, not to preserve wilderness -- until decades later, when he remembered the Crying Indian.
It was the approaching quincentennial of Columbus’s voyage that reminded him. In 1990, he came across a new book by the journalist Kirkpatrick Sale, called The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf). According to Mr. Sale, Indian religions recognized that a “special and delicate balance has to be maintained to conserve the human population.”
Mr. Sale expresses no patience for those who question the reasons for that balance, much less its existence. “To believe that such a phenomenon could exist only because this Indian did not have the technologies or the numbers,” he writes, “is the last refuge of one who cannot imagine that there might be a society that would not destroy nature if it could.”
Although Mr. Sale has not read The Ecological Indian, he is familiar with Mr. Krech’s earlier work. Mr. Krech “doesn’t like people who sentimentalize Indians,” he says, and nor does he; but he thinks Mr. Krech fails to see the larger truth of Indian beliefs beyond his bundle of facts: that Indian populations and technology were limited “not by accident, but by design of Indian religions.”
“Sale’s Indians are noble and Edenic,” insists Mr. Krech. He hopes that his study will reveal not a larger truth, but many smaller ones, about Indians closer to earth than what he views as Mr. Sale’s otherworldly creations.
Mr. Krech is not the first person to challenge the idea of the ecological Indian. But until now, most work on the subject has been site-specific. Mr. Krech has used those local studies as well as interpretive readings of his own to create a much broader panorama.
After chapters about the extinction of animals such as the woolly mammoth and the giant land sloth (in which the first immigrants to the continent may have played a part), irrigation, and the idea of “Eden,” he moves on to a series of case studies that carry his narrative across ecosystems: “Fire,” “Buffalo,” “Deer,” “Beaver.”
About each he asks: What was it for? Why, exactly, did Indians burn the land and kill the buffalo? How, and why, do people produce from nature what they do? And just what do they think they’re up to?
Although Mr. Krech is no Marxist -- he says research on property among Indians would turn Marx on his head -- his investigations are informed by his fascination with the commodification of nature.
“Deer and beaver are the really big ones for the history of commodities,” he says, but he’s so keen on this question that he enthusiastically points out missing chapters from his own book. “Someone could say something really interesting about caribou. Someday somebody will write a great chapter on seals. And a case study of salmon! Something else I never really wrote on is farming. Acorns! The Ecological Indian could be a book that’s just monstrous. There could be a chapter on whales. A beluga chapter, a narwhal chapter. And shellfish -- oysters!”
For all that he has left out, Mr. Krech has taken pains to be thorough about that which he has included. His chapter on fire, for instance, details with numerous citations the many reasons for which various American Indian peoples burned the land -- as recorded in their own words, deduced by scientists from tree rings, observed by early Europeans, and alluded to in their myths. Their motivations included the improvement of forage for animals and themselves; the repulsion of insects; fertilization; warfare; sanctions against traders; protection from poachers; communication; the suppression of lightning fires; and the harvest of grasshoppers.
Mr. Krech’s chapter on buffalo may prove to be just as incendiary. Key to understanding the near-extinction of the buffalo, he says, are population numbers -- a topic that is at the center of current debates in American Indian studies.
If the American Indian population was as great as some advocates of the ecological Indian say -- 18 million -- then Plains Indians would very likely have eaten the buffalo to extinction several hundred years ago. Even if the numbers were lower, as Mr. Krech believes -- somewhere between two and seven million -- American Indian participation in the commercial market for hides would have endangered the beasts long before the railroad brought on the final slaughter in the late 19th century.
“New markets and means of transportation” doomed the animal, Mr. Krech unequivocally states. But he marshals considerable archaeological evidence, including buffalo-jump bone heaps that predate European contact, to suggest that regardless of the market, some American Indians slaughtered far more buffalo than they could eat -- killed, in fact, every cow, calf, and bull they could catch. Not out of greed or blood lust, but often because of the very respect for the animal that advocates of the ecological Indian admire.
Many American Indians believed that buffalo were as intelligent as themselves; if hunters let one escape, it might reveal their traps to others.
Nor would American Indians have had cause to concern themselves with any scarcity of buffalo; most of them devoted more thought to how so many could exist.
More than one tribe turned to reincarnation as an explanation. The Cherokee thought that deer recycled themselves; many Cree expected the return of beaver spirits to bones they had abandoned.
Not all American Indians believed in reincarnation, Mr. Krech says, but those who did disproved the image of themselves as conservationists. There was no need to conserve that which would be reborn.
Today, most of those beliefs are forgotten. Instead, says Mr. Krech, Indians throughout North America proudly claim ideas about themselves that may have originated as European self-criticism.
The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, an English professor at the University of Arizona, has written that “in principle, if not yet in name,” pre-contact Indians were “conservationists.” Matthew Coon-Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, proclaimed in 1994 that his people “have hunted and fished, in balance with nature, for more than 300 generations.”
Such talk boggles Mr. Krech. The sun has set and he has come indoors. He is paging through a museum catalogue of American Indian artifacts as he shakes his head and chuckles with dismay at Mr. Coon-Come’s comment; he wonders whether such words set a trap for American Indians that their opponents, ideological and economic, will spring.
But he refuses to condemn Mr. Coon-Come’s comments as false.
“I think the Cree political leaders talk the way they do because they’re in a fight for their lives, as they understand their lives,” he says. “They say the things they need to say to set themselves off from people who would seek to change their environment in these very fundamental, lasting ways.”
Although ecological Indians did not exist in the past, says Mr. Krech, the myth itself may have called them into being. Just as the land shapes the lives of the people who live on it, the stories people tell shape those who tell them.
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