Native Americans and North American History – Part 1

Dehumanizing, binary stereotypes of Native Americans

One of my earliest memories of the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans involves a public service television advertisement that ran for years in the 1970’s, often during Saturday morning cartoon shows geared toward kids.  It was called “The Crying Indian,” and it was produced by the Keep America Beautiful campaign:

(Apparently, the actor who played the Native American in the ad wasn’t himself Native American, although he played one in many films and television shows. And his tear wasn’t really a tear, but rather a drop of glycerol, applied for dramatic effect.)

Shepard Krech III, in his excellent book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, writes:

Through the Crying Indian, Keep America Beautiful cleverly manipulated ideas deeply engrained in the national consciousness.  “Pollution: it’s a crying shame” expressed the widely held perception, then and now, that there are fundamental differences between the way Americans of European descent and Indians think about and relate to land and resources.  In what amounted to a powerful indictment of white Americans, the Crying Indian unequivocally implicated white polluters; they, not Indians, were the people who start pollution.  He shed a tear for land and resources, which, by implication, he and other Indians treated kindly and prudently (as conservators might) and understood ecologically.  But after arriving in North America, Europeans and their descendants ruined its pristine, unspoilt nature.  A noble image speaking to ecological wisdom and prudent care for the land and its resources, the Crying Indian is the paramount example of what I call the Ecological Indian: the Native North American as ecologist and conservationist.  How faithfully it reflects Native North American cultures and behavior through time is the subject of this book.

As Krech points out:

[W]hile this image [of Native Americans] may occasionally serve or have served useful polemical or political ends, images of noble and ignoble indigenousness, including the Ecological Indian, are ultimately dehumanizing.  They deny both variation within human groups and commonalities between them.  As the historian Richard White remarked, 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.”  In a related vein, Henry M. Brackenridge, a lawyer with archaeology as his avocation, remarked some 180 years ago on a voyage on the Missouri River how “mistaken” are those “who look for primitive innocence and simplicity in what they call the state of nature.”  As he traveled along the Missouri, Brackenridge mused on the “moral character” of Indians he encountered: “They have amongst them their poor, their envious, their slanderers, their mean and crouching, their haughty and overbearing, their unfeeling and cruel, their weak and vulgar, their dissipated and wicked; and they have also, their brave and wise, their generous and magnanimous, their rich and hospitable, their pious and virtuous, their frank, kind, and affectionate, and in fact, all the diversity of characters that exists amongst the most refined people.”  One need not believe that moral or emotional or psychological traits are universal (like most anthropologists today, I would assert that to be human is fundamentally to be a cultural being) to appreciate that no simple stereotype satisfied Brackenridge, who refused to reduce Indians to silhouetted nobility or ignobility.

The less one knows about history or culture, the more likely one is to fall for false narratives that portray a certain race or ethnicity as essentially binary: that is, either all good or all bad.  Americans should all know more than we do about the history of where we live, namely North America, and Krech’s book and others that will be discussed in this series provide excellent starting points for anyone wanting to broaden their understanding of this continent’s past and present.  That broader understanding in no way diminishes anyone, but rather demonstrates that Native Americans responded to incentives created by their environment, their culture, their needs, and their knowledge at the time -- just like everyone else.  People are people, after all.

We’ll start with an explanation as to why Native Americans were not environmental angels, certainly not by today’s standards.  As Krech writes in The Ecological Indian:

According to archaeologists, American Indians often so pressured or depleted basic resources like land and trees that they had to switch from one type of food or another to move the locations of their villages.  Native farmers throughout North America transformed landscapes (as farmers everywhere did), not just by burning and clearing woodland for conversion to agricultural land, but through the steadily escalating demand for wood for fuel and construction matching growing populations supported by domesticated crops.  In the East, they cleared fields by slashing and burning forests, then hoed the fields into washboard-like ridges or small hills in which they cultivated crops … In many places, farmers used fields year after year, until declining yields pushed them elsewhere.  With soils rendered infertile, fields choked with weeds, fuel exhausted, and game scarce, Indians left their villages behind for more favorable habitats (perhaps in the knowledge that they would return one day when the ground and trees recovered) … Wood, one of the most crucial resources, seemed particularly susceptible to overuse.

One of primary means by which Native Americans dramatically shaped their environment to their own benefit was through the use of large, raging fires:

Indians used fire to improve subsistence more than any other end.  Across the continent, they deployed fire to improve their access to animals, to improve or eliminate forage for the animals they depended on for food, and to drive and encircle animals … [T]his occurred in much of the East (and elsewhere on the continent), where Indians burned forest in order to eliminate understory and promote the growth of grasses and other forage favored by large animals … Throughout the continent, especially in the fall, Indians hunted animals by surrounding them with fire.  In California, the Shasta encircled mule deer; in the East, the Delaware surrounded white-tailed deer; and on the Plains, many did the same with the buffalo.  The hunts demanded cooperation – in the East, dozens and perhaps hundreds of hunters cooperated in lighting fires around a herd of deer and then killing all that were trapped … Sometimes Indians set grasslands on fire around a buffalo herd, except for several places through which animals were encouraged to pass to escape the flames, where they would wait and kill some “six score in a day.”  Sometimes, as Nicolas Perrot described seventeenth-century Illinois [tribe] as well as the Iowa, Pawnee, and perhaps Omaha, people of an “entire village” enclosed buffaloes inside a summer grass fire … On some hunts they evidently killed as many as fifteen hundred buffaloes.

Native Americans used fire strategically against animals:

Indians routinely burned lands so that animals could not use them.  On the Plains, Indians set fires to ruin forage and force animals to find grasses in areas where they were more easily hunted.  This was common in late fall, when Indians evidently burned large sections of grasslands and subsequently easily found buffalo, elk, and deer in timbered river bottoms where grasses remained unburned … Thus, almost everywhere Indians burned the land to surround, drive, frighten, or scorch the animals and reptiles they sought to eat, and to create proper foraging conditions … for small and large predators (including themselves) that sought them.

And Native Americans used fire strategically against other human beings:

Indians across North America may have used fire most often in contexts relating to subsistence, but they also collectively employed fire as a weapon … As men and women of European descent soon discovered, many Indians unhesitatingly used fire as an offensive and defensive weapon.  They employed tactical fires effectively to drive unwanted strangers or enemies from cover or away altogether … Indians used fire against each other as well as against Europeans … Indians burned other native people’s hunting territory to force them farther away, or burned near a post to prevent hunting and enhance the value of their own provisions … Throughout North America, American Indians burned the land pragmatically to confuse, hinder, maim, or kill their enemies, Indian or white, to drive them from or into cover …

Native Americans also used fire to communicate over long distances, often without much apparent thought regarding the fire’s costs and benefits:

Communication was evidently the predominant cause of summer burns in the central portions of the Plains.  Here (and elsewhere) Indians used fire to communicate with each other almost endless possible matters including success in war, arrival of white people, sightings of buffaloes, and so on.  Often large fires … could and did rage out of control … Still others spoke of the loss of hundreds of acres from the “most trivial signal” …

And Native Americans used fire to simply clear their path:

In some parts of North America, Indians lit fires to ease travel.  In the East, Europeans often remarked that Indians burned the woods to make travel through them easier.

As Krech summarizes:

[T]he harmful consequences of fire simply cannot be ignored.  The evidence that Indians lit fires that then were allowed to burn destructively and without regard to ecological consequences is abundant.  In 1796, David Thompson remarked that Indians were “frequently very careless” when it came to extinguishing fires set in the northern forests … Thompson speculated that “this devastation is nothing to the Indian,” for the simple reason that “his country is large.” … By the time Europeans arrived, North America was a manipulated continent.  Indians had long since altered the landscape by burning or clearing woodland for farming and fuel.  Despite European images of an untouched Eden, this nature was cultural not virgin, anthropogenic not primeval, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Indian uses of fire.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore the extent to which Native Americans hunted the buffalo, deer, and beaver populations.

Complete list of essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10.