The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (review)

The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. By Shepard Krech III. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 318 pp., preface, introduction, index. $27.95 cloth.)

Every investigator of the course of events in time, scientist or historian or whatever, wants a starting line before which all was "without form and void." And then, on the investigator's signal, change begins, the significance of which can be gauged in terms of measurements from the starting line. Our astronomers have posited a supremely useful starting line, that is, the Big Bang, the absoluteness of which leaves us investigators of the human experience glowering enviously.

Euro-Americans have been comfortable with the date of their arrival in the Western Hemisphere as the American Big Bang. Before that, according to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the forest was "primeval," a forest that, according to historian James Truslow Adams, covered the eastern third of North America so thickly that "squirrel might have leaped from bough to bough for a thousand miles and never seen a flicker of sunshine on the ground, so contiguous were the boughs and so dense the leafage." ¹ And then in 1492 or, if you will, 1607 or maybe 1620, God breathed upon Columbus or John Smith or William Bradford and the engine of American history coughed and started, and it has been going ever since.

Shepard Krech III, in his new and excellent amalgam of the research and publications of recent generations of anthropologists and students of American "prehistory," deprives us of that clear and convenient starting date, leaving us in the windy expanse of a history that extends back not four or five hundred but thousands upon thousands of years. He is most at ease with a Native American arrival date of 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, though he nods respectfully to those who claim even more ancient debuts. By any and all informed estimates, a piddling five percent at the very most of the history of human presence in the Americas has passed since Columbus, Smith, Bradford & Co. debarked on American beaches. Human history in the Western Hemisphere began before capitalism, before the wheel, before agriculture, possibly before the bow and arrow.

But we still long for the convenience of an American Big Bang, and many of us have connived to switch from a quantitative to a qualitative designation of the American starting line. Okay, Native Americans got to North America long before the aforementioned C., S., B. & Co., but they did not change things much at all. They flowed with the ecological flow so smoothly that the continental ecosystem stayed much the same as if they had remained in Siberia. So, again, the starting gun (an especially appropriate metaphor) did not go off until the white folks arrived. At that moment, say the Euro-American reactionaries, certifiably human occupation began. At that moment, say the ecologically aroused, white capitalists began to displace "the Ecological Indian" and the destruction of the American environment began.

Krech points to the Hohokam canals, to the Cahokia's pyramids, to the mosaic of forest and field created east of the Mississippi by the Amerindians' wielding of the firestick, and declares that pre-Columbian America was a "manipulated environment" (122). He does not go so far as to embrace Paul Martin's theory that the Amerindians exterminated most of America's megafauna, but does assess it respectfully, and does entertain the notion that the Hohokam and the Cahokia were in decline before Jamestown and Plymouth because of their abuse of their environments. Native Americans were, in his view, not so numerous as to have gutted the ecosystem of which they were members, but they were fully human—that is, they did rearrange and sometimes overexploit it.

Krech rejects the 1492 Big Bang, yet does endorse the view that the coming of the Old World peoples was a catastrophe, especially epidemiologically, for Native Americans. However, he is always restrained in theorizing and on the outlook for specific data...