Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian

Introduction

This is not a book conceived primarily to assess Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999), but it is inevitable that it deals with Krech’s book and its 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. That this event—the book’s publication and reception—is a cultural event rather than merely an academic one is evident by the amount and intensity of discussion it fostered, in academic seminars and on talk radio at the end of the 1990s. That this epoch is now over has been brought home to us repeatedly : by the coming of the millennium and the contested presidential election, the stock market dot-com crash, and, of course, 9/11. Pointedly, the conference at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming upon which the present volume is partly based was originally scheduled for that tragic week in September, and was postponed until the following spring. So, if this is not exactly a contemporaneous assessment of the controversy over The Ecological Indian, it has the benefit of distance and perspective . Of course, many of the same issues and themes persist in the present, and the problematic that Krech explored has stimulated further scholarship (e.g., Hunn et al. 2004). However, a new set of issues having to do with cultural difference has taken priority for the foreseeable future. So rather than ask, “What is it about the ecological Indian critique that so sparked controversy?,” we must ask “What was it?” Introduction Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis xx | michael e. harkin and david rich lewis Like most motivating symbols, and all symbols in the political arena, the ecological Indian was eminently ambiguous (see Kertzer 1988, 57–76; Ortner 1973). On one level, of course, all populations and cultures are “ecological” in the rigorous sense of the term; that is, they necessarily have recurring, structured relations with the natural world. We might call this Ecological1 . On a second level we must address the concept of sustainability. While most Native American cultures demonstrated gross-level sustainability— the ability to persist in the same environment over millennia, although not necessarily at the same population level (e.g., the Mayas and the AnasaziPueblos , who suffered population declines in the wake of ecological and/or climatic changes)—the record with regard to particular species and even entire adaptations (e.g., terrestrial vs. maritime, faunal vs. plant) is not so clear. Thus, the precontact extirpation of game species such as elk in the intermontane West and seals in California seem clearly to be linked to human activity and resulted in a change in adaptive focus (see Kay and Simmons 2002). We will label the sustainability criterion Ecological2 . A third sense of the term is located at the level of discourse, where “ecological” refers to political support for sustainability, conservation, and a host of issues specific to industrial society, such as global warming, pollution controls , recycling, alternative fuels. We will label this Ecological3 . This is the most problematic sense, as it refers to an ideological matrix specific to industrial and post-industrial societies and thus is not relevant or appropriate to most of the Native American cases, from Paleoindians to the reservation period (see Nadasdy 1999, 2005). It is problematic in a second sense as well, insofar as it is essentially a utopian discourse, one with no actual referent. Environmentalism, as this ideology is more commonly called, meets many of the criteria of a religious movement, including the weekly ritual of recycling cans and newspapers (see Hitt 2003). Although it acts in the world, as a religious discourse it envisions an alternative, otherworldly reality. In sum, we agree with Paul Nadasdy’s recent position that environmentalism is a complex and contradictory continuum that is in most ways more problematic than the ecological practices of indigenous peoples; our tripartite model should not, however, be confused with his (Nadasdy 2005). introduction | xxi Krech consciously chooses to operate on all three levels. Moreover, it is clear that he envisioned a book that would address the three levels in a somewhat ambiguous manner. As one prominent critic of Krech’s told me, the use of the somewhat outdated term “ecological” to refer to what would, today, more commonly be called “environmental” or “conservationist” is...