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3. Myths of the Ecological Whitemen: Histories, Science, and RIghts in North American-Native American Relations
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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In the final chapter of The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999), Shepard Krech sets out an argument about how the Northern Algonquian peoples came to be conservationists by learning from Europeans during the course of the commercial fur trade.1 This argument synthesizes his review of the ethnohistories of beaver conservation in the subarctic and concludes his main argument for the volume as a whole. In this chapter I show how his argument and the policy conclusions he draws from it are significantly flawed. I do agree with a careful critique of the popular idea that Native Americans were universally ecologists, or environmentalists or conservationists . These are often “mythic” statements, as Krech argues, that obscure the complexity and diversity of indigenous peoples’ lives and of their uses of lands and resources. However, while rejecting the myth, we still need to carefully consider the ways in which specific Native American peoples have, or have not, under varying conditions, acted with respect and caring for lands, animals, and other peoples. I hope to give a better sense of some Native Americans’ relationships to the environment, and also of relationships between Native Americans and North Americans. Krech’s choice of the ethnohistorical cases on which he based his fur-trade analyses, his selections from those cases of textual passages to quote, and his quick summaries of the available sources catch many of the highlights 3. Myths of the Ecological Whitemen Histories, Science, and Rights in North American–Native American Relations Harvey A. Feit myths of the ecological whitemen | 53 of the available literature on the northern fur trades. Furthermore, his ability to make this material accessible to nonspecialist readers is impressive. His analyses in this chapter are based primarily on six important published ethnohistorical case studies, each of which, he notes, is specific to a particular area and time period (1999, 175–76). From this disparate and therefore fragmented set of records he attempts to synthesize a single historical account of Euro-Americans’ conservation pedagogy for a vast continental expanse occupied by the Northern Algonquian peoples.2 These peoples’ lands stretched from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, and the recorded fur trade covered three and a half centuries.3 Krech’s analysis of this material is replete with surprising omissions, puzzling scholarly decisions, and problematic conclusions. In this chapter I therefore avoid examining Krech’s choices of evidence or the diversity of the historical record in order to focus on the structure of the arguments Krech presents. I explore four central problems with his analyses. First, Krech neglects to assess the effectiveness of fur traders’ gamerestoration policies or to consider whether the policies of nineteenth-century European fur traders could be considered conservation practices in a contemporary sense. Yet Krech argues that their policies were the primary means of restoring beaver populations and that they were the source of contemporary Northern Algonquian conservation practices. Second, Krech’s treatment of Northern Algonquians is equally problematic . He fails to consider whether the most widely acknowledged conservation practice used by Northern Algonquians during the nineteenth century, hunting territories, could have been learned from other Northern Algonquians , not mainly from fur traders. He also argues that Northern Algonquians’ religious statements about human-animal relationships were demonstrably unrelated to “Western ecology” and to conserving game populations. But he omits to examine these statements in the light of the findings of biological research, which concur with some of the more enigmatic of them. Third, having found fundamental problems with Krech’s analyses of both fur traders and Northern Algonquians, I trace the changing under- [3.235.249.219] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:12 GMT) 54 | harvey a. feit standings and intercultural communications between them by examining the process on a smaller scale. A case study of a mid-nineteenth-century Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) beaver-restocking experiment shows how hbc leadership initially misunderstood beaver conservation and ecology and how Northern Algonquians were involved in the hbc leadership’s beginning to understand ideas of conservation and ecology. Fourth, at the very end of his analyses Krech makes political and legal pronouncements about the rights that Native Americans can have today. He bases these policy arguments on the lack of conservation knowledge and practices among Northern Algonquians during the fur trade and on his conclusion that their present practices are derived from those of EuroAmericans . His policy arguments are misleading, both with respect to the present status of indigenous rights recognition and in relation...