The Return of the Savage

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

As an effort to undermine a pernicious environmental mythology that threatens to turn Indians into nature—ripe for development—The Ecological Indian is praiseworthy. And yet, for a book that seeks to synthesize a new generation of scholarship, perhaps the most striking thing about this book is how old it feels. Dated diction is part of the problem. These days, "ecology" refers less to natural, waste-free living than to relationships between organisms. Ecological Indians? In the usage that prevails, we are all ecological because we all live in webs of biota and ecosystems.

But the problem of diction is merely a symptom of a larger weakness in the book's premise. Krech is right that Indians should not be reduced to symbols of natural living. But in attacking one mythology, he invokes others. To Krech, the epitome of enlightened attitudes to nature is the prevention of waste, which he calls "conservation." Early conservationists, particularly Ernest Thompson Seton, frequently feature in this book as paragons of natural stewardship. This is problematic, for the early conservationists he so admires often battled "waste" of natural resources by denying them to large groups of people, including immigrants, poor whites, African-Americans, and, especially, Indians. Conservationists achieved some remarkable things—such as the creation of national parks and national forests—but the very fact that those achievements often came at the expense of Indians (many of whom were expelled from ancestral lands to make room for national parks, for example) makes Krech's valorizing of conservation and discounting of Indian environmental sensibility more than a little jarring.

In the end, his arguments are deeply troubling. Replicating the critique of Indian hunters that white conservationists leveled generations back, he ultimately goes to extremes to portray Indians as at best spotty stewards of the American land. As he points out, evidence for Indian culpability in the Pleistocene extinctions is very weak. And yet in his view, it is enough that Indians hunted animals that would someday be extinct, thereby pushing "certain species already heading toward their doom over the edge to extinction" (41). By this analysis Indians could be held responsible for the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the carolina parakeet, animals that they hunted but that were undeniably driven to extinction by white settlers and the expansion of the transatlantic economy.

Krech seems unwilling to acknowledge Indian environmental sensibilities where there is strong evidence for them. Numerous environmental historians have traced the Indian role in maintaining the gallery forests and verdant meadows of the New World. To Krech, Indian cultural practices, Indian choices, had little bearing in this ecology, which "was mainly an artifact of demography and epidemiology" (99). That is, Indians never came in large numbers, and imported Eurasian pathogens killed more of them, and this did the work of maintaining nature; Indians were virtuous mostly in their absence. Indeed, Indians "often so pressured or depleted basic resources like land and trees that they had to switch from one type of food to another or move the locations of their villages" (76–77). Variegated food bases and shifting cultivation are characteristic of hunter-gatherer systems the world over. Might not these strategies in themselves be construed as an environmental sensibility? In ignoring that question, Krech goes beyond arguing that Indians were unecological. To him, apparently, they trashed the place.

He reserves his heaviest blows for his discussion of buffalo hunting. Various scholars have argued that Indian hunters diminished the great herds of the nineteenth century. But Krech extends these arguments by quoting contemporary white critics of Indian bison hunting as if they were disinterested observers. After pages of bloody accounts of bison slaughter by Indians, he denounces the toll of "wasted animals" (143) and the tendency of later authors to overlook such improvidence in favor of "stressing the sacrality of the...