Debunking the Myth of the Ecologically Noble "Indian" (properly titled Natives, First Nations, or First Peoples):

Since contact, European settlers and their ancestors in North America have come to believe a series of sweeping oversimplifications regarding the First Nations, assumptions applied to a population mistakenly imagined as part of a monolithic entity, one which is seen as at least being relatively homogeneous in terms of custom and culture. This has led to such overarching stereotypes as the “uncivilized savage,” which in turn generated its more positive mythological antitheses, that of the “noble savage.” Now, as history has lurched onward, this same mythical archetype has developed modern offshoots, the debunking of which is the mandate of this paper. The Aboriginal populations of North America have been victim to erroneously conflated perspectives since European contact. Though attitudes have evolved, this tendency towards the mass conflation of such diverse and complex societies alongside how they interact with one another and the world around them has led to much self-perpetuating misinformation. Among this flood of misinformation, much of the modern environmentalist movement has taken the old stereotype of the “noble savage” and renovated it to assert that aboriginal peoples are the original conservationists, having lived in a pristine, conscientious balance with nature. The issue with this misguided appraisal of all aboriginal peoples is that it relies on the claim that Natives did not intervene in the environment in any significant way (such as species overkill) whereas recent evidence suggests that many aboriginal populations had deliberately and significantly been altering environments to meet their needs for millennia prior to contact.

In the epilogue to his controversial 1978 book “The Keepers of the Game”, Calvin Martin points to this stereotype of the ecological Indian as being the assumed equal and opposite reaction to the stereotype of European-Americans as environmentally destructive and irresponsible¹. In this sense, the narrative of both myths rely on and reciprocate with one another dangerously, creating cultural presuppositions that bleed into the ideological dispositions of the modern global environmental movements. In looking to challenge these myths, Martin points to the fur trade in Canada during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and how tribes became complicit in, and, in some places, the major driving force behind the commercial overkill of fur-bearing animals. As an example, he found that by 1635, the Huron tribe of the Lake Simcoe area in modern-day Ontario “had reduced their stock of beaver to the point where Father Paul Le Jeune, the Jesuit, could flatly declare that they had none”². This severe exploitation of such fur-bearing animals as beavers was at its most acute within the vicinity of major trading posts and among the tribes already closely associated with the trade, such as the Mi'qmaq and League Iroquois. This, in stark contrast to the tribes beyond effective European influence at the time who enjoyed abundant beavers and other fur-bearing animals within their regional localities.³ Quoting Nicolas Denys, a merchant who spent 40 years living with the Mi'qmaq, Martin relays that "few in a house [beaver den] are saved; [the Mi'qmaq] would take all. The disposition of the Indians is not to spare the little ones any more than the big ones. They killed all of each kind of animal that there was when they could capture it."⁴ From this, Martin extrapolates the following: “In sum, the game which by all accounts had been initially so plentiful was now being systematically exterminated by the Indians themselves.”⁵ Of course, as must be noted, this is due to the mass incentive provided by trading posts which were looking to satisfy the high demand for pelts in the European market. Denys, already quoted above, comments on this fact when he says that, prior to and during the formative years of contact, the Mi'maq's “greatest task was to feed well and to go hunting. They did not lack animals, which they killed only in proportion as they had need of them”⁶.

In his Aboriginal overkill hypothesis, Charles E. Kay of Utah State University asserts that “[i]t is often claimed ... that Native Americans' religious belief systems prevented those peoples from over-utilizing their resources.” However, “Native Americans tended to view wildlife as their spiritual kin where success in the hunt was obtained by following prescribed rituals and atonement after the kill. A scarcity of animals or failure in the hunt were not viewed as biological or ecological phenomena, but rather as a spiritual consequence of social events or circumstances”⁷. In other words, if Native Americans could not find game to harvest, it was not due to overkill; it was because their animist deities were displeased. In his paper “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian”, ethnographer Paul Nadasdy discusses these same misunderstandings when he points to the example of the Rock Cree first nation (of what is today northern Manitoba) who did not believe humans could affect or deplete animal populations through over-hunting, thus making them anti-conservationist in the modern Euro-American sense.⁸ During the pre-contact era, the Rock Cree concept of respect came bundled with the belief that all hunted game would be reincarnated and offer itself to the same hunter at some point in the future. This ideological framework also assumed that hunters had to kill all the animals they saw, whether or not necessity demanded. This was because it was thought that if an animal offered itself to a hunter, to refrain was offensive to the creature, thus jeopardizing ones chance of receiving these offerings in the future. It is thought this is what caused the Cree hunters to play a major (though unwitting) role in the near-extinction of local beaver populations in the early to mid-1800's.⁹ In fact, there is no evidence to suggest any prohibition on waste or over-hunting until well after European contact, likely as a result of the already mentioned near-eradication of the local beaver, after which it is thought the Rock Cree began to gradually reformulate their relationship with animals, coming to see human over-hunting as one potential reason for population declines. After awhile, this prohibition on waste entered as a key element into the Cree concept of respect.¹⁰

The example of the Rock Cree of northern Manitoba is only one historical trajectory among many. Whereas the Cree eventually adopted something akin to typical conservationist principles, the Yup'ik Eskimos of western Alaska still hold strongly to the belief that hunted animals are constantly reborn and that as such, over-hunting is impossible. This has lead to much tension between the Yup'ik and state wildlife management,¹¹ muddying the monolithic myth of the ecologically noble savage into a larger, richer, and more ambiguous arena of complexities in need of deeper investigation. Having partaken in over-hunting in some places while subsisting on settled agriculture complete with urban centres in others, the Aboriginal populations of North America were much more complex, consequential, and advanced than has generally been recognized until very recently. In whole, it can be said that pre-contact natives exerted a much more anthropogenic influence on their environment for innumerably diverse reasons, all fitted within a spiritual framework often largely divorced of any 'conservationist' ethic as we would understand it today. In conclusion, with all of the provided examples, author John Green's pithy maxim rings true: “truth resists simplicity,”¹² as it always has and always will.

1. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 160.

2. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade, 27.

3. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade, 27.

4. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade, 28.

5. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade, 28.

6. Calvin Martin, Keepers Of The Game: Indian-Animal Relationships And The Fur Trade, 33.

7.Charles Kay, Aboriginal Overkill And Native Burning: Implications For Modern Ecosystem Management, ebook, 1st ed. (Logan, Utah: World Journal of Applied Forestry, 1995), accessed September 23, 2016, 122-123.

8. Nadasdy, Paul. "Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism." Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 291-331. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, 308.

9. Nadasdy, Paul. "Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism," 308-309.

10. Nadasdy, Paul. "Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism," 309.

11. Nadasdy, Paul. "Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism," 309.

12. YOU ARE WRONG!, video (YouTube: Hank Green, 2011). 

PLEASE NOTE: THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AS AN ESSAY FOR MY UNIVERSITY HISTORY COURSE, "CANADA TO CONFEDERATION."