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 17th
and 18th
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.
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.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AS AN ESSAY FOR MY UNIVERSITY HISTORY COURSE, "CANADA TO CONFEDERATION."
