Buffalo Jump. Charles M. Russell
While the nation performs a fecal analysis of the Iowa Caucuses, we here in this backwater of the blogosphere have been preoccupied with grander things, though poignant and tinged with loss. Ghost Dancing and chasing buffalo.
Talking Story about uncontacted tribes remaining in a “world laid bare.”
Plumbing “Deep Time In Texas.”
And we have scouts out there who know the territory — and they send us hieing off down strange and winding scholarly paths.
Thom Eley bird-dogged this study titled Aboriginal Overkill, from the journal Human Nature by Charles E. Kay. I haven’t downloaded the PDF — the price tag is a bit stout for the book budget at the moment. But the abstract gets the point across.
Prior to European influence, predation by Native Americans was the major factor limiting the numbers and distribution of ungulates in the Intermountain West. This hypothesis is based on analyses of (1) the efficiency of Native American predation, including cooperative hunting, use of dogs, food storage, use of nonungulate foods, and hunting methods; (2) optimal-foraging studies; (3) tribal territory boundary zones as prey reservoirs; (4) species ratios, and sex and age of aboriginal ungulate kills; (5) impact of European diseases on aboriginal populations; and (6) synergism between aboriginal and carnivore predation. Native Americans had no effective conservation practices, and the manner in which they harvested ungulates was the exact opposite of any predicted conservation strategy. Native Americans acted in ways that maximized their individual fitness regardless of the impact on the environment. For humans, conservation is seldom an evolutionarily stable strategy. By limiting ungulate numbers and purposefully modifying the vegetation with fire, Native Americans structured entire plant and animal communities. Because ecosystems with native peoples are entirely different than those lacking aboriginal populations, a “hands-off” or “natural regulation” approach by today’s land managers will not duplicate the ecological conditions under which those ecosystems developed. The modern concept of wilderness as areas without human influence is a myth. North America was not a “wilderness” waiting to be discovered, instead it was home to tens of millions of aboriginal peoples before European-introduced diseases decimated their numbers.
This is in Deuce Richardson’s wheelhouse. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the current scholarship on pre-contact conditions in North America — albeit primarily focused on the eastern third of North America.
Pre-contact North America — or Africa for that matter, or anywhere else — was not “pristine.” Nor, as the Crow Creek Massacre demonstrates, was the land free of deliberate, exterminationist warfare. No Eden. Or, perhaps, better stated: Et In Arcadia Ego.
Of course, such studies can be corrupted into arrows in the quivers of Culture Warriors. “See, the aboriginal peoples manipulated their environment — ergo, making the world safe for WalMart is the highest endeavor of mankind.” No. Hell no!
What these studies do — in addition to moving us closer to understanding of our ancient reality — is more fully humanize peoples who often exist to us as abstractions and symbols. The native peoples had economies; they manipulated their environment; they had raid-and-trade networks of astonishing reach and complexity.
For the native peoples, the world was not “wilderness” — it was just their world.
Somewhere in there lies the key to understanding — if not resolving — the frontiersman’s paradox. Most of the men I have studied and profiled loved the world they found on the frontier — the wildness, the opportunity for exploration, discovery (and personal profit).
And in their drive to discover, explore and profit, they changed and enabled the destruction of the thing they loved. The tragic theme of every A.B. Guthrie novel. It’s the story of Lonesome Dove — Gus and Call who ran down the wild Comanche and quelled the border bandits, then were rendered bored and restless by the tameness they wrought.
Maybe I’ll tease it out and explain it to myself someday; maybe it will elude me. Doesn’t matter. It’s all just chasing buffalo, in the end, I guess.
Paul McNamee says
If there isn’t a song called “Frontiersman’s Paradox,” you should take a stab at writing it.
JimC says
Work-in-progress: But I’m going with the more poetic Chasing Buffalo.
deuce says
Great post. Plenty of people try to say America was a “Garden of Eden” before Columbus. It was, in the sense of a “garden” being a tended piece of land. Native Americans used fire and other strategies to radically modify their habitats. Whether that was good or bad, it certainly wasn’t “stepping lightly on the land”.
As always, I recommend Charles C. Mann’s “1491” and “1493”.
Craig Rullman says
Yes! This post brought to mind the same books. Those two books are an excellent treatise, and for my money blow the lid off the myths that are now in currency.
Keith West says
I need to read Mann’s books.
Keith West says
I did a brief post the other night on an ancient bison kill north of where I live, and in the background reading, I came across some material that discussed how much meat was wasted. I hadn’t really given that aspect of a bison hunt much thought.
I guess that simply means people are people, no matter their level of technology.
JimC says
And that gives me a nearly mystic sense of “rightness” with the world — if that makes any sense at all.
JimC says
Holy smokes, Keith, that’s a delightful little piece of synchronicity. And a great, post, too. Linked to it above and here it is again.
http://adventuresfantastic.com/dispatches/deep-time-in-texas/#more-130
Great to see you getting active with that blog. I’ll add it to The Muster.
Keith West says
Thank you very much, sir. I guess great minds think alike.
I’ll be attempting to post there at least once or twice a month, if at all possible.
Norman Andrews says
Great post thank you, I guess it dispels the kind of “old hippie ” myths that everything was golden back in time , people have always done what they had too , to get by .
Norm.
JimC says
X-ring. Thanks Norm.
Wayne says
As Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind, put it, pre columbian America wasn’t wilderness it was habitat.
Do read 1491 and 1493.
Lane Batot says
Okay, guys, I’ll TRY and control myself here, but NO WAY is the often superior conservation cultural views of many, many indigenous peoples a “hippy myth”! Many of these IDEALS(and keep that word in mind, cultural ideals may not always be practiced by everyone in that culture!) were recorded by ethnologists, explorers, and historians LONG, LONG before any hippies appeared! We in this modern Western world have been BRAINWASHED into thinking environmental degradation is inevitable with humans, regardless of their ethnicity, but that is very very WRONG! For HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of years this DID NOT occur(at the level it has in modern times), and virtually every culture RESISTED the cancer-like spread of the real culprit– Intensive, INDUSTRIAL Agriculture! Some successfully resisted for centuries, but Industrial Agriculture virtually always, eventually wins out, alas. Everyone should be required to read(and reread) Quinn’s “Ishmael” and the sequel “My Ishmael” to see how culturally blinded most of us have been! That said, I will admit….to be continued….
Lane Batot says
….I will admit that there is plenty of evidence more “primitive” peoples DID wastefully use the earth’s resources at times(like, for instance, the likelihood that Native Americans contributed greatly to the extinction of the Mega-Fauna in North and South America)–but perhaps that is exactly WHY they had developed these environmentally sound ideals, that we would be wise to listen too! They’ve already “been-there-done-that”! And NO WAY, no matter how destructive or manipulative some “primitive” cultures have been with their environments, it in NO WAY compares to modern destruction that has occurred since Industrial Agriculture(as opposed to simple subsistence agriculture, nomadic pastoralism, or hunter-gatherer societies) began it’s take-over of the planet and our species…….
JimC says
There’s no question that the footprint of native peoples was too small to have anything like the catastrophic impact that industrialized western civilization has had. I guess that my takeaway is that it’s not so much what we do as it is the means of doing it and how many people are doing it that makes the difference. Scale and intensity make for a qualitative as well as quantitative change in an action.
lane batot says
Indeed, scale and intensity DO have a lot to do with it, BUT, I have read some PROFOUND ethical views espoused by aboriginal peoples from Australia, throughout Indonesia and Asia, and across Africa, as well as North and South America! Some of those primitive naked savages had some in depth philosophies regarding their place in Nature–definitely more of RESPECT, and part of the whole process, rather than entitled masters, as Industrial Agricultural based cultures tend to. Old. old ways still practiced today. I remember a Cherokee basket weaving course I took as a college elective(the institution of enforced learning I was incarcerated in was near the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in Western N. C.), where our teacher was Edmund Youngbird, who taught the class in a very traditional way, certainly! We had to gather our own materials in the forest, including roots for dyes. When searching for plants, you ALWAYS passed the first THREE you found, and only selected from the FOURTH, to insure there were always some left to carry on. Most peoples that live close to the land develop such ethics–heck, that trapper in the posts about “The Happy People” in the Taiga, spoke of how they detest greedy, wasteful trappers!
JimC says
You are right, of course. That was a bit of clumsy writing on my part — it’s not just scale and intensity. There is a difference in outlook. Genaddy’s thoughts on trappers came to mind for me as well.
lane batot says
….And, incidentally, I actually did a college term paper(for one of my Anthropology classes) on how the introduction of the horse to Plains Indian cultures, allowed them to be far more selective and less wasteful in killing buffalo, as before when they utilized these “Piskuns”(Blackfoot word), or swamps/bogs and such for stampeding buffalo. And how, with the addition of the horse, it made their lifestyle even MORE sustainable! And I got an “A” on that paper! One of the very few of those I ever got! Ha!