Re: M-I: Ecology and the American Indian

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

     Well, this is now the third list I am replying to 
Louis P. on this on.  Don't disagree fundamentally, but 
find this generalized romanticization of "Indians" a bit 
much.  There is and was a lot of diversity among tribes on 
many grounds.  Many fit this idealized view that Louis 
presents, but not all did.  An extreme example is the 
self-destroying Mayans, but there are plenty of other 
examples.  This is not as simple as it seems.  
     Note that I am not defending European technologies or 
approaches here.
Barkley Rosser
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard
> nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the
> European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they
> developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that
> were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling
> over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the
> animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and
> the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An
> assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the
> whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan,
> "An injury to one was an injury to all."
> 
> The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with
> nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science.
> Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching
> radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of
> their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had
> identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role
> of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their
> past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it
> developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern,
> "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will
> simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in
> it for some.
> 
> The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially
> for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a
> coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My
> friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping
> us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness."
> 
> In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of
> restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the
> Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the
> rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future
> crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers.
> For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a
> small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of
> tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds
> that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the
> plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and
> cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will
> come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it."
> 
> In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take
> less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict
> that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed
> elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants
> they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck
> it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve three
> specimens for future growth. When the Navajo herbalist is out collecting
> "deer-plant medicine", a member of the parsnip family, he first approaches
> a large specimen and prays, "I have come for you, to take you from the
> ground..." However, at this point he takes a smaller specimen since his
> faith instructs him that "you never take the plant to whom you pray."
> 
> The same kind of restraint applies to animal husbandry as well. The Hopi
> have a custom of releasing one male and female mountain sheep when they had
> surrounded a pack. "So as to make more sheep for the next hunting" was the
> reason they gave. When a tribe failed to observe these types of
> environmental measures, it could actually provoke war. Iroquois legend
> states that they once made war against the Illinois and Miami tribes when
> they were killing female as well as male beavers. Sparing females is a
> cardinal rule of these hunters. A spirit fawn tells the Navajo, "If you are
> walking on an unused road and see the tracks of a doe, or if a doe catches
> up with you from behind, that is I. And knowing this you will not bother me."
> 
> Another key element of Indian ecological behavior was game "fallowing."
> Although this term originates in agriculture and refers to the practice of
> leaving portions of field to rest, the tribes followed a similar practice
> in hunting. The Cree and other Algonkian tribes worked only a portion of
> their hunting grounds in a given year and let the fallow areas recover. The
> Ojibwa of Parry Island in southeastern Ontario invoked their spirits to
> give legitimacy to this practice. The "shadows" of slain animals would
> cause living animals to grow wary in a certain area. Hence, they took care
> not to produce too many of these shadows and kept a natural balance between
> hunter and prey.
> 
> The value system absolutely excluded wanton destruction of animals. Hopis
> told John Bierhorst, the author of "The Way of the Earth: Native America
> and the Environment," that when they were children, they practiced shooting
> at small animals and birds. But their elders warned them not to kill any
> creature that they did not intend to eat. A Lushootseed man told him that
> he never forgot his father's disappointment when he caught him gaffing fish
> just 'for the fun of it.' He chastised him, "My son, you must respect them.
> You must not kill them for the fun of it." Nora Thompson Dean, a Delaware
> woman, remembers the time her brother killed a crane for sport. Their
> mother told them that "we don't kill things for sport" and made them eat
> the dark, tough flesh of the bird as a lesson.
> 
> The European invaded viewed these practices as wasteful. From the very
> beginning, the North American Indian innate conservationist existence was
> in conflict with the goals of farmers, hunters, miners and ranchers who
> sought to make money from the land and from animals. When they exhausted
> the land, they simply would move elsewhere. The only way they could carry
> out such predatory commercial activities was by removing the Indian. They
> found a  rationale for the "ethnic cleansing" of the Indian from the land
> in a variety of European religious and philosophical literature.
> 
> In 1978, Texas gubernatorial candidate asked a question that epitomized the
> invader's outlook. "Is this area of Texas more productive, more fulfilling
> of God's purpose--are we playing our role of destiny with this broad
> expanse of Texas--than when there were five thousand Indians here eating
> insects?" Clement's racist query is deeply rooted in the American colonial
> past.
> 
> The Judeo-Christian religion, unlike the Indian's, was amenable to
> ecological despoliation. Genesis 1:28 says, "And God blessed them, and God
> said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
> subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of
> the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." The
> notion of "subduing" nature was alien to the Indian tribes.
> 
> The colonial priests worked hard to find theological justification for the
> dispossession of the Indian. When Roger Williams criticized Puritan seizure
> of Indian land, Reverend John Cotton rejected the idea that the tribes
> could have title to the land since they had no concept of "improving" it.
> He said, "We do not conceive that it a just Title to so vast a Continent,
> to make no other improvements of Acres in it."
> 
> By the time of the American Revolution, the land utilization argument had
> become part of the conventional wisdom, according to William T. Hagan.
> ("Justifying Dispossession of the Indian: the Land Utilization Argument,"
> in "American Indian Environments," edited by Christopher Vecsey and Robert
> W. Venables, Syracuse Univ., 1980.) In 1774, Lord Dunmore, the governor of
> Virginia, denounced the "avidity and restlessness" of the Indian. "They do
> not conceive that Government has any right to forbid their taking
> possession of a Vast tract of Country, either uninhabited, or which Serves
> only as a Shelter for few Scattered Tribes of Indians."
> 
> In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the war against the Indian
> intensified. As the new, secular republic sought to dispossess the Indian,
> the politicians invoked religious arguments less frequently. Instead
> straightforward arguments of an "economic" nature prevailed. It was a
> "waste" of precious natural resources to allow a bunch of ignorant Indians
> to go about hunting, fishing or picking nuts and berries. Governor William
> Henry Harrison of Indiana expressed this view in a merciless fashion, "Is
> one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature,
> the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator
> to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization,
> of science, and of true religion."
> 
> Andrew Jackson launched the genocidal war against the Indian that came to a
> culmination in 1890. He was the first American President to fully
> understand the degree to which American capitalism was in conflict with
> Indian rights. In 1830, he said, "Philanthropy could not wish to see this
> continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our
> forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and
> ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with
> cities, towns and prosperous farms...occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy
> people."
> 
> So what kind of country did Andrew Jackson and his successors build, once
> they had finished murdering the inconvenient Indian or shunted him off to
> reservations? Once they got rid of the Indian, they were free to launch two
> important revolutions on the land: the mechanization of agriculture and the
> adoption of high input farming.
> 
> The shortage of labor in the USA spurred the introduction of machinery.
> Mechanical reapers were more necessary here than in Europe in the 1860s,
> where labor was still plentiful. The introduction of the internal
> combustion engine was the breakthrough that industrial farming required.
> There 250,000 tractors on US farms in 1920 and 2.3 million in 1945. Other
> mechanical devices soon followed, from electric milkers to combine
> harvesters. As mechanization increased, the size of the farm increased and
> the number of laborers decreased. There were 7 million farms in the 1930s,
> while the number dropped to below 3 million in the 1980s.
> 
> Until the 19th century, farms relied on manure and composts produced by
> organic processes. The discovery of fertilizers changed all this. At first,
> the farmers used relatively harmless substances like guano, bat dung. Later
> industrial companies began to mine phosphates around the world, from North
> Africa to some Pacific Islands. But the real breakthrough occurred when
> chemists were able to develop artificial fertilizers in the 1840s, the
> superphosphates. When scientists developed nitrogenenous fertilizers in the
> 1920s, the tendency to regard agriculture as a business increased. "Input"
> and "output" were key factors, just as they were in a Ford automobile
> plant. The relationship between soil, water, animal and human being began
> to fade into the background. The soil was no longer a living organism, as
> the American Indian had considered it, but a platform to hold crops while a
> variety of chemicals were poured on them.
> 
> Since 1945 there has been more and more of an emphasis on single crop
> production. Larger and larger farms are devoted to corn, wheat, alfalfa,
> sorghum or other commercial grains, especially those that can be used as
> livestock feed. Monocrops are more susceptible to disease. Hence, chemical
> herbicides and pesticides become more important. The amount of such
> substances sprayed on crops in the USA since 1953 has risen fifteen-fold.
> The new book "Living Downstream" by Sandra Steingraber includes maps that
> show increased cancer rates near counties with increased use of such
> substances. Ms. Steingraber has a doctorate in biology and grew up in one
> such county in Michigan. She is also a breast cancer survivor.
> 
> Livestock production changed dramatically in the nineteenth century as
> well, once the "wasteful" Indians were removed from grazing land. At first,
> sheep and cattle were allowed free range on the grasslands where the
> buffalo had lived. As herds of such animals left the soil exhausted, the
> rancher simply moved elsewhere since he thought that land was limitless.
> The damage left by the sheep led John Muir, the 19th century
> conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, led him to describe the
> animals as "hoofed locusts."
> 
> In the 20th century, dwindling grazing lands forced the livestock industry
> to move indoors, where it raises animals in small compartments and
> artificial feed. Such conditions are the cause of a variety of endemic ills
> such as Mad Cow Disease, e-coli bacteria and the recent appearance of
> poultry flu in Hong Kong. Clive Ponting's "A Green History of the World"
> (Penguin, 1991) contains a stark picture of the conditions of livestock
> animals. "Chickens are kept in over-crowded battery cages, cattle in small
> stalls and pigs are chained to walls in sties small enough to ensure that
> they can not move. Animals, which are herbivores, are fed on a diet which
> may include a high percentage of dead animals, recycled manure, growth
> hormones and also antibiotics to control the diseases that would otherwise
> be rife in such conditions." Those of us who do not get cancer from
> pesticides risk infection from the livestock fed by the grain such
> processes require. If this is what Andrew Jackson had in mind when he spoke
> of 12 million "happy people," he had no idea of what the fate of such
> people would be.
> 
> Industrial farming eventually influenced the form in which foodstuffs came
> to the table. The goal was to make food available, while sacrificing the
> quality. Wonder Bread was a paradigm for this dubious new plenitude. Soon
> canning and refrigeration made it possible to supply fruit and vegetables
> out of their natural season. While the Indian harvested nuts and berries
> and hunted deer, modern society can put slices of Wonder Bread, canned
> green beans and beef on the table twelve months a year. Raw meat, however,
> must be kept away from dinner plates, however, or else one of us "happy
> people" risk severe illness, including bloody diarrhea, that might lead to
> death. A solution to bacterial meat has been proposed. Irradiation will
> kill all such bacteria, but care must be taken that the nuclear plants that
> produce such radiation do not spill their poisons into the water and soil
> and give us leukemia.
> 
> The ecological crisis of today is intimately linked to the genocide of the
> American Indian. By removing the custodian of the land who had lived here
> for tens of thousands of years and making it possible for capitalist
> ranching and farming to "subdue" the land, American society has become its
> own worst enemy. Resolution of the ecological crisis will force us to
> revisit the beliefs of the people who preceded us on this continent, whose
> attitude toward nature was inherently more respectful. The respect given
> nature was ultimately respect that humanity gave itself, since we are part
> of nature ourselves.
> 
> In my next post, I will review Jerry Mander's "In the Absence of the
> Sacred: the Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian" This book
> is an examination of American Indian beliefs and a critique of the insanity
> of our current industrial system, based as it is on private profit. Mander
> concludes that the problem is technology and industrialization, rather than
> ownership of land and factories by the business class. His co-thinker
> Kirkpatrick Sale agrees with him and was a supporter of Ted Kaszynski. He
> begins each lecture by smashing a personal computer. I will offer my own
> ideas on how Indian ecological and religious beliefs can be reconciled with
> modern society. It does not include smashing computers, otherwise I would
> not have a way to be communicating my ideas with you good people out there.
> I will propose that the First Nation, the American Indians, can also
> benefit from the use of such technology.
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> 
> 
> 
>      --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]