Tim Stoshane: There was a book in the late 70s or early 80s called KEEPERS OF THE GAME by an anthropologist (Calvin ???) whose last name I cannot remember. He makes a very interesting and HIGHLY controversial argument about how the tribes in the northeast and northwest (that is, what we now refer to as the Midwest) had no "scientific" way to explain the diseases brought by the Europeans (Dutch, French, English, others) were striking down their populations. They reasoned that their gods were angry at them and they sought revenge against animals whom they thought were the channels for disease. This confluence of interpretations coincided with the extinction and near extinction of many species (e.g., beaver, mink) through their increased hunting for the fur trade. We're probably talking mid- to late-18th century in North America. This book was really controversial. It is well-argued and documented, but there are some leaps that the author had to explain and document. I don't remember what consensus emerged from the brouhaha. One major objection was that it really takes the gloss off of the image of Native Americans as somehow more spiritual and loving stewards of the natural world. It was, after all, as the book shows, Indian warriors and hunters who showed the European fur traders where the habitats of these animals were and helped kill them. A REPLY: Indian complicity in the whites' fur trade is the subject of Calvin Martin's 1978 work, Keepers of the Game. Martin asks how Indians could have broken their covenant with game animals, particularly beaver, in overhunting them to near extinction. He rejects the idea that Western marketplace systems caught up Indians in their web, so that Indians could not resist because they wanted white goods. Instead, he proposes that diseases, in conjunction with missionary teachings and social disequilibrium, corrupted Indian animal responsibilities. Indeed, Indians came to blame beaver and other animals for the new diseases that so demolished Indian populations for centuries, and the fur trade was in part a revenge against the disease-bearing animals. There is no doubt that diseases, along with dislocation, loss of tribal autonomy, and environmental disruption, undermined traditional Indian religions, social systems, and ecological practices through spiritual crises and loss of confidence. Did Indian religious beliefs not have an effect on Indian actions in historical events? It is unfortunate that Indian ideals regarding environment were often vitiated by white economic and religious thrusts, but weakening does not mean that ideals were nonexistent or aboriginally ineffective. They simply were not strong enough always to withstand white pressure, and it should be noted that Indians often did try to withstand the white seduction to kill animals rapaciously. The Indian complicity must be seen in the context of the colonial trade in which Indians OFTEN HAD TO SACRIFICE THEIR IDEALS IN ORDER TO SURVIVE. Some American Indians took part in a white colonial fur trade through which enormous numbers of animals, especially beaver, were killed. But if white Christians kill inordinate numbers of human beings, do we conclude that Christians have no ethical relations with other humans? No, it is clear that Christianity and even Christians themselves hold that other humans are worthy of ethical consideration. Unfortunately, there are circumstances in which these ethical relations do not apply, or they become cancelled by events. The same can be said for the Indians in the fur trade. Events dislocated their ethical relations with the environment. What were those events? Certain tribes had to acquire white trade items, most specifically guns, in order to maintain the precontact equilibrium among Indian nations that whites disrupted. If they did not kill beaver, other Indians would and thereby inherit the trade and gain advantage. Through dependence on fur trade items, Indians saw their very survival at stake, and the successful hunting of beaver and other animals was their only way of staying above water. Also, white goods often preceded the trade itself and whetted Indian appetites for trade, this explains Indian eagerness to trade on first contact. Furthermore, we must deal with the condition of identifying with the oppressor. Indians, an oppressed and exploited people, wore white clothing in order partially to share in white power that had given whites guns and other items of status. It is possible that in participating in the white fur trade Indians wanted to act like whites in order to become more like them. When seen in the context of cultural invasion in which white missionaries insisted that Indian values were evil or infantile, it is no wonder that Indians buckled under the ideological pressure. Furthermore, if we see Indians as part of a nascent capitalist system, we understand how they came to see animals as property, as commodities in trade, rather than as persons of nature capable of equivalence with humans. In the fur trade beaver became devalued in Indian eyes. (From Christopher Vecsey's "American Indian Environmental Religions" in "American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History", edited by Vecsey and Robert W. Venables, Syracuse University, 1980. Vecsey is Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.) Louis Proyect: I am struck by the analogies between American Indian survival strategies and what is happening in Cuba today. Communalist societies based on hunting and gathering, and modern socialist societies, both have to function in an ocean of capitalist property relations. Relations with the hostile, cash-based outside societies involve compromise, if not betrayal of one's deepest beliefs. Does this mean that the belief itself is somehow flawed? No, rather it means that the power of capital to corrupt and to undermine egalitarianism and democracy are almost irresistible. The continuing efforts of American Indians to preserve their values against rapacious American corporations and the effort of socialist Cuba to provide health-care, education, and other social services to working people under attack from the same quarters should inspire us. Gambling casinos on Indian reservations or glitzy tourist flesh-traps in Havana represent concessions made to a more powerful adversary. Our goal as progressives and socialists is to fight for and solidarize with the best aspects of these societies and not condemn them. As the class struggle of the next century unfolds, it will become clearer and clearer that the ecological insights of land-based peoples like the North American Indian, Australian aborigines, Nigerian Ogonis who fight Shell Oil, the Indian villagers who resist World Bank dams are not only just on their own terms, but utterly necessary to universalize for the survival of all humanity. American Indians and ecology will in fact be the topic of my next article, which should appear sometime this weekend.
