The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (Taschenbuch)

The image is gripping: a handsome American Indian with a sad, tear-filled eye offers the simple message, "Pollution: It's a Crying Shame." This 1970s anti-pollution advertisement, which reached millions of people, helped entrench the notion that Indians treated the land kindly and white invaders spoiled it. Not so, says anthropologist Krech, in this compelling, if somewhat incomplete, examination of the historical truths and romantic myths about Native Americans and their relationship with nature. Acknowledging that Indians clearly possessed vast knowledge of their environment, Krech contends that this knowledge was often merged with a religious cosmogony that left little room for conservation as it is understood today. Indians may have treated the individual animals upon which they preyed with great respect in order to avoid offending their spirits, but this view did not prevent occasional overhunting or depletion of resources, according to Krech. If the New World seemed like a rich Eden to European immigrants, Krech contends it was because the populations of Native Americans were too small to have made much of a difference in their environments before they were overtaken by the newcomers' resource-based economy. To prove his points, Krech closely examines the role Native Americans played in a variety of environmental histories, from Pleistocene extinctions to the demise of the buffalo. Yet he overlooks what was one of the greatest single animal-based economies of precontact times, the vast subsistence salmon fisheries of western North America. (Aug.)
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Anthropologist Krech analyzes the origins of the image of the "Noble Indian," a figure emblematic of Native Americans' deep respect for nature that is often cited by environmentalists. He wondered whether this vision of a people who hold nature sacred and never waste an animal's life or harm the environment was based on fact or myth. Krech searched for scientific and historical evidence of Native American "environmental knowledge, ecological thought, and conservation-related behavior" over the last 11,000 years and discovered that, like most generalities, this convention is oversimplified. Diverse and complex, Native American cultures inevitably impacted the environment. Krech presents unexpected and provocative perspectives on the disappearance of the Hohokam, or Canal Builders, who once thrived in the Sonoran Desert; the widespread use of fire as a hunting and agricultural tool; the role Native Americans played in the buffalo, deer, and beaver trades; and current conflicts within Indian communities over land use. Not only does Krech shatter a romantic stereotype, he also forces us to think more realistically about environmental issues. Donna Seaman -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Iron Eyes Cody, the Weeping Indian, was a fraud, and so, says Krech, is the image of the American Indian as protoecologist. When, in 1971, Keep America Beautiful used Cody (an Italian-American who passed himself off as a Native American) as its antipollution icon, it furthered a then-emerging view of American Indians as somehow better people vis-...-vis the land than the Europeans who supplanted them. That view gained popularity in later years, helped along by advocates like Vine Deloria, a Sioux historian and attorney, who said, The Indian lived with his land. The white destroyed his land. He destroyed the planet Earth. But, writes Brown University anthropologist Krech, there is little historical basis for the notion that Indians were any more responsible caretakers of the land and its nonhuman denizens than were contemporary Europeans. While this image, he writes, may occasionally serve useful polemical or political ends, images of noble . . . indigenousness, including the Ecological Indian, are ultimately dehumanizing. They deny both variation within human groups and commonalities between them. Krech goes on to examine a number of case studies to show that Indians were not the protoecologists of modern environmentalists dreams: several Great Lakes tribes, for example, hunted the beaver nearly to extinction in the region; southern tribes similarly overhunted the white-tailed deer; migratory Great Plains bands regularly exhausted game supplies in their home areas and were thus forced to move on, expanding their historic territories and coming into conflict with other Native groups that claimed the same land; southwestern tribes may have overwatered their fields, ruining them with accumulated salt deposits. These unfortunate actions, Krech suggests, do not mean that the Indians were guilty of a program of wanton despoliation; they mean that the Indians were human, capable of mistakes. Krechs case studies deliver nothing new to the scholarly literature, but general readers may find his historical overview, though academic, to be of interest. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

A popular question of debate has centered on the Native American relationship to the environment. Were they the first environmentalists, conservationists who neither wasted nor altered their natural resources? Krech (anthropology, Brown Univ.) addresses this cherished American myth by reviewing archaeological, oral, and written records and applying them to a few specific cases. The Native Americans, like all peoples, altered their environments, responded to climatic changes, adjusted to times of feast and famine, and adapted to the new economic forces introduced by Europeans. They were not Noble Savages, nor was North America the Eden that Europeans recorded. Europeans saw what they wanted to see, neglecting the native histories, cultures, and religions that would have helped them gain an accurate representation of this "new land." Krech asks questions to spark new debate on the image of the "ecological Indian." A thought-provoking book; recommended for all libraries.APatricia Ann Owens, Wabash Valley Coll., Mt. Carmel, IL
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"Krech's book is a quite brilliant tour d'horizon illuminating every facet of North American culture..."

The Ecological Indian "exposes the myth that Native Americans lived in perfect harmony before the coming of the Europeans" (History Today). Shepard Krech, a leading anthropologist who has lived and worked with Native Americans, reveals that they, like all other humans, sometimes exploited nature. He argues that the image of the saintly Indian, protecting the land, is simplistic and harmful even to the Indians themselves.

The myth that Native Americans lived in ecological harmony with nature is exposed in this book. Krech reveals that they, like all other humans, sometimes exploited nature. He argues that the image of the saintly Indian is simplistic and harmful to the Indians themselves.

Shepard Krech is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.