Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Ecology and the American Indian


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




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