The Ecological Indian: Myth and History [Paperback]

Shepard Krech III (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1999

The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is a cherished contemporary myth. In this book Shepard Krech seeks to correct the stereotype. Krech surveys North American environmental history to explore the relation between humans and the rest of nature before and after the arrival of Europeans. He addresses such questions as: were Pleistocene-era humans responsible for the extinction of many large mammals in North America? Did the Hohokam of Arizona destroy their society by over-irrigating and over-salinating theor crops? What role did native Americans play in the near-extinction of the deer, the beaver and the buffalo? How did they use fire? And was the natural "Eden" that awed the first European visitors just a feature of very low-population density? Providing historical and anthropological evidence, he offers a new picture of Indians as sophisticated humans who both changed the land and responded to its changing ecology.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1 edition (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047555
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047554
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #865,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, though not perfect, April 20, 2000

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Bortukan (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (Paperback)

In this book, Krech sets out to contradict popular perceptions of Native Americans as perfect beings living in harmony with their environments. This doesn't sound like a very nice thing to do at first, but the author clearly states that he feels such images are not only inaccurate generalizations based on biased, outdated European stereotypes, but are dehumanizing in their suggestion that native people are "natural" animals rather than "cultural" humans. He goes on to present a number of case studies showing situations in which Native Americans were indeed cultural humans not living in perfect ecological balance with their surroundings. His treatment of the archaeological evidence is pretty thorough and unbiased. His historical case studies, while relying a bit heavily on potentially biased historic records by White settlers, remain fairly convincing examples of situations in which Native Americans were not perfect conservationists. Unfortunately, after this array of case studies it can be easy to forget that Krech's stated reasons for examining them were to present Native Americans as active human beings rather than passive stereotypes. Instead, readers can end up with a negative feeling about Native American land use practices in general or about Krech in particular, as the reviews below point out. In spite of these flaws, however, the book does raise interesting questions about how perceptions of Native Americans are constructed (both by native people themselves and by others) and about how we should approach environmental issues (including our definition of a "natural" environment) we grapple with today. His writing is clear and issues are presented in a fairly understandable way for a general audience, not just dusty academic types. Although you may not agree with all of the book's conclusions, the issues it raises make it very worthwhle reading material for anyone interested in environmental impact and Native Americans in the past and today.

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Bag, February 25, 2000

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E. N. Anderson (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (Paperback)

Earlier customer reviews have tended to comment on bias. Most of the book is actually very fair, particularly the first few chapters; the treatment of Paul Martin's "Pleistocene overkill" hypothesis is exemplary. But the last couple of chapters are indeed rather biased, and read perhaps more "anti-Indian" than Dr. Krech intended. For example, Dr. Krech makes it sound as if the buffalo jump was a common, regular thing--the Indians drove a few million buffalo over a cliff every time they wanted a light lunch. Actually, archaeology and common sense both suggest that a big jump episode was rare. Try herding buffalo on foot and you'll understand. And Krech takes an extreme position in re the Indians' tendency to kill beaver; most authorities agree that beaver were more or less conserved until the white trappers got into the act. Certainly, there were lots of beaver, and not just in eastern Canada (the area he considers). Over a million beaver were trapped out of the southwestern US in the 1830s and 1840s, in spite of very dense Indian settlement then and earlier. The first 5 or 6 chapters would provoke little reasonable disagreement, but the last 2 or 3 would provoke (or are provoking) increasingly acrimonious debate among the learned. Suffice it to say that if you got the message that the Native Americans were not always models of selflessness, but were ordinary (if sensible) human beings, you're right, and this is probably what Dr. Krech intended. If you got the message that the Native Americans were bloodthirsty savages who killed wantonly, you're wrong. I hope and trust Dr. Krech did not mean that, but he does quote-at length and with apparent favor--a lot of racist 19th-century writers who did mean that.

52 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beyond revisionism, April 25, 2000

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Saleem Ali (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (Paperback)

At first I thought that this book was yet another revisionist history of Native/Nature relations. However, I recently had an opportunity to interview Professor Krech and realized that much of his argument has been misunderstood and caricatured by people on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. Krech is not trying to state that Natives do not have a particular respect for nature but rather that their actions were often not congruent with the Western notion of "conservation" a la Gifford Pinchot or Aldo Leopold and certainly not the kind of "preservation" ethic articulated by Muir. Krech is deeply aware of the Native respect for nature and has lived and worked with native communities in Northern Canada.

My only problem with the book is that he does not address the resurgence of native environmentalism in much detail. The work of Winona La Duke, Tom Goldtooth, Ward Churchill and others is briefly mentioned at the end but not much is provided in terms of how this movement has arisen. In my interview, I questioned him about this and he responded with great respect for native environmentalists, saying that he knew that their feelings were genuine and grounded in native history to some extent. However, their feelings for the environment have been realized in a modern context that is somewhat different from the less self-conscious relationship which ancestral Indians had with nature. Critics of Krech should certainly give him the benefit of the doubt and read his earlier works, particularly his criticism of Calvin Martin's first book (Keepers of the Game). Interestingly enough Martin has since changed his views and has taken a much more mystical approach to describing Native / environmental relations in his recent treatise: The Way of the Human Being". So please, reviewers and readers, try to step back for a moment and read this as an academic work which was well-intentioned, but perhaps needed another chapter at the end, further explicating the current rise of native environmentalism.