Ecological Indian : Myth and History

9780613914147: Ecological Indian : Myth and History
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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.

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About the Author:
Shepard Krech is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Maine.
From Kirkus Reviews:
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.

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  • PublisherBt Bound
  • Publication date2003
  • ISBN 10 0613914147
  • ISBN 13 9780613914147
  • BindingLibrary Binding
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9780393321005: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History

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Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000
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