native americans: shapers of the land

Non-Native Americans have lived for generations with a terrible handicap when it comes to understanding the first inhabitants of the land we are all walking on today. Hampered by biased and inaccurate cultural myths and poor or utterly incorrect public school education, our vague beliefs about the story of Indian Country have obscured the truth and denied us the privilege of operating in daily life from a position of comprehension. The American People, as a whole, have been thinking and acting in the absence of good information and this has created a tragic situation in which Americans have not only frequently been guilty of stereotyping or discriminating against Native Peoples, but have also been denied the vision of a past, the understanding of which, could dictate a future that heals our troubled Earth.

The 2 Natives We’ve Been Shown
As non-Natives, we have historically been the recipients of two erroneous depictions of Native Americans.

1) The Murderous Savage. This is the character depicted in the Westerns – amoral, bloodthirsty and terrifying. Campfire stories, books and movies paint a picture of crazed, small bands of wandering killers who run amok and murder, just for the fun of it.

2) The Noble Savage. This is the champion of the environmental movement of the 20th century – the character who is so removed from the practicalities of life that he leaves no mark whatsoever on the land. This image has been convincingly used to convey the idea that only untouched land is inherently good and right.

Both characters are fictitious, and we can be extremely grateful for the more accurate picture that has begun to emerge of the Native Peoples of the landmasses known as North, Central and South America. Hopefully, many people have by now begun to understand that the majority of documented violent encounters between Natives and Americans were rooted in terrible assaults on indigenous peoples by the newcomers – conquistadores, colonists, pioneers, gold miners, missionaries, etc. Native People fought because their lives were at stake. I think many people have been exposed to the truth about this in modern times.

But the facts that are still almost totally unknown and untaught relate to that second character – the Noble Savage who leaves no mark on the land. This popular misconception is finally being overturned by American scholars who are spending their lives seeking information that may bring real enlightenment to us all. I am very grateful for the work of these scholars who have taught me that, far from not interacting with the Earth, the majority of Native Peoples were farmers…in fact, they were the most gifted farmers the world may ever have known. The South American Rainforest, the woods of the East, the lands of the Southwest, the Yucatan Peninsula – these were the enormous gardens of the earliest peoples and what the Europeans mistook for ‘nature’ was, in fact, agriculture on a scale that was simply too huge for them to recognize.

Forestry practices ensured that the most fruitful trees got the most space and sun. Acres of orchards were tended with wisdom. Miles and miles of poor soil was aerated with broken pottery and enriched with ash. The food crops that now feed the whole world (corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, manioc, peppers, onions, etc.) were cultivated and hybridized by farmers of almost incomprehensible skill. Vast irrigation systems brought water to deserts. Prairies were burned over to create ideal conditions for game hunting. Roads spanned the Andes and crisscrossed the North. And towns and cities equal to or larger than those of Europe dotted the continents. And, as it is now believed, these towns and cities contained a population larger than that of Europe.

What Happened?
The heartbreaking story that has emerged in this journey of American scholarship is that disease preceded the European invasion of the Americas. For many generations, schools taught that the ‘Indians’ were overwhelmed by European technology (horses and weapons), but the scenario just didn’t add up when examined more closely. Finally, in the 1960s, a man named Henry F. Dobyns put the pieces together. Just before, or just after any party of Europeans hit the shores of North or South America, Native cities and towns were abruptly depopulated. This phenomenon happened again and again, and suddenly, it became clear that the invasion of the continents ‘succeeded’ not because of technology, but because of disease. It is now widely believed that the continents lost 95% of their population to small pox, measles and other infectious diseases. 95%. Those catching a first glimpse of non-depopulated areas were staggered by the number of people living here, but always, within a short time, all the people abruptly ‘disappeared’. The almost incomprehensible loss of life is now being called the the greatest disaster of mankind.

How, then, did we go from the initial European understanding of a incredibly densely populated land to the Hollywood myth of a few, sparse tribes roaming an empty environment? Basically, Americans forgot. It can be convincingly argued that guilt made it pleasant to forget that European invasion destroyed 95% of the people living in the ‘New World’, but whatever the reason, it was forgotten that the continents were once so thickly peopled. The truth about this is starting to be told, at last.

The human tragedy is truly unspeakable. The loss of life is something I can hardly imagine. But there is another part to the story that I believe it is so important we understand: the loss of skills. The giant garden that was the world of the Native Peoples was created and maintained with skills we have not only lost, but that few people understand ever existed. The land that Europeans thought was untouched by man was so successfully tended that it looked natural. It was laden with food, abundant in wild birds, animals, fish, frogs, insects…everything we would think of today as a dream healthy ecosystem.

When I look at the deadly choice of the United States to ‘manage’ forests with pesticide, to subsidize the very factory farms which ensure we will be sickened by zoonotic diseases like swine flu, when I look at a culture of mono-skilled workers who do not know how to feed themselves and are systematically made dependent on designated ‘experts’ to provide foodstuffs, I am so struck with the wrong turn that was made. The polar opposite of America looking so good we’d mistake it for ‘nature’, our lands are polluted with chemicals, fouled by monocropping and now under siege by the assault of genetically modified organisms that are turning trees and plants into alien life forms, never before seen on earth. Far from us being like the Native peoples who so stunned the Europeans with their amazing health and vigor (qualities unknown to those from the disease-ridden ‘Old World’), American peoples are plagued with the diseases that come from poor diet and close association with confined animals. Life isn’t a contest, certainly, but the emergent picture of the real ‘Old World’, the old world that was created and cultivated by early Peoples of these continents was in almost every way a winner.

The Ideal
Are we supposed to ‘mess with Mother Nature?’ That’s the question that has served as the background for much environmentally-oriented debate over the past century. With their hearts in the right place, many modern Americans have argued that healthy environments are those untouched by man. Our National Parks are one outcome of this train of thought, creating museums of ecosystems in the hopes that we can keep things ‘the same’ in perpetuity. But, I have begun to see that these thoughts are pointing us all in the wrong direction. There is a better way to live than setting aside small pieces of land so that they cannot be ‘spoiled’ by man, all the while turning the rest of the continents into toxic wastelands that bring disease and death to all of their inhabitants. The lives of the First Peoples, which are only now beginning to be explored and considered, are beginning to set us an example which, if followed, could get us out of the mess we are in.

Imagine, if you can, a system of local and regional trade in your part of the continent. Everyone you know is a farmer or forester of some kind. You have a private garden for the majority of your family’s meals, and tougher crops like grain are grown in cooperatives with your neighbors. The conifers in your area are being carefully tended so the ones that produce the most pinenuts get the best places in the forests, while the orchards of mixed fruit trees provide a bounty of fresh fruit for everyone in season. I’m a vegan and don’t eat meat, but if yours is a hunting community, your grasslands are kept ideal for grazing animals and your streams are kept clean so that fish are abundant. No one has swine flu, because all of the animals you eat are wild…they don’t live in your house, passing their diseases to you and they aren’t living in close confinement with one another, passing diseases amongst themselves in the way of the modern factory farm. You live in a land of meadows, fields, bodies of water, orchards and forests so beautiful that they look like a verdant National Park, but the secret is, they produce so much food for your well-organized region that no one is hungry.

In point of fact, I am describing a system equivalent to that of the Inca empire of 500 years ago. Mountains, jungles, hills, valleys and coastline were all brought into a single system that produced enough food for people to eradicate the specter of hunger from that civilization. In my own ideal scenario, I would grant more autonomy to individuals, and rather than the system working on the principle of imperial might, it would work on a system of trade. Trade networks that stretched from Canada to South America once existed here, and because footwork provided the means of conveyance, rather than fossil fuel, modern people yet again made the mistake of seeing the lands as somehow untouched by the hand of man. Goods could be transported over thousands of miles without destroying the Earth’s ability to keep supporting plant growth or keep supplying clean water and air to for the support of life.

The trick would be to view our present landscape with new eyes…new eyes informed by the new understanding of how millions of Native peoples once lived abundantly here while keeping the lands looking like that thing we call ‘Nature’ instead of a dump. It isn’t wrong to ‘mess with Mother Nature,” I’ve concluded. We are set upon this Earth with the duty of finding a way to feed ourselves and survive. The majority of the peoples we call ‘Indians’ accomplished this by farming, secure in the knowledge inherent in most of their lifeways that a higher power had made this land for them to inhabit and care for. Christian traditions have the same teaching, in fact, but the European response to this teaching has lately been to exploit and destroy the precious lands rather than tend them with love and skill. The Native Peoples had the skills that fooled Europeans into thinking the Americas were a wilderness. More than anything else, I would love to see modern people of all ethnic backgrounds now seek out the echos of the wisdom that was lost and gratefully embrace it as the key to our future survival.

Thanksgiving is the one time of the year in the United States when many Americans may give some fleeting thought to old stories about Indians helping European settlers. Our myths about the first Thanksgiving are mostly made-up and fail to tell the whole story of those first contacts between natives and invaders. Nonetheless, it is a cultural practice to associate this November holiday with Native Peoples, albeit in a rather strange way.

I would like to offer a prayer that, this Thanksgiving, people begin to reach for the knowledge that lay long hidden from them about the real story of these lands. Maybe we can begin to hold a new idea in our minds – an idea that humans can live in such a way that we make the Earth beautiful while living well. We live in a world of conflicting messages – guilty messages about overpopulation and the destructiveness of mankind. The old and true stories can teach us something different; that mankind can shape his world in a healthy way that makes it possible for his species to continue to dwell here for generations. The old ones who loved this land best are pointing the way.

Like To Learn More?
I highly recommend reading the wonderful, wise book 1491 by Charles C. Mann for its revelatory depiction of pre-Columbian life in North and South America. This book will change your whole conception of the brilliant farmers and foresters who once made these lands the most fruitful and beautiful on Earth. It is time we really understood this and stopped teaching false myths to generations of Americans. This book is an excellent starting point for the new education we need.