American Indian Environmental Relationships::

Despoilers of Nature

As the concept of the Ecological Indian took shape and gathered pace during the 1960s, the scholar Paul S. Martin published his 'overkill thesis'. The thesis declared that ancient Indians, or Paleo-Indians, were not as ecologically-sound as the public desired; that instead, prehistoric Indians had been single-handedly responsible for the destruction and extinction of certain Pleistocene animals, beginning some 11,000 years ago.

It has been posited that at least 35 mammalian genera vanished. These included giant, tusked mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloth, a type of giant armadillo, single-hump camels, a variety of saber-toothed cat and certain types of wolf. The watershed millennium for these mass extinctions was mainly around 11,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The thesis has been heavily criticised for its tendency to fix prehistoric American populations into engaging only in big game hunting. In fact, Indian cultures were not so homogeneous and static, and the period exhibited a variety of material and subsistence cultures, ranging from agricultural to maritime economies. Scientists today are more likely to blame such mass extinctions on the climatic and geographical changes that occurred towards the end of the Ice Age. Despite this, a diluted form of the 'overkill thesis' has proven, among some, to be as seductive and as resilient as ever.

Some commentators have declared that Indians contributed dramatically to wildlife destruction through particular hunting practices and active participation in the fur trade. Shepard Krech, for example, argues that the advent of the horse onto the Plains in the seventeenth century greatly increased the Indian hunter's ability to run hundreds of buffalo off a cliff at a time - a common practice that led to significant waste, evidence of which warrants a serious review of the idea that Indians wasted no part of the buffalo. Moreover, demand for the fur of the beaver, for example, and Indian participation in providing for that demand, led to the animal being killed in large numbers.

Recent decades have also witnessed examples of non-ecological behaviour amongst tribal nations. In the 1960s, both Navajo and Hopi tribal governments agreed to allow the Peabody Coal Company to strip-mine coal from their lands, exacerbating splits between the tribal councils and anti-development traditionalists on the reservations. Most recently, the Ute (or at least a proportion of them) were campaigning for a dam and reservoir, possibly to transport coal at some future time. Many, if not most, tribal councils have accepted waste storage, resource extraction or other development projects on their reservations - though often against the wishes of some of their own people.

American Indians and environmentalists have opposed each other on hunting and trapping. Debates on whaling have embroiled environmentalists or animal rights activists and such indigenous peoples as the Makah Indians of Washington state and the Inupiat of Alaska. When the International Whaling Commission gave the Makah permission in 1997 to revive the traditional hunt for grey whales for cultural, spiritual and subsistence reasons, Humane Society International threatened a lawsuit and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society declared that they would endeavor to obstruct the hunt.

Shepard Krech points out that each time an Indian group makes a decision that contradicts the constructed notion of the Ecological Indian, western conservationists draw disapproving breaths. He writes:

"The connections between Indians and nature have been so tightly drawn over five hundred years, and especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century, that many non-Indians expect indigenous people to walk softly in their moccasins as conservationists and […] preservationists. When they have not, they have at times eagerly been condemned, accused of not acting as Indians should, and held to standards that they and their accusers have seldom met."