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By Bornali Halder
© 2002 by Bornali Halder
Url: http://www.lakotaarchives.com/natenvironpr.html
Despite the great diversity of Native American cultural features, practices and beliefs, despite there not being a single Native American worldview and despite the variety of geographical habitats Native American peoples have inhabited, there are certain characteristics that are held in common. The comparative theologian and Lakota scholar, Joseph Epes Brown has said:
"This common binding thread is found in beliefs and attitudes held by the people in the quality of their relationships to the natural environment. All American Indian peoples [possess] what has been called a metaphysic of nature; and manifest a reverence for the myriad forms and forces of the natural world specific to their immediate environment; and for all, their rich complexes of rites and ceremonies are expressed in terms which have references to or utilize the forms of the natural world."
This 'metaphysic of nature' is based upon a belief in a concept of relationship that threads itself through all Native American philosophies. As Brown says:
"In terms of interconnections, a dominant theme of all Native American cultures is that of relationship, or a series of relationships that are always reaching further and further and further out; relationships within the immediate family reaching out to the extended family, to the band, outward again to the clan, to the tribal group; and relationships do not stop there but extend out to embrace and relate to the environment: to the land, to the animals, to the plants, and to the clouds, the elements, the heavens, the stars; and ultimately those relationships that people express and live, extend to embrace the entire universe."
Let us look at the cultural environments of the Northeast, the Subarctic and the Plains regions.
The environment of the Ojibwa or Chippewa of the Northeastern culture region is lush and diverse. Before relative confinement on reservations, the Ojibwa gathered in fishing villages in spring and summer, planted fields of corn, squash and beans, and gathered wild fruit, nuts, berries and roots. In the winter, Ojibwa families scattered into the dense forest and hunted migrating waterfowl and game such as deer, and trapped beaver.
During the long winter evenings, elders told stories which recounted the origins of the world, which taught social values and norms, or which simply made people laugh. In common with most of Native North America, the majority of Ojibwa myths have natural elements at their core. The Ojibwa culture hero and trickster figure is Nanabushu, the Great Hare, who teaches the people social values through the mischief he gets up to. Animals and plants in Ojibwa mythology are not portrayed as impersonal objects but as sentient, nonhuman beings living in family units and societies of their own. In mythology, marriage frequently occurs between humans and animals, and people easily transform themselves into beavers or bears and vice versa.
In Ojibwa belief, all animals, for example, are endowed with reasoning power and faculties. They also have spiritual natures, glossed as 'souls', which go to the same place as human souls after death. Ojibwa still speak of bears and other animals as 'relatives', 'grandfathers', 'brothers', and so on. Like their human relatives, animals also pray to the four directions.
Animals, humans and plants are seen to be partners in survival. A concept of mutual assistance and dependence exists in human-plant relations. If farmers or gardeners treat plant life with respect, if they do not overharvest or waste, then plant life will return in abundance year after year.
The concept of mutual assistance and dependence extends into human-animal relations also. One scholar has written that, for the Ojibwa, "the animal has the same right to life that man has. It is necessary to use the animal for the subsistence of man, but the animal is sacrificed regretfully for this purpose". Game and human hunters are each bound by corresponding obligations. For example, if the bones of slain animals are not returned to the earth or to the water from whence they came, they will not return to life. Each species has its own spiritual warden. In the case of the animals hunted by the Ojibwa, these 'keepers of the game' make sure that humans treat the game they hunt with respect. This means that if a hunter breaks a rule of the inter-species relationship - for example, by neglecting to treat the bones of the slain with due respect - then the keeper can either withhold further animals from the offender, or visit harsher reprisals upon him. For its part, an animal is obliged to surrender itself to a hunter's weapons if that hunter has extended to it all the appropriate courtesies and tokens of exchange. The anthropologist, Frank Speck sums up:
"The hunter's virtue lies in respecting the souls of the animals necessarily killed, in treating their remains in prescribed manner, and in particular making as much use of the carcass as is possible. […] The animals slain under the proper conditions and treated with the consideration due them return to life again and again. They furthermore indicate their whereabouts to the 'good' hunter in dreams, resigning themselves to his weapons in a free spirit of self-sacrifice."
In another article, Speck describes a similar relationship existing between game and Naskapi hunters of the Subarctic. He states that the mutual and intertwined relationship must be seen in the context of creation:
"The difference between man and animals, they believe, lies chiefly in outward form. In the beginning of the world, before humans were formed, all animals existed grouped under 'tribes' of their kinds who could talk like men, and were even covered with the same protection. When addressing animals in a spiritual way in his songs, or using the drum, the conjuror uses the expression . . . 'you and I wear the same covering and have the same mind and spiritual strength.' This statement was explained as meaning not that men had fur, not that animals wore garments, but that their equality was spiritual and embraced or eclipsed the physical."
For the Lakota of the Northern Plains, the relationship between all species also stems from a common origin at the beginning of time. According to a Lakota origin story, creation unravelled or unfolded through antagonistic as well as harmonious interaction and interrelation between all the elements of the cosmos. Inyan, the Rock, created Maka, the Earth. The earth then divided the waters to create the seas, lakes, and running streams. Skan, or the Sky created day and night. All elements of the universe created the buffalo: from the earth was created flesh, from the waters came blood, from stone came bones, and from the sky was created spirit and energy. Eventually, humanity itself sprang up out of the buffalo.
The phrase mitaku'oyasin, all my relations, is a frequent refrain in Lakota ceremony. It expresses the belief that all things - visible and invisible, human and nonhuman - are related as spiritual kin and bound together by the binding force that is Wakantanka, commonly glossed as the Great Spirit or Mystery. Within the sacred hoop of life everything is a part of a dynamic, universal and living whole. Because of this, categories of things are not completely bounded as Lakota philosophy allows for a blurring of rigidly maintained distinctions. Though each living form has its own unique identity - its own spiritual and physical nature - there is a fluidity or transparency between each one. To paraphrase the Oglala medicine man, Nicholas Black Elk: everything in creation, though having its own spiritual and physical identity, flows back to the same source, to be united in Wakantanka.
Such mutuality or relationship enabled a Lakota buffalo hunter to attract the buffalo towards himself, or perhaps more accurately, to enable the buffalo to give of themselves. Before a hunt, a medicine man or woman would sing and pray to secure buffalo for the camp. He or she would paint a buffalo skull with red and blue stripes and lay beside it a filled pipe on a bed of fresh sage. It was believed that the skull would turn into a real buffalo that would call its kin. A special song was sung in the dark and a buffalo chip would be burned so that the spirit of the buffalo would be released. After a hunt, a vision was usually sought by the medicine person, in which the spirits called upon the camp for some action or sacrifice in thanks for the aid the spirits had given them in the successful hunt. This repayment usually took the form of an offering to be placed at a particular place.
As in the northeastern and subarctic cases, no contradiction is felt between the need to appropriate animals and plants for survival and the view that such animals and plants are kin. The key is mutual care and dependency. Provided that animals and plants are treated with respect and are taken in response to genuine need, then the basic philosophical model of mutuality and relationship remains intact. Wooden Leg, a 19th century Cheyenne, summarises the Plains Indian view:
"The old Indian teaching was that it was wrong to tear loose from its place on the earth anything that may be growing there. It may be cut off, but it should not be uprooted. The trees and the grass have spirits. Whenever one of such growths may be destroyed by some good Indian, his act is done in sadness and with a prayer for forgiveness because of his necessities, the same as we were taught to do in killing animals for food and skin."
As nomadic hunters in the pre-reservation era, the very survival and perpetuation of Plains Indian cultures depended on the possession of a rich fund of knowledge about their natural surroundings, particularly about the animals in their habitat. Interrelated with this knowledge was the their own subjective interpretation of his or her surroundings. And interwoven with both knowledge and subjectivity was "the culturally conditioned orientation toward the environment. It was imperative that this be taught and transmitted to subsequent generations" (Epes Brown 1992:21). This meant that children especially were told of the importance of observing nature closely in order to gain practical knowledge with which to ensure greater success in the hunt or the warpath for example.
Writing of the Sioux in 1821, a Jesuit missionary wrote, "They acquire this practical knowledge by long and close attention to the growth of plants and trees, and to the sun and stars...Parents teach their children to remark such things, and these in their turn sometimes add new discoveries to those of their fathers".
The Dakota author Charles Eastman wrote that each morning his father would remind him to,
"'Look closely to everything you see,' and on return he would question the boy for several hours concerning his observations. It was his custom to let me name all the new birds that I had seen during the day. I would name them according to the color or the shape or the bill or their song or the appearance and locality of the nest - in fact everything about the bird that impressed me as characteristic."
The Lakota, Brave Buffalo said,
"Let a man decide upon his favourite animal and make a study of it...Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but Wakan Tanka does not intend they shall do so directly - man must do the greater part in securing an understanding...When I was ten years of age I looked at the land and the rivers, the sky above and the animals around me, and could not fail to realise that they were made by some great Power. I was so anxious to understand this Power that I questioned the trees and the bushes."
Within Native American philosophies, the entire land is considered sacred. A concept of 'sacred' is not confined to small areas of life, such as holy days or a church building, but both manifest itself in and permeates all areas of life, time and space.
Sacred geography is powerful in Native America. The entire cosmos - from trees, flowers, rocks and rivers to galaxies, wind, fire and sun - is living, breathing and animated with spirit. Each aspect of the cosmic landscape has a personal identity and human beings are seen to be a part of the natural order rather than separate from it through some kind of superiority of human consciousness. As the Nez Perce leader, Chief Joseph said to US administrators towards the end of the 19th century, "The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same".
The Sioux lawyer, activist and scholar, Vine Deloria JR, has written that, for the most part, tribal histories are land-centered, by virtue of the fact that Indians have lived on their land for such a long time that they have an historical perspective of their environment that is passed down through the generations. Thus the Native American's feeling of an emotional attachment to the landscape is intensified by 'prolonged intimacy' with it. As Deloria points out: "[The Lakota writer] Luther Standing Bear once remarked that a people had to be born, reborn, and reborn again on a piece of land before beginning to come to grips with its rhythms". Deloria has also stated that land is as much a source of revelation as a medium for reflection. By this he means that, on the one hand land provides the medium through which humans can reflect upon the nature of life. On the other hand, land itself produces revelation and meaning, which must then be discerned by the intuitive mind and open spirit.
All landscape is sacred and sanctified, but some areas of land and space are singled out as being particularly holy: the Black Hills, for example, are considered to be a sacred geographical site for the Sioux because they provide a home for particular birds and animals, and because a creation story has the Sioux people being birthed there. Among the Mescalero Apache of New Mexico, specific geographical places are considered sacred, partly because of the roles they have played in mythological time and partly because they provide natural resources required in traditional ceremonies as well as for sustenance. Of particular importance for the Mescalero Apache are the four primary sacred mountains - Guadeloupe, Salinas, Capitan, and San Augustin - which in cosmology are the Four Grandfathers who support the universe and encircle that part of the earth that is the homeland of the Mescalero Apache.
Sweatlodge and vision-questing sites are particularly sacred because they form the physical meeting points between the vertical and the horizontal worlds. These sites are believed to exhibit intense sacred power, for it is there that the worlds of the spirit and of nature (including humanity) intersect. Such points of intersection on the physical landscape may be called 'power centres'. They can also be called 'transformer sites' which are sites of spiritual transformation. Such power centres are spiritually ideal locations from which to communicate with the spirit world, and shamans all over Native America utilise such powerful locations to invoke rain, wind, snow and to heal. One example is that of the Mescalero Apache who traditionally undertook a sweatlodge ritual prior to and after a hunt. Before the hunt, the hunter sweated so that during the hunt he would be able to enter the spirit world and be transformed into a predatory animal, with all the predator's visual acuity, speed and stealth. After the hunt, it was necessary to sweat again in order to transform himself back into the person who could resume normal, daily contact with his people again.
Despite the whole of the landscape being considered holy, the following may prove a useful classification of those areas of the landscape that are considered particularly sacred:
Humanity is not the only species to engage with the universe ceremonially. Many Native American scholars, elders and spiritual practitioners have commented on the fact that other living species perform ceremonies that humans know little or nothing about. The Lakota, for example, used to talk about the animals and birds gathering in the Black Hills for their annual council meetings, social gatherings and ceremonial activities. This the Lakota also replicated when, before the days of the reservation system, all the various bands would gather once a year in the Black Hills for their political social and religious meetings.
In recent years, controversy has raged in academia as to whether there has ever been such an ideal as the 'Ecological Indian' - that is, were and are Indians natural ecologists or conservationists?
The following two quotes each presents a different perspective on the view that Native Americans were or are inherently ecological. The first is by writer J. Donald Hughes:
"Long before the first European ship dropped anchor off the shores of the New World, the western continent was the home of the American Indians. They had lived here for twenty, thirty, forty thousand years. There was not a section of land unknown to some Indian tribe, and there was nowhere, from the slowly shifting arctic ice shelves to the blowing sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, where they did not go. Indians hunted buffalo on the plains and deer in the eastern forests. They planted corn in rich river bottomlands and near springs in the high desert. They caught salmon in the northwestern streams and set their boats on the Pacific waves in search of the great whales. Everywhere they went, they had learned to live with nature; to survive and indeed prosper in each kind of environment the vast land offered in seemingly infinite variety.
"And they did all this without destroying, without polluting, without using up the living resources of the natural world. Somehow they had learned a secret that Europe had already lost, and which we seem to have lost now in America - the secret of how to live in harmony with Mother Earth, to use what she offers without hurting her; the secret of receiving gratefully the gifts of the Great Spirit.
"When Indians alone cared for the American earth, this continent was clothed in a green robe of forests, unbroken grasslands, and useful desert plants, filled with an abundance of wildlife. Changes have occurred since people with different attitudes have taken over."
This next quote is by the anthropologist Shepard Krech III:
"Prior to the arrival of Europeans some Native Americans actively changed their environment; some wasted part of their kill at buffalo jumps; and some caused environmental deterioration through deforestation and salinization, either inadvertently or because they ignored warning signals that their actions would have systemic consequences. The conclusion that some Native Americans were neither conservation-minded nor ecologically aware is inescapable.
"After they arrived, Europeans were quickly joined by Native Americans in exploiting buffalo, beaver, deer, and many other animals for a commodities market, unhesitatingly killing off local populations. […] In the centuries of the fur trade, many Subarctic Crees exterminated beaver, and some who did believed that the beaver they killed would regenerate spontaneously or be reincarnated as fetal animals. Until there was an erosion in this belief, the Crees were not, and perhaps could not be, conservationists. The Southwest Alaskan Yupik may have shown respect to belugas (so-called white whales) by treating their bones in a prescribed manner, but they also slaughtered them in large numbers. They did not give a thought to the implications of carnage for beluga populations because they defined this sea mammal as an infinitely renewable resource. In short, their respect for belugas had nothing to do with western notions of conservation. […] [O]nly the idea of the Ecological Indian prevents us from considering pre-industrial man as a factor in radical habitat change or species extinctions."
Both quotes - which I term the harmonious and the destructive models respectively - present extreme and antithetical positions. The harmonious model depicts Indians as lovers of nature, living in unending harmony with it, whose subsistence activities caused no or minimal changes to the North American natural environment. The destructive model presents the Indians as exploitative despoilers who ravaged the natural world and changed it irrevocably.
The harmonious model - the view that Indians were and are inherently conservationist-minded - has its roots in 18th century Europe, where such scholars as Rousseau and de Montaigne developed the image of New World Indian as 'noble savage', and lauded the Indian as living a life that was inherently harmonious, egalitarian, carefree and 'good'. This trend traversed a virtually uninterrupted path from the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to the best-selling novels of 19th century author James Fenimore Cooper. In recent years, Rousseau's 'noble savage' has evolved into a new stereotype - one that adds to the erstwhile 'savage', the 'drunken' Indian and the 'vanishing' Indian - that of the 'ecological' Indian. As the conservationist-minded 60s developed, adverts depicting Indians crying at industrial pollution began to appear.
Within the burgeoning conservationist movement, the Indian was lauded as ecological hero. The Native American's reverence for Mother Earth was contrasted against the Euroamerican's alleged crass view of nature. Vine Deloria JR became a strident activist of this view. He wrote:
"The Indian lived with his land. He feared to destroy it by changing its natural shape because he realized that it was more than a useful tool for exploitation. It sustained all life, and without other forms of life, man himself could not survive. […] All of this understanding was ruthlessly wiped out to make room for the white man so that civilization could progress according to God's divine plan. […] The white man destroyed his land, he destroyed the planet earth. […] To survive, white society must return the land to the Indians in the sense that it restores the land to the condition it was in before the white man came."
The historian, Wilbur R. Jacobs, echoed Deloria's sentiments, if not stridency, by stating that the Native American in Frontier America was conservator of natural resources, and that Euroamericans were avid despoilers of the so-called wilderness. He urged modern America to pay attention to Native American respect for the earth and to use the vision to restore the planet's balance.
Today, the concept of Ecological Indian finds its reinforcement in mass culture. Popular books have flooded the market, bearing such titles as Earth Prayers and Mother Earth Spirituality, written by Indians and non-Indians. Likewise, classes and seminars abound, claiming to teach the earth-based wisdom of Native American shamanism or Native American drumming.
In the legal and political arena, Native American nations have frequently taken firm stands for conservation. Since 1975, for example, a Chippewa tribe has been fighting Exxon's attempts to extract copper and zinc from northern Wisconsin - an activity that threatens to destroy the fish and wild rice resources on which the Chippewa depend philosophically as well as materially, via pollution from sulfuric acid, acid rain, wastes and tailings. Numerous Indian tribes have united with environmental groups to fight against timber cutting, various forms of mining, and the building of power plants on or near reservation lands. Many native oppositions to development have been made on religious rather than ecological grounds. An example of this comes from New Mexico: in the late 1980s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs planned to place a high-voltage power line through the Jemez Mountains. Four Pueblo governments objected on the grounds that the power line would intrude upon sacred lands and infringe on the Indians' right to practice their religion freely.
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."
Can these two positions just described be reconciled? Both theses - that of the Ecological Indian and that of the Destructive Indian - can inform each other and impose moderating constraints. As usual, complexity clouds the clarity of each position.
The thesis that postulates the view that Indians were active exterminators of beaver during the fur trade ignores the fact that, although beaver populations declined across eastern and central Canada, not all Northern Algonquians participated in the trade. This was especially the case when it was perceived by such tribes that the activity conflicted with traditional subsistence activities and spiritual beliefs. There is also no doubt that European invasion of traditional family hunting territories, the disruption of traditional lifestyles and beliefs, and the growing menace of poverty and foreign disease undermined the very value system that might have prevented certain tribes from participating in the fur trade.
At the other extreme, the view that cannot see Native Americans as anything but natural conservationists ignores the fact that tribes engaged in a variety of environmental relationships, not all of them ecologically-sound by today's western standards. Indian populations are as fallible as populations from all historical eras and geographical regions. Apparent ecological errors such as stampeding too many buffalo over cliffs or deforesting particular regions for the purposes of subsistence did occur, and should not undermine the general fact that the wide variety of Native American philosophies espoused a reverential relationship with the natural world.
The issues are complex, but a better understanding of Native American philosophies would lay to waste both extreme theories. As far as can be discerned from the available oral and written sources, no Indian religion posits a perfect harmony with nature. Humans are both a part of and apart from other beings. There will always be a tension between living beings so long as each one has its own unique identity, needs, and relationship to the spiritual realm. This separateness and uniqueness does not preclude relationship and unity, however. Instead, it could be said that Native American philosophies envision dynamic relationships based on fusion and fission. The relation between an animal and a human, for example, is as volatile as that between two humans, but a relationship still remains, and a respectful one is advocated.
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