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Reviews
NATIVE AMERICANS AND ENVIRONMENT: PERSPECTIVES ON THE ECOLOGICAL INDIAN THE
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by Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis
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| University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2007. Maps, notes, index. 367 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| The editors conceived Native Americans and the Environment as a forum to present recent scholarship on tribal ecology and as a critique of Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian (1999). The irony is that Krech spearheaded a similar response to Calvin Martin's Keepers of the Game (1978), titled Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game. Now Krech's tribal land use study is under scrutiny as Native Americans and the Environment's authors evaluate his interpretations of the sustainability of indigenous appropriation strategies. For continuity, the editors employed a three-part ecological analysis: "ecology one" states all cultures have relations with their physical environment, "ecology two" focuses on tribal resource sustainability practices, and "ecology three" is environmental politics. |
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In Part 1, Krech's responses to reviews of The Ecological Indian are printed, and then critics reply. Darren J. Ranco argues that Krech fails to expand our understanding of tribal land use practices or of the importance of tribal standing at environmental negotiations. Harvey Feit refutes Krech's nineteenth century sub-arctic-trap-line thesis, in which he concludes that tribesmen learned conservation from whites. Instead, Feit argues, tribal trappers understood the relationship between trapping intensity and beaver populations because of the complex relationship between Hudson's Bay Company traders, tribal trappers, and beaver numbers. |
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In Part 2, "(Over)hunting Large Game," Robert L. Kelly and Mary M. Prasciunas conclude that late-Pleistocene climate change destroyed megafauna and that hunters only assisted in the unstoppable event. As a result, Kelly and Prasciunas conclude, indigenous hunters were not responsible for the mammoth's extinction. Ernest S. Burch, Jr. describes Inuit making rational decisions based on animal numbers and premised on social transactions. Hunting is a social transaction of give and take between the hunters and the non-human persons they hunt, which negates conservationist or exploitative as proper adjectives for their actions. He defines over-kill as taking more than needed and over-harvest as taking at a rate that jeopardizes specie's survival. Ignoring rationality, Dan Flores declares that climate, intertribal wars, and tribal market hunting significantly reduced northern bison populations before the hide hunters' finale. Sadly, Flores fails to substantiate any of his arguments. If materialism drove tribes to war, for example, war must also have diverted tribal attention from resource procurement, thereby reducing pressure on bison. He argues for "ecology two," writing on "ecological politics," but fails to mention that the 1877 Black Hills Agreement ended Lakota off-reservation hunts and opened the northern killing fields to whites. |
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John Dorst opens Part 3, "Representations of Indians and Animals," by comparing Krech's work to the Draper Museum bison exhibit. Both avoid critical inquiry concerning tribal-bison relations. Sebastian F. Baum reviews recent literature on twenty-first-century bison commons despite contemporary tribal bison projects' focus on environmental politics, which are counter to many tribal goals. |
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In Part 4, "Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)," Michael Harkin explores Northwest Coast salmon fishing. He concludes that tribal relations to fish included ecologies one and two, but not three because of feast and famine patterns based on fish availability. Examining Tlingit salmon fishing, Stephen J. Langdon discovered that only ecology one is present, since there is no tribal conservation ethic. The Tlingit's consideration of salmon to be other-than-human persons who require reciprocity and gifts reveals the extent of tribal-fish social relationships. |
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"Contemporary Resource Management Issues" concludes the book. Larry Nesper and James H. Schlender describe the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission as a scientific and legal entity, thereby debunking stereotypes of tribesmen living in harmony with the land or destroying the land's resources. David Rich Lewis evaluates sovereignty's role in the Skull Valley Goshutes' decision to store nuclear waste, pointing to difficult choices all societies make in regard to landscapes. |
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Krech concludes the anthology by leveling hard criticism at Feit for selectively using sources, but he supports Flores's argument that tribesmen contributed to the bison's demise, although Flores fails to explain how they did so. Having not evaluated Flores's research, Krech is guilty of the same error he attributes to Feit; Krech relied on Flores's work to draft his bison chapter. Neither Krech nor Flores answers the question of whether tribesmen over-killed or over-harvested. The differences between these two environmental behaviors are vast. Darren J. Ranco, Robert L. Kelly, Mary M. Prasciunas, Ernest S. Burch, Jr., John Dorst, Sebastian F. Braun, Stephen J. Langdon, and Harkin make strong critiques of The Ecological Indian, providing thoughtful essays that take readers beyond Krech by explaining the relationships between tribal people, their cultures, and their landscapes. To do so, they refuse to make western conservation, ecology, environmentalism, and over kill their straw men; instead, they evaluate tribal landscape relationships from within. Larry Nesper, James H. Schlender, and Lewis examine similarities between cultures and their environmental relationships. Contemporary Chippewa have tribal wildlife and fisheries plans and the Goshute, like every culture, make daily conscious and rational decisions to use or change their environment. All of us have social transactions with our landscape, and that truth forces us to find a common format for creating meaningful discussions of relations between tribal people, culture, and landscape, and in that light the editors have succeeded. |
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| Richmond Clow
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| University of Montana, Missoula |
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