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Understanding the narrative components of Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison helps me understand the book better. This story is a tragedy, chronicling the downfalls of several characters: the bison, the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The bison’s story is, perhaps, the saddest. At the beginning of the story, the free and wild bison covered the plains. At the end, they suffered two fates. First, they “had become an imprisoned species only by the constant intervention of human keepers” (165) and then almost all the American bison ended up domesticated, privately-owned, and raised only to be killed for meat (189).
Looking from beginning to end–without the all-important middle–the losers in this story were also the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The environment suffered as the destruction of the bison upset the diversity of life on the plains environment, causing invasive plant life to overtake the places where the shortgrass used to grow. The Indians suffered along with the bison as Euroamericans sought to control the Indians by cutting off their their only trading asset–the bison. Even the Euroamerican hunters suffered as they failed to receive the bulk of the payment and Euroamerican merchants and industrialists accumulated wealth.
Isenberg’s view, however, is that the middle of the story is the most important part. In the middle, the story gets complicated (because humans, human society, and ecology are all complicated and dynamic): the destruction of the bison “was a consequence of the encounter between Indians and Euroamericans in the Great Plains — an encounter in which the interactions of indigenous and Euroamerican ecologies were as significant as, and inextricably bound to, economic and cultural exchanges” (12). Isenberg spends the rest of the book working out those inextricable exchanges, elucidating the ways in which these exchanges reciprocally influenced each other.
A compelling part of Isenberg’s argument is where he places humans in the story. He emphasizes the dangers of holding the view of the dualism of humans and nature (the insistence “that whereas human culture is dynamic, nature is essentially stable” [195]). But Isenberg does not discount human influence. He explains human societies as “embedded in the complex ecology of the region” (194). Humans, in Isenberg’s view, have agency, but human decisions are influenced by (and cannot be understood apart from) the complex workings of their physical and social environments.
I agree with Ian’s assessment of the definition of nature in the book. He writes, “By noting how the buffalo were actually devastated by other factors outside of human hand, it offers a perception that humanity’s alteration of the environment is a natural progression of the world.” Similarly, a passage in Isenberg confirms this view: “A bison hide did not cease to be part of nature when it had been removed from the carcass and sold. The hide continued to flow through the environment like all energy and material” (196). Though procuring a hide also meant killing the animal, Isenberg glazes over that to show that a hide’s movement from an animal to a vat of lime to a leather belt in a machine was a natural movement.