Native Americans – American Environments to 1893

April 27, 2014

The Role of Nature and Human Agency in American History

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The Prologue of Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History ends with a statement that refers to a discussion consistently brought up in class: “Suddenly the earth itself becomes an actor, a force to be reckoned with, instead of a simple line drawing inside a book’s cover.” (7) In his book, Steinberg makes nature a significant player in America’s history since the beginning. Justin makes an interesting point that “history cannot be told without all the key players, and these key players do not always involve animate actors.” This seems to be one of Steinberg’s main points in his work. Working forward from Pangaea, Steinberg argues that Americans ultimately shaped their environments through the commodification of nature. In this American history textbook, Steinberg describes the settlement of the country, the surveying of the land, and the rise of commercialism to depict both the implications of human action and natural phenomenon on American history.

Something I found particularly interesting about Steinberg’s book is that he makes some interesting points about Native Americans and their relationship with nature. He makes a comment that early in American history, Indians were intimately aware of the environment around them and their rituals reflected their dependence on nature. Steinberg states, “they farmed the soil, hunted game, set fires, and gathered berries and nuts, engaging in a spiritually rich relationship with the land, while shaping it to meet the needs of everyday survival” (11). This resourceful and spiritual relationship with nature describes the kind of Indian connection with the environment I am used to reading in typical history textbooks. Steinberg acknowledges this unique Native American connection with nature, but also argues that they eventually began to see nature as a commodity as they became more and more influenced by American habits and presence. For example, the Cheyennes began to acquire more horses than needed. Indians, Steinberg argues, contributed to their own demise by keeping tens of thousands of horses, more than the land could support. (123) He therefore argues that a combination of human agency and environmental factors played a role in the demise of peoples and in the annihilation of space as humans began to use nature in ways beyond those needs required for survival.

Steinberg doesn’t simply blame human agency for the use and overuse of resources and the exploitation of land. Steinberg emphasizes that nature played a huge role in the development of American history. His statement at the end of Chapter 8 wraps up this main argument: “plants and animals are not merely a backdrop of history. They are living things that have needs that make demands on the land. Sometimes the land lives up to the task, and sometimes, because of a variety of factors both human and nonhuman, those needs outstrip the ability of the environment to provide.” (123) His interesting textbook on American environmental history not only contributes to some of our main discussions on actors, Native Americans, and the role of human agency, but also sheds new light and perspective on our conversations.

April 13, 2014

Supplementary Reading: American Indians and National Parks

Growing up on the East Coast made national parks a difficult concept for me to understand. A friend used to tell me about spending summers at her grandmother’s home in Grand Junction, Colorado, where her grandmother’s backyard was the Colorado National Monument. I only understood the word ‘monument’ as in a memorial, such as the Washington Monument, and was confused about why anyone would care to live near it, until I saw this picture:[1]

My ignorance about the West also extends to national parks. Reading American Indians and National Parks by Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek helped me understand the scale of national parks in that part of the country (Keller and Turek do not study only western parks, but most of the parks they study are in the West). For example, Glacier National Park in Montana is made up of 1,012,837 acres and contains 762 lakes.[2] While it may seem that there was enough land in the West for both parks and Indian tribes, Keller and Turek demonstrate why that is a myth and expose the complicated story of the United States government’s appropriation of tribal land. What Keller and Turek do for Indian tribes, Karl Jacoby does for “common folk” more generally in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. After explaining Keller and Turek’s book, I will consider their history in light of Jacoby’s study.

Keller and Turek tell the story of the changing relationships between the Indian tribes who lived in or around the parks and the National Parks Service (NPS) and environmentalists between 1864 and 1994. They fill a void in scholarship by examining the formation of national parks through the perspective of the native people who lived in or around the parks in the United States. The authors assert that, though scholars have studied national parks and American Indians separately, the connection between them has largely been ignored, to the detriment of both fields. Keller and Turek focus their research on what they call the “crown jewels” of the parks system—including Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Yosemite National Park—nearly all of which have had disputes with native peoples concerning ownership and use of park land.[3]

Keller and Turek tell a hopeful story about the relationship between the NPS and Indian tribes; though the NPS has not always understood or treated American Indians well, policy and “awareness and sensitivity” have improved since the 1960s. Keller and Turek tell a less hopefully story about the relationship between conservationists and native peoples. By the end, the authors conclude, “honest dialogue can help idealists realize that protecting land is no simple matter.” Keller and Turek seek to “dispense with stereotypes of the Indian-as-ecologist/Indian-as-victim, and cease seeing tribal members as colorful, nostalgic versions of environmentalists themselves.” By understanding the culture and history of Indian tribes and the history of Indian tribes’ relationships to national parks, Keller and Turek demonstrate that fair policy is possible in theory: policy that takes into account not only the environment, but also the people who lived on and off of the land prior to the establishment of national parks. They also acknowledge that this is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.[4]

For sources, Keller and Turek rely on individual national parks’ archival sources, government documents, and a series of interviews the two authors conducted with Native Americans. The history is largely a bureaucratic one: the NPS, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Indian tribes—not individual people, but institutions—are the actors in the story. However, since Indian tribes were underrepresented politically, Keller and Turek gave them a collective voice by interviewing individual Native Americans.[5] The book’s focus on bureaucracy, though, makes reading American Indians and National Parks dull; quotations from the interviews are among the few highlights of the book.

In the conclusion to American Indians and National Parks, Keller and Turek list several general phases of relations between national parks and Indian tribes. The first phase started in 1864 with the beginning of the federal government’s seizure of land for parks and continued for fifty years after the establishment of the NPS in 1916. Keller and Turek note that this period was characterized by unfettered appropriation of land and “little genuine concern for native rights.” Next, there was a phase that was marked by Native American success in promoting their political interest, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Finally, the period beginning in 1987 with the NPS formulation of the Native American Relationships Management Policy, the service adopted a policy promising to “respect and actively promote tribal cultures as a component of the parks themselves.” [6] Although these stages indicate tidy progress in NPS and tribal relations, it was not a period of strictly upward progress. Keller and Turek emphasize the differences between each tribe and park, and include backward moments. No two situations were the same, but the authors tell a story of eventual progress. It would have been helpful if Keller and Turek had split the chapters into sections so these phases were clear from the beginning. Since they only explained the phases at the end of the book, the independent chapters had no context and it proved difficult to reconstruct Keller and Turek’s argument while reading the book.

Keller and Turek begin the book with the hopeful chapter ,“‘A Lucky Compromise’: Apostle Islands and the Chippewa,” about the 1970 victory of the Chippewa in protecting their reservation’s land on the national stage.[7] This chapter is contrasted with the next: “From Yosemite to Zuni: Parks and Native People, 1864-1994,” which presents a bleaker picture of relations between tribes and the NPS. In its infancy, the NPS was a flawed institution, according to Keller and Turek. The NPS “bequeathed distortions and ignorance about native history” in founding and maintaining its parks.[8] These chapters set the scene for the case studies that compose the rest of the book.

In summary, chapter three addresses the paradox of artifact preservation coinciding with ignoring the living native peoples through the example of the Utes in Mesa Verde National Park. Chapter four deals land usage rights among the Blackfeet in Glacier National Park. Chapter five explores the relations between Paiutes and Mormons in controlling Pipe Spring. Chapter six attends to the problems that arose because of multiple tribes in a locale, as demonstrated in Olympic National Park and the surrounding area. Chapters seven and eight examine the tensions between conservationists and native tribes in using and controlling the Grand Canyon. Chapters nine and ten tell the stories of the Navajo and the Seminoles, respectively. Though these chapters are full of information, the text wants a more analytic voice to drive the argument. As it is, Keller and Turek are content to describe, and rarely argue.

Since Crimes against Nature studies the case of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon, I will summarize Keller and Turek’s history of the Havasupai in Grand Canyon National Park in chapter eight as a reference to compare the stories told by the two books (though they address different periods). After giving a brief history of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon area, Keller and Turek describe the Congressional bill transferring land to the tribe. From 1974 to 1976, a political fight broke out between the Havasupai and environmentalists who opposed the measure. Environmentalists were concerned that “the Havasupai, being poor, would place economic development ahead of preservation” and that the Grand Canyon was a national park in that it belonged to the American people, not the Havasupai. The land transfer bill eventually passed, but it stipulated that “transferred land ‘shall remain forever wild’” without an indication of what “forever wild” meant. Keller and Turek analyze the relationship between native tribes and environmentalists. The authors posit that conservationists believed that “The Grand Canyon … transcends humanity,” which means that no humans, not even native tribes, belong there. Second, Keller and Turek debunk the “Indian as Environmentalist” myth, arguing that it “freezes Indians as an idea and artifact” instead of treating them as a dynamic people. Finally, Keller and Turek acknowledge that the Canyon could have been better preserved if environmentalists had their way, but that situation would have made it “no longer be an Indian community or homeland for its people.”[9] The authors reveal their belief in the impossibility of reconciling the interests of native tribes and environmentalists.

American Indians and National Parks addresses themes that Jacoby also addresses, including the concept of “national” parks versus local spaces and environmental versus social justice. Where Jacoby’s stances are clear, Keller and Turek’s must be teased out of the text. Analogs to Jacoby’s opinions can be found in American Indians and National Parks, though. “Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice,” Jacoby claims. [10] Keller and Turek’s book also demonstrates this: though the NPS has improved its policies since 1916, conservationists have resisted deeply considering human interests in forming policy. The idea of local versus national control is present in both books. Jacoby demonstrates this by contrasting common Adirondack land use practices with how wealthy sportsmen and the state of New York used the land. In Keller and Turek’s view, this played out through the NPS control of native tribal lands. In both, there is an implicit recognition that local control was often superior to national in terms of environmental health. This directly counters Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which is necessarily a national story of “Americanization.” Finally, Keller and Turek agree with Jacoby about man’s place in nature: both books include humans as an unavoidable, if not ideal, part of the natural world.

Bibliography

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Keller, Robert H. and Michael F. Turek. American Indians and National Parks. Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1998.

[1] Sally Bellacqua, Monument Canyon, http://www.nps.gov/colm/photosmultimedia/index.htm.

[2] Glacier National Park Fact Sheet, http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/fact-sheet.htm.

[3] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), xv, xii-xiii.

[4] Keller and Turek, 232-240.

[5] Keller and Turek, 241-242.

[6] Keller and Turek, 233-234.

[7] Keller and Turek, 3-16.

[8] Keller and Turek, 17-29.

[9] Keller and Turek, 164-184.

[10] Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198.

February 23, 2014

The Buffalo: A Tool Against Native Americans

The Destruction of the Bison by Andrew C. Isenberg is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the relationships between both Native Americans and Euroamericans on the bison within North America. In his work, Isenberg provides a number of different arguments for the decline of the bison, such as the growth of the fur trade, their presence in the way of American progress, and many others. Yet, he also indicates that the destruction of the bison was a directive by the United States military and pioneers to help rid the land of the Native Americans. Isenberg describes how a fellow historian, David D. Smits, argues that the United States Army was primarily responsible for the destruction of these creatures. The support for this position rests with the evidence that indicates how American soldiers would often destroy the Native American’s natural resources to push the Indians onto the reserves after various defeats to them in battle. General Sherman, most notably known for his work in “Sherman’s March,” was an advent supporter of this philosophy, for he believed if you removed their resources, the Native Americans would be forced to retreat to the reservations (128).

The army was not the only political body that held this idea either, as members of the House of Representatives also supported this directive in the light of American progress. During the Delano vs. Fort debates regarding a humanitarian and animal preservation bill in the 1870s, Columbus Delano expressed his side’s position on the matter. He stated in reference to the bison “The rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs” (152). His words clearly articulate how members of the United States Government were openly in favor of the destruction of the bison as the means of a weapon against the Native Americans to control their actions. Avoiding the ethical questions that arise within this position, as there are many, it is evident that many members of the United States Government saw the bison as merely a side-effect of progress, a creature that was in the wrong place as the wrong time. Though there were many others who did not take this position, such as President Roosevelt moving into the 20^th century, it remained a common perception of the time.

I would say I have to completely agree with Sean’s points regarding Isenberg’s ideas on the definition of nature. 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. Though many people would deny this, offering a definition that places nature outside of human contact, if we look at contemporary movie examples for images of the future, we potentially can see Isenberg’s perspective at work. The first movie that comes to mind is “Star Trek: Into Darkness.” In the film, both futuristic London and San Francisco are portrayed, displaying a completely technologically based society almost entirely void of “wilderness.” Portrayals such as this somewhat indicate that the natural steps of ecological evolution are allowing for humanity to shape the environment as it can, for every other creature we interact with does the exact same within their capacity.

February 13, 2014

Final Paper Topic

America’s Last Great Beast: The Bison and Their Hunters

For my paper, I plan on studying the different ways the bison were perceived and interacted with by both Native Americans and American Pioneers/Americans. Through this research, I will compare the similarities and differences between the two people and their interactions with these creatures, noting any cultural norms, economic significance, as well as any other factors that contribute to the way they saw/used the bison. In terms of a time frame, as of now most of the 19^th century is open to explore, but I will most likely narrow this period down as my research accumulates. There are a number of questions I hope to answer through this study regarding the various perceptions of these creatures. Naturally, what differences existed between the ways the American Indians interacted with the bison compared to their human counter parts of American Pioneers and other American citizens? Did the perceptions and interactions with the bison for both sets of people change over time, or did their views generally remain the same even with a dwindling population? Were there different perceptions and usages of the bison in different regions of the West for both parties, i.e. Northwest vs Southwest? Finally, was the destruction of the bison a necessary side-effect of human progress, or was it simply another way to stifle Native lifestyle in an attempt to integrate their people into Anglo American culture? In order to answer these questions, a number of different types of sources addressing both American and Native American perspectives will need to be analyzed. In terms of the American perspective, I believe newspapers from western towns would be a great place to find out some information on their ideas of the bison. Though they will be more difficult to find, any comments made in speeches or memoirs by Native American chiefs will do wonders to display their relationships with this magnificent creatures. Furthermore, by potentially looking at any records of trade or advertisements in newspapers, it will be clear what economic values the bison might have had for white individuals in particular, but also the Native Americans.