On Fri, 17 Nov 1995, Mike Patrick wrote:
> While I'm at it, I would like to contradict the attitude that the Native
> Americans practice of collecting animals for ceremonial purposes is immoral:
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 1) they DO have a legitimate cultural claim to these practices
> 2) they also have a legitimate *moral* claim to these practices - under their
> stewardship of this land there were apparently very, VERY few animals
> driven to the brink (or over the edge) of extinction - and certainly not
> egrets, eagles, wolves, lions, grizzelies, etc.

I certainly won't argue with the first bit. I believe Native
Americans should be entitled to feathers. We cannot say whether it's
immoral or not, it's not our place to judge.

But it seems that the popular idea of Native Americans living in harmony
with their environment is far too simplistic. Perhaps our resident
anthropologist Gene Hunn will step in here. Native Americans have been
altering their landscapes drastically for at least 12,000 years. Like
Europeans, they used hands and mind to make their homes better, whether
that home was on the plains, coastal arctic tundra, or extensive forests.
The main difference between their methods and ours is that we had superior
technology, and came at it from a unified front. Native Americans were
not as technological as Europeans, and intertribal conflict kept them from
the scale of alteration achievable by Europeans. But evidence from
forestry research exists showing that forests on Cape Cod underwent
prescribed burnings as far back as 12,000 years ago. The practice
probably was used to clear out shrubs for dwellings, and to improve
habitat for deer, a staple food item in New England. The extent of this
was so great as to convert the entire Cape from an American beech forest
community to a pitch pine community *prior* to European settlement.
Governor Bradford's journal of the Mayflower colonists talks extensively
of pine and oak (spelled okes back then) forests they encountered in 1620.
Natives were sparse on the Cape then, probably because the forests were of
poor quality due to this conversion. Today, the only place in this entire
region where a native 'old-growth' beech community remains is on one
uninhabited island in the Elizabethan Islands. I'm sorry I can't provide
sources. I had some saved on a disk, which I just found out has an error
in it, and the text version is in a box somewhere (we just moved,
everything is in boxes). I believe other evidence exists to show that
Native Americans were responsible for quite a few extinctions of their
own: mastodon species (3 or 4 of these), short-faced bear, dire wolf,
saber-toothed cats, ground sloth, the North American 'horse', a much
larger species of caribou (in addition to the one we have today), and a
larger bison species. Most of these species existed in refugia from
glaciations, and might have perished anyway due to climatic changes, it's
unlikely anyone will truly know. But their extinctions certainly were
hastened along by humans (Native Americans). Now, I'm going to be blasted
for saying this (and I'm *not* trying to legitimize our destruction of
habitat or species), but if the above is true, it seems that Native
Americans might be responsible for just as many vertebrate extinctions as
Europeans. I will not argue that our impact on the overall landscapes of
North America is certainly of a greater magnitude, this is certainly true.
Nevertheless, I can think of the following vertebrates Europeans have
helped go extinct: bison, Labrador Duck, Carolina Parakeet, Great Auk,
Passenger Pigeon, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Steller's Manatee, Atlantic
gray whale, and the almost extinct red wolf and California Condor.

It would seem that the large landscape alterations Europeans have made
result in a greater number of subspecies extinctions, and non-vertebrate
extinctions, though I have no evidence to prove this. But remember the
Dusky Seaside Sparrow and Heath Hen. Native Americans might also have
shared in subspecific extinctions which we will never know of.

Geez, more to say, but that'll do for now (back to work). I believe I've
seen literature discussing the extinctions of native Hawaiian birds due
to their native peoples.

PS does anybody know how to get a file off a damaged disk? I'd like to
recover the one I mentioned above, it has alot of obscure references.

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html