Subject: Re: native peoples (was "collecting legalities")
Date: Nov 17 11:32:38 1995
From: Eugene Hunn - hunn at u.washington.edu


Tweets,

I could say too much about this issue. But time is short. But let me
just say that while it is undoubtedly true that Native American peoples
in their 12000+ years of residence in "America" did alter the environment
in many ways, intentionally and otherwise. But then again, so did
beavers, ants, and earthworms. Fire was used quite regularly,
systematically, and perhaps universally as a tool to clear the understory
to ease travel in forested regions, to initiate succession in grasslands,
marsh edge, chapparal, woodland, and forest environments for various
purposes, notably to encourage plants such as huckleberries, camas,
bracken, etc. for food and to attract game animals, etc. However, the
population density of areas occupied by hunter-gatherers, such as the
Pacific Northwest probably rarely exceeded 1/mi2, typically more like
0.2/mi2 in interior regions, perhaps > 1/mi2 along the coasts. Compared
to contemporary Washington State density of ca. 80+ and of New Jersey of
ca. 1000/mi2. Not to mention that each resident today consumes perhaps
20x or more energy per capita than was the case before Euroamerican
settlement. The arithmetic speaks for itself.

However, Paul S. Martin's "Pleistocene Overkill" theory is considered
entirely without merit by myself and my archaeological colleagues. His
claim that the loss of 31 genera of mammalian megafauna at the end of the
Pleistocene in North & South America was due primarily if not entirely to
predation by "big game hunting" Paleoindians using spears tipped with
Clovis points requires us to believe that these people were somehow
motivated to massacre 5x to 50x the animal biomass they would have
required to meet their per capita food energy requirements. It takes
effort to dispatch a mammoth or a mastodon. It is totally absurd to
assume people would so waste their finite energies for the sheer blood
lust of it. Furthermore, as Martin admits, there is virtually no
archaeological evidence linking human hunters to any of the extinct
megafauna. Bison kills there are, but the bison survived by the tens of
millions to the middle of the nineteenth century. I know of one bison
kill site in Colorado dated to ca. 7000 BC involving ca. 300 animals
driven into a narrow canyon and dispatched en masse. However, the bones
of 90% of these are carefully disarticulated, suggesting that waste was
quite limited.

In short, we should dismiss the romantic notion that Native Americans had
no impact on the environment, but we should not allow the pendulum to
swing to the opposite extreme of suggesting they were no more sensitive
than we are of the need to establish and maintain balance in their
relationships to the plants and animals on which their lives depended.
Their deeply felt religious values continually underscore their clear
perception of the delicacy of that balance.

Gene Hunn.

On Fri, 17 Nov 1995, M. Smith wrote:

> 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
>
>