Native Americans and the Environment: A survey of twentieth century issues with particular reference to peoples of the Colorado Plateau and Southwest (page 9 of 10)

Author: David Rich Lewis. Adapted from: Lewis, David R. 1995. "Native Americans and the Environment: A survey of twentieth century issues." American Indian Quarterly, 19: 423-450, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Visit the University of Nebraska Press website at nebraskapress.unl.edu/.

Stereotypes and Interests in Conflict

In recent years, tribal land use - including their resistance to submitting to certain state and federal environmental regulations - has put Indians at odds with environmentalists. This turn of events emerges as Indians begin placing immediate needs and desires over older cultural regulatory patterns, shattering both traditional standards of behavior and static white stereotypes of Indians as "the original conservationists." Indeed, early environmentalists found inspiration in Native American cultures. Some was richly deserved while much was based on a cultural misinterpretation of a more complex and dynamic whole. The grosser stereotypes depicted Indians as beings without action or agency, who left no mark on the land, who lived within the strictest of natural constraints. These ideas unintentionally denied Native Americans their humanity, culture, history, and most importantly, their modernity.

This stereotypic vision blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Indians became symbols for the American counterculture, American environmentalism, and New Age mysticism - symbols for a way of life in opposition to urban, white, Christian, techno-industrial society. Iron Eyes Cody shedding a tear in television ads as he surveyed a polluted landscape, and an apocryphal speech written as a film script and attributed to Chief Seattle made Indians "the mascot of an international ecology movement." Native peoples fostered this facile view for its positive results. Yet in the end the images offered more a justified critique of industrial society than any critical understanding of Native peoples' complex interactions with the environment. Even the highly touted motion picture Dances With Wolves (1990) is a sensitive if misleading dance with mythology, using Indians and animals as environmental symbols to attack twentieth-century human-nature relationships. Stereotypic images persist to the detriment of Native Americans because the images relegate them to a "past" and misdirect non-Indian society's responses to modern Native peoples and issues.

Indians were never properly "ecologists" - a term referring to a highly abstract and systematic science. They were, however, careful students of their functional environments, bound by material and cultural needs and constraints, striving for maximum sustained yield rather than maximum production, yet unafraid to exploit moments of periodic abundance. They developed an elaborate land ethic based on long-term experience, tied to a cosmological view of the world with all its animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural inhabitants as an interrelated whole. They recognized that they were part of creation and acted accordingly. Land and place were central to survival, to their beliefs, to their very identity. They shaped their environments which, in turn, shaped them. Their population densities and technologies, subsistence strategies and beliefs mitigated perhaps the worst environmental degradations, but did not leave the natural environment or ecology of their regions untouched. They lived, they acted, they are, and oversimplified or romantic stereotypes should not deny them that complex human experience past or present.

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Conclusion
Selected References