Frankly, I feel like everything I post tonight is going to be things that people have already said. I agree with Obecks about the Indians quickly becoming dependent on the trading of their resources with the Europeans. And again, we’re slowly learning that some of the perpetuated assumptions about the history of nature (not necessarily environmental history, but the history of nature) are false. The Indians played a role in doing damage to the natural resources in America just as the Europeans did. Nature, however, still seems to be portrayed in these readings as a paradise beyond compare. I also agree with Will (Freedberg) about Morton viewing this Eden as a gold mine to dig from rather than a place to become intertwined with.
To answer Olivia’s initial question about having some of our key elements of our environment being taken away from us, I’d say it depends on whether those elements are man made or natural, and what the specific elements are. If you take away a huge chunk of the forests throughout the country, it would not pose the same problem in 2011 that it did back then, with architecture relying on steel and iron instead of wood.
As a whole, the readings tonight were really unnerving. The central theme, obviously, was humanity viewing the New World as breathtaking and nearly perfect, and then proceeding to slowly ruin it. The only question I would pose to the group is this: if Indians were able to fight off the diseases and come away mainly unharmed, would they have been able to learn from the Europeans, learn how to make their weapons, and actually put up a fight against them? Or, as with the merchant trading, would the Europeans use the inexperience of the Indians as a way to further exploit them?
My question is: How come Indians were sometimes able to "exhaust" resources in their given areas (and therefore forced to move) when they had such supposedly small and dispersed populations, yet European populations that settled in similar areas could do so permanently and seemingly be sustained??
Rachel I think this is a really good question. I think that even though Native Americans lived in small villages and were very dispersed around the country when they exhausted their resources they needed to move because they did not have the means to bring resources in. Or at least I think maybe they were able to bring some resources in but not enough to sustain a whole tribe. I believe that European populations could settle permanently in similar areas and stay there longer but that they still did exhaust the resources but they had a way of dealing with it. If the soil was exhausted and the colonists were not able to grow enough crops for a while they could probably get food from ships coming over and other colonies. Does that make any sense?[/quote]
I agree with this and I also think a possible reason for this is that Native Americans had been already been relying on the land for a few thousand years when the Europeans arrived. The Native Americans had historically been stressing the land much more than Europeans because they had been there for so much longer.
As I continue through the readings I am finding more and more things that are in this gray area of both human and nature, like the diseases and the domestication of animals that are making my definitions much less clear cut.
One question I had was when it says in the Eden reading “When the population was near and at its height, Cahokians imported wood.” How did they import? Did they trade for it from other people or did they send people off to go cut down trees in some other location? I’ve never really thought of Native American cultures as being global and that is what that quote implies to me.
Also responding to Olivia Buntaine’s question of
If key elements of our nature/environment got taken away from us as they were for the Abenaki TODAY, would we be dealing with the same calibre of cultural repercussions? or was the level of affect particular to that culture?
I do not think we would be dealing with the same level of cultural repercussions. I feel like the environment that we rely on is more of our man made environment. We rely on computers and the internet and technology more than we rely on any sort of “nature” environment. If our man-made technological environment was taken away I think we would face some very serious repercussions but not so much our nature environment. I also do not think that I can think of a nature environment that our modern culture really relies on.
Olivia: I couldn't really relate to the fervent puritanical christian aspect of the Bradford reading, but I can totally understand why he would have considered Nature an oppressor. I think people tend to the think of limitations as an oppressor, whether or not the limit is placed with intent. In the modern first-world, most limitations on the things you can and can't do aren't imposed by nature. But for a European accustomed to a certain level of technological advancement and settlement coming to the new world, the limitations most certainly were natural ones, so i don't think it's an unreasonable response to see nature as an oppressor.
Shooot. I just read through the posts again and I realized that other people had said pretty much exactly what I had written above about Bradford, but said it more succinctly. Sorry.
I think it's interesting to look at the Eden reading with respect to the Diamond reading. They did sort of inverse things. Diamond asked "Why were the people this way?" and then looked at environmental causes for the answer, and Krech asked "Why was the environment this way?" and looked to people and populations for the answer. Throughout the first half or so of the reading I felt like a lot of what Krech said sort of called Diamond's argument into doubt. He wrote, "According to archaeologists, American Indians often so pressured or depleted basic resources like land and trees that they had to switch from one type of food to another or move the locations of the their villages. Native farmers throughout North America transformed landscapes (as farmers everywhere did), not just by burning and clearing woodland for conversion to agricultural land." To me, that indicated that not only had Native Americans developed the sort of agricultural communities upon which Diamond said that metalworking was predicated, but they also had large enough populations to make the european-esque technological advancements (or else, I assumed, they wouldn't have been able to affect the environment in the way Krech described above).
But then he went on to talk about how the Native American population wasn't really that big and they really didn't affect the environment that significantly, which left me with a question really similar to Rachel's: If some Native American groups were both willing AND able to exploit the land in a fashion similar to that of europeans, why did they fail to reap similar rewards, at least in terms of population size and settlement permanency?
I just realized that they are two threads- thanks Olivia for copying and pasting my post onto this one!
I liked reading "A Hideous and Desolate Wilderness". Most of the readings we have read so far come from a more modern, scientific, environmentalist perspective, so hearing an account that took place in the past and included aspects of faith interested me. I think everyone else summed up how nature can be the force of the oppressor nicely, so no need for me to repeat that.
In response to Ellie's question- about not mentioning winter, that crossed my mind too. As far as I know, Native Americans did not pass many deadly diseases to Europeans, but winters in New England were difficult for many European settlers/explorers to adapt to. [/quote]
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