Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2011 3:00 pm Post subject: Bison and Husbandry
I finished the first one, and will post again after I finish tghe husbandry writing.
The big I dea I got was what seems good now will be one's downfall later, just as Native Americans were introduced to the horse and then on began heavily relying on bison hunting for survival. I thought it was strange, considering how many other food rescources they had before, and that it seemed lke it worked just fine. I can't figure out why they would just switch to only bison, when the system before worked. maybe bison was really tasty? I don't know.
Second, there is a quote, "..the horse's superiority over the dog for traction and transport..." (page 51) Did some Native Americans ride dogs? I have tried searching online, but nothing that came up seemed relevant. Anyone else know anything about this?
and for the other reading!
I find the cultural differences made apparent by how the English settlers farmed vs. how the Native Americans farmed super cool, and a great connection to the ideas we discussed about land ownership. The Natives would move and use different land to grow crops every few years, whereas Europeans kept using the same land year after year, so they needed to enrich the soil and take care of the land so it will continue to bear crops. I relate this directly back to the different views each group had on land. In Europe, land was property, and it would be difficult to just find another batch of land to grow crops on once it was necessary. Native Americans, however, were more nomadic in the sense that they didn’t really ‘own’ land, so they could move around when necessary. This bit really helped me understand this idea much better.
Horses caused a transformation in the lives of many Indian nations. Indias were living off what Cronon and Richard White call "safety nets", a system which involves minimal use of the environment just being used to survive, not flourish. With the introduction of the equestrian aid, indians lives truly changed forever, transforming into "equestrian nomads." This reading talked a lot about the introduction of the horse to the Americas by the Europeans. Intertribal trade was soon established. With horses, the most prominent and well known Indian groups changed "from life on the fringes of the plains and partial dependence on the bison for subsistence to nomadism and primary dependence of the bison." This transformation of sorts happened from the 16th century (the first introductions of Horses) to around the 18th century (change to primary dependence on bison). Indians seemed to be quick learners when it came to bison hunting on horses. They learned the migration patterns of the bison whether it be during the summer or the drastic change to the winter.
"In order to effec this transformation, they adopted a new technology, the horse."
I liked this quote because it describes the past perfectly. Technology is what its all about, and getting the new technology is a desire no matter what the time frame.
So I liked the sharing of active reading/quotes that I used before, so I'm going to try it again.
Bison reading:
- "The Indians' land use strategy protected them from both random environmental shock and overexploitation." (page 51)
- "The social segmentation of the groups that migrated to the plains was a direct consequence of the nature of mounted bison hunting." (page 5
- "...a more secure land-use strategy than the combination of hunting and sedentary horticulture - at least in the short term." (page 5
- "... the Indians depended on trade rather than on their own labor to insure a diversity of resources." (page 5
The first quote describes what was going right for the Native Americans (N.A.'s). They knew how to protect their land, and were going along with that. Both hunting and agriculture were part of their interactions with nature, establishing a balance so neither source would die out. The second quote was SO interesting to me. Isenberg went on to explain that because of this, "social segmentation," some N.A.'s survived better and longer than others. This seemed so common sensical, but the idea was still very interesting. It counters the first quote, because instead of balancing food sources, the N.A.'s went for the bigger prize, messing up their strategies. The third quote summarizes this idea; although bison hunting had bigger rewards, the rewards would not be available in the long run. Finally, the consequences. Isenberg tells us that the N.A.'s became dependent on other cultures and settlements because of their carelessness and the disruption of environmental balance they caused.
On the other hand, European settlers in the Northeast took a different route, with the same results.
Husbandry reading:
Same deal as above. This time, with Europeans though. These guys went and over used their land because they wanted money. For a while, they had a good system going, but then the crappy New England land couldn't take the exploitation. What I found interesting was the mindset change the settlers had, and from that idea I got a question. Why did the New Englanders decide to go from a series of self-susstainable communities to be part of the agricultural revolution? Did they have a choice? Seems like they sorta made the wrong one if they did... Anyway, the more interesting stuff about this was the similarity to the first article, and why two relatively stable communities got sucked into modern advances and disrupted their balances.
If i were to pull two words out of the second reading it was COWS and GRASS. I agree with dylan that the crappy New England land didn't allow for Europeans to exploit it easily, they actually had to work. Using mixed husbandry, a system "that combined livestick and tillage to supply the necessities of life," Europeans learned how do use animals to their primary survival advantage, specifically cattle which gave a year around supply of essential necessities. This is just what the Native Americans did when they were introduced to horses, they adapted and survived. Growing grass for cattle in an environment that wasn't completely suited for it was a hardship the Euroamericans had to overcome to let mixed animal husbandry work.
There were a lot of causes and effects flying around these readings. In one sense, it was nice because they united the two types of definitions of E.Hist we’ve been looking at- they look at nature as a cause of societal and environmental changes.
But on the other hand it got a little jumbled. I’d like to straighten some of them out….
It seems like far more factors were at work when mixed husbandry fell out of favor than when it started in the 1630’s. Donahue lists causes inherent to the MH system and incidental to it:
(inherent problems)
-finding enough land for heirs was difficult, and early colonial agriculture depended on high children/adult ratios
-the yeoman system fell out of cultural favor
-MH worked on a small scale, but exhausted local ecosystems as much as it took up physical space, and so became less productive
(incidental agents of change)
-industrialization & globalization
-more production resources available after Appalachian mountains crossed; Cotton boom in South
-demand for more diverse produce and products in New England (demand mostly coming from Europe and the Southern US)
MH came about, though, simply because it worked and because White settlers had experience with it. (I think).
Conversely, it seems like more factors contributed to the rise & survival of Bison-hunting than its fall-
-The horse made bison hunting and nomadism easy
-the horse brought about other changes to NA societies that made a nomadic lifestyle preferable
-European cultural and economic systems (the fur trade, for example) made nomadism and bison-hunting profitable
-settled, static NA groups were susceptible to disease and encroachment by Europeans
The author doesn’t discuss why bison-following died out as a way of life, and rather focuses on the effect it had on other aspects of Indian society. But I’m pretty sure it disappeared because White Americans wiped out nearly all the bison and confined NAs to reservations… can somebody else speak to this?
On an unrelated note, Isenberg’s approach to Europeans kinda floored me. He takes bison-following for what it is rather than letting its associations with Europeans color his opinion of it. It made “NAs abandon their ecological safety nets” and affected “gender division of labor... trade… [and] culture” but “was not a step backward in human evolution” (59). That is, he concludes it was a viable alternative to agriculture or hunt/gathering under the circumstances….
I agree to some extent with Knaide's basic point of "The big I dea I got was what seems good now will be one's downfall later" but I'd like to perhaps make it a little more specific.
Both readings illustrated to me that the insertion of domesticated animals into practices of survival such as hunting, agriculture, and as a source of goods (leather, mutton, milk, etc) will not only focus and streamline daily procedures but also effect the given environment to a far greater degree than humans planting and hunting independently. Furthermore, the maintenance and work necessary in keeping/maintaining domesticated animals (horse, cattle, sheep, etc) proves to change not only the environment but also completely alter pre-existing economic landscape.
The example of the Native Americans and their acquisition of the domesticated horse does, while the catalyst for a large cultural shift for many tribes of the midwest/west, is not a great example of domestication and possession changing the literal environment. However, the introduction of the horse completely disintegrated previous tribal relations among the now "nomadic" natives who's market now completely consisted of intertribal trading of horses and food stuffs. Their markets both centralized around this almost singularly focused good while also decentralizing drastically, a function of very individualistic endeavors, as once it became evident that "equestrian bison hunting yielded greater wealth at less expense than a combination hunting gathering and planting.." (5, a very European-esque emphasis on a margin of profit over actual needs met truly began emerging.
A similar thing happened in a different way--and with far more permanent results---for the farmers in New England. Originally families had their own farms, yet with little real division between them or really, any desire for one. Families were categorically more or less self-reliant for sources of food, cloth and building material through the fruits of their mixed-husbandry construct, relying on a barter system to supplement in town for anything they did'nt have. Most notably, towns even had shared grazing space for cattle, supported by an idea of public access (or, in a way, partial ownership)
Yet, like the Native Americans, a changing economy changed these New England farmers focuses as well, as they shifted from viewing cattle as a personal source of meat, dairy and leather to a commodity capable of giving them profit in commerce. Beyond just cattle and in terms of crops, "They [farmers] now began to look deliberately for those crops that brought the best cash return," (114) Essentially, there was a great shift in ideology and priority that demanded flourishing, not just surviving and both utilized and specialized domesticated animals and crops.
Yet unlike the small, dispersed populations of nomadic equestrian native Americans, the famer's and their maintenance of lands---especially the grasses necessary to support their most important staple of cattle--devastated the land often rendering it useless for their purposes and requiring further economic and agricultural innovation.
Basically, I think, at the top of the food chain, its really hard to understand our roles in the environment, like whats appropriate, and whats over-stepping/exploitative. It gets a whole lot harder when humans decide to domesticate and own/control the populations and distributions of still other species. Whether it were horses for the Native Americans or cattle for the New England Farmers, animals' needs and then, the reliance we have on these animals has proven to monopolize economies and radically alter the natural landscapes.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong things here but I think man's connection to environment using other nature (as animals are not man) as a point of intersection is one of the more fascinating relationships in environmental history
So I’m midway through the husbandry essay and done with the bison one. I thought Isenberg’s essay about how the Indian’s adapted so much once the horse was introduced was really interesting. Like Will said, this was totally about cause and effect and just another example of how the Indian’s were so dramatically affected by something the settlers introduced to their way of life. The paragraph that most jumped out at me was on the first page when Isenberg was talking about how the Indians strategically didn’t use/become dependent on only one resource for the “safety net” reason and so as not to completely exhaust one resource: “By varying their production the Indians reduced the likelihood that they would overexploit any one resource. The Indians’ land use strategy protected them from both random environmental shock and overexploitation.” This was of course genius and something we should be doing but also kind of sad that they completely changed this method once they had horses and became utterly dependent on the bison. This also affected much more than just their food resources, as Rachel said, it completely decentralized their social strata, thus making them more easily conquered by the settlers.
The Europeans changed the Native American’s way of life in so many manners. What we have read so far mainly dealt with the changes caused by disease brought over by the Europeans and caused the raised amounts of hunting NA’s did because the Europeans wanted furs. I found it really interesting that one animal, the horse, could change an entire populations way of life. Native Americans in general seem to adapt well to most circumstances and use most of what Europeans brought over to their advantage although sometimes the advantage only last for a little while like the bison hunting. The Native Americans used the horses to their full advantage while hunting the bison and even changed their way of life to follow the bisons living patterns. “The social segmentation of the groups that migrated to the plains was a direct consequence of the nature of mounted bison hunting… The Indians broke into small bands in the winter, mirroring the actions of the herds…” (5 I thought that it was really clever to follow the animals patterns because they were able to get even more profit since they were hunting year round but I also think this is probably part of the reason that bison populations declined so quickly in combination with Europeans hunting them.
To answer Knaides question: Did some Native Americans ride dogs?
No Native Americans did not ride dogs but they used them to pull loads and transport materials around. They were like pack animals for them. Because they did not have mules or horses, which are used as pack animals they used dogs instead.
One theme I noticed in the two essays was (sorry for the bad phrasing) you can't introduce a foreign species to a new environment without consequences.
It reminded me of the introduction of cane toads in Australia. Cane Toads are from central and South America. Cane toads were brought to Australia in order to eat a species of beetle that was destroying the crops. It later became an invasive species and damaged the eco systems and became overpopulated in Australia. One thing Australia and the United States have in common is the introduction of foreign species and the overall effect on the environment (as well as the people who lived in it).
Sometimes a species that is beneficial in one environment can damage another. For the Native Americans, horses helped them travel great distances in shorter periods of time and hunt bison, but their new hunting techniques were less sustainable and damaged an ecosystem.
For the Europeans, they had to adapt their farming and grazing techniques. What worked in Europe did not always work in New England. But like Zach and Dylan said, Native Americans and Europeans both found ways to adapt to the challenges a new environment/introduced species brought, and incorporate them into their lifestyle. One question I had was....
-Horses spread through the United States via trading, raids etc. How did the arrival of horses impact Native Americans living in environments other than the plains? (This was not addressed in the reading, but if anyone knows, I’d love to hear)
Zach said: Technology is what its all about, and getting the new technology is a desire no matter what the time frame.
I completely agree with this. Today we live in a very materialistic society and the more gadgets someone has the better. Having a lot of technology is a sign of wealth in todays world but was also the same for the Native Americans. Of course there was not computers, ipods and cell phones back then but they wanted the new material the Europeans brought in like kettles, and guns. In many tribes, how wealthy and how they were regarded in the community was based upon how many horses they had and the quality of the horses. No matter where people are from and which societies people belong to I belief that humans are always materialistic. It seems to me people always want more even though they might not need that more to lead a happy life. I think the Native Americans were the same in this way as the Europeans.
Donahue uses the term "ecological fitness" a few times in a sort of vague way that I don't really understand. He says, "The most notable flaw in the ecological fitness of these New England yeomen was not agronomic, but demographic: there were too many children. The most glaring social flaw was that...etc." I'm not sure if he means that the demographics of the society eventually loop back on the environment or something, or that the health of the society was a part of the ecological fitness, but i couldn't really figure it out.
I think Rachel brought up a good point that it's really difficult to figure what the appropriate human effect on the environment is. I mean i think it's easy to say that, yeah, it would be better if our agricultural system were less exploitative and that the rate at which humans are changing, and if you want to call it that, "destroying" the environment is bad. The way this ideal of sustainability is presented seems like it's as much about unchangingness as it is about anything else. And although I would agree that this rapid, human-propelled environmental change is "inappropriate", I think forced environmental stasis under the banner of sustainability would produce an ecological stagnation that is neither remotely natural nor particularly appropriate. Cyclicality implies change, and I'm not convinced that the cessation of nature's historical cycle is any more "natural" than its linearization.
If you think that a sustainable relationship with the environment would prove safer and more benificial for humans and large life forms over the course of time and that that's a valuable thing in itself, then fine, I would very much agree with you. But let's not pretend that any of our plans would provide a more "just" or "natural" relationship with the environment in the sense that we would not be wreaking changes (or damage, depending on how you look at it) that otherwise would not occur. Because a fluctuating, ultimately changing-never-to-come-back-again ecology is natural. Not a sustainable farm or a set of fields whose nutrient counts are carefully maintained at productive levels. Just as easily as you can pose the question "Who are we to change the environment so radically", you can ask, "Who are we to prevent it from changing?"
Well this became something it wasn't meant to. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. I mean I'm pro-sustainable agriculture and anti-strip mining and everything like that. I just think sometimes our arguments fall back on these assumptions that are so firmly held that they feel like something other than assumptions when really they arent. I dunno.
Last edited by Willblum on Thu Jan 13, 2011 10:19 pm; edited 1 time in total
So, to give you an idea of how tired I am right now, I wrote "phood chain" instead of food chain when I was taking notes on what to respond to on the forum.
In any case, although I'm not done with the second reading yet, I'm finding these articles very readable but not particularly discussion-inducing. It was helpful to read the forum, but instead of trying to force some interpretation of the text I'm going to return to something interesting some one has already said.
Rachel brought up the point of humans understandgin their place at the top of the food chain in relation to the rest of our environment
Quote:
Basically, I think, at the top of the food chain, its really hard to understand our roles in the environment, like whats appropriate, and whats over-stepping/exploitative.
I think that idea has been a missing piece in some of the conversations we've been having. Forgive the incredibly off phrasing of this next part, but not only is it difficult to understand how to interact with …beings… lower than us on the food chain in a respectful way, but to understand all the different facets of our relationship with the non-animal environment- being that we are at the top of the food chain.
I know someone is going to groan if I pull this next card, but none of the above seems very far off from societal, human privilege.
Perhaps the parallel between the way our human hierarchies function within human society and the way humankind functions in nature at the top of the food chain is not coincidental- but another reason to look to environmental history.
I don't know if this is something everyone else has already thought of, but the idea that our (humans) relationship with nature could be indicative to our relationships with eachother (particularly oppressed groups) is a really interesting lens for me.
p.s. I'm really enjoying the unintentional emoticons slipping into our posts
I thought it was very interesting to look at the effect of animals in these readings; our previous readings haven’t really dealt with this aspect of environment history. In the “Indians and Bison on the Great Plains” I thought the progression of how the Native Americans sustained themselves was odd. They started off “by varying their production the Indians reduced the likelihood that they would overexploit any one resource” but then switched to relying so heavily on the Bison that they overexploited them and no longer had them as a resource.
Two points from that reading that really jumped out at me were
“Because the microbes that cause smallpox, measles, and other diseases cannot survive long among sparse populations, the Arctic migration acted as a disease filter”
“The densely settled, relatively sedentary villagers were thus more likely to contract diseases than the nomads, who spent much of the year isolated in small outlying bands”
The first one gave somewhat of a reason to the ever present Native American disease problem we have been encountering. The second one really shows how much of an impact horses had on the lives of the plains Native Americans.
I thought it was very interesting to look at the environment history of the areas around us in the second article. Like Dylan said, I thought it was interesting how just like with the Native Americans the modern more efficient technology that the Europeans adopted eventually ended up disrupting their balance. This reading also made me look at the land around me much differently. While I complain about the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer, I have never had these two things affect my life in anyway other than just my physical comfort. However both of these were extreme obstacles for the farming colonists and as a Massachusetts resident that is something that is very worth appreciating.
As Gigi said, it’s unbelievable how much impact a single animal can have on such an enormous culture, and so immediately. “In essence, the horse regularized food procurement in the unpredictable environment of the western plains.” (Page 5. In other words, the horse brought stability. The Indians now knew how they were going to get Bison, and it helped them convert to a nomadic society during the eighteenth century. I didn’t really like or dislike the first reading, mainly because it was so short. I think Shakespeare would’ve loved the Native Americans, because their whole encounter with the Europeans is one gargantuan tragedy. But there was a silver lining to this story, at least in the short term. The Indians may not have been able to keep up the nomadic hunting routine up for very long, but as the reading says “the transformation of many groups from woodland planter-hunters to grassland bison hunters was not a step backward in human evolution.” It was the Indians adapting once again to something new, like a batter adjusting to a pitcher’s curveball (of course I’m the one who always uses sports analogies).
The second reading was a little duller, although when I first saw the article my face lit up. The last time I’d heard the word husbandry, I was playing Age Of Empires on my computer as a kid, and I was frustrated that I had to deal with such petty things like farming and supplying my armies with food and whatnot. Moving on from words that cause instant nostalgia, I want to talk about the point Olivia (Bunty) brought up in her last post, something that hadn’t really crossed my mind. At first glance, I think the way humans interact with nature isn’t really comparable to the way we treat each other, simply because when we interact with other humans, their reaction is so starkly different than nature’s reaction. I hope this gets brought up in class tomorrow, I’m really interested to hear what other people’s take is on this. Lastly, I want to offer an opinion on what Rachel initially brought up and Olivia re-brought up: the issue with being at the top of the food chain. I think is does come back to our own sense of entitlement, that we almost don’t think about the slaughtering of animals for food because we’re so accustomed to it. It’s almost like the mindset has become “we’re at the top of the food chain, and we can do what we want. If we want to kill zillions of cows, pigs, and other animals for food, who’s gonna stop us?” It’s a little weird to think about. Again, I hope it gets brought up in class.
P.S.: I agree with Olivia that the random smileys with sunglasses made reading the forum that much better tonight.
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