There’s a big debate going on about hunting for sport. On one side are the “antis,” as they are often labeled—advocates of animal rights, who think that shooting and killing a deer or a duck is almost as bad as murdering a human being. The fact that it is done for sport only makes matters worse, because hunters evidently get a sadistic pleasure from spilling the blood of other living, sensitive creatures.
On the other side are the “pros”—sportsmen (and sportswomen) and their supporters. The pros believe, to the contrary, that people are totally superior to animals and have a God-given right to do whatever they like to “lower” forms of life, provided no injury is done another human being. An important element in the justification of modern sport hunting is the “objectification” of the “game,” the minimization of animal consciousness. Animals have no thoughts or feelings beyond their immediate sensations and get around largely by “instinct,” or so many of the pros allege. Thus to hunt and kill these moving targets is a far cry from doing similar things to another genuine “subject,” another fully conscious, thinking, feeling person.
Among traditional American Indian peoples, whose livelihood consisted primarily of hunting and gathering wild foods, we might expect to find attitudes similar to the pro side of the sport hunting controversy—if such folk had any thoughtful opinions at all on the matter. Once upon a time, even anthropologists believed that the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere lived in a rude and primitive estate, only a notch above the beasts they preyed upon. If so, one could hardly imagine that these “savages” (then a perfectly acceptable term in anthropology) entertained any other notion about animals than which ones were good for eating and what was the easiest way to catch them.
But when anthropologists began to study the cognitive as well as material cultures of American Indian peoples, a startlingly different set of native attitudes and values was revealed. Thus, by the 1930s, the distinguished American anthropologist Frank Speck could claim that
Among Indians in the hunting level, . . . various families and clans . . . held themselves in special relationships to groups of animals, associations which have earned the name of “totemism.” . . . The animal world, in their view, enjoyed the right to exist in close association with human beings. . . . Numerous regulations govern the taking and killing of plant and animal life. With these people no act of this sort is profane, hunting is not war upon the animals, not a slaughter for food or profit, but a holy occupation.1
Though Speck doesn’t mention it, above all for the Indians, neither is hunting a sport. And not because it is their work instead of their play. Hunting an animal for sport would violate its dignity, sanctity, and right to be respected by human beings.
Hunters who believe in animal rights?! That sounds like a contradiction.
Gifted contemporary writers such as Richard Nelson, Gary Snyder, and Calvin Martin have tried to work us imaginatively into the seemingly paradoxical mind-set of pre-Columbian American Indian hunter-gatherers, and, for that matter, into the mind-set of the animals and plants they pursued. Nelson subverts the assumption that for traditional hunters the animal is a mere object, not a subject, and suggests that, according to their beliefs, when we look out upon the natural world, there are many sets of eyes—most concealed—looking back at us.2 Martin suggests that as incredible as it may seem to those of us in the grip of the modern Western worldview, the traditional American Indian hunter did not attempt to attack his prey so much as to seduce it.3 The sacred game must want to give itself to the tender, loving human carnivore and to go willingly, even cheerfully, to its fate.4 Gary Snyder tries to explain why it would: The animal is seized with a desire to come into the lodge, teepee, or hogan of the hunter, to smoke his tobacco, and to hear him and his friends tell their stories and sing their songs.5
Assuming that these authors are reporting their facts straight, is this some kind of collective madness . . . or what? But it just might be that American Indian peoples had a coherent philosophy to support such seemingly ludicrous beliefs. We think that they did, and what we’re going to try to do here is to bring it out and make it seem both clear and reasonable.
Here we sketch, in broadest outline, the picture of nature endemic to pre-Columbian North America. And, more specifically, we argue that the view of nature typical of traditional American Indian peoples has included and supported an environmental ethic that helped to prevent them from overexploiting the ecosystems in which they lived.
We do not enter into this discussion unaware of the difficulties and limitations lying in ambush at the very outset. In the first place, there is no one thing that can be called the American Indian belief system. The aboriginal peoples of the North American continent lived in environments quite different from one another and culturally adapted to these environments in quite different ways. For each tribe there were a cycle of myths and a set of ceremonies, and from these materials one might abstract for each a particular view of nature.
However, recognition of the diversity and variety of American Indian cultures should not obscure a complementary unity to be found among them. Despite great differences there were common characteristics that culturally united American Indian peoples. Joseph Epes Brown claims that
this common binding thread is found in beliefs and attitudes held by the people in the quality of their relationships to the natural environment. All American Indian peoples possessed what has been called a metaphysic of nature; and manifest a reverence for the myriad forms and forces of the natural world specific to their immediate environment; and for all, their rich complexes of rites and ceremonies are expressed in terms which have reference to or utilize the forms of the natural world.6
Calvin Martin has more recently confirmed Brown’s conjecture:
What we are dealing with are two issues: the ideology of Indian land-use and the practical results of that ideology. Actually, there was a great diversity of ideologies, reflecting distinct cultural and ecological contexts. It is thus more than a little artificial to identify a single, monolithic ideology, as though all Native Americans were traditionally inspired by a universal ethos. Still, there were certain elements which many if not all these ideologies seemed to share, the most outstanding being a genuine respect for the welfare of other life-forms.7
A second obvious difficulty bedeviling any discussion of American Indian views of nature is our limited ability to accurately reconstruct the cognitive—as opposed to the material—culture of New World peoples prior to their contact with (and influence by) Europeans. Arrowheads, bone awls, and other cultural artifacts that were made before 1492 still exist and can be carefully examined. But documentary records of precontact Indian thought do not.
American Indian metaphysics was embedded in oral traditions. Left alone, an oral culture may be very tenacious and persistent. If radically stressed, it may prove to be very fragile and liable to total extinction. Hence, contemporary accounts by contemporary American Indians of traditional American Indian philosophy are vulnerable to the charge of inauthenticity, in that for several generations American Indian cultures, cultures preserved in the living memory of their members, have been both ubiquitously and violently disturbed by transplanted European civilization.
Perhaps we ought, therefore, to rely where possible upon the earliest written observations of Europeans concerning American Indian belief. The accounts of the North American “savages” by sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europeans are, however, invariably distorted by ethnocentrism, which today appears so hopelessly benighted as to be more entertaining than illuminating. The written observations of Europeans who first encountered American Indian cultures provide, rather, an instructive record of the implicit European metaphysic. Because Indians were not loyal to the Christian religion, it was assumed that they had to be conscious servants of Satan, and that the spirits about which they talked and the powers their shamans attempted to direct had to be so many demons from hell. Concerning the Feast of the Dead among the Huron, Jean de Brébeuf wrote in the Jesuit Relations of 1636 that “nothing has ever better pictured for me the confusion among the damned.”8 His account, incidentally, is very informative and detailed concerning the physical requirements and artifacts of this ceremony, but the rigidity of his own system of belief makes it impossible for him to enter sympathetically into that of the Huron.
Reconstructing the traditional Indian attitude toward nature is, therefore, to some extent a speculative matter. On the other hand, we must not abandon the inquiry as utterly hopeless. Postcontact American Indians do tell of their traditions and conceptual heritage, and the critical ear can filter out the European noise in such accounts. Among the best of these nostalgic memoirs is John G. Neihardt’s classic, Black Elk Speaks, one of the most important and authentic sources available for the reconstruction of an American Indian attitude toward nature.9 The explorers’, missionaries’, and fur traders’ accounts of woodland Indian attitudes are also useful, despite their ethnocentrism, since we may also critically correct for the distortion of their biases and prejudices.
Further, disciplined and methodical modern ethnographers have recorded an American Indian oral narrative heritage, a diverse body of myths and stories that convey the cognitive structure and values of the people who told and retold them, generation after generation. Folktales have a life of their own and may survive the demise of the material culture in which they originated. Consider the fairy tales we Euro-Americans tell our children. They are set an ocean away in a material culture of castles and knights-in-shining-armor that no longer exists. Yet they remain relatively unchanged when we retell them in our present world of skyscrapers, fast-food joints, and TV. From them we might learn something about the enchanted-thought world of our medieval ancestors. Similarly, American Indian folktales may represent a relatively transparent window on the pre-Columbian mind-set of Stone Age North America.
Using these three sorts of sources—first-contact European records, transcribed personal recollections of tribal beliefs by spiritually favored Indians, and Native American folktales—we may achieve a fairly reliable reconstruction of traditional Indian attitudes toward nature.10
The distinct flavor of the typical American Indian conception of nature may be brought out most vividly by contrasting it with the typical Western European concept of nature, which now also prevails in North America and has, until recently, eclipsed native thought.
The European style of thought was set by the Greeks of classical antiquity. Whatever else it may have come to be, modern science is a continuation and extrapolation of certain concepts originating with the Greeks of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C.
Salient among the originally Greek notions of nature to find its way into modern science is the atomic theory of matter. The ancient atomists imagined all material things to be composed of indestructible and internally changeless particles, of which they supposed there were infinitely many. Each of these atoms was believed to be solid and to have a shape and a relative size. All other qualities of things normally disclosed by perception exist, according to the atomic theory, only by “convention,” not by “nature.” In the terms of later philosophical jargon, characteristics of things such as flavor, odor, color, and sound were regarded as secondary qualities, the privately experienced effects of the primary qualities on the sensory subject. The atoms move about haphazardly in the “void” or space. Macroscopic objects are assemblages of atoms; they are wholes exactly equal to the sum of their parts. Such objects come into being and pass away, but process and change were conceived as the association and dissociation of the eternally existing and unchanging atomic parts. The atomists claimed to reduce all the phenomena of nature to a simple dichotomy, variously expressed: the “full” and the “empty,” “thing” and “no-thing,” the atom and space.
The eventual Newtonian worldview of modern science included as one of its cornerstones the atomists’ concept of free space, thinly occupied by moving particles or “corpuscles,” as the early moderns called them. It was one of Newton’s greatest achievements to supply a quantitative model of the regular motion of the putative material particles. These famous “laws of motion” made it possible to represent phenomena not only materially but also mechanically: All change could be reduced to bits of matter moving through space impacting on other bits.
That the order of nature can be successfully disclosed only by means of a quantitative description is an idea that also originated in sixth-century B.C. Greece and is attributed to Pythagoras. The prevailing modern concept of nature might be over-simply, but nonetheless not incorrectly, portrayed as a merger of the Pythagorean idea that the order of nature is mathematical with the atomists’ ontology of void space (so very amenable to geometrical analysis) and material particles.
As Paul Santmire characterizes the modern European concept of nature that took root in North America,
Nature is analogous to a machine; or in the more popular version nature is a machine. Nature is composed of hard, irreducible particles which have neither color nor smell nor taste. . . . Beauty and value in nature are in the eye of the beholder. Nature is the dead res extensa, perceived by the mind, which observes nature from a position of objective detachment. Nature in itself is basically a self-sufficient, self-enclosed complex of merely physical forces acting on colorless, tasteless, and odorless particles of hard, dead matter. That is the mechanical view of nature as it was popularly accepted in the circles of the educated [Euro-Americans] in the nineteenth century.11
Santmire is careful to mention the nineteenth century because developments in twentieth-century science—the general theory of relativity, quantum theory, and ecology—have begun to replace the modern mechanical model of nature with another paradigm. A cultural worldview, however, lags behind the leading edge of intellectual development and so most Westerners still apprehend nature through a mechanistic-materialistic lens, blissfully unaware that the Newtonian worldview is obsolete. In any case, Santmire’s comments bring to our attention a complementary feature of the prevailing (albeit theoretically defunct) modern classical European and Euro-American worldview of particular interest to our overall discussion. If no qualms were felt about picturing rivers and mountains, trees, and even animals as inert, material, mechanical “objects,” only a few hard-nosed materialists (Democritus among the ancients and Hobbes among the moderns) were willing to try to provide a wholly mechanical account of mental activity.
The conception of the soul as not only separate and distinct from the body but as essentially alien to it (that is, of an entirely different, antagonistic nature) also was first introduced into Western thought by Pythagoras. Pythagoras conceived the soul to be a fallen divinity, incarcerated in the physical world as retribution for some unspecified sin. The goal in life for the Pythagoreans was to earn the release of the soul from the physical world upon death and to reunite the soul with its proper (divine) companions. The Pythagoreans accomplished this by several methods: asceticism, ritual purification, and intellectual exercise, particularly in mathematics.
Plato adopted Pythagoras’s concept of the soul as immortal, otherworldly, and essentially alien to the physical environment. Influenced by Plato, Saint Paul introduced it into Christianity. Although Plato and Pythagoras had not restricted the soul to human beings, but believed that all sorts of animals are inhabited by one too, Christian orthodoxy limited the earthly residence of souls to human bodies. The “father of modern philosophy,” René Descartes, reiterated in especially strong terms both the ancient Pythagorean/Platonic dualism and the Judeo-Christian insistence that only human beings are ensouled. Thus the essential self, in the eventual modern Western worldview, the part of a person by means of which he or she perceives and thinks, and in which resides virtue or vice, is less a citizen of Earth than of Heaven; and while living here on Earth we are lonely strangers in a strange land. Worse, the natural world is the place of trial and temptation for the quasi-divine human soul, its moral antipode.
So what attitude to nature does modern classical European natural philosophy convey? In sum, nature is an inert, material and mechanical plenum completely describable by means of the arid formulae of pure mathematics. In relation to nature, human beings are lonely exiles sojourning in a strange and hostile world, alien not only to their physical environment but to their own bodies, both of which they are encouraged to fear and to attempt to conquer. These Christian-Cartesian ideas were added to the core concepts, thoroughly criticized by Lynn White, Jr., Ian McHarg, and others, forthrightly set out in Genesis: God created man in his own image to have dominion over nature and to subdue it. The result, the Judeo-Christian/ Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, was a very volatile mixture of ingredients that exploded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an all-out European and Euro-American war on nature, a war that, as we rush headlong into the third millennium, has very nearly been won. (To the victors, of course, belong the spoils!)
The prevailing Western worldview, rooted in ancient Greek natural philosophy, is in fact doubly atomistic. Plato accounted for the existence of distinct species by means of his theory of ideal and abstract forms. Each individual or specimen “participated,” according to Plato, in a certain essence or form, and it derived its specific characteristics from the form in which it participated. The impression of the natural world conveyed by Plato’s theory of forms is that the various species are determined by the static logical-mathematical order of the formal domain, and then the individual organisms (each with its preordained essence) are loosed into the physical arena to interact adventitiously, catch-as-catch-can.
Nature is thus represented as like a room full of furniture, a collection, a mere aggregate of individuals of various types, relating to one another in an accidental and altogether external fashion. This picture of the world is an atomism of a most subtle and insidious sort. It breaks the highly integrated functional ecosystem into separate, discrete, and functionally unrelated sets of particulars. Pragmatically, approaching the world through this model-which we might call “conceptual” in contradistinction to “material” atomism—it is possible to radically rearrange parts of the landscape without the least concern for upsetting its functional integrity and organic unity. Certain species may be replaced by others (for example, wildflowers by grain in prairie biomes) or removed altogether (for example, predators) without consequence, theoretically, for the function of the whole.
Plato’s student Aristotle rejected the otherworldliness of Plato’s philosophy, both his theory of the soul and his theory of forms. Aristotle, moreover, was a sensitive empirical biologist and did as much to advance biology as a science as Pythagoras did for mathematics. Aristotle’s system of classification of organisms according to species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom (as modified and refined by Linnaeus) remains a cornerstone of the modern life sciences. This hierarchy of universals was not real or actual, according to Aristotle; only individual organisms fully existed. However, Aristotle’s taxonomical hierarchy, as it was formulated long before the development of evolutionary and ecological theory, resulted in a view of living nature that was no less compartmentalized than was Plato’s. Relations among things again are, in Aristotle’s biological theory, accidental and inessential. A thing’s essence is determined by its logical relations within the taxonomical schema rather than, as in ecological theory, by its working relations with other things in its environment—its trophic niche, its thermal and chemical requirements, and so on.
Evolutionary and ecological theory suggests, rather, that the essences of things, the specific characteristics of species, are a function of their relations with other things. Aristotle’s taxonomical view of the biotic world, untransformed by evolutionary and ecological theory, thus has the same ecologically misrepresentative feature as Plato’s theory of forms: Nature is seen as an aggregate of individuals, divided into various types, that have no functional connection with one another. And the practical consequences are the same. The Earth’s biotic mantle may be dealt with in a heavy-handed fashion, rearranged to suit one’s fancy without danger of dysfunctions. If anything, Aristotle’s taxonomical representation of nature has had a more insidious influence on the Western mind than Plato’s “real” universals, because the latter could be dismissed, as often they were, as abstracted Olympians in a charming and noble philosophical romance, whereas metaphysical taxonomy went unchallenged as “empirical” and “scientific.”
Also, we should not forget another Aristotelian legacy, the natural hierarchy, or great chain of being, according to which the world is arranged into “lower” and “higher” forms. Aristotle’s belief that everything exists for a purpose resulted in the commonplace Western assumption that the lower forms exist for the sake of the higher forms. Since we human beings are placed at the top of the pyramid, everything else exists for our sakes. The practical tendencies of this idea are too obvious to require further elaboration.
The late John Fire Lame Deer, a reflective Sioux Indian, comments, straight to the point, in his biographical and philosophical narrative, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, that although the “whites” (that is members of the European cultural tradition) imagine earth, rocks, water, and wind to be dead, they nevertheless “are very much alive.”12 In the previous section we tried to explain in what sense nature is conceived as “dead” in the mainstream of European and Euro-American thought. To say that rocks and rivers are dead is perhaps a little misleading, since to say that something is dead might imply that it was once alive. Rather in the usual Western view of things, such objects are considered inert. But what does Lame Deer mean when he says that they are “very much alive”?
He doesn’t explain this provocative assertion as discursively as one might wish, but he provides examples, dozens of examples, of what he calls the “power” in various natural entities. According to Lame Deer, “Every man needs a stone. . . . You ask stones for aid to find things which are lost or missing. Stones can give warning of an enemy, of approaching misfortune.”13 Butterflies, coyotes, grasshoppers, eagles, owls, deer, and especially elk and bear all talk and possess and convey power. “You have to listen to all these creatures, listen with your mind. They have secrets to tell.”14
It would seem that for Lame Deer the “aliveness” of natural entities (including stones, which to most Europeans are merely “material objects” and epitomize lifelessness) means that they have a share in the same consciousness that we human beings enjoy. Granted, animals and plants (if not stones and rivers) are recognized to be “alive” by conventional European conceptualization, but they lack awareness in a mode and degree comparable to human awareness. According to Descartes, the most extreme and militant dualist in the Western tradition, even animal behavior is altogether automatic, resembling in every way the behavior of a machine. A somewhat more liberal and enlightened view allows that animals have a dim sort of consciousness, but operate largely by “instinct,” a concept altogether lacking a clear definition and one very nearly as obscure as the notorious occult qualities (the “sporific virtues,” and so on) of the medieval Scholastic philosophers. Of course, plants, although alive, are regarded as totally lacking in sentience. In any case, we hear that only human beings possess self-consciousness, that is, that only we are aware that we are aware and can thus distinguish between ourselves and everything else!
Every sophomore student of philosophy has learned, or should have, that solipsism is an impregnable philosophical position, and corollary to that, that every characterization of other minds—human as well as nonhuman—is a matter of conjecture. The Indian attitude, as represented by Lame Deer, apparently was based on the reasonable consideration that since human beings have a physical body and an associated consciousness (conceptually hypostatized or reified as “spirit”), all other bodily things—animals, plants, and, yes, even stones—were similar in this respect. Indeed, this strikes us as an eminently plausible assumption. One can no more directly perceive another human being’s consciousness than one can that of an animal or a plant. One assumes that another human being is conscious because he or she is very similar to oneself in physical appearance. Anyone not hopelessly prejudiced by the metaphysical apartheid policy of Pauline Christianity, Descartes, and the Western worldview that is their legacy would naturally extend the same consideration to other natural beings. Human beings closely resemble other forms of life in anatomy, physiology, and behavior. The myriad organic forms themselves are obviously closely related, and the organic world, in turn, is continuous with the whole of nature. Thus virtually all things might be supposed, without the least strain upon credence, like ourselves, to be “alive,” that is, conscious, aware, or possessed of spirit.
Lame Deer offers a brief, but most revealing and suggestive, metaphysical explanation:
Nothing is so small and unimportant but it has a spirit given it by Wakan Tanka. Tunkan is what you might call a stone god, but he is also a part of the Great Spirit. The gods are separate beings, but they are all united in Wakan Tanka. It is hard to understand—something like the Holy Trinity. You can’t explain it except by going back to the “circles within circles” idea, the spirit splitting itself up into stones, trees, tiny insects even, making them all wakan by his ever-presence. And in turn all these myriads of things which make up the universe flowing back to their source, united in one Grandfather Spirit.15
This Lakota panentheism (the belief that there exists a single unified holy spirit that is, nevertheless, also manifest in each thing) presents a conception of the world that is, to be sure, dualistic: It posits the existence of a personal spirit in otherwise material bodies. But it is important to emphasize that, unlike the Platonic-Pauline-Cartesian tradition, it is not an antagonistic dualism in which body and spirit are conceived in contrary terms and pitted against one another in a moral struggle. Further, and most important for our subsequent remarks, the pervasiveness of spirit in nature, a spirit in each thing which is a splinter of the Great Spirit, facilitates a perception of the human and natural realms as akin and alike.
Consider, complementary to this Native American panentheism, the basics of Siouan cosmogony. Black Elk (a Lakota shaman of the generation previous to Lame Deer’s) rhetorically asks, “Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?”16 Accordingly, he prays, “Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is!”17 Black Elk speaks of the great natural kingdom as, simply, “green things,” “the wings of the air,” “the four-leggeds,” and “the two-legged.”18 Not only does everything have a spirit; in the last analysis, all things are related as members of one universal family, born of one father, the sky, the Great Spirit, and one mother, the Earth herself.
More is popularly known about the Sioux metaphysical vision than about those of most other American Indian peoples. The concept of the Great Spirit and of the Earth Mother and the family-like relatedness of all creatures seems, however, to have been a very common, not to say universal, American Indian idea and, likewise, the concept of a spiritual dimension or aspect to all natural things. Pulitzer Prizewinning American Indian poet and essayist N. Scott Momaday remarked, “‘The earth is our mother. The sky is our father.’ This concept of nature, which is at the center of the Native American worldview, is familiar to us all. But it may well be that we do not understand entirely what the concept is in its ethical and philosophical implications.”19 And North American ethnomusicologist Ruth Underhill has written that “for the old time Indian, the world did not consist of inanimate materials. . . . It was alive, and everything in it could help or harm him.”20
Concerning the Ojibwa Indians, who speak an Algonkian language and at the time of first contact maintained only hostile relations with the Lakota, Diamond Jenness reports:
Thus, then, the Parry Island Ojibwa interprets his own being; and exactly the same interpretation he applies to everything around him. Not only men, but animals, trees, even rocks and water are tripartite, possessing bodies, souls, and shadows. [These Indians, Jenness earlier explains, divided spirit into two aspects—soul and shadow—though, as Jenness admits, the distinction between the soul and shadow was far from clear and frequently confused by the people themselves.] They all have a life like the life in human beings, even if they have all been gifted with different powers and attributes. Consider the animals which most closely resemble human beings; they see and hear as we do, and clearly they reason about what they observe. The tree must have a life somewhat like our own, although it lacks the power of locomotion. . . . Water runs; it too must possess life, it too must have a soul and a shadow. Then observe how certain minerals cause the neighboring rocks to decompose and become loose and friable; evidently rocks too have power, and power means life, and life involves a soul and shadow. All things then have souls and shadows. And all things die. But their souls are reincarnated again, and what were dead return to life.21
A. Irving Hallowell has noted an especially significant consequence of the pan-spiritualism among the Ojibwa: “Not only animate properties,” he writes, “but even ‘person’ attributes may be projected upon objects which to us clearly belong to a physical inanimate category.”22 Central to the concept of person is the possibility of entering into social relations. Nonhuman persons may be spoken with, may be honored or insulted, may become allies or adversaries, no less than human persons.
The philosophical basis for attributing personhood to nonhuman natural entities also helps to explain the American Indian understanding of dreams. Like eating, getting sick, falling in love, having children, and other such things, dreaming is an experience common to all peoples. But the meaning, the interpretation of the dream state of consciousness differs from culture to culture. A culture’s understanding of dreams, no less than its explanation of disease, reflects its more general worldview. Thus, a culture’s representation of dreams can also be very revealing of its more general worldview.
For example, the ancient Greeks, before philosophy had thoroughly undermined their mythic worldview, believed both illness and dreams to be visitations from the gods. In Plato’s Symposium, to take a case in point, Socrates remarks that the woman who taught him the mysteries of love was believed to have postponed a god-sent plague in Athens by performing certain religious rites; and in the Phaedo, Socrates remarks that over the course of his life the same dream had come to him, sometimes wearing one countenance, sometimes another, but always commanding him to work and make music. Most of us modern Europeans and Euro-Americans follow Descartes in believing that to be sick is to experience a mechanical breakdown in our bodies and that dreams are confused phenomena of the mind (though some of us add to this generic idea Freud’s more specific hypothesis that dreams are confused manifestations of the unconscious dimension of a person’s psyche).
The French fur traders and missionaries of the seventeenth century in the Great Lakes region were singularly impressed by the devotion to dreams of the “savages” with whom they lived. According to Vernon Kinietz, Paul Ragueneau, in 1648, first suggested that among the Algonkians, dreams were “the language of the souls.”23 This expression lacks precision, but we think it goes very much to the core of the American Indian understanding of dreams. Through dreams, and most dramatically through visions, one came into direct contact with the spirits of both human and nonhuman persons, as it were, naked of bodily vestments. In words somewhat reminiscent of Ragueneau’s, Hallowell comments, “It is in dreams that the individual comes into direct communication with the atiso kanak, the powerful ‘persons’ of the other-than-human class.”24 Given the animistic or panspiritualistic worldview of the Indians, acute sensitivity and pragmatic response to dreaming make perfectly good sense.
Dreams and waking experiences are sharply discriminated, but the theater of action disclosed in dreams and visions is continuous with and often the same as the ordinary world. In contrast to the psychologized contemporary Western view in which dreams are images of sorts (like afterimages) existing only “in the mind,” the American Indian while dreaming experiences reality, often the same reality as in waking experience, in another form of consciousness—as it were, by means of another sensory modality.
As one lies asleep and experiences people and other animals, places, and so on, it is natural to suppose that one’s spirit becomes temporarily dissociated from one’s body and moves about encountering other spirits. Or, as Hallowell says, “when a human being is asleep and dreaming his otcatcakwin (vital part, soul), which is the core of the self, may become detached from the body (miyo). Viewed by another human being, a person’s body may be easily located and observed in space. But his vital part may be somewhere else.”25 Dreaming indeed may be one element in the art of American Indian sorcery (called “bear walking” among the Ojibwa in which the sorcerer skulks around at night in the form of a bear, and appears indeed to be a bear to persons unskilled in detecting the subtle differences between a mischievous bear walker up to no good and an ordinary well-meaning bear minding its own business). 26 If the state of consciousness in dreams is seized and controlled, and the phenomenal content of dreams volitionally directed, then sorcerers may go where they wish in order to spy on enemies or perhaps affect them in some malevolent way.
It follows that dreams should have a higher degree of “truth” than ordinary waking experiences, because in the dream experience the person and everyone he or she meets is present in spirit, in essential self. This, notice, is precisely contrary to the European assumption that dreams are “false” or illusory and altogether private or subjective. For instance, in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes, casting around for an example of the highest absurdity, says that it is “as though I were to say ‘I am awake now, and discern some truth, but I do not see it clearly enough; so I will set about going to sleep, so that my dreams may give me a truer and clearer picture of the fact.’” Yet this, in all seriousness, is precisely what many Indians have done. An episode from Hallowell’s discussion may serve as illustration. A boy claimed that during a thunderstorm he saw a thunderbird. His elders were skeptical, since to see a thunderbird in such fashion, that is, with the waking eye, was almost unheard of. He was believed, however, when a man who had dreamed of the thunderbird was consulted and the boy’s description was “verified”!27
The Ojibwa, the Sioux, and, if we may safely generalize, most American Indians lived in a world that was peopled not only by human persons but by persons and personalities associated with all natural phenomena. In one’s practical dealings in such a world it is necessary to one’s well-being and that of one’s family and tribe to maintain good social relations not only with proximate human persons, one’s immediate tribal neighbors, but also with the nonhuman persons abounding in the immediate environment. For example, Hallowell reports that among the Ojibwa “when bears were sought out in their dens in the spring they were addressed, asked to come out so that they could be killed, and an apology was offered to them.”28
In characterizing the American Indian attitude toward nature, we have tried to limit our discussion to concepts so fundamental and pervasive as to be capable of generalization. In sum, we have claimed that the typical traditional American Indian attitude was to regard all features of the environment as enspirited. These entities were believed to possess a consciousness, reason, and volition no less intense and complete than a human being’s. The earth, the sky, the winds, rocks, streams, trees, insects, birds, and all other animals therefore had personalities and were thus as fully persons as human beings were. In dreams and visions the spirits of things were directly encountered and could become powerful allies to the dreamer or visionary. We may therefore say that the Indians’ social circle, their community, included all the nonhuman natural entities in their locales as well as their fellow clan and tribe members.
Now a most significant conceptual connection obtains in all cultures between the concept of a person, on the one hand, and certain behavioral restraints, on the other. Toward persons it is necessary, whether for genuinely ethical or purely prudential reasons, to act in a careful and circumspect manner. Among the Ojibwa, for example, according to Hallowell, “a moral distinction is drawn between the kind of conduct demanded by the primary necessities of securing a livelihood, or defending oneself against aggression, and unnecessary acts of cruelty. The moral values implied document the consistency of the principle of mutual obligations which is inherent in all interactions with ‘persons’ throughout the Ojibwa world.”29
The implicit overall metaphysic of American Indian cultures locates human beings in a larger social, as well as physical, environment. People belong not only to a human community but to a community of all nature as well. Existence in this larger society, just as existence in a family and tribal context, places people in an environment in which reciprocal responsibilities and mutual obligations are taken for granted and assumed without question or reflection. Moreover, a person’s basic cosmological representations in moments of meditation or cosmic reflection place him or her in a world all parts of which are united through ties of kinship. All creatures, be they elemental, green, finned, winged, or legged, are children of one father and one mother. One blood flows through all; one spirit has divided itself and enlivened all things with a consciousness that is essentially the same. The world around, though immense and overwhelmingly diversified and complex, is bound together through bonds of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity. It is a world in which a person might feel at home, a relative to all that is, comfortable and secure, as one feels as a child in the midst of a large family. As Brown reports:
But very early in life the child began to realize that wisdom was all about and everywhere and that there were many things to know. There was no such thing as emptiness in the world. Even in the sky there were no vacant places. Everywhere there was life, visible and invisible, and every object gave us great interest to life. Even without human companionship one was never alone. The world teemed with life and wisdom, there was no complete solitude for the Lakota (Luther Standing Bear).30
In this section we develop a little more formally the hypothesis that the American Indian concept of nature supported an environmental ethic. And we illustrate and document the existence of an American Indian environmental ethic with reference to specific cultural materials.
Aldo Leopold’s land ethic has been the contemporary ecology movement’s environmental ethic of choice. It may serve thus as a familiar model of environmental ethics with which we may compare the American Indian worldview and its associated environmental attitudes and values.
According to Leopold, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land.”31 Ethics depend ultimately, Leopold suggests, upon a sense of community. One will acknowledge moral obligations only to those persons whom one recognizes as fellow members of one’s own society or group. And if one’s sense of community includes nonhuman natural entities and is coextensive with the whole of nature, one has the cognitive foundations of a land ethic.
What we have already discovered about the American Indian concept of nature amply shows that nonhuman natural entities are personalized. Whereas in the Western worldview only human beings are fully persons, nature in the Indian worldview abounds with other-than-human-persons, among them “plants and animals” and even “soils and waters,” as Leopold’s specifications for an environmental ethic would require. For Leopold, the personhood of the nonhuman world is a sadly neglected implication of evolutionary biology. We are, from an evolutionary point of view, animals ourselves. Since we experience sensations, feelings, and thoughts, then only pre-Darwinian prejudices about the uniqueness of people would blind us to similar capacities in other animals. The reasoning indeed is not unlike that of the Indians as outlined by Jenness, quoted in the previous section. Leopold summed up the moral implications of the theory of evolution this way:
It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men [and women] are only fellow voyagers in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.32
Although it would be presumptuous to think that American Indians had anticipated Darwin in discovering the evolutionary origin of species, the American Indian worldview certainly supported a similar upshot: a continuity among all beings. That nonhuman persons form with us a community or society Leopold inferred from the science of ecology, which represents plants and animals, soils and waters as “all interlocked in one humming community of cooperations and competitions, one biota.”33 Pre-Columbian American Indians were no more informed by scientific ecology than they were by the theory of evolution, but they did regard themselves as members of multispecies socioeconomic communities of interlocked cooperations and competitions. Traditional Ojibwa narratives amply document this aspect of the pre-Columbian American Indian worldview. The stories tell again and again of the transformation of a human being into an animal (or vice versa) and of a marriage between the transformed human (or animal) person with a person of another species.
One especially representative example is “The Woman Who Married a Beaver.” In this story, a young woman on her vision quest meets a person “who was,” as the narrator puts it, “in the form of a human being.”34 He asks her to come to his attractive and well-appointed home by a lake and to be his wife. The man was a very good provider; the woman was in want of nothing; and their home was very beautiful. For her part, she collected firewood, made mats and bags out of reeds, and kept the house in very neat order. She has two clues that the person she married was not really of her own species: “When they beheld their first young, four was the number of them”; and “sometimes by a human being were they visited, but only round about out of doors would the man pass, not within would the man come.” “Now,” the story goes, “the woman knew that she had married a beaver.”
The meaning of this oft-repeated theme may not be obvious to Westerners, but a little basic anthropological information should help to make it entirely clear. In tribal societies, alliances between different clans (or extended families) are established through marriage. Further, in many tribal societies, clans are distinguished from one another through totem representation. Within a tribal group, in other words, there may be the bear clan, the snake clan, the crane clan, and so on. (Entertaining the notion of interspecies marriages, therefore, would probably seem less weird to people who think of themselves in terms of totem identities—the bear people, the snake people, the crane people, and so on.) Further, each clan may assume both ceremonial and economic specialties metaphorically associated with their totems. For example, only the bear clan may be permitted to kill bears for the annual bear ceremony, and thus the bear clan may be the principal provider of bear meat and grease for the whole tribe. Or, to take another hypothetical example, the crane clan may specialize in organizing seasonal migrations and gathering wild rice. Intermarriages between clans—what anthropologists call the rule of exogamy or out-marriage-binds them all together in a functioning tribal whole. More especially, it facilitates the exchange of specialized goods and services among all the subgroups. Such exchange of goods and services was typically less a matter of barter than of gift-giving, as would befit clans united by matrimonial ties.35
So the basic meaning of “The Woman Who Married a Beaver” and of similar tales seems to be this: The marriage between the two groups, the people and the beavers, establishes an alliance with economic implications. Gifts are exchanged that are mutually beneficial. Our suggestion is confirmed as the plot develops.
The odd couple of this story is very prolific and the beaver-man (though not the woman herself) and their offspring would go home with the human beings who visited them from time to time. “The people would then slay the beavers, yet they really did not kill them; but back home would they come again.” When they came home, “All sorts of things would they fetch—kettles and bowls, knives, tobacco, and all the things that are used when a beaver is eaten. Continually were they adding to their great wealth.” Here is the clearest possible representation of a mutually beneficial economic relationship between two matrimonially united “clans”—the beaver “people” and the people proper—executed through gift exchange. The beavers give the people all that they have to give, their flesh and fur, and the people give the beavers what the aquatic rodents could not otherwise obtain: hand-crafted articles (like kettles and knives) and cultivars (like tobacco), which they highly prize.
But of course the animals could not benefit from the gifts they are given in return if they were dead. So the Indians conveniently supposed that they were not really dead. How did that work? We have already seen that in pre-Columbian North America there prevailed a ubiquitous belief in nature spirits. The spirits of the slain animals would, it was assumed, survive the killing of their bodies and, if their bones were not broken or burned and if they were returned to their appropriate element (water in the case of beavers), the bones might be reincarnated and reclothed in fur.
The existence of many taboos respecting the bones of game animals and the preoccupation of many stories with the proper treatment of animal bones may be understood in one or the other of two possible ways: The spirit may reside in or take refuge in the bones. Or at a stage of American Indian thought before the formation of the concept of an immaterial spirit, the immortal thing may have been supposed to be the skeleton—which, after all, is more lasting than the softer parts.
People, obviously, are economically dependent not only on one another but on many other species as well. To people who live largely by hunting and gathering, this dependence is more palpably apparent on a daily basis than it is to us who are insulated from the natural economy by a series of middlepersons. The Ojibwa represented their dependence upon other species through a social metaphor, not altogether unlike that of contemporary ecology. Ecologists draw an analogy between the economic structure of human societies and the “economy” of the “biotic community.” The Ojibwa similarly pictured their interspecies economic relationships with beavers, moose, bears, and other creatures in terms of their intraspecies economic relationships with one another. Again, “The Woman Who Married a Beaver” is almost didactically explicit about this:
That was the time when very numerous were the beavers, and the beavers were very fond of the people; in the same way as people are when visiting one another, so were the beavers in their mental attitude toward the people. Even though they were slain by the people, yet they were not really dead. They were very fond of the tobacco that was given them by the people; at times they were also given clothing by the people.
Now, as we earlier observed, social interaction among persons is facilitated by ethical protocols. The conclusion of the story of the woman who married a beaver is explicitly moral. Having grown old together, the beaver-man instructs his wife to return to her people, and he departs for another land.
Thereupon she plainly told the story of what had happened to her while she lived with the beavers. . . . And she was wont to say: “Never speak you ill of a beaver! Should you speak ill of a beaver, you will not be able to kill one.”
Therefore such was what the people always did; they never spoke ill of the beavers, especially when they intended hunting them. . . . Just the same as the feelings of one who is disliked, so is the feeling of the beaver. And he who never speaks ill of a beaver is very much loved by it; . . . particularly lucky then is one at killing beavers.
In addition to forging the alliance between the human clan and the beaver clan necessary for the gift exchange of goods and services typical of a tribal economy, the human changeling often serves in such stories as the emissary from the animals about their special requirements and demands. As we have just seen in this story, when the woman who married a beaver returns to her own kind she informs them of the feelings of the beavers and the appropriate attitude of respect that the beavers demand if people wish successfully to engage in this particular form of fur trading. In another story, “Clothed-in-Fur,” in addition to reciprocal gift-giving and respect, the moral of the story focuses on the proper treatment of the beavers’ bones.
Let us now explore a little more deeply the suggestion made at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that in its practical consequences the traditional American Indian view of nature was on the whole more productive of a cooperative symbiosis of people with their environment than is the view of nature predominant in the prevailing Western European and Euro-American tradition.
Respecting the latter, Ian McHarg writes that “it requires little effort to mobilize a sweeping indictment of the physical environment which is [Western] man’s creation [and] it takes little more to identify the source of the value system which is the culprit.” 36 According to McHarg, the culprit is “the Judeo-Christian-Humanist view which is so unknowing of nature and of man, which has bred and sustained his simple-minded anthropocentricism. ”37
Since the early 1960s popular ecologists and environmentalists (perhaps most notably Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, along with McHarg and Lynn White, Jr., and, more recently, Norman Myers, Paul Ehrlich, and Bill McKibben) have, with a grim fascination, recited a litany of environmental ills. They have spoken of “polychlorinated biphenyls,” “chlorofluorocarbons,” “nuclear tinkering,” “acid rain,” and “the gratified bulldozer” in language once reserved for detailing the precincts of Hell and abominating its seductive Prince. Given the frequency with which we are reminded of the symptoms of strain in the global biosphere and the apocalyptic rhetoric in which they are usually cast we may be excused if we omit this particular step from the present argument. Let us stipulate that modern technological civilization (European in its origins) has been neither restrained nor especially delicate in manipulating the natural world.
With somewhat more humor than other advocates of environmental reform, Aldo Leopold characterized the modern Western approach to nature thus: “By and large our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”38 So far as the historical roots of the environmental crisis are concerned, we have here suggested that the much maligned attitudes arising out of the Judaic aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition (man’s God-given right to subdue nature, and so forth) have not been so potent a force in the work of remodeling as the tradition of Western natural philosophy that originated among the ancient Greeks, insidiously affected Christianity, and fully flowered in modern classical scientific thought. At least Western natural philosophy has been as formative of the cultural milieu (one artifact of which is the steam shovel itself) as have Genesis and the overall Old Testament worldview. In any case, mixed and blended together, they create a mentality in which unrestrained environmental exploitation and degradation could almost have been predicted in advance.
It seems obvious (especially to philosophers and historians of ideas) that attitudes and values do directly “determine” behavior by setting goals (for example, to subdue the Earth, to have dominion) and, through a conceptual representation of the world, by providing means (for example, mechanics, optics, and thermodynamics) expressed in technologies (for example, steam shovels and bulldozers). Skepticism regarding this assumption, however, has been forthcoming. Yi-Fu Tuan says in “Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behavior: Examples from Europe and China”:
We may believe that a world-view which puts nature in subservience to man will lead to the exploitation of nature by man; and one that regards man as simply a component in nature will entail a modest view of his rights and capabilities, and so lead to the establishment of a harmonious relationship between man and his natural environment. But is this correct?39
Yi-Fu Tuan thinks not. The evidence from Chinese experience that he cites, however, is ambiguous, while the evidence from European experience that he cites misses an important point that we earlier made about the origins of Western environmental attitudes and values.
According to Tuan, traditional Chinese attitudes toward nature shaped by Taoism and Buddhism are supposed to have been “quiescent” and “adaptive.” But, he points out, China’s ancient forests were seriously overcut, suggesting that the traditional Chinese were no more concerned about living in harmony with the natural Tao (or Way of nature) or about respecting the Buddhahood of plants and animals than were their European counterparts. On the other hand, Tuan reports that China’s first railway was decommissioned because it was believed to have been laid out contrary to the principles of feng shui—the art of siting human works in accordance with the flow of rivers, the direction of prevailing winds, and the contours of land forms—thus suggesting that the Chinese were in fact more concerned about living in harmony with nature than were their European counterparts. One can hardly imagine a European or American railway being pulled up solely because it was incompatible with principles of environmental aesthetics. Generally speaking, among the Chinese before Westernization, the facts that Yi-Fu Tuan presents indicate as many congruences as discrepancies between the traditional Taoist and Buddhist attitudes toward nature and Chinese environmental behavior.
Concerning European experience, we would expect that the ancient Greeks and Romans—who deified nature—would not have trashed the environment, if they really believed what they said they did and if human actions are determined by human belief. But Tuan marshals examples and cases in point of large-scale transformations, imposed, with serious ecological consequences, on the Mediterranean environment by the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity. He concludes this part of his discussion with the remark that “against this background of the vast transformations of nature in the pagan world, the inroads made in the early centuries of the Christian era were relatively modest.”40
Our discussion in the second section of this chapter, however, should explain the environmental impact of “pagan” Greek and Roman civilization consistently with the general thesis that worldview substantially affects behavior. The Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity lived in an age of increasing religious skepticism. By the mid-fifth century B.C., materio-mechanistic, dualistic, and humanistic philosophy had undercut and replaced the earlier sincere paganism of the ancient Greeks. The same religious skepticism eventually spread to the ancient Romans, who habitually followed Greek intellectual fashions. In the absence of religious restraint, the ancients exploited, despoiled, and defiled the natural (but no longer sacred) world.
Nevertheless, a simple deterministic model will not suffice with respect to this question: Do cultural attitudes and values really affect the collective behavior of a culture? At the one extreme, it seems incredible to think that all our conceptualizations, our representations of the nature of nature, are, as it were, mere entertainment, a sort of Muzak for the mind, while our actions proceed in some blind way from instinctive or genetically programmed sources. After all, our picture of nature defines our theater of action. It defines both the possibilities and the limitations that circumscribe human endeavor. We attempt to do only what we think is possible, while we leave alone what we think is not. Moreover, what we believe human nature to be, and what we take to be our proper place and role in the natural world, represents an ideal that, consciously or not, we strive to realize. At the other extreme, the facts of history and everyday experience do not support any simple cause-and-effect relationship between a given conceptual and valuational set and how people actually behave. Notoriously, we often act in ways that conflict with our sincere beliefs, especially our moral beliefs, and with our values.
Here is our suggestion for understanding the relationship between human environmental attitudes and values, on the one hand, and actual human behavior in respect to nature, on the other. Inevitably, human beings must consume other living things and modify the natural environment. Representations of the order of nature and the proper relationship of people to that order may have either a tempering, restraining effect on our manipulative and exploitative tendencies or an accelerating, exacerbating effect. They also give form and direction to these inherently human drives and thus provide different cultures with their distinctive styles of doing things. It appears, further, that in the case of the predominant European mentality, shaped both by Judeo-Christian and by Greco-Roman images of nature and man, the effect was to accelerate the inherent human disposition to consume “resources” and modify surroundings. A kind of “takeoff” or (to mix metaphors) “quantum leap” occurred, and Western European civilization was propelled—for better or worse—into its industrial, technological stage, with a proportional increase in ecological and environmental distress. The decisive ingredient, the sine qua non, may have been the particulars of the European worldview.41
If the predominant traditional Chinese view of nature and man has been characterized by Yi-Fu Tuan and others as quiescent and adaptive, the American Indian view of the world has been characterized as in essence “ecological”—for example, by Stewart Udall in The Quiet Crisis. The general American Indian worldview (at least the one central part of it to which we have called attention) deflected the inertia of day-to-day, year-to-year subsistence in a way that resulted, on the average, in conservation. Pre-Columbian American Indian conservation of resources may have been a consciously posited goal. But probably it was not. Probably conservation was neither a personal ideal nor a tribal policy because the “wise use” of “natural resources” would, ironically, appear to be inconsistent with the spiritual and personal attributes that the Indians regarded as belonging to nature and natural things. So-called natural resources are represented by most conservationists, whose philosophy was shaped by Gifford Pinchot, the nation’s first chief forester, as only commodities, subject to scarcity, and therefore in need of prudent “development” and “management.” The American Indian posture toward nature was, we suggest, more moral or ethical. Animals, plants, and minerals were treated as persons, and conceived to be coequal members of a natural social order.
Our cautious claim that the American Indian worldview supported and included a distinctly ethical attitude toward nature and the myriad variety of natural entities is based on the following basic points. The American Indians, on the whole, viewed the natural world as enspirited. Natural beings therefore felt, perceived, deliberated, and responded voluntarily as persons. Persons are members of a social order (that is, part of the operational concept of person is the capacity for social interaction). Social interaction is limited by (culturally variable) behavioral restraints—rules of conduct—which we call, in sum, good manners, morals, and ethics. Thus, as N. Scott Momaday maintains: “Very old in the Native American world view is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists. It follows logically that there are ethical imperatives in this matter.”42 The American Indians, more particularly, lived in accordance with an “ecological conscience” that was structurally similar to Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.”
Examples of wastage—buffalo rotting on the plains under high cliffs or beaver all but trapped out during the fur trade—are supposed to deliver the coup de grace to all romantic illusions of the American Indian’s reverence for nature. But examples of murder and war also abound in European history. Must we conclude therefrom that Europeans were altogether without a humanistic ethic of any sort?43 Hardly. What confounds such facile arguments is a useful understanding of the function of ethics in human affairs.
As philosophers point out, ethics bear a normative relation to behavior. They do not describe how people actually behave. Rather, they set out how people ought to behave. People remain free to act either in accordance with a given ethic or not. The fact that on some occasions some do not scarcely proves that, in a given culture, ethical norms do not exist, or that ethics are not on the whole influential and effective behavioral restraints.
The familiar Christian ethic, with its emphasis on the dignity and intrinsic value of human beings, has long been a very significant element of Western culture, and has exerted a decisive influence within European and Euro-American civilization. Certainly, it has inspired noble and even heroic deeds both by individuals and by whole societies. The documented existence and influence of the Christian ethic are not in the least diminished by monstrous crimes on the part of individual Europeans. Nor do shameful episodes of national depravity, like the Spanish Inquisition, and genocide, as in Nazi Germany, refute the assertion that a human-centered ethic has palpably affected average behavior among members of the European culture and substantially shaped the character of Western civilization.
By parity of reasoning, examples of occasional destruction of nature on the pre-Columbian American continent and even the extirpation of species, especially during periods of enormous cultural stress, as in the fur trade era, do not, by themselves, refute the assertion that American Indians lived not only by a tribal ethic but by a land ethic as well. The overall and usual effect of such an ethic was to establish a greater harmony between the aboriginal American peoples and their environment than that enjoyed by their Euro-American successors.
We are living today in a very troubling time, but also a time of great opportunity. The modern mechanistic worldview and its technological expression are collapsing. A new, more organic ecological worldview and a corresponding technological esprit are beginning to take shape. But how can we translate this essentially scientific realization and its technosocial analogue into terms easily grasped by ordinary people so that we may all begin to see ourselves as a part of nature and as dependent on it for our sustenance? Only then can we hope to evolve a sustainable society.
The Indians were hardly evolutionary ecologists, but their outlook on nature was, albeit expressed in the imagery of myth, remarkably similar to the concept of nature emerging from contemporary biology. They saw themselves as plain members and citizens of their respective biotic communities, humbly and dependently participating in the local economy of nature. Hence one way to help popularize the emerging new ecological worldview and its associated lifestyle would be to turn for help to the indigenous wisdom of the North American continent. American Indian mythology could put imaginative flesh and blood on the dry skeleton of the abstract environmental sciences.
American Indian thought remains an untapped intellectual resource for all contemporary Americans. Euro-Americans cannot undo the past injustices that our forebears inflicted on American Indians. What we can do, however, is to recognize and fully incorporate the cognitive cultural achievements evolved in this hemisphere. So doing would engender respect and honor for the peoples who created them and for their contemporary custodians.
Some may say that “mining” the so-far “untapped” intellectual “resource” represented by traditional American Indian cognitive cultures would only perpetuate the history of exploitation of Native Americans by Euro-Americans.44 After appropriating Indian lands, now we propose to add insult to injury by appropriating Indian ideas. We disagree. Things of the mind are not diminished when they are shared. Teachers do not diminish their knowledge by sharing it with students. Quite the contrary. Similarly, American Indian thought could only be enlarged and enriched should it become a principal tributary to the mainstream of contemporary North American culture and civilization. And, vice versa, North American culture and civilization could at last become something more than an extension of its European matrix should it mix and merge with the rich legacy of its native peoples.
Frank C. Speck, “Aboriginal Conservators,” Bird Lore [now Audubon] 40 (1938): 259–60 (Speck’s emphasis).
Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-American Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).
The allusion is to Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Scribner’s, 1973).
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
Joseph E. Brown, “Modes of Contemplation Through Action: North American Indians,” Main Currents in Modern Thought 30 (1973–74): 60.
Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game, p. 186.
Quoted in W. Vernon Kinietz, Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 115.
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932). For its authenticity, see Raymond J. DeMallie, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
For a more complete discussion of the methodological problem of reconstructing American Indian worldviews, see J. Baird Callicott, “American Indian Land Wisdom?: Sorting Out the Issues,” Journal of Forest History 33 (1989): 35–42.
H. Paul Santmire, “Historical Dimensions of the American Crisis,” reprinted from Dialog (Summer 1970) in Western Man and Environmental Ethics, ed. Ian G. Barbour (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1973), pp. 70–71.
Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer. Seeker of Visions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 108–9.
Ibid, p. 101.
Ibid, p. 124.
Ibid, pp. 102–3.
Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, p. 3.
Ibid, p. 6.
Ibid, p. 7.
N. Scott Momaday, “A First American Views His Land,” National Geographic 149 (1976): 14.
Ruth M. Underhill, Red Man’s Religion: Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 40.
Diamond Jenness, The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life, Canadian Department of Mines Bulletin no. 78, Museum of Canada Anthropological Series no. 17 (Ottawa, 1935), pp. 20–21.
A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. S. Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 26.
Kinietz, Indians of the Western Great Lakes, p. 126.
Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology,” p. 19.
Ibid., p. 41.
See Richard M. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).
Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology,” p. 32.
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., p. 47 (emphasis added).
Brown, “Modes of Contemplation,” p. 64.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p. 239.
Ibid., pp. 116–17.
Ibid., p. 193.
This and all subsequent quotations from this story are taken from Thomas W. Overholt and J. Baird Callicott, Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 74–75.
For a full discussion, see Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1972).
Ian McHarg, “Values, Process, Form,” from The Fitness of Man’s Environment (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), reprinted in Robert Disch, ed., The Ecological Conscience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 25.
Ibid., p. 98.
Leopold, Sand County, pp. 263–64.
Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behavior,” in Ecology and Religion in History, eds. D. Spring and I. Spring (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), p. 92.
Ibid., p. 98.
For a full discussion, see J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, “Epilogue: On the Relation of Idea and Action,” in J. B. Callicott and R. T. Ames, eds., Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 279–89.
Momaday, “First American Views,” p. 18.
The most scurrilous example of this sort of argument with which we are acquainted is Daniel A. Guthrie’s “Primitive Man’s Relationship to Nature,” BioScience 21 (July 1971): 721–23. In addition to rotting buffalo, Guthrie cites alleged extirpation of Pleistocene megafauna by Paleo-Indians, ca. 10,000 B.P. (as if that were relevant), and his cheapest shot of all, “the litter of bottles and junked cars to be found on Indian reservations today.”
A similar complaint about Western intellectual colonialism of Asian traditions of thought has been registered by Gerald James Larson, “‘Conceptual Resources’ in South Asia for ‘Environmental Ethics’” in Callicott and Ames, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, pp. 267–77.