Sustainable cultures are to subsistence cultures as squares are to rectangles. That is, all sustainable cultures are subsistence cultures, but not all subsistence cultures are sustainable. Here I explore the nature of subsistence and look at what we might learn about our own sustainability from that exploration. Of course I do not think we should—in some romantic dream fog—try to return to the old ways of hunting and gathering. Nevertheless, I want to explore a tribal definition of subsistence by looking closely at contemporary traditional cultures with which I am somewhat familiar. From our place in a subsistence culture, we can see what it takes to move toward becoming a sustainable culture as well. In some observations of traditional subsistence, we will find parallels with our mainstream American culture, for we are as dependent on the land as any traditional people ever were. Our hunting may not be for animals, but we are hunters and gatherers still. We may not see ourselves as such, but our frantic hunt for the last barrel of oil is not a metaphor but is very real hunting and very real gathering. Oil is our big game, and the dangers in our hunt for it and the consequences of our failure to find it are as real as those of a caribou or whale hunt are for Eskimo people. Without oil we are as apt to be hungry as an Inupiat village without whales and seals. Our culture is a subsistence culture unaware of itself.
If subsistence is our culture, and if we are to live it fruitfully and use it as a model to create a sustainable culture, we may turn again to those traditional cultures that have much to teach us. The ones I know best are those of Alaska’s native peoples, though this does not mean I understand them. Perhaps no one outside the culture can make that claim, and some inside the culture cannot either. That is only natural, and as true of modern American culture as any other. Stop any person on the street and ask him or her the difference between Plato and Aristotle, and few could answer.
What I am looking at here, trying still to understand, are the intriguing glimpses of the various cultures I was privileged to witness over a quarter of a century. The subsistence life of village people has changed over the years, as every culture changes. Subsistence now requires some cash, just as living in mainstream American culture requires more money than it used to, for items we used to do without: refrigerators, television, autos, health insurance . . . Many village people now live a hunter-gatherer life mixed with a part-time or full-time job. Yet much of the food of people in small villages on the lower Kuskokwim River or along Bristol Bay in Alaska, for instance, is still derived from land or sea by the work of their hands, the risk of their lives, and their incomparable knowledge of the region. Many still participate in rituals and ceremonies, dances and songs that reveal a life embedded in the land and share a profound and complex belief system that includes animals and that is central to their daily lives. That worldview is the primary aspect of a subsistence life; technology and cash are only adjuncts, the tools of hunting and gathering or the medium of exchange. Much of the cash they need to continue their subsistence life in modern times comes from the harvests of land or sea, or the handicrafts and art that are made from raw materials garnered from the hunt or harvest. Often that income is supplemented by work for a native corporation, a local health agency, or the school district. That they work for cash to run the outboard or buy shells for the rifle does not mean that they are no longer a subsistence people. Cash income from such work is simply incorporated into the subsistence life. Cash and subsistence are not contradictory terms, in part because cash is limited to the economy; subsistence transcends the economy.
Sometimes Anglo observers of the subsistence life remark on changes in technology and point to the use of rifles, skiffs, and kickers to indicate that the old ways are gone and that the subsistence life Alaskan Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts have lived for thousands of years is over. Since it is not technology that makes a subsistence life, however, such a notion is misleading. For indigenous peoples subsistence means direct, personal engagement with land and sea and the recognition of humans’ dependence on the land for energy, nourishment, tools, and household goods. Our American culture no longer demands such personal engagement, but ultimately all subsistence depends not on technology, not even on fish and game, livestock or agriculture, and certainly not on transnational corporations or oil, but on persistence in maintaining a certain worldview. The difference between a harpoon and a gun is irrelevant to the necessity of hunting seals, as is the use of a boat covered with walrus hide instead of aluminum. Aluminum skiffs and high-powered outboard engines have been adopted by these adaptable people for many of the same reasons that we adopted automobiles: ease, extension of range, speed of transport, sheer pleasure of power. When we took up those purring motors, we did not realize that they would power us to a dead end. It is life on the land and the view of the world, not the technology, that create subsistence and sustain a culture. Since our culture no longer maintains such ties to the land, what it might adapt to its advantage is the worldview.
Non-Indians have made much of the differences between American Indian perceptions of the land and their own. What is often overlooked is a fundamental similarity: that we all live in a subsistence relationship to the land, that every economy, regardless of cash, credit, stocks, or other media for the exchange of goods and values, is but one part of a subsistence life based upon what the land has to offer for energy, raw materials, and food. If ours is not a subsistence culture, why do we fret so over oil supplies, timber harvests, commercial fishing, the number of cattle on our public lands, the depletion of our aquifers, the poisons in the air we breathe, and the toxins in the water we drink and the food we eat? Clearly we are dependent on the land, and our own cultural existence transcends our economy. Ultimately our culture’s life depends upon a healthy landscape as surely as any traditional people’s ever did. It also depends on our worldview, our sense of place and purpose, of how we might best fit into an ongoing life within the constraints of a Nature we have thought of as either a lovely landscape that restores our souls or a lucrative landscape that is ours to exploit for personal or corporate gain.
One of the problems in our discussions of subsistence is much like a problem we have with sustainability: it is one of definition. It is easy to see what subsistence is not; it is not, despite anthropology’s nomenclature, an economic system. I sat in on a conference in Juneau a few years ago where village people and nonnative hunting guides came together to talk about subsistence. The nonnative participants referred to subsistence primarily as “hunting, fishing, and berry picking,” a phrase that came up repeatedly. Their definition was basically an economic one. Native participants, on the other hand, consistently talked of subsistence as “a way of life.” Others insist that subsistence is not a merely a way of life: “It is our life.” That life includes far more than hunting, fishing, and berry picking or even the most intimate knowledge of land and sea and their animals and plants. We nonnatives are also likely to view subsistence as a level of existence, as in “They were living at a mere subsistence level.” We see that level as lower than our own, less sophisticated, more primitive, even “superstitious.” Native people see subsistence as a base upon which an entire culture establishes its identity: philosophy, ethics, religious belief and practice, art, ritual, ceremony and celebration, law, the development and adaptation of a variety of technologies, and an educational system that will ensure the survival of the people. All fall within the realm of subsistence. The gulf between the native and nonnative definitions is profound.
Nor is subsistence just a conservation-based ecological approach, allowing people to survive on the land. That resembles the notion of stewardship, and therefore we applaud it. But “stewardship” is a limp word to equate with subsistence. Subsistence, as conceptualized by Yup’ik people, is immensely more complex and more insightful than acting as sty wardens of the world. As anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan notes, “Given this cultural framework, it is possible but altogether inappropriate to reduce subsistence activities to mere survival techniques and their significance to the conquest of calories. Their pursuit is not simply a means to an end, but an end in itself.” Stewardship puts the power in people. But, Fienup-Riordan says, “The real power is not in people, but in the continuing relationship between humans and the natural world on which they depend.”1
Subsistence is not only hunting and fishing but the life that gives meaning to hunting and fishing. History and metaphysics are also involved. Birth and death, and a constant rebirth and dying, are central to that continuing relationship and reciprocity between humans and the natural world that Fienup-Riordan observes. That relationship, often trivialized by Americans’ faith in industrial systems, is maintained by practices we scorn as primitive. Yup’ik children, for example, are named for deceased persons, and the souls of the deceased are thus alive to those still living. The souls of seals or salmon, of moose or ground squirrels, when treated properly, are able to return another season. Thus, in a sense, the relationship has been maintained by the same souls, the same humans and seals or salmon, who have been interacting all along. “The birth of a baby is the rebirth of a member of its grandpa-rental generation. The death of the seal means life to the village.” Thus, says Fienup-Riordan, “The same people and the same seals have been on this earth from the beginning, continually cycling and recycling through life and death.”2 I’m sure I don’t have all this exactly right, which is why I keep trying to think about it. But perhaps it is right enough to indicate a connection between Nature and humans that is both more profound and more insightful than we suppose when we disparage subsistence as a simple culture’s economic system. Subsistence ramifies through every aspect of the culture and knits the culture whole. As long as indigenous cultures and other cultures continue to use such differing definitions of subsistence, there will be no communication about environmental or any other issues.
The narrow concept of subsistence as an economic system comes primarily from anthropology. It does not come from economics, for economists are not out in the field studying other cultures. Nor does it come from history or other social and behavioral sciences, though these disciplines have adopted anthropology’s definition. Anthropology also took the lead in developing the taxonomies by which we divide and subdivide the lives and cultures of other people for study. This seems natural to Anglos, whose cultures have been fragmented for centuries. But these taxonomies are “outsider” names; they do not come from within the culture, and they do not represent definitions that traditional peoples would use. They are names for non-Indians’ preconceptions of what we expect to find. Our names for Eskimo culture represent fragments that were once parts of a whole for us and are still parts of a whole for indigenous cultures. Continued use of anthropologists’ definition of subsistence perpetuates a misperception as if it were true. Both the misperception and the definition are destructive of traditional subsistence life and pernicious in the extreme, as anthropologists are often enlisted in the Division of Subsistence of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to study subsistence practice and offer advice on policy. Anthropologists in the division spent considerable time helping folks in several villages record the numbers of caribou, moose, ptarmigan, ducks, geese, various species of berries, salmon, herring, and parky squirrels that were used over the course of a year. These clearly economic measurements reinforced the notion among nonnatives that subsistence is an economic system.
A further complication in thinking of subsistence as an economic system is that such systems are usually associated in nonnative minds with so-called primitive cultures. This may stem, again, in part from their association with anthropology, which has been seen for years as a discipline that studies cultures that are “primitive,” perhaps even “savage,” or at least “exotic.” We often say of such peoples that they must move into a cash economy, which, in our view, is more sophisticated and complex—and like our own, of course. We want that for native people now, precisely at a time when our own culture is moving to a credit or even cashless society where transactions are increasingly made by computer-generated electronic transfers.
If subsistence is a way of life, or if it is indeed life, it is dependent upon the way people live, not on the availability of fish and game or certain vegetation. In the old days when game was gone, subsistence life did not stop; even when the game did not come all winter, when the rituals and prayers and ceremonies all failed and people starved, the survivors persisted in a subsistence life. There was no other choice for them, and, in fact, there is none for us.
Subsistence, then, is not an economic system, nor a matter of numbers of fish and game harvested in the course of a season; it is a matter of worldview. The white man’s preoccupation with economics and determination to quantify everything are irrelevant to the life under discussion. It is possible that we could have, in the future, the largest populations of moose and bear, caribou and salmon, that Alaska has ever known. Sound wildlife management might bring us that highly unlikely outcome. But we can have abundant game and have no subsistence culture left. If that happens, traditional culture will have slipped its moorings and lost its way, become part of mainstream American culture in a massive act of assimilation, joining an exploitation culture that has forgotten its roots in the sacredness of Nature. What is critical for all of us is to know ourselves—regardless of the culture we belong to—to be subsistence people, to acknowledge the subsistence character of the culture, and to practice a life that protects both the land and the culture through its beliefs, rituals, songs, and stories. We must be willing to take time for the rituals even when hunger gnaws us and dogs our families. Western culture has deliberately struggled to forget the rituals to set itself loose to pursue every avenue to take from the land anything that smacks of profit, without due consideration for the land itself. Yet depleting resources is like depleting a bank account; sooner or later we go broke and belly-up.
Both anthropologists and educators, in the name of offering understanding, sympathy, and help, have been in the forefront of the effort to eliminate subsistence. In a tragic way anthropologists and schoolteachers have a common record. Both have often meant well, and tried to stand against the standard-brand racist institutions, agencies, and personnel, all of whom (me as teacher and bureaucrat included) have been the bad guys, because no matter how well meaning or astute or careful, we just don’t know what we are doing when we tinker with other cultures. Social engineering always has unanticipated outcomes, and the most important results are almost always negative. Perhaps that stems from the arrogance that lies behind every social engineering effort: the idea that someone or some small group, often outsiders, knows so much better than others the life that they ought to live. The result of our American engineering effort has been that the academy has laid siege to traditional societies, and the knowledge of them gained and disseminated by anthropology and other disciplines has often been used against them.
The public schools also have been determined agents for the erosion and eventual loss of indigenous cultures. An Alaskan superintendent of schools once insisted to me that his purpose was “to wipe out the last vestiges of Eskimo culture as fast as I can.” For years the goal of schools for American Indians was assimilation and ethnocide. One of every culture’s most profound characteristics is language. For years in Alaska we insisted that village children forget their own language and adopt English. The teachers punished any use of the local language on the playground or in class, sometimes severely. Washing a student’s mouth out with lye soap was a standard punishment, and not the worst. Nothing diminishes a culture more quickly than the oppression of its language.
Despite the external threats that have been hurled at indigenous populations in the Americas for hundreds of years, the threat I fear most is no longer an external one. The gravest threat to traditional culture now is an internal deterioration of subsistence: the withering away of subsistence values from within the culture; the loss of subsistence integrity, not forced by nonnatives but coming from the loss of knowledge and understanding inside the culture. That is the way that Western cultures lost their own sense of subsistence. This was not something that somebody else did to us; we did it to ourselves. There is a kind of romantic notion that if we can control the outside forces that have an impact on a culture, everything will be OK. But most often our most serious cultural losses come from inside the culture. We lose track of our own internal resources. Now my fear is that the stories, the worldview, the methods, and the magic that make subsistence possible will be forgotten. How do we maintain them? Since we all live in subsistence cultures whether we recognize it or not, this is an important issue for all of us.
If a traditional culture lets go of the life that gives meaning to subsistence activities, then it has also let go of its own definition of subsistence and reduced it to an economic system. In Alaska laws have been passed in recent years that gave hope to native peoples that the land could be saved and that subsistence would be saved thereby. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 and the state laws regarding subsistence priority for village residents are examples. But protections for subsistence culture cannot come from ANCSA, village schools, Indian Reorganization Act councils, or any other laws or institutions external to the culture. Protection can come only from living the subsistence life itself, from maintaining the subsistence worldview, from telling the real stories of subsistence. The law can only slow the white onslaught on traditional culture. Only the culture can protect the culture. The culture protects itself only by continuing—by deliberately choosing, each day, to continue—the training of the young in the subsistence values of the culture and by doing that from within the culture, despite what the schools or any other alien institutions of other cultures say or teach.
In part, Eskimo and Indian people have kept subsistence alive, and sustained their cultures, by learning from their elders. That learning has been primarily through stories, music and dance, and observation and practice in the field and at home. But it is not entirely a matter of learning what the elders have to teach, and it is not entirely a matter of stories and music and dance. That learning is absolutely essential, but real learning must also come from within, from personal experience, from seeing for oneself. Part of the genius of traditional educational systems is that they make provisions not only for texts (stories and songs) but for personal experience. Maybe we have to learn everything twice: once from others, and again in our own experience. This is important so that when, as elders, we pass our learning on, we speak not only from our learning but from the conviction that arises from an authentic life of personal engagement and experience. Youth then not only need to hear what the elders have to say in their stories but must go out on the land and develop their own close observation of the natural world, their participation in the lives of animals, in the prayers and practices that make the animals return. Much of that observation of elders working on the land, living the life, is a matter of learning how to pay attention to details and to relationships, of finding the connections between humans’ behavior and the behavior of animals and plants. If that does not happen, then essential knowledge—the knowledge that holds the world together—is lost.
At an Alaska Federation of Natives evening of dancing, drumming, and singing, everyone was excited to see the kids up and dancing. Some village dance groups were composed entirely of junior high and high school kids. Folks were elated that they were learning the old songs and dances, yet as I sat there watching, I got more and more depressed. The kids were all lined up like a chorus line, everyone making exactly the same movements, like the Radio City Rockettes, singing songs and dancing dances they learned in school, taught by their elders. In the village community everyone, of every age, participated; in school it is only the kids and one or two elders employed as teachers’ aides.
That, it seems to me, is the problem. In the old days a man prepared himself and his equipment, went hunting, came back, invented his song and dance, and performed for the whole village what was an integral part of a cultural whole, not something he learned from someone else. A woman went berry picking and met a bear, and that evening she turned the experience into a dance, and the dance was as integral to the subsistence of the people as the food. Those kids at the AFN convention had been taught, not in the community but in school, a fragment of what is too broad ranging and integrated to be taught. It can be learned in a community but not taught in school. It can be learned only in a system that is of the culture, not an institution imposed by another, frequently antagonistic, culture.
Anglos can be taught the elements of our cultures (art, music, history, language, etc.) a piece at a time because they have been fragmented for a long time. We can learn about our cultures in our schools because they are our own cultures’ institutions. But they are not Yup’ik, Crow, Inupiat, or Navajo institutions.
The traditional hunter grew up in an ecosystem, a natural and social context, in which he could move comfortably. He learned about that system of relationships both from stories and by direct observation enabled by personal experience, participating in the process with an elder. Within the village culture, what the hunter learned was the whole process; what the school teaches is the song. So schools try to teach what can’t be taught, and educators think they do it successfully, in part, because even the elders think it is wonderful. At the same time, schools deprive kids of an opportunity to learn the integrated whole because they have to be in school, which is where, in the dominant American culture, education takes place. So they don’t hunt, not over long, contiguous days and nights out in fall or winter’s dwindling light. Life on the land, engaged in subsistence activities, is the source for understanding the game and the landscape, and of both the song and the dance, which are integrated not only with the hunt but the preparation for it and the return in triumph or failure: the carving, the prayers, the making of tools, the planning and mapping, the hunting itself, the rituals of acceptance of the gift of animal life, the return, and the community celebration—out of all of which come the song and the dance. No, that’s wrong: the song does not come out of all that; it remains part of all that. No single element can be pulled out without unraveling the whole.
As long as nonnatives persist in believing subsistence is an economic system, native peoples only play into their hands and reinforce the misunderstanding when they base their arguments for subsistence on the need for fish and game. For years anthropologists working for Alaska’s Division of Subsistence furthered the mistake by counting fish and game taken during the year by native villages. To say “We need 1,900 pounds of birds and game to keep us for the year” is an economic argument that leads to the nonnative numbers game, balancing one economic cost against another. It is also an anthropologic activity that scholars in an alien culture know how to pursue, so they do it out of a desire to help. What it does, however, is reinforce the impression among Anglos, especially anthropologists, that subsistence is an economy, and it deepens the difference between our ideas of what subsistence means. It also works against traditional cooperative systems, for “quantities are competitive; qualities are complementary.”3 That is also one difference between an economic system and a people’s life together. If song, dance, and subsistence can be broken out and described separately, then maybe they can be taught, but not as integers, not as integral to the whole, not with integrity.
More important, and more frightening, if they can be broken out, they can also be replaced. If subsistence is only a matter of economics—of hunting, fishing, and berry picking—then one can substitute army beef for buffalo (as happened in the lower forty-eight), beef for caribou or moose, or Spam for salmon, a shift one congressman touring Alaska noted was “easy to make.” Even if the nutritional value is equivalent (though it rarely is), the culture that ramifies from subsistence and through which subsistence permeates is gone. Such a shift also makes village people dependent on another culture’s food, the sources of which are miles away—a dependence on nonnatives that our larger American culture says it deplores but always encourages and that its laws often make inevitable. The sum of the parts of a fragmented culture always add up to less than the whole. An integrated culture adds up to more, a whole so large that the parts are lost or submerged in it, undiscerned by members of the culture.
Further, the bits and pieces cannot, perhaps ought not, be taught unless the whole can be taught, and it seems clear that the latter is far beyond our schools’ willingness and capacity. In school, dance becomes dance only—a replaceable fragment. If a song is only a song, it can be taught in school, but if a song is the culmination of making tools, of hunting, of cold and endurance, of disappointment or triumph, of going out and returning, of feeding the people, and of expressing what all feel—if it is a community’s life—then it cannot be taught except in that context. It surely cannot be taught in an institution that remains fundamentally alien, and alienating, to the community. To hold a class “about” it in school, even to have the elders teach the class, is to perpetrate a falsehood (we can teach what can’t be taught) and to create false hopes (we can count on schools to keep the culture alive). To admit that the song is a fragment, to consent to that, is to condemn it forever to be a fragment, cut off from the rest of the culture and replaceable.
No matter how much the elders do through schools, the second leg of knowledge, which comes from the experience of life within Nature, is still missing for many Alaska native children. Subsistence learned in school is only a matter of hearsay, not experience. As such it is poor fodder. The analogy for education goes like this: school is to hearsay as local culture is to experience. The best learning about subsistence takes place outside school, in the field, youth and elders together, the elders helping the young ones to understand and interpret what they are seeing. In the field—not just hunting and fishing, important as they are, but being in the field, away from home and village—elders demonstrate to youth a worldview by living it rather than telling it. Back home later, they share it in stories and songs in a larger community context where every activity makes more sense than it does in a classroom. Shinto farmers in Japan share a similar notion. There, although traditional learning about the land is important, says the Shinto philosopher Munetada Kurozumi, “if you really want to be a good scholar for the benefit of the world by comprehending the real things, you must read the real book in the form of the ‘living world.’”4
When the culture is taken apart for observation or analysis by anthropologists or educators, the culture at that instant becomes in some ways a Humpty Dumpty fallen, never to be made whole again. Once the anthropologist says “Tell me about your dances,” the members of the culture see dance in a new and isolating spotlight. It is not possible to return from the alien vision to see the whole again. Elders applaud the children’s learning to dance in school because they don’t think of it as a reproduction of a reproduction, a stark marker of the death of their way of life. They applaud because they have learned from nonnatives that this is “Indian art,” or “Eskimo dance,” activities once so unselfconscious as to be undifferentiated parts of a culture with integrity.
When village people sense the loss of wholeness, of integrity, they can only look back, never at, or toward, the whole as it exists now, or see it as it will or might exist in the future. If they could look at it as nonnatives look at their culture, they would be outside it, not in it—another feature of the Cartesian worldview and a sure sign that the traditional culture has already been diminished, the traditional worldview dislocated. What has shifted in our Cartesian view of the world is not our participation in Nature but merely our point of view. Our vantage point has become detached, that of a spectator rather than a participant. This is part of the problem as well: what we grope for, regardless of culture, is an integrated view of the world that sustains us.
Once the various elements of culture are separated, some parts seem to be more important than others—especially to an outside observer. They can be replaced by something like them (food for food), or they can be dropped entirely. We saw how this worked during the 1980s, when the imagined or invented necessity for defense took precedence over the arts. That precedence has expanded enormously in this new century. If art is separate from the rest of the culture, and if defense is the priority, then defense tends to become the entire cultural core, and art is seen as impeding the flow of scarce resources to defense. Art thus becomes not just a fragment of culture but an adjunct and, more dangerously, an obstacle to survival. The humanities, privacy, human rights, social safety nets, and an array of other cultural values then suffer the same fate.
Similarly, if time in the school day is limited, and if we are free to prioritize elements of a culture, then—even in rural Alaska—we put English, American history, and American government first. Eskimo language, Eskimo dance, Eskimo stories, and Eskimo cultural ways and experiences become extracurricular add-ons at the end of the day, an adjunct to the “real” work that must be accomplished. When the budget crunch comes and both time and dollars for education are scant, then we drop the dance entirely to teach Eskimo or Indian children the “more important” fragments of nonnative culture. Those who do the prioritizing, who know what is a necessity and what is an add-on, are folks from outside the culture, people from Washington, D.C., or Indiana, California, or Texas.
Anthropology, the traditional humanities, and educational systems have all played roles in western European colonial expansion and have contributed to the fragmentation, breakdown, and oppression of traditional societies. Anthropology, however, has lately turned a serious corner that may send the enterprise in a new and more useful direction. Both Fienup-Riordan and Richard Nelson, another Alaskan anthropologist, began asking in the 1980s and 1990s not only what nonnatives can learn about traditional cultures but what we might learn from them.5
We are all one with the land—whether we choose to be or not. The greatest Western philosophers and scientists have not yet created a system that lets us stand apart, and they cannot, and they never will. The best Western science and philosophy and the traditional views of indigenous peoples all over the world are agreed on this. The notion that we moderns have somehow separated ourselves from Nature is fatuous at best and naive in the extreme. Modern science has made clear to us what traditional societies learned ten thousand years ago: that the chemical and spiritual bonds between us and the earth are absolute. Those ancient cultures knew what we are still learning, that when land health declines, human health declines, economic health declines, the quality of our lives declines—even to the vanishing point. We dare not believe that either technology or social engineering can let us off the hook. The question of subsistence and land use is not just a technological or structural one; it is an ethical and spiritual one. The dilemmas that subsistence presents are ours forever, and we have to work at their resolution forever. The only answers lie in us, in our cultures, in each one of us holding the subsistence worldview, living the subsistence life.
We are as dependent upon the land, and especially on its oil, as Plains Indians were dependent on the land, especially its buffalo. We have all read accounts of how wonderfully adept Indians were at using every part of the animal. Food, clothing, shelter, equipment, boats, household goods, needles and thread, bedding—all were derived from the buffalo. This is the testimony of historians, anthropologists, and other interested observers. General William Tecumseh Sherman was one such observer, and he knew that the more quickly the buffalo disappeared, the more quickly he could contain and control the Great Plains tribes.6 No wonder the reports, as early as the 1850s, from Indian agents, scouts, and the Indians themselves that the buffalo were under grave threat went unheeded. We Americans knew we were exterminating the great herds and proceeded to our task with determination, skill, and thoughtful deliberation. We did not simply drift into slaughter; we knew what we were doing. This was not a thoughtless effort to kill buffalo but a calculated attempt to exterminate, or at least control, Indians. If we could make a dime in the process, so much the better; that was just good ol’ American enterprise, to be lauded. And if it cost a species or two, more or less, it was worth the price.
So it is not hard to imagine an anthropologist or historian, five hundred years from now, describing early-twenty-first-century American culture. He will remark on the skill with which we used all parts of oil:
From some of it they manufactured clothing, from some shelter, elaborate transportation systems, warmth for their homes, tools, incredibly intricate industries, entire agricultural systems, even whole economic systems. But, alas, they were a one-resource culture, just like the Plains Indians whom they despised for their simplicity.
When it became clear how dependent they were upon that one commodity, they were at the mercy of the world, their lives and future controlled by those who could cut off their supply, or at the mercy of their own desires, incapable of restraint, refusing to husband the resource so it would last. As the number of their friends in the world declined and others turned their backs on them, a clear limit to the life of their culture became apparent. They waited, mesmerized and demoralized, for their end to come with the end of oil. They were just like the Indians at the mercy of General Sherman. They knew their history, but they thought it belonged to the past, not to them, and they did not learn from it.