here is part of modern America – thinking about it as just “history” would mean missing one of the most important insights which environmental history has to offer: that not all people think about nature in the same way. Nelson is attempting to present us with a view of nature through Koyukon eyes. Whatever else we say about his interpretation, there is no doubt that Koyukon people see the natural world as a universe of spirits, most of them having great and potentially dangerous powers. Environmental history often leads us, in surprising ways, to the connections between peoples and their creators.
What in the Koyukon view of nature strikes you as different from your own understandings of nature? Is the Koyukon world generally more “natural” than your world? And is “nature” one thing among the Koyukon? Is nature separate from other parts of the Koyukon world? Or do its distinctive entities, spirits, presences, and forces infuse all aspects of Koyukon life? Do different parts of Koyukon nature have different meanings?
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There’s always things in the air that watch us
A Way of Seeing
… Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature – however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be – is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect. All things in nature have a special kind of life, something unknown to contemporary Euro-Americans, something powerful .…
Over a span of millennia, the Koyukon people and their ancestors have sustained themselves directly from their surroundings. The intimacy of their relationship to nature is far beyond our experience – the physical dependence and the intense emotional interplay with a world that cannot be directly altered to serve the needs of humanity. This close daily interaction and dependence upon an omnipotent natural universe has profound importance to the Koyukon people and provides a theme upon which their cultural lives converge.
Koyukon perceptions of nature are aligned on two interconnected levels. The first of these is empirical knowledge. The practical challenges of survival by hunting, fishing, and gathering require a deep objective understanding of the environment and the methods for utilizing its resources. In short, the Koyukon people are sophisticated natural historians, especially well versed in animal behavior and ecology.
But their perception of the natural environment extends beyond what Westerners define as the empirical level, into the realm of the spiritual. The Koyukon inherit an elaborate system of supernatural concepts for explaining and manipulating the environment. From this perspective the natural and supernatural worlds are inseparable, and environmental events are often caused or influenced by spiritual forces. Detailed explanations are provided for the origin of natural entities and for the causation of natural events (which seldom, if ever, take place purely by chance). Furthermore, behavior toward nature is governed by an array of supernaturally based rules that ensure the well-being of both humans and the environment.
It is important to understand that Koyukon beliefs about nature are as logical and consistent as they are powerful, but that they differ substantially from those prevailing in modern Western societies. Our own tradition envisions the universe as a system whose functioning can be explained through rationalistic and scientific means. The natural and supernatural worlds are clearly separated. Environmental events are caused by ongoing evolutionary and ecological processes, or else they happen purely by chance. Finally, modern Western cultures regulate human behavior toward nature and its resources primarily on the basis of practical rather than religious considerations.
For the traditional Koyukon Athapaskans, ideology is a fundamental element of subsistence, as important as the more tangible practicalities of harvesting and utilizing natural resources. Most interactions with natural entities are governed in some way by a moral code that maintains a proper spiritual balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This is not an esoteric abstraction, but a matter of direct, daily concern to the Koyukon people. Failure to behave according to the dictates of this code can have an immediate impact on the violator’s health or success. And so, when Koyukon people carry out their subsistence activities they make many decisions on the basis of supernatural concerns. The world is ever aware.
From the Distant Time
As the Koyukon reckon it, all things human and natural go back to a time called ’adonts’idnee, which is so remote that no one can explain or understand how long ago it really was. But however ancient this time may be, its events are recounted accurately and in great detail through a prodigious number of stories. ’adonts’idnee (literally, “in Distant Time it is said”) is the Koyukon word for these stories, but following from its conversational use I will translate it simply as Distant Time.
The stories constitute an oral history of the Koyukon people and their environment, beginning in an age before the present order of existence was established. During this age “the animals were human” – that is, they had human form, they lived in a human society, and they spoke human (Koyukon) language. At some point in the Distant Time certain humans died and were transformed into animal or plant beings, the species that inhabit Koyukon country today. These dreamlike meta-morphoses left a residue of human qualities and personality traits in the north-woods creatures.
Taken together, the Distant Time stories describe a primordial world and its transfiguration into modern form. Some are so long that a single narration may require many evenings, even several weeks of evenings, for a complete telling. Stories of this kind – widely known as legends, myths, or folklore – are found throughout North America and elsewhere. It is common practice, however, to vastly underrate their significance in the lives of people like the Koyukon. They are not regarded as simple entertainment (though they are appreciated as such), and they are certainly not considered fictional. Stories of the Distant Time are, first of all, an accounting of origins. They are a Koyukon version of Genesis, or perhaps of Darwin. Woven into the plots of many stories are innumerable subplots or asides, which often describe the origins of natural entities.
The scope of Distant Time stories ranges from the minute to the cosmological. They explain the beginnings of entities that inhabit the sky – the sun, moon, and aurora. They account for certain weather phenomena, such as thunderstorms, which are the transformed embodiment of a formerly human spirit. For this reason thunderstorms have consciousness and can be turned away by people who know how to influence them. Features of the earth, such as prominent hills or mountains, are also given some accounting in these stories. For example, a hill near Huslia is called “Giant’s Firemakers” (Yiłkuh tł’ aala’), because it was formed when a giant man lost his flints there.
A central figure in this ancient world was the Raven (it is unclear, perhaps irrelevant, whether there was one Raven or many), who was its creator and who engineered many of its metamorphoses. Raven, the contradiction – omnipotent clown, benevolent mischief-maker, buffoon, and deity. It was he, transformed into a spruce needle, who was swallowed by a woman so she would give birth to him as a boy. When the boy was old enough to play, he took from beneath a blanket in her house the missing sun and rolled it to the door. Once outside, he became Raven again and flew up to return the sun to the sky, making the earth light again.
And it was he who manipulated the natural design to suit his whim or fancy. When he first created the earth, for example, the rivers ran both ways, upstream on one side and downstream on the other. But this made life too easy for humans, he decided, because their boats could drift along in either direction without paddling. So Raven altered his creation and made the rivers flow only one way, which is how they remain today.
There are hundreds of stories explaining the behavior and appearance of living things. Most
