the nature of the hunt and the nature of the garden, balancing the spirits’ gifts, and making balanced offerings to the spirits in return.
Figure 1.4 The offering of a stag to the sun. Every year, a little before their spring (at the end of February, in fact), the chief Outina’s subjects take the skin, complete with antlers, of the biggest stag they have been able to catch (Source: Alamy Images). They stuff it with all kinds of the choicest plants that their land produces, sew it up again, and deck the horns, the throat, and the rest of the body with their more special fruits made up into wreaths or long garlands. Thus decorated, it is carried away to the music of pipes and singing into a very wide and beautiful plain, and there it is placed on a very tall tree trunk, with its head and chest turned towards the sunrise, prayers being repeatedly uttered to the sun that he should cause to grow again in their kingdom good things similar to those offered to him.
The chief with his sorcerer is nearest to the tree and gives the lead in what is said, with the people who are farther away responding. When they have greeted the sun the chief and the rest of the people go away leaving the skin there until the following year. This sort of ceremony is repeated each year. Artefact/Alamy Stock Photo.
Map of Bitterroot Forest Reserve
Our last document is a US Geological Survey map of Bitterroot Forest Reserve (today’s Bitterroot National Forest) in the Northern Rocky Mountains, along the Idaho–Montana state line. The surveyor who compiled the map, J. B. Leiberg, noted the extent of old fire scarring and woodland regrowth over hundreds of thousands of acres. Leiberg dated some fires as far back as 1719, long before American settlers arrived in the region. The area with multiple lines drawn through had seen successive burns. Some of these fires were doubtless the result of lightning, but many more were likely to have been ignited by Indians, who used fire to clear out dense undergrowth, encourage new growth of grasses for game, and preserve mountain mweadows from forest encroachment, among other reasons. How much was America’s “virgin wilderness” in fact a landscape maintained by Indians?
Figure 1.5 Map of Bitterroot Forest Reserve showing burned areas by J. B. Leiberg 1890.
(Source: US Geological Survey, Twentieth Annual Report (1990), pp. 384–385. Public Domain.)
Further Reading
1 M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2013). University of California Press, Berkeley.
2 Karl W. Butzer, ed., “The Americas Before and After 1492: Current Geographical Research.” Special issue, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82(3) September 1992: 343–568.
3 Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
4 Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982; rev. edn 1997). University of Washington Press, Seattle.
5 Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (1979). Memorial University Institute of Social and Economic Research, Newfoundland.
2 The Other Invaders Deadly Diseases and Extraordinary Animals
European colonists did not arrive alone in the Americas. They brought a great deal of baggage, some of it unintentionally. Many of the most significant changes in America’s natural environments came about through autonomous workings of natural organisms that accompanied colonists and traders. These included disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and horses, and also weeds, or plants – many of them imported – that grew in conditions of disturbance brought on by plowing, grazing, or other colonial activities.
The impact of these organisms was enormous. Together, they remade much of American nature to better suit the new arrivals from Europe. While all of them had different effects, which varied from one region to the next, it is fair to say that without these small, often microscopic “co-invaders,” it is unlikely that Europeans would have conquered those vast sections of the Americas which their descendants now dominate.
In the material presented below, we see how the linking of the Americas to the rest of the world in the early colonial period (and even after) meant that the nature of the New World was suddenly attached to the nature of the Old World, often with astounding consequences. Alfred Crosby explores the impact of microscopic germs, viruses, and plasmodia on American Indians, and particularly the impact of smallpox and its role in the conquest of the Americas and Australia. This piece is taken from one of Crosby’s most famous books, but some of his terms need to be explained. Crosby refers to “Pangaea,” which is the name scholars give to the world’s single great land mass before it broke into continents millions of years ago, long before people existed. In part, Crosby argues that after the world split into separate continents, different disease environments eventually emerged in different places. To cross the ocean becomes, in Crosby’s narrative, to cross “the seams of Pangaea.”
The people who cross the ocean, sailors, he occasionally refers to by their Portuguese name, marinheiros, because many of the earliest European sailors and explorers were Portuguese. And finally, he refers to “neo-Europes,” by which he means those parts of the world outside Europe where the marinheiros and other Europeans settled and successfully transformed the natural environment into some approximation of European nature. These include the temperate zones of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of southern Africa, among others. In Crosby’s analysis, the process of making a strange new environment into a “neo-Europe” was the key to success for any European colonial regime.
In this excerpt, keep a close eye on how the diseases mentioned come to the Americas, and pay special attention to the way in which long isolation from the disease environments of Eurasia makes American Indians especially vulnerable at the time of contact. Why did Europeans bring diseases to Indians, without Indians having diseases of their own to kill Europeans? Also, you might ask why disease did not play the same role in the Europeans’ attempted conquest of Africa, where pathogens worked in the opposite direction, often undermining the power of the colonists. Does the fact that natural organisms often worked to European and Euro-American advantage mean that the conquest was “natural?” Or were settlers who took the land from dying Indians merely exploiting the environmental conditions they had created, intentionally or otherwise?
It is important to remember that as important as biological change can be, it never determines the totality of history. In other words, we must resist what is called biological or environmental determinism – the belief that nature determines history. Instead, we should try always to keep in mind that people make their histories from a range of possibilities within any environmental setting. Indian responses
