William Cronon - 460 Handout 2

Lecture #2: The World That Coyote and Raven Made

Outline

I. Coyote Steals the Sun and Moon:

The lecture opens with Zuñi story of Coyote (companion of Eagle) stealing the Sun and the Moon and by so doing bringing cold and ice and winter to the world (this version of the tale taken from Richard Erdoes & Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends [1984])

Trickster figure central to many Indian belief systems, can take several different animal forms: Coyote, Great Hare, Raven

In the Zuñi story, Coyote tricks Eagle into letting him look into box containing moon and sun that they've stolen from Pueblo Kachinas, result is release of moon, coming of winter (and hence seasons)

Relationships of Indians to universe of animals and plants far different from European notions of nature that we'll discuss this semester. No comparable monolithic category like "Nature"--a category that often presupposes a monotheistic God. Instead: a multiplicity of creatures and spirits in living universe filled with awareness, gifts, dangers, spiritual complexities, moral responsibilities.

Death & violence everywhere: life lives by killing. The burden of the hunter is to take responsibility for the consequences of bringing death to conscious beings like oneself.

II. Opening Caveats and Generalizations

A key danger of this lecture is its tendency to offer sweeping generalizations seemingly about all Indians: inherently a hazardous and misleading undertaking, with problems similar to those of "nature" (with same risk of perceived timelessness).

Notice too the problem of vocabulary: "American Indian"; "Native American"; "First Nations"; "Indigenous Peoples": all of these are generalizing words that abstract and lump together peoples with radically different languages, cultures, and histories. In general, most native peoples in North American prefer to be known by the tribal names they call themselves. Yet it's also true that especially in the 20th century, the phrase "American Indian" became a rallying label under which native peoples of different tribes gathered together to resist the power of the Federal government--often using "Indian" treaties and "Indian" law as some of their most important weapons. As a result, it's common in "Indian Country" for native peoples in the United States to refer to themselves collectively as "Indians" even as they also defend the sovereign rights of their own people under their particular treaties and work at the same time to defend the rights of indigenous peoples everywhere. ("Indian" is thus a fairly common term in the United States for native and non-native people alike; it is much less commonly used in Canada, where it's regarded as highly pejorative.)

One of the most important generalizations I hope you'll take from today's lecture is the extraordinary diversity of North America's native peoples.

Another generalization, especially relevant to our environmental focus in this course: the intimacy and intricacy of the many adaptations native peoples made to widely varying environments, and the complexity of the niches they chose and gained the skills to occupy as a result.

Key argument that runs through today's lecture applies not just today but to the entire course, for all the peoples we'll encounter and discuss: the environment was not (and is not) determinative for the indigenous peoples of North America, but offers limits across an (often wide) range of cultural and technological options: people made choices relative to the limits they confronted in a given time, place, and environment.

Maps of vegetation and physiographic regions of North America are also maps showing resources and subsistence possibilities. These in turn were used to map native "culture areas," first introduced by anthropologists in the 1920s, to generalize about lifestyles and subsistence practices of different indigenous groups. The publication by Driver and Massey listed in the Suggested Readings above is an encyclopedic compendium of such maps, which though dated is still well worth perusing to gain a sense of the diversity of ways native peoples interacted with the environments they inhabited.

"Culture areas" aren't just environmental, of course. They're also affected by myriad languages and language families that characterized the Americas at the beginning of the colonial encounter with Europe, as well as different kinds of social organization, ways of dwelling, political practices, and so on. Today, we'll concentrate mainly on relationships with environments.

III. Living with Fish and Trees

Given the immense diversity of lifestyles and subsistence practices on the continent, best way to illustrate these generalizations is to explore a few individual cases in greater detail. I've opted for a few that may be less familiar to many people attending this lecture.

Take, for instance, the Northwest Coast peoples of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska: Tlingits, Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiutls, Salish, etc.

Their richest and most reliable source of subsistence were salmon, which each year followed their own ecological cycle of traveling far upstream from ocean to lay eggs at the headwaters of major rivers, giving their young the best chance of survival before swimming downstream into the richer waters at the mouths of rivers and in the open ocean--that were also full of predators.

Wide range of technologies (tools) for harvesting salmon: hooks, spears, nets, weirs, traps: technology helps define and draw boundaries around different human niches relative to these fish.

Among the most important materials for creating these tools was wood, most frequently harvested from the enormous cedar trees that grow in this part of North America. Extraordinarily rich source of wood and fiber, but consider the challenge of harvesting such trees with no metal-working technologies.

Techniques for handling cedar for boats, tools, houses: complex wood-working technologies used fire before the acquisition of iron and steel from traders originating in Europe and Asia, followed by explosive growth in new wood-working techniques once these metals became available: dynamic cultures embedded in the materials of the biophysical world.

It would be utterly wrong to think of the cultural changes in Northwest Coast art and material life with the acquisition of iron and other metals as "caused" by "European" tools; instead, indigenous peoples made these metals and tools their own and used them for purposes that never would have occurred to the traders who sold these goods.

Furthermore: attached to this material world of tools, technology, subsistence was a symbolic world of rituals inviting the salmon to return up the streams, intervening in and expressing gratitude for the continuation of natural cycles.

IV. Bringing Home Animals

The case of the Mistassini Cree east of Hudson's Bay in Canada shows one of the many ways these spiritual relationships between human hunters and their animal prey occurred (based on work of Adrian Tanner in Bringing Home Animals, referenced in the reading list above).

Hunting strategies and techniques were embedded in gift relationships with animals, who sacrificed themselves so that hunters could live, in return for ritual payments of gifts by their hunters: this mutual exchange of gifts maintained the cycles that united people and animals and the spirit world that shaped all of their lives.

Behind the animals were keepers of the game, spirits responsible for the well-being of game animals. These spirits must be thanked and supplicated in exchange for success in the hunt.

Like many migratory peoples, the world of northern hunters maintained an orderly social universe in a mobile community that regularly moved from place to place (following the animals it harvested) by reproducing clearly articulated spatial relationships, representing male/female, old/young, single/married, individual/group. The spatial arrangements of dwellings and communities reflected and affirmed these social and spiritual relationships.

Wide variations (seasonally and from year to year) in the subsistence resource base (animal and plant populations) required spreading subsistence across numerous species, along with the maintenance of low population densities. (This latter is often referred to by ecologists as Liebig's Law, which says that the size of biological populations is governed not by total resources, but by the scarcest resource, which operates as a limiting factor on population size.)

Low human populations essential for survival in environments where availability of food varied widely from season to season, which is one reason why native populations were generally much lower in environments with wider seasonal swings or harsher overall conditions (as in the deserts of the West or the colder environments of the far North) than in more fertile, abundant areas.

V. The Planters' World

Horticulturalists--people who sustain themselves at least in part by planting, caring for, and harvesting domesticated plants--can be more sedentary, storing food in anticipation of hungry times when food was scarce, thereby evening out the seasonal variabilities that might otherwise yield hunger or even starvation. By storing food across the seasons of the year, they can sustain larger populations.

Here too spiritual relationships shaped human relationships with the natural world: the cycles of planting, weeding, harvesting were accompanied by seasonal dances and ritual ceremonies, especially expressions of gratitude and thanksgiving for the harvest.

For an excellent early description with lots of concrete examples and illustrations of what was involved in managing the seasonal cycles of horticultural planting and harvest, see Gilbert Wilson's classic Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden (1917; 1987), about Hidatsa horticulture along the Missouri River on the eastern margins of the Great Plains, available online at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/buffalo/garden/garden.html

Agriculture was often combined with seasonal hunting activities too: cycles of planting and harvesting crops were tied to cycles of hunting and gathering in complex webs of ecological and spiritual interdependence.

Storing food was critical to maintaining larger populations--and control of such stored foods also helped create the material foundations for more elaborate class hierarchies.

Except in the Southwest, horticulture was largely a woman's activity; mixed Mesoamerican crops of maize, squash, and beans were planted in polycultures that made optimum use of land while also yielding a harvest rich in calories and complementary proteins.

VI. Fire and its Ecological Effects

Native peoples used fire for clearing fields and many other purposes, yielding some of their greatest ecological effects on North American landscapes.

Use of fire occurred across the continent, with different effects depending on ecosystems: in Northeast, open, park-like forest in areas around villages; in Midwest, the eastward extension of prairie grasslands was at least somewhat aided by native burning; in the West, drier ecosystems both limited the effects of fire and shifted species composition toward fire-tolerant species in locations where anthropogenic fire could make a difference.

More often than not, fire also increased game resources by via what twentieth-century ecologists called the "edge effect": producing grassy, open landscapes favored by a number of game species.

VII. Sacrificing Buffalo to Make the Corn Grow

Fire represented a genuine manipulation of landscapes we'd recognize as having been altered by human activity: European beliefs in "virgin land," unaltered by human beings, promulgated a myth that ignored the role of native peoples in reshaping many ecosystems on the North American continent.

But for native peoples, their most important efforts at manipulation came through a universe of ritual gift-giving, honoring the mutual obligations among people, animals, and spirits: Indian communities recognized their vulnerability to fluctuations across seasons, and sought to regularize their subsistence by supplicating the spirits responsible for controlling such fluctuations.

All of these were linked in ritual relationships: the lecture ends with story of Pawnee chief Petalesharo being told by Quaker missionary that he should stop hunting, settle down, and depend solely on "civilized" farming. Petalesharo responded that to stop hunting would mean stopping the sacrifice of bison meat to the spirits responsible for overseeing the success of the planting, which in turn would mean that corn crops would fail.

For the missionary, this seemed like a crazy idea...but why? In a world where Coyote is always waiting to bring unexpected change, doesn't it make sense always to be careful in thanking the spirits for their gifts? And doesn't it make sense to spread the challenge of finding what you need to subsist across the seasons of the year across as many different foods and resources as you can? Under such circumstances, why would peoples like the Pawnee give up hunting bison and rely only on crops in an environment given to recurring droughts and crop failures?