Native American Environmental Issues Essay Research Paper

Native American Environmental Issues Essay, Research Paper

Native American Environmental IssuesTraditionally Native Americans have had an immediate and reciprocal relationship with their natural environments. At contact, they lived in relatively small groups close to the earth. They defined themselves by the land and sacred places, and recognized a unity in their physical and spiritual universe. Their cosmologies connected them with all animate and inanimate beings. Indians moved in a sentient world, managing its bounty and diversity carefully lest they upset the spirit “bosses,” who balanced and endowed that world. They acknowledged the power of Mother Earth and the mutual obligation between hunter and hunted as coequals. Indians celebrated the earth’s annual rebirth and offered thanks for her first fruits. They ritually addressed and prepared the animals they killed, the agricultural fields they tended, and the vegetal and mineral materials they processed. They used song and ritual speech to modify their world, while physically transforming that landscape with fire and water, brawn and brain. They did not passively adapt, but responded in diverse ways to adjust environments to meet their cultural as well as material desires. The pace of change in Indian environments increased dramatically with Euroamerican contact. Old World pathogens and epidemic diseases, domesticated plants and livestock, the disappearance of native flora and fauna, and changing resource use patterns altered the physical and cultural landscape of the New World. Nineteenth-century removal and reservation policies reduced the continental scope of Indian lands to mere islands in the stream of American settlement. Reservations themselves were largely unwanted or remote environments of little perceived economic value. Indian peoples lost even that land as the General Allotment Act of 1887 divided reservations into individual holdings. By 1930, this policy contributed to the alienation of over 80 percent of Indian lands — a diminishment of land, resources, and biotic diversity that relegated Indians to the periphery of American society. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Native Americans controlled mere remnants of their former estates, most in the trans-Mississippi West. Relatively valueless by nineteenth-century standards, their lands contained unseen resources of immense worth. This single fact informs nearly all Native American environmental issues in the twentieth century. Land, its loss, location, and resource wealth or poverty, the exploitation and development of that land, and changing Indian needs and religious attitudes all define the modern environmental debates. By the beginning of the twentieth century, agriculture and grazing had fundamentally changed the face of Indian lands. In Oklahoma and on the high plains, Indians and agents cleared, plowed, and planted large areas in a succession of monoculture crops. Overcropping marginal lands, drought, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, isolation, and the vagaries of the American market economy led to the wide-scale abandonment of Indian agriculture after World War II. Likewise, the adoption of domestic animals radically changed the landscape and biotic diversity of reservations, In the 1930s, the government instituted drastic livestock reduction and reseeding programs on southwestern reservations. Range scientists introduced new plant and animal species into fragile ecosystems, but were unable to solve problems of overgrazing on the drought-ravaged Navajo and Papago reservations. On a cultural level, the programs backfired by ignoring Native explanations and ecological methods, resulting in increased Indian economic dependence. Since then, tribes have had to deal with overgrazing and erosion, invasive noxious plants, reclamation, and improper land use. Given past experience, tribes are beginning to weigh the relative utility of leasing lands to non-Indians against developing their own operations which might be more sensitive to sustainable agricultural alternatives. In the early twentieth century, some reservations contained extensive forests that made them attractive targets for exploitation. To protect these forests government officials outlawed Indian burning as a means of environmental management — clearing forest underbrush to reduce the potential for destructive crown fires while improving game animal habitat and useful vegetal materials. Government-managed timber sales brought some economic development and prosperity to the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Klamath of California and Oregon; to Western Apaches in Arizona; and to Chippewas and Menominees in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But gross mismanagement of sustained yield programs led to reckless clearcutting, erosion, and the loss of forest habitats on all these reservations. In the Black Hills of South Dakota and near Taos Pueblo’s sacred Blue Lake, lumbering operations in national forests threatened sacred sites. The process continues today as the Bureau of Land Management chain-clears pinon-juniper forests in Nevada to improve the grazing potential of the land for white permit holders, destroying traditional Western Shoshone resources and gathering areas without Indian consent. Modern hunting, gathering, and fishing rights based on nineteenth-century treaties have created a number of problems between Indians, sportsmen, and state and federal governments. In the early twentieth century, under pressure