Myths of the Ecological Whitemen: Histories, Science, and Rights in North American – Native American Relations

Abstract

In the “Ecological Indian: Myth and History” (1999) Shepard Krech argues that Northern Algonquian peoples came to be conservationists by learning from Europeans during the course of the commercial fur trade. This argument concludes his main argument for the volume as a whole. I explore four central problems with his analyses. To begin, Krech neglects to assess the effectiveness of fur traders' wildlife restoration policies or to consider whether their nineteenth-century policies could be considered conservation practices in a contemporary sense, as he claims. Second, Krech's treatment of Northern Algonquians is problematic because he fails to consider whether the most widely acknowledged conservation practice used by Northern Algonquians during the nineteenth century, hunting territories, could have been learned from other Northern Algonquians who had hunting territories earlier, not mainly from fur traders. He also argues that Northern Algonquians' religious statements about human-animal relationships were demonstrably unrelated to "Western ecology" and to conserving game populations. But he omits to examine their statements in the light of the findings of biological research, which concur with some of the more enigmatic aspects of their knowledge. Next, I trace a history of changing understandings and inter-cultural communications by examining the process through a case study of a mid-nineteenth-century fur trader beaver-restocking experiment, which shows how traders initially misunderstood beaver conservation and ecology and how Northern Algonquians were involved in traders beginning to understand ideas of conservation and ecology. In his conclusion, Krech makes political and legal statements about the rights Native Americans can have today based on the claimed lack of conservation knowledge and practices among Northern Algonquians during the fur trade. His policy arguments are misleading, both with respect to the present status of indigenous rights recognitions and in relation to the lessons he draws from fur-trade histories about Euro-Americans' and Native Americans' respective authority to govern the land today.