It’s a common myth in Western study of American Indians that they lived lightly on the land, neither damaging nor improving their environment. They are assumed to have been more like an animal population than like Europeans in their placid acceptance of nature’s bounties and perils. Supposedly, then, the Americas were largely Pristine wilderness when the Europeans found them. Known as the pristine myth, this is a false and harmful characterization. Native communities were instrumental in shaping the land around them, often for better, sometimes for worse. The idea that America was an untouched wilderness was mostly invented by 19th-century American writers pining for a past that never existed and seeing the long-term effects of radical Native American depopulation, which resulted in natural habitat regeneration. Before European colonists arrived, the human impact on the North American landscape was far from negligible. Despite the enduring imagery of the “crying Indian” conservation campaign, natives practiced a wide variety of approaches toward the natural world.
When the first European colonists arrived, what they found was a carefully maintained landscape habituated to a large population’s hunting and farming needs. Before being decimated by disease, the Native Americans transformed New England and Midwestern forests into a mixture of fallow growth, open fields, and meadows via regular, controlled burning. Early colonists noted that the remaining forests weren’t a dense tangle of brush but wide, grassy pathways and openings among trees. The paradisaical forests of America and the Midwest’s iconic prairies were also the result of carefully planned fires set by natives. After they were cleared from those lands, forest rapidly encroached upon the settlers’ fields, resulting in the lush growth we know today.
Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks — they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.
One reason that this version of history continues to be taught is that it provides a way for schools to give lessons about conservation. In my experience, this has been transformed into the notion that we should return the land, as much as possible, to the wilderness it was before Columbus. Don’t litter, do recycle, don’t cut down the forests – we should learn from the Indians, the story goes, and leave the land alone. Much of what passes for environmentalism today is dedicated to taking humans out of the landscape so that it will be “pristine” as it was prior to European arrival. They do not understand that an authentic, pre-human environment for this continent would be far different than they think. In fact, it would have to be the environment of the Pleistocene.
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