Native American Culture and History 2

So imagine a forest and what is today the American Midwest. You know, for me RepA Wisconsin where that is. You can be Illinois, Ohi. You can shop on Iowa, even Nebraska. Sure, let's imagine this forest. The canopy is moving with motion. You hear this roaring sound. It's like the sky itself is made of wings. You look up and the heavens are absolutely thick with birds, millions, millions upon millions, casting shadows that fall across the land. These are passenger pigeons.

They were the most populace of all North American bird species. Today they're gone, not rare, not endangered, They're completely extinct. There is this enduring myth of American history that before European colonization the land was untouched, unshaped, a pristine wilderness. Historian Stanley Rice writes, quote, this image of a continent teeming with wildlife and wilderness is more fantasy than fact end quote. Those who lived in North America, the Native Americans,

were not passive inhabitants of some untouched eden. They were ecosystem engineers, people who actively and skillfully managed their environment. There probably were somewhere between three to five billion passenger pigeons, just to continue with this one example in North America, when Europeans arrived, some flocks could, as they're moving, stretch

for three hundred miles. If you were sitting below a flock as it passed, it might take fourteen hours from start to finish before their migratory pattern passed beyond your site. So these weren't just birds. These were a dominant ecological presence,

shaping forests through their foraging and nesting behaviors. In fact, they're kind of like a superorganism when they need Imagine, they did so in such enormous numbers that their collective weight could actually break tree branches and flatten the undergrowth beneath. Their droppings altered the chemical composition of the soil. Their constant movement distributed seeds across vast distances. In short, passenger pigeons weren't simply residents of North America, not residents of

the forests. They were architects of this. And do you know who understood this? Native Americans. They understood it deeply and understood it very very well. They hunted them, of course, true, but not mindlessly and pointlessly. The hunts were deliberate, timed and steeped in generation upon generation of ecolo knowledge. Tribes waited until the birds had nested and the young were nearly grown. This ensured a maximum yield while allowing the

population enough time to recover. They never took all the birds. They took enough to eat, enough to dry and store, but they always left the rest. Hunting passenger pigeons is my example here today. But it's not a matter of happenstance or opportunism. This is sort of a larger practice and web of this seasonal pattern of using migratory patterns to your advantage, and something that Native Americans, particularly in North America, were very, very skilled at. In late spring

and summer. Large nesting sites were predictable, and this is for various species. And tribes understood this, and they could converge on them. There would be whole communities that would participate in the hunt and other historian rights quote, children, elders, warriors. They all had roles to play. They used long poles, nets, and smoke to bring the birds down end quote. Hunting wasn't just an act of survival, It was an act of relationship. In many Native American traditions, there were prayers

before the hunt and rituals afterwards. To kill an animal was to enter into a sacred exchange. To quote one Native elder, you must love your prey or you will not hunt it well. End quote. Now it's kind of easy to see how this system worked because it was broken so thoroughly by the Europeans when they arrived. With the arrival of European settlers, the careful balance that the Native peoples of North America had struck with the environment

and the animals around them was totally upended. The newcomers saw the sky's thick with birds and assumed that the land was simply inexhaustible. They didn't have any cultural memory of scarcity. In this new world, they didn't have any inherited stories of balance and the need for restraint. Instead, the Europeans came with a market based logic to extract resources and profit from them. The pigeons, suddenly, like everything else,

became a commodity. Commercial hunters simply slaughtered them by the millions. They used nets to trap entire flocks and shipped barrels of salted birds back to the growing European cities. They shot them out of the sky for fun, often leaving the body simply to rot. Here's one passage from a contemporary observer quote. The ground was covered with their carcasses. We used them as kindling for our fires end quote. Somehow, in just a few decades, a species that had once

seemed all but eternal was gone. The last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in nineteen fourteen. Her body was sent to the Smithsonian, where it was taxidermied and put on display to become a relic. Really a warning, i suppose, to the dangers of unwarranted and overconsumption. But the extinction of the passenger pigeon was not an accident. It wasn't the slow result of climate change.

It was a human decision. It was a decision that European settlers and the Americans made and then repeated a billion times. It didn't happen because the pigeons were weak or somehow preordained to vanish from this planet. It happened because we chose to ignore the limits of nature. We chose to ignore the lessons of Native American peoples before us. We rejected the idea that nature had limits at all. The Native American hunters knew the land. Those who came

from Europe simply consumed it. Native American hunters took only what they needed. Europeans took everything they could. Now in the end, we tend to paint this, and it's been painted for a long time in American history as this view of Europeans as simply dominant as Europeans who use their technological superiority in it. The reason that they're able to get more from the land is that they're just simply better than Native Americans. I'm not sure that that's true.

I wonder if it's more about understanding the world around you and participating in it. The reality was that native peoples, when they did hunt, they weren't just out to kill and eat. They were also shaping the world around them and guiding the cycles of life. Native peoples understood what ecologists today would probably call a sustainable yield. They knew that if they took without giving back, they would destroy

this source of life itself. And that brings us to our ultimate paradox that when Europeans arrived, they simply misunderstood what they saw. They looked at a forest teeming with animals, flocks of passenger pigeons, and they assumed this was wild. They couldn't see the signs of management from last episode, the seasonal fires from this one, the selective hunting, and as we'll get to the cultivated plant patches. The newcomers forgot that landscapes weren't static, that there were stories written

in the language of fire, migration, and memory. It's interesting, you know, the loss of the passenger pigeon isn't just a tragedy. It's really a cautionary tale. It reminds us I think that we would do well to remember this today. That abundance isn't forever, That even the sky once actually dark with birds can be empty, but it also offers

a model for restoration. If we look back to the past, we learn that if we can be good hunters, then we can actually live well in coordination with nature around us. There are good hunters, those who listen to the land, who give thanks, who take only what is needed and

leave enough for tomorrow. That's really the legacy that we can take and one of the legacies that we can take from the North American peoples who came before us, because it explains how we can live in balance with nature and those who did it so very very well. And before I begin this next section, I want to take a moment. Hopefully you're not driving, but if you are, don't do this part. But if you're not, close your eyes.

Just picture a farm, not just any farm, but the ideal farm, the one that we've been trained, literally since kindergarten to see in our mind's eye. It's obviously vast, it's geometric. It's a checkerboard of corn or wheat, maybe soybeans. Each row is a perfect line, each plant genetically identical to the one next to them. It's quiet except for maybe a hum of a distant tractor. This image so familiar, so modern is what we've all been taught to call

quote unquote civilized agriculture. Now, instead, imagine the edge of a forest dappled in light. There's no fence to divide it, no neat squares. Squash lines creep along the ground. Corn stalks rising clusters, not rows. Beans spiral up the stalks like green serpents around them. Sunflowers tilt their yellow faces toward the sun and interspersed with it all or berry bushes and nut trees, each one tended, remembered, and returned

to it each season. This too, is a farm, It's just not the one that we've been taught to look for. These were the sorts of farms that dominated North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. There's a famous saying by Michael Bloomberg quote, I could teach anybody to be a farmer. You dig a hole, you put a seed in it, you put dirt on top, add water up

comes the corn end quote. It's a statement that didn't win Michael Bloomberg whole up votes, but encapsulates a broader and more dangerous misunderstanding, the idea that farming is simple. Anybody who's tried at tend a garden knows this isn't the case, and that Native Americans, because their farms didn't look like theirs of Europeans, weren't actually farmers at all. This is a trope that's even repeated in history classes today that Native Americans were say it with me, hunter

gatherers and they just kind of wandered from place to place. Well, we know that that's not true. We've learned it from the Jamestown series. The Native Americans of North America were cultivating props, just in a different way. Native American agriculture wasn't primitive. It was both brilliant and adaptive, ecologically sophisticated, and most importantly, given the environment, it was sustainable. To understand where it came from, we have to start at

the beginning. When the first humans arrived in North America, whether fIF teen thousand years ago or as some evidence now suggests, even earlier, they were hunter gatherers. They entered a continent rich in game and wild fruit and nut bearing trees, in rivers full of fish, and for a time this bounty was enough. But humans are always learning, always innovating. As populations grew and As people began to settle in particular regions, they started doing more than just

gathering what nature offered. They started to shape it. They saved seeds, they transplanted favored plants closer to home. They learned which soils grew the best sunflowers, which slopes held the right moisture for squash. A farm is as much an ecosystem as is a forest or a prairie, and of course every ecosystem is complex. One of the earliest crops domesticated in what is today the United States was

sump weed, a plant with small, oily seeds. It's not exactly a crowd favorite today, but for early Native American farmers it was an amazing source of food. Alongside some weed, cane, sunflowers, and goosefoot and other seed bearing plants. These were the early ancestors of what would become a sophisticated agricultural toolkit. But of course the game changed with the arrival of crops from further south. And I'm sure we all know what we're talking about here. We're going to get into

corn maze, whatever you want to call it. The agricultural revolution of North America didn't begin in North America. It began in Mexico, where native farmers developed one of the most important crops in human history. Maze. Maize, or corn as we call it, didn't exist in the wild. It was painstakingly bred from a grass called Teyacinthe, a plant so unlike modern corn it's hard to believe that the

two are even related. Developing maize into a prop on which entire your native societies could be based on took a lot of work and time. It was a masterpiece of agricultural engineering. It took hundreds of years to develop this correctly, and then it took hundreds of more years for corn to slowly move north from Mexico all the way to what is the modern United States as native peoples learned where it would grow and where it wouldn't. Now,

alongside maze came beans and squash. This is the famous three sisters grown together in mutual support, and it does work to grow these three together, I've tried. The corn provides a stock for the beans to climb. The beans fixed nitrogen in the soil. The squash spread out below, shading the ground, holding in moisture into turning weeds. Together they form an ecological symphony. But here's their twist. Despite their brilliance, these gardens didn't look like what Europeans bought

arms should look like. There were any plows, there were any fences. There were no ox and dragging furrows through square fields. Crops were planted in mountains, often in forest clearings. They were interplanted. They weren't road and as a result, when European colonists arrived in North America, they didn't know what they were seeing. To them, they looked around and said, this is wilderness. Unfortunately, this blindness shaped policy and engendered violence.

Take the Cherokee, for instance. By the seventeen hundreds, they were deeply agricultural. They still raised corn as they had in previous centuries, though they now used plows and oxen rather than digging sticks. They had livestock, barns, fences, and still the US government insisted they were not properly using the land. Why because their farms didn't match the colonial ideal. This misunderstanding wasn't just an intellectual exercise and a failure

at that, it was very deadly. During the eighteenth century, American military campaigns to Live targeted Native American food systems. Heck We've seen this even in Jamestown with John Smith. In seventeen sixty one, British forces under Colonel James Grant destroyed Cherokee cornfields and orchards across the Appalachian South, driving thousands of people into the mountains to starve. American forces

continued this practice during the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees were forced quote fled into the mountains, leaving behind their villages horses, cattle, dogs, and fowl, as well as forty to fifty thousand bushels of corn end quote. Destroying Native American agriculture wasn't just collateral damage. It actually was the strategy. The colonists needed

a rationale for all this. We need this a lot in American history, and so they repeated a lie that Native Americans didn't farm, that they didn't improve the land, that they were savages wandering through unclaimed wilderness. And that lie still echoes today. Now we should also look at our modern agriculture esthetics, the way we prize flat fenced, square fields planted in vast monocultures. We actually adore this

uniformity tried out. Look for a stock photo right now, if you're on a computer of a farm, there's going to be a lawn perfectly uniform except for maybe a couple of small weeds. There's going to be all kinds of squares and patterns. That's what we love. That obsession with order and control is deeply embedded in our American mindset because it was actually deeply embedded in the colonial mindset. It's the only way that we know how to farm,

but it's not necessarily the best way. Traditional Native American agriculture was diverse, It was resilient and closely attuned to local ecologies. Fields were planted with many species. There was no reliance on chemical fertilizer or pesticide. Crops were rotated not just across years, but within years according to the rhythms of the sun and the rain. Forests weren't obstacles to farming to be flat, and there were partners in it. I think we need to think about, just like the

colonial people, that how do we define farming? Because I think that that's a valuable exercise for us all to go about now, and I think it's something worth learning about. It's certainly something that the colonial Americans didn't Now next time, we're going to move from more broader exercises of how Native Americans farm and how they use the land. To look at more a couple of tribes a little bit

closer up. If you're interested in more Western ZIV up until that point, please check out the link in the show notes, so it'll take you to Western SIEV two point zero. We're deep in the death throes of the Roman Republic at this point, moving on to the Empire a much more detailed fashion than I covered it the first time. You get your first week for free if you'd like to try it out, and it's the best way to support the show.