The Indian as prophet of sustainability - a myth?
Indians - Lost Worlds
June 24, 2018 - September 30, 2018
An interview with Matthias Glaubrecht
Karl May did a great job. The folkloric image of the feathered Indian who lived in harmony with nature and respected the environment has fundamentally shaped our conception of the indigenous peoples of North America. Prof. Dr. Matthias Glaubrecht, historian of science, reflects on the image of the "noble savage" and wants to tell a different story of the Indians of North America.
What is there to the image of the typical Indian with long hair, feather ornaments and fringed clothing?
Our distorted image of the Indians stereotypically shows the native peoples of North America riding horses and hunting bison on the prairies of the Great Plains. Overlooked is the fact that these - commonly called "Indians" thanks to Columbus' error - once nearly exterminated the bison. And that much of the dry grasslands of the plains were not permanently settled until after the Spanish brought horses back to the New World in the 16th century, integrating the Indian peoples settling west of the Mississippi into their culture. For the longest time, Indians were pedestrians; the "incomprehensible dog," as the Lakota called the hoofed animal, changed the lives of Indian peoples, facilitated their hunting, increased their mobility, and became a status symbol. Thus, bison hunting by the Plains Indians is a new cultural development that began only in the mid-17th century.
What role do the North American travels of the naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied play in this context?
For example, as much as the travelers Maximilian Prinz von Wied-Neuwied and Karl Bodmer strove to create an authentic image of the Indians on the upper Missouri in the 1830s, a mythical figure also emerged thanks to their depictions in later sources and second-hand accounts. From Alexander von Humboldt to Karl May, people in Europe glorified "the" proud and independent Indian in images and accounts that were strikingly reminiscent of statues from ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, the way of life of the "savages" was mystified with the iconic external appearance. Nevertheless, the travel documentaries of Prinz von Wied and Bodmer give us insight into a world that has long since ceased to exist.
To what extent have the indigenous peoples of North America changed the flora and fauna of the continent?
The indigenous peoples of North America were once invaders themselves. About 25,000 years ago, a population had split off in East Asia and begun to colonize Beringia. Within a few thousand years, they had crossed the virgin double continent to Tierra del Fuego and begun to colonize the entire New World.
Today it seems certain: Indians did not spare nature either and often ruthlessly exploited their later much-invoked "Mother Earth". Whether nomads or farmers, hunting was the most important source of food for almost all Indians. Surviving, for example, is the drive hunt for whole herds of bison to let them jump into the abyss. In the process, more of the wild cattle were always killed than the tribe needed.
Today, environmental historians are increasingly recognizing that Native Americans also left a distinct ecological footprint on the continent. They have been able to show that Native Americans intensively cleared forests and shaped their own environment. Thus, the yield of the land depended on a complicated cycle of burning down, cultivation, and harvesting. The lands tilled by the Indians had their own ecological balance; beans and corn, for example, they planted side by side to keep nitrogen in the soil. This was permanently upset when European domestic and stable animals such as pigs and horses destroyed the soils on the prairies, for example.
So is the Indian not the "noble savage" and first eco?
The "green red man" is a myth, many anthropologists are convinced today. The popular image of the Indian respectfully sparing nature is basically nothing more than another variant of the enduring fiction of the "noble savage." It does not reflect reality, but says more about ourselves than about Indian cultures. The idea that "savages" are better people than those corrupted by the constraints of civilization goes back to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Age of Enlightenment.
What is true, however, is that according to their animistic worldview, for the Indians all animals, plants and stones are animate. In their world of spirits everything is connected with everything and nature is more than just a collection of raw materials. It is also true that the Indians' relationship with nature was much closer than that of the Europeans who invaded North America. Almost all Native American languages feature ecological metaphors. In order to survive, of course, all indigenous peoples had learned to use herbs and other plants for medicinal purposes, for example.
What do you think of the theory that the Indians wiped out the megafauna of North America?
According to recent genome analyses, anthropologists assume that there were once no more than 5,000 people who are considered to be the ancestors of all Native Americans. Some researchers suspect, others are more skeptical, that these people were the first to wipe out the ice-age megafauna - a menagerie consisting of mammoth, mastodon, musk ox, woolly rhinoceros, steppe bison and saber-toothed cat, giant ground sloth and horses - in a kind of ecological blitzkrieg. Although this "overkill hypothesis" is still hotly disputed, in fact, wherever the ancestors of the Indians appeared in the course of settlement history, all large mammals weighing more than a ton disappeared soon after.
It is certain that the first settlers not only fed on berries, nuts, and grasses or caught fish along the coasts and rivers, but that they hunted large animals with throwing spears and javelins. Most likely, this hunting pressure, along with climatic effects, caused the megafauna to become extinct. Only moose and caribou, bison and bear were able to save themselves in remote regions, from where they later repopulated northern North America.
