by danbrickman | February 14th, 2012
Is it easier to prove the merits of new ideas and scholarship or to disprove what has become conventionally held beliefs? Shepard Krech III’s work The Ecological Indian attempts to do the latter. In contrast to the exchange literature’s tendency to either victimize or glorify the native, Krech’s purpose is to avoid both these propositions. By removing the North American Indian from a mantle of ecological authority and harmony, a position the Indian himself has gladly accepted according to Krech, he has placed the Indian and white/European together as equals, both capable of environmental harm or conservation. It is this method of simaltaneously exposing Indian conservation and waste that humanizes the Indian while placing all of humanity within the realm of nature. This last effect is no easy feat considering the longstanding myths of the “noble savage” living in perpetual balance with nature, while the white/European has posed a constant ecological menace, .
In his introduction Krech outlined his overarching view of the role of humans in the construction of nature and history, ironically suggesting that myth can never be completely separated from either. Here he states that ”all history is a metaphor…but the present is also a metonym.” This idea has deep ramifications towards the understanding of environmental history from a humanities perspective rather than a clemenstian approach, which separates humans from nature. Not only are humans part of nature, but nature exists because humans have decided so. Cronon had made a similar case in Uncommon Ground when he suggested that nature is dynamic, changeable and “entangled with humans.” Both authors realize the impossibility of taking humans out of nature. Krech’s choice to trace the ecological imprint of the Indian all the way back to paleolithic times affectively makes the case for humanizing the mythical Indian while bringing the dehumanized white/european “back to nature.”