THE SPECULATIONS OF KRECH:
A review of The Ecological Indian by Vine Deloria, Jr.

From the excited, glowing reviews of The Ecological Indian I had seen I was prepared for a brilliant tour d 'force giving us a real inside view of Indians and the environment. Instead I find a badly confused arrangement of anecdotal evidence clustered around several topics: big game hunters, extermination of the buffalo, ill-use of agricultural lands, mysteries at Chaco Canyon and the Hohokam villages, and the use of fire. While presented in a scintillating style, neither the evidence nor the arguments are convincing. Yet this book has been applauded coast-to-coast as a major step forward in ecological history. Do reviewers actually READ the book they praise or has the anti-Indian phase of academic reaction reached its crest with this silly non- indictment?

What does it mean, Krech asks early in the book, to say Indians are ecologists? He argues that "because they are the most consistent attributes of the image of the Ecological Indian, the concepts should be defined with care. (p. 22) Unfortunately it takes another one hundred pages before Krech begins to define what he means by ecology. We are caught, according to Krech, between "those who think that Indians were somehow nontechnological or pretechnological, had no impact on the environment, and were therefore "natural", and those who disagree." (p. 122) This definition originates in language used in the Wilderness Act of 1964 language which defines wilderness as "untrammeled by man", as primeval" in character and as "affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticed." (p. 122) At times Krech seems bound to this most radical definition, at other times he seems more understanding. At best "untrammeled by man" is a silly definition of wilderness since there must not be a single spot on earth that has not felt the imprint of our species. So if Indians left any traces of their historical journey they be would automatically disqualified as ecologists.

Were Indians "conservationists'? Not according to Krech. And he gives us evidence that is hardly convincing. Citing an obscure site in southern Colorado, Krech explains his indictment:

"Olsen-Chubbuck records a single episode that took place eight millennia ago, when hunters drove a herd of bison (of a species one-third larger than today's) over a bank of a dry gulch where almost two hundred, a mixed group of adults and juveniles, cows and bulls perished." Two hundred animals out of perhaps 30 million or so does not seem excessive to me but to modern conservationists it certainly seems criminal. This evidence is cited to prove the immoral practices of more modern Indians because Krech concludes: "Indians who hunted buffaloes at OlsenChubbuck evidently had as little interest in conservation as did the many Indians using communal hunting sites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (p. 144)

Now this is an excessively far reach to indict or convict. If we apply the logic with equal vigor we can reach equally startling conclusions. Since the English put many people to death using swords, it should be clear that Queen Elizabeth II should have been tried for the murders instead of O.J. Simpson. Krech also examines traders' reports from Canada as evidence of Indian neglect and carelessness:

Thus far we have six frames of Northern Algonquians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. In the first three -the Montaguias in the 1630s, the East Main Cree in the period from 1650 to 1745, and the York Factory Cree from 1738 to 1775- the concept of conservation seems to have been largely absent: most Indians -but not all -had no interest whatsoever in it. (p. 194)

Citing three periods of time, early in the colonial era, the last one consisting of only 38 years, and applying this miniscule evidence to "the ecological Indian" is absurd. Of course the casual reader, perusing these lines, will recoil in horror that these tribes did not think like Earth First, the Isaac Walton League, the Sierra Club and other groups of modern vintage. And to admit that only "some" Indians rejected conservation ideologies - which were not developed until after 1960, seems ludicrous. A few pages later Krech says: "Apparently today's conservation ethic and practices were largely absent among Northern Algonquians until certain historical conditions emerged in the wake of the arrival of European outsiders mainly interested in controlling Indians economically and spiritually. (p. 206) Since no one knows what today's conservation practices are with any degree of certainty, one might note that some of these Indians are STILL not interested. So Krech's criterion really is whether Indians from 8,000 years ago until the present lived up to today's ecological definitions. I would hardly call this perspective a well-reasoned argument.

Krech does say a few nice things about Indians in this respect. "Their actions," he notes, "while perfectly reasonable in light of their beliefs and larger goals, were not necessarily rational according to the premises of Western ecological conservation." (p. 212) But what are the premises of "Western ecological thought"? At one time people were busy planting trees on the Great Plains because "trees created rain". Remember Ronald Reagan's dire warnings that trees caused pollution? When we look deeply into Krech's assumptions for good definitions of conservation, we find this little gem tucked away from reviewers:

Native people understood full well that certain actions would have certain results; for example, if they set fire to grasslands at certain times, they would produce excellent habitat for buffaloes one season or one year later. Acting on their knowledge, they knowingly promoted the perpetuation of plant and animal species favored in their diet. Inasmuch as they left available, through these actions, species of plants and animals, habitats, or ecosystems for others who came after them, they were "conservationists." (p. 212)

HOLD THE PHONE, CHARLIE!!!!! Let's try and guess what group came after them - make a wild and speculative guess!!! In other words, where Indian practices contributed to lands that would be desirous for white settlers, they were great conservationists. Since the whites took almost everything, the ecological Indian should stand tall and proud.

But now we have the clincher of the Krech argument: "The native people who molded North America were fully capable of transformative action in ecosystems they knew intimately, but in almost all instances their populations were too small to have made much of a difference." (p. 99) (Emphasis added.) So does this confused, pitiful display of illogic merit Carolyn Merchant's jacket blurb of "A stunning, provocative reassessment of the image of the noble Indian living harmoniously within nature." Has she even read one page of this tract?

Let us now turn to some specific topics that constitute contemporary accusations leveled against Indians, presumably from 12,000 BP to the present by the anti-Indian scholars. . Krech discusses Paul Martin's crazy notion that big game hunters killed off the mega fauna of North America. He cites with apparent approval one of the silly scenarios: ". . one hundred Paleoindians arrived on the Alberta prairies some 12, 000 years ago. Each year, they moved southward just twenty miles and killed only one dozen animals per person. They also reproduced, doubling their population every twenty years." This premise assumes a fantastic scenario since the postulated reproduction rate is unknown in human history. Krech has the same reservations: Except for the reproduction rate, the assumptions underlying these figures seem fairly modest." (p. 34) Neither Krech nor Martin seems familiar with studies on the in a relatively 'natural environment', that is, hunter-gatherers, have decided limited fertility, with late menarche (at age 16 or 17) followed by a number of years of adolescent sterility, late first birth, several years of lactation, and an interval of years or more between births, followed by early menopause." How then are these people going to double every twenty years when it may take a young woman 17 years simply to be capable of being a mother?

First, not all animals are good sources of food. Predators as well as prey became extinct in the Pleistocene loss and one can hardly blame Paleoindians for the nearly 5,000 sabre tooth and dire wolf skulls on the walls at La Brea Tar Pits. Second, a little band of one hundred could not completely clear even a hundred mile area of all big game. The grazers would simply move away from the hunters and go back to their original feeding grounds north of the band as soon as the next spring season came. The idea that there were no animals north of the band that has escaped the last season's hunt is absurd. Every fall massive numbers of hunters with guns, scopes, and other modern instruments of killing conduct a ruthless slaughter of game without seriously denting even the deer population. Were one hundred Indians with spears so much better hunters than whites with guns?

Krech laments: "If only there were numerous archaeological sites with associated extinct megafauna to test Martin's thesis of overkill. But there are only fifty or so sites - a mere handful." (p. 36) This dire is the traditional war cry of the big game hunter theorists. But if you can't test the thesis because there is no evidence, why does it still qualify as a thesis? Why would Krech even pretend that this nonsense should be taken seriously? Here, I suspect, Krech is simply paying his dues to establishment scholars who hold this view. How I would like to get Krech on a witness stand and have him defend his belief.

We come, then, to Krech's treatment of ancient settlements that might show Indians demonstrating an appalling lack of conservation concerns, remembering that there was no such thing as either ecology or conservation at the time when there were large settlements in North America. Krech takes on the mystery of Chaco Canyon:

In the arid Southwest, where trees take many human generations to grow, an expanding Anasazi population could easily have stripped their trees for house and kiva construction and for fuel, and to produce arable fields, bringing about a deforestation with various adverse repercussions on all aspects of their lives, just prior to debilitating drought. In Chaco Canyon alone they used over 200,000 (' Wesson, Robert, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, p. 99) trees in multistory buildings and denuded the land, inviting erosion and destruction of arable lands. (p. 77) (Emphasis added.)

I have emphasized "could have" in this description because it eliminates the requirement to present evidence and relies on pure speculation. It is an accusation without a basis. The question is not whether the Indians could have done something but rather did they in fact do something. The number of 200,000 trees sounded outrageously high to me so I got on the phone and began calling "experts" on Chaco to see 1) if there were that many trees and 2) where they were obtained. The results were predictable, hilarious, and demonstrated that we know virtually nothing about these people. Most of the scholars I called had no idea there were that many trees nor did they know where the trees came from. One very prominent scholar lyrically told me that the trees were harvested in the San Francisco mountains, some two hundred miles west of Chaco, and asked me to imagine little gangs of Indians hauling telephone-pole-sized logs across northern Arizona to Chaco Canyon. No one was able to explain where the wood came from, how it was brought to Chaco, or how the people were organized to accomplish this feat. All of them agreed that the Anasazi had to go some very long distances to get their wood however.

Krech makes it seem like the Anasazi harvested their wood adjacent to the building site, denuding the landscape and turning the area into a desert. There is no evidence for this proposition at all. Visitors to Chaco, if they have read The Ecological Indian, may well stand in that desolate location and curse the Indians for cutting all the trees. They will be wrong! No one knows where the trees came from and no one has pointed out any denuded region nearby caused by tree cutting. It is the same accusation and speculation for Cahokia:

When the population was near and at its height, Cahokians imported wood. Perhaps they had no choice. They could easily have stripped the estimated 600,000 floodplain trees growing within a six-mile radius of the Cahokia center in a matter of decades, inducing deforestation-related runoff, erosion, sedimentation, and silting." (p. 77) (Emphasis).

Again, we have merely a supposition -the Indians COULD HAVE But did they? No proof whatsoever is offered and if this kind of supposition is convincing to other reviewers, it certainly is. not compelling to me.

The Hohokam also come under scrutiny and Krech develops a very tedious argument that the Indians, not realizing that there was salt and other minerals in the waters of the Salt and Gila rivers near present-day Phoenix, failed to rotate crops or find salt-friendly things to grow thereby dooming them to ruin their lands. He tries to appear knowledgeable about fluctuations in rainfall but has to admit that best guesses of the availability of water to the desert are based on rainfall estimates in northern Arizona made by examining tree rings to determine wet and dry years. No one has told him that weather conditions are different on the plateau than in the desert and that this way of determining the flow of desert rivers has some logical flaws in it. He doesn't pursue this line of inquiry very far because again there is simply no evidence. And he admits:

"Changes to the environment in the six centuries since the time of the Hohokam, especially at the hands of American settlers have made it impossible to reconstruct conditions in most of the fields farmed by the Hohokam." (p. 61)

This logic is typical of scholars lost in their theories. We should notice that he says "most of the fields" implying that we do have data on "some" of the fields. If so, give us a few citations so we can check the theory. And of course there are no studies that he can cite. So we are left believing that the Hohokam ruined their lands by over-irrigating. Nowhere does he say that the idea that the Hohokam ruined their lands is taken, by analogy, from the real, historical ecological, disaster when beginning around the 1890s white farmers ruined their fields by over-irrigating. Projecting backwards from the practices of large commercial agriculture to small subsistence agriculture surely avoids the use of convincing logic and Krech's great revelations collapse of their own weight.

On the demise of the buffalo Krech half-heartedly supports the bizarre theories of Dan Flores and Elliott West to the effect that Indians were responsible for the near-extinction of these animals. Curiously he repeats the same gross errors in calculating the buffalo population already made by Flores. Krech writes that: "Horses that competed for virtually the same grazing niche conceivably affected the massive bison herds even more. In 1800, "Indians on the northern Plains had to find forage for thousands of horses when they moved from one camp to another, through time herds of wild horses increased in size throughout the Plains." (p. 118) In order for horses to be any kind of threat to buffalo grazing, we would have to have historical reports of their numbers similar to those we have of buffalo. Where is the evidence? If Indians had thousands and thousands of horses, why are all the old stories about small parties raiding each other for horses and being delighted at stealing 30 or more animals from their enemies?

Krech also accepts without critical examination the unusually low figures now being suggested by anti Indian scholars which then tends to magnify the percentage of Indian buffalo kills and makes it appear that Indians, not white buffalo hunters, doomed the animal. Krech writes: "There is so much uncertainty in these calculations that is seems wiser to err on the side of caution, with a bison population on the low side, human consumption on the high side, heavy predation, and maximal consumption estimates." (p. 136) The low estimates are absurd. Krech says, correctly that "From 1871 to 1878 the hunters shot the southern herd to extinction and then moved north, thousands strong, to exterminate the northern herd by 1883." But then he continues: "From 1871 to 1883, they may have taken four million hides." (p. 141) Here Krech demonstrates his total lack of knowledge of the subject. David Darcy in The Buffalo Book cites the report of Frank Mayer in his book, The Buffalo Harvest as counting 3,158,730 buffalo killed in 1872-73-74 in the Dodge City area alone. (p. 96) Did all the buffalo willingly come to Dodge City and environs to be killed? If over 3 million were taken in one location in three years, what were the buffalo hunters shooting at between 1875 and 1883? Krech's figures, like others, are impossibly low and show a lack of knowledge about the subject.

Many Indian tribes, my own, the Sioux, among them, believed that the buffalo came from underground and that they went underground during the winter. They would then come from their underground in the spring in various numbers depending on the stability of their relationship with the Indians. Violations of prohibitions might mean a greatly reduced number to hunt the next year. So many things had to be done to maintain good relationships with the animals. There is a puzzling question why, with so many millions of buffalo around, it was so difficult to find these animals in the wintertime. People took great care to cure the meat of summer hunts for the winter and there were many caches of dry meat buried so people could avoid the inevitable winter starvation that has also been widely reported.

Indians had the same winter needs as the buffalo -shelter from blizzards, water, and grazing areas -making riverbeds the ideal location for winter camps. In fact Elliott West raises this argument in accusing the Cheyenne Indians of camping in the Big Timbers on the Arkansas -a twelve mile stretch of cottonwoods as the reason the southern herd became extinct. So where did the buffalo go? That is a major and intriguing problem for historians and ecologists to solve should they ever decide to research winter accounts of the buffalo and the plains. Krech, of course, understands the problem differently. Referring to this belief he comments that "it is easy to see how a belief of this nature would not encourage conservation or management of a Krech seems to think that accidental fires are a major black mark against Indians because he hammers at the theme several times. "Observers depicted many Indians including the Ojibwa, Cree, Mandan, Arapahoe, Gros Ventres, Shoshone, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, and various Northern Athapaskan peoples as 'careless burners' by which they meant that Indian fire accidentally blew up into vast conflagrations or burned until the rain fell (which may have been what the Indian intended) (p. 121) And, Krech noted: "... these Indians sometimes produced hot summer fires with the clear potential to run away." (p. 120) (Emphasis added.) Now, EVERY fire has a clear potential to run away. Did Krech expect the Indians not to cook their food or keep warm when it was cold in order to qualify as ecological symbols? Even modern thinkers do not have such rigid requirements for ecologists.

The confusion grows geometrically the more Krech tries to explain his point. "Their ecological awareness or respect did not stop them or other people from lighting fire at times that, while convenient for iterant burners, were inopportune from other standpoints. (p. 118) (Emphasis added) .Who are these others of whom Krech speaks? Non-Indians would seem to compose this unidentifiable group and we have Krech in effect blaming Indians for what "others" did. Then we have the ultimate nonsense: "Communication was evidently the predominant cause of summer burns in the central portion of the Plains. Here (and elsewhere) Indians used fire to communicate with each other almost endlessly possible matters including success in war, arrival of white people, sightings of buffaloes, and so on." (p. 108) Is he serious?

Let us imagine a hunting camp on the Powder River. A large fire is sighted on the horizon and tribal elders come out to view it. "The war party has returned," says Indian No.1, " "You dolt," says Indian No.2, "They have spotted a herd of buffalo." "You are too young to make decisions", Indian No 3 tells his friends, "That's Jim Bridger come to trade furs." Then Indian No.4 comes out, looks around, and says " You morons, that's an "and so on" from yesterday". Which Indian is correct? As it turns out, one of the first instances of setting fires for communication was when Lewis and Clark started a fire as they approached the Omaha village on their way west to announce their arrival.. As to Indians setting fires to communicate, you don't advertise your presence until you know who is out there. We all learned that from DANCES WITH WOLVES.

We now come to the clincher. Krech writes: "Indians burned regularly to set the stage for new plant growth and for the return of animals and men when conditions were right. After burning, animals left until another season when they might return for new palatable growth. [Remember the big game hunters?] Again, this was common on the Plains. In the spring or fall, Indians often set fire to grasslands to improve the forage for buffalo in the summer, and fall fires for better pasturage the following spring. The fires, which were sometimes hundreds of miles across, worked." (pp. 105-106) At last we think, Krech has said something positive about Indians. But such is not the case for he admits that "... information on the extent, intensity, and duration of the fires is often poorly known, and while observers might note grasslands or forests burning in every direction, they do not know whether they were set alight be man or lightning ". (p.110) (Emphasis added.) Finally, Krech notes: "whatever the influence of Indian fires, there are strong climatic and environmental reasons for doubting that fires were the only or even the major formative one. In the central and western Plains, compared to eastern portions, there is less moisture from rain and snow, lower humidity, higher winds, and more periodic drought. Singly or in combination. these conditions prevent forest formation and growth and would lead to extensive grasslands without help from the fires."(p. 115) (Emphasis added.) In other words, whatever Indians AND lightning did had no effect on the grasslands as a rule. So why even bother to develop the topic????

How then do we appraise Krech's thesis? He promised to set the record straight about Indians as ecologists and came up with a little anecdotal evidence and silly accusations. By analogy, this is his logic. Mrs. Murphy goes outside with a watering can to tend her roses at the precise moment of the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania. Afterward Krech and others are asked to determine the cause of the flood, Avoiding the obvious, they focus on Mrs. Murphy, alleging that had she not put that last bucket of water on her flowers, everything would have been fine.

In attacking the image of the "ecological Indian" many scholars today make pitiful cases yet use vivid imagery, Indians rushing the buffalo over the cliff and failing to stampede the precise number they will use, Indians accidentally setting fires, or was it lightning? Indians cutting 200,000 trees to create the desert lands of the high plateau in Arizona, Indians ruining farm lands in the Salt River valley, and so forth. This book is not scholarship; it is plainly propaganda. Not a single scholar, but particularly Krech, if placed upon a witness stand, could make a credible case at all. But the social sciences do not depend on evidence for proof of their speculations, academic status is sufficient. Whatever the nonsense promoted, such as Paul Martin wanting to bring elephants back to southern Arizona to increase rainfall, becomes a topic of discussion because of their academic status, not because of rational theses that contribute to our knowledge.

Let me conclude with a research proposition. I have noticed, in an unscientific survey, that an amazing number of western historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists were originally attracted to their fields by childhood experiences in the Boy Scouts and YMCA Indian guides. Career decisions were made based on the teachings of these programs. "Indians walked single file through the woods without making a sound, etc, " On actually meeting Indians this image of faded and these people became bitter that modern Indians didn't walk around in pure white buckskin suits spouting aphorisms. Many of them can't stand the tensions created by the collapse of their childhood fantasies so they become loose cannons liable to explode with anti-Indian sentiments at any time. A good many others decide to replace Indians with new heroes, ecologists, shamans and so forth. Their only means of hanging on to their childhood dreams is by becoming Indians themselves and to do that they much bring discredit on any benign image of Indians that may be accepted at the moment.