I’m tired of hearing about political correctness at American universities. You know the stories, about how the liberal elite have captured the halls of academia and are teaching our young people to be zombies who refuse to question the status quo crammed down their throats by the media and Madison Avenue. It’s my opinion that the students who fit this mold lost their intellectual curiosity before they got to the university. They probably never had that curiosity piqued. The blame can be spread around - parents, teachers, society at large, television, music, computer, whatever. In most cases, a college education opens people’s eyes instead of closing them. Blaming university professors and administrators for the shortfalls of students seems a weak excuse.

Shepard Krech III, a Brown University professor who spoke last week at Western Carolina University, certainly turned on its head any notion of an academic fear of proposing something most will find distasteful and unpopular. Anyone who thinks academics are content to stay safely tucked away behind their research and busy teaching schedules should read his book.

The Ecological Indian, Myth and History is Krech’s new book (he’s written eight and published more than 100 academic papers), and it led to a recent protest by Native Americans in the Northwest. Native Americans marched outside a conference where Krech was slated to speak, branding him a racist. The balding, soft-spoken Krech seems anything but a rabble rouser, but his book has sent anthropologists and historians scrambling to the field and the published literature to examine his hypothesis.

Krech speculates that the idea of the North American Indian as a great ecologist and environmentalist is, in some ways, not backed up by the evidence. In fact, Krech argues that the native Americans here before Europeans played a key role in the extirpation of the animals they depended on to maintain their subsistence lifestyles.

That will strike many as sacrilege. Krech points out that what he calls the myth of the noble, pure and ecological-minded Native American was as much a response to problems within the existing European cultures the early writers belonged to as it was a true depiction of the lives of the Native Americans encountered in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in North America.

He says that many of the earliest romantic depictions came from French writers like Jean Jacques Rosseau and Michel de Montaigne. Krech argues that these writers depicted Indians as noble Adams and Eves living in an egalitarian Eden, a society much more moral and ethical than the noble aristocracy that at that time was struggling for its survival in France and the rest of Europe. They used their vision of the life of Native Americans as a foil for European society.

The book (I’ve only read parts) goes through a list of representations of the American Indian, all the way to present times and the famous anti-pollution commercial with the tear running down the eye of a Native American chief. “Pollution, it’s a crying shame,” the commercial and posters read.

Krech makes use of evidence that showed Native Americans would kill more buffalo than they needed, especially when driving them over cliffs. He says many tribes believed that animals presented themselves to be killed and would be reincarnated infinitely if treated with respect. This led to overkilling, particularly of beaver and deer. Once Europeans arrived, Indian traders stepped up killing in order to trade skins for goods from these early settlers.

Those who want to label Krech a racist seem too quick to criticize. He does not condemn Native Americans; he simply tries to point out that what we today consider environmentalism and ecology were unknown to most Native Americans.

“But knowledge is cultural, and each group in its own way made the environment and its relationships cultural. Their ecologies were premised on theories of animal behavior and animal population dynamics unfamiliar to Western science, beginning, for some, with the belief in reincarnation. And their ecological systems embraced components like underground prairies, which were absent from the ecological systems of Western scientists. Their actions, while perfectly reasonable in light of their beliefs and larger goals, were not necessarily rational according to the premises of Western ecological conservation.”

Another writer at this newspaper explained the concept clearly: Native Americans were part of the environment and ecosystem, and therefore modern ideas of conservation and ecology don’t apply. They and the land and animals around them were too closely woven together.

The author also points out that generalizing about Native Americans - or any group of humans - and their beliefs is suspect. We are, simply, complicated beings who act as much as individuals as we do as part of a group.

However one looks at it, Krech’s book is a fascinating study. Trying to de-mythologize beliefs about past cultures leaves one open to mistakes. It also invites criticism based more on emotion than rational analysis.

(McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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