Were American Indians Really Environmentalists?

As usual, the real story is more complicated

By Thomas E. Woods

The traditional story is familiar to American schoolchildren: the American Indians possessed a profound spiritual kinship with nature, and were unusually solicitous of environmental welfare.

According to a popular book published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, “Pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.”

If we are to avert environmental catastrophe, the not-so-subtle lesson goes, we need to recapture this lost Indian wisdom.

Photo: Iron Eyes Cody, putative Indian poster-boy for environmental white guilt campaign, was born Espera De Corti, the son of Sicilian immigrantsAs usual, the real story is more complicated, less cartoonish, and a lot more interesting.

In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, then-Senator Al Gore cited a nineteenth-century speech from Chief Seattle, patriarch of the Duwamish and Suquamish Indians of Puget Sound, as evidence of the Indians’ concern for nature. This speech, which speaks of absolutely everything in the natural world, including every last insect and pine needle, as being sacred to Seattle and his people, has been made to bear an unusually heavy share of the burden in depicting the American Indians as the first environmentalists.

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2007-07-20