Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Western SIEV. Today I continue my
Speaker 1: bonus little story arc here on North America and Native
Speaker 1: American cultures before the arrival of Europeans, so what we
Speaker 1: like to call pre Columbian America. The whole goal of
Speaker 1: this series is to try to paint a picture of
Speaker 1: the world before Europeans and the people who lived in it,
Speaker 1: and to explain how those people who did live in
Speaker 1: it were extremely effective in managing the resources that were
Speaker 1: available to them. I want to begin with a scene.
Speaker 1: So imagine a forest and what is today the American Midwest.
Speaker 1: You know, for me RepA Wisconsin where that is. You
Speaker 1: can be Illinois, Ohi. You can shop on Iowa, even Nebraska. Sure,
Speaker 1: let's imagine this forest. The canopy is moving with motion.
Speaker 1: You hear this roaring sound. It's like the sky itself
Speaker 1: is made of wings. You look up and the heavens
Speaker 1: are absolutely thick with birds, millions, millions upon millions, casting
Speaker 1: shadows that fall across the land. These are passenger pigeons.
Speaker 1: They were the most populace of all North American bird species.
Speaker 1: Today they're gone, not rare, not endangered, They're completely extinct.
Speaker 1: There is this enduring myth of American history that before
Speaker 1: European colonization the land was untouched, unshaped, a pristine wilderness.
Speaker 1: Historian Stanley Rice writes, quote, this image of a continent
Speaker 1: teeming with wildlife and wilderness is more fantasy than fact
Speaker 1: end quote. Those who lived in North America, the Native Americans,
Speaker 1: were not passive inhabitants of some untouched eden. They were
Speaker 1: ecosystem engineers, people who actively and skillfully managed their environment.
Speaker 1: There probably were somewhere between three to five billion passenger pigeons,
Speaker 1: just to continue with this one example in North America,
Speaker 1: when Europeans arrived, some flocks could, as they're moving, stretch
Speaker 1: for three hundred miles. If you were sitting below a
Speaker 1: flock as it passed, it might take fourteen hours from
Speaker 1: start to finish before their migratory pattern passed beyond your site.
Speaker 1: So these weren't just birds. These were a dominant ecological presence,
Speaker 1: shaping forests through their foraging and nesting behaviors. In fact,
Speaker 1: they're kind of like a superorganism when they need Imagine,
Speaker 1: they did so in such enormous numbers that their collective
Speaker 1: weight could actually break tree branches and flatten the undergrowth beneath.
Speaker 1: Their droppings altered the chemical composition of the soil. Their
Speaker 1: constant movement distributed seeds across vast distances. In short, passenger
Speaker 1: pigeons weren't simply residents of North America, not residents of
Speaker 1: the forests. They were architects of this. And do you
Speaker 1: know who understood this? Native Americans. They understood it deeply
Speaker 1: and understood it very very well. They hunted them, of course, true,
Speaker 1: but not mindlessly and pointlessly. The hunts were deliberate, timed
Speaker 1: and steeped in generation upon generation of ecolo knowledge. Tribes
Speaker 1: waited until the birds had nested and the young were
Speaker 1: nearly grown. This ensured a maximum yield while allowing the
Speaker 1: population enough time to recover. They never took all the birds.
Speaker 1: They took enough to eat, enough to dry and store,
Speaker 1: but they always left the rest. Hunting passenger pigeons is
Speaker 1: my example here today. But it's not a matter of
Speaker 1: happenstance or opportunism. This is sort of a larger practice
Speaker 1: and web of this seasonal pattern of using migratory patterns
Speaker 1: to your advantage, and something that Native Americans, particularly in
Speaker 1: North America, were very, very skilled at. In late spring
Speaker 1: and summer. Large nesting sites were predictable, and this is
Speaker 1: for various species. And tribes understood this, and they could
Speaker 1: converge on them. There would be whole communities that would
Speaker 1: participate in the hunt and other historian rights quote, children, elders, warriors.
Speaker 1: They all had roles to play. They used long poles, nets,
Speaker 1: and smoke to bring the birds down end quote. Hunting
Speaker 1: wasn't just an act of survival, It was an act
Speaker 1: of relationship. In many Native American traditions, there were prayers
Speaker 1: before the hunt and rituals afterwards. To kill an animal
Speaker 1: was to enter into a sacred exchange. To quote one
Speaker 1: Native elder, you must love your prey or you will
Speaker 1: not hunt it well. End quote. Now it's kind of
Speaker 1: easy to see how this system worked because it was
Speaker 1: broken so thoroughly by the Europeans when they arrived. With
Speaker 1: the arrival of European settlers, the careful balance that the
Speaker 1: Native peoples of North America had struck with the environment
Speaker 1: and the animals around them was totally upended. The newcomers
Speaker 1: saw the sky's thick with birds and assumed that the
Speaker 1: land was simply inexhaustible. They didn't have any cultural memory
Speaker 1: of scarcity. In this new world, they didn't have any
Speaker 1: inherited stories of balance and the need for restraint. Instead,
Speaker 1: the Europeans came with a market based logic to extract
Speaker 1: resources and profit from them. The pigeons, suddenly, like everything else,
Speaker 1: became a commodity. Commercial hunters simply slaughtered them by the millions.
Speaker 1: They used nets to trap entire flocks and shipped barrels
Speaker 1: of salted birds back to the growing European cities. They
Speaker 1: shot them out of the sky for fun, often leaving
Speaker 1: the body simply to rot. Here's one passage from a
Speaker 1: contemporary observer quote. The ground was covered with their carcasses.
Speaker 1: We used them as kindling for our fires end quote. Somehow,
Speaker 1: in just a few decades, a species that had once
Speaker 1: seemed all but eternal was gone. The last known passenger pigeon,
Speaker 1: a female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen. Her body was sent to the Smithsonian, where
Speaker 1: it was taxidermied and put on display to become a relic.
Speaker 1: Really a warning, i suppose, to the dangers of unwarranted
Speaker 1: and overconsumption. But the extinction of the passenger pigeon was
Speaker 1: not an accident. It wasn't the slow result of climate change.
Speaker 1: It was a human decision. It was a decision that
Speaker 1: European settlers and the Americans made and then repeated a
Speaker 1: billion times. It didn't happen because the pigeons were weak
Speaker 1: or somehow preordained to vanish from this planet. It happened
Speaker 1: because we chose to ignore the limits of nature. We
Speaker 1: chose to ignore the lessons of Native American peoples before us.
Speaker 1: We rejected the idea that nature had limits at all.
Speaker 1: The Native American hunters knew the land. Those who came
Speaker 1: from Europe simply consumed it. Native American hunters took only
Speaker 1: what they needed. Europeans took everything they could. Now in
Speaker 1: the end, we tend to paint this, and it's been
Speaker 1: painted for a long time in American history as this
Speaker 1: view of Europeans as simply dominant as Europeans who use
Speaker 1: their technological superiority in it. The reason that they're able
Speaker 1: to get more from the land is that they're just
Speaker 1: simply better than Native Americans. I'm not sure that that's true.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's more about understanding the world around
Speaker 1: you and participating in it. The reality was that native peoples,
Speaker 1: when they did hunt, they weren't just out to kill
Speaker 1: and eat. They were also shaping the world around them
Speaker 1: and guiding the cycles of life. Native peoples understood what
Speaker 1: ecologists today would probably call a sustainable yield. They knew
Speaker 1: that if they took without giving back, they would destroy
Speaker 1: this source of life itself. And that brings us to
Speaker 1: our ultimate paradox that when Europeans arrived, they simply misunderstood
Speaker 1: what they saw. They looked at a forest teeming with animals,
Speaker 1: flocks of passenger pigeons, and they assumed this was wild.
Speaker 1: They couldn't see the signs of management from last episode,
Speaker 1: the seasonal fires from this one, the selective hunting, and
Speaker 1: as we'll get to the cultivated plant patches. The newcomers
Speaker 1: forgot that landscapes weren't static, that there were stories written
Speaker 1: in the language of fire, migration, and memory. It's interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, the loss of the passenger pigeon isn't just
Speaker 1: a tragedy. It's really a cautionary tale. It reminds us
Speaker 1: I think that we would do well to remember this today.
Speaker 1: That abundance isn't forever, That even the sky once actually
Speaker 1: dark with birds can be empty, but it also offers
Speaker 1: a model for restoration. If we look back to the past,
Speaker 1: we learn that if we can be good hunters, then
Speaker 1: we can actually live well in coordination with nature around us.
Speaker 1: There are good hunters, those who listen to the land,
Speaker 1: who give thanks, who take only what is needed and
Speaker 1: leave enough for tomorrow. That's really the legacy that we
Speaker 1: can take and one of the legacies that we can
Speaker 1: take from the North American peoples who came before us,
Speaker 1: because it explains how we can live in balance with
Speaker 1: nature and those who did it so very very well.
Speaker 1: And before I begin this next section, I want to
Speaker 1: take a moment. Hopefully you're not driving, but if you are,
Speaker 1: don't do this part. But if you're not, close your eyes.
Speaker 1: Just picture a farm, not just any farm, but the
Speaker 1: ideal farm, the one that we've been trained, literally since
Speaker 1: kindergarten to see in our mind's eye. It's obviously vast,
Speaker 1: it's geometric. It's a checkerboard of corn or wheat, maybe soybeans.
Speaker 1: Each row is a perfect line, each plant genetically identical
Speaker 1: to the one next to them. It's quiet except for
Speaker 1: maybe a hum of a distant tractor. This image so familiar,
Speaker 1: so modern is what we've all been taught to call
Speaker 1: quote unquote civilized agriculture. Now, instead, imagine the edge of
Speaker 1: a forest dappled in light. There's no fence to divide it,
Speaker 1: no neat squares. Squash lines creep along the ground. Corn
Speaker 1: stalks rising clusters, not rows. Beans spiral up the stalks
Speaker 1: like green serpents around them. Sunflowers tilt their yellow faces
Speaker 1: toward the sun and interspersed with it all or berry
Speaker 1: bushes and nut trees, each one tended, remembered, and returned
Speaker 1: to it each season. This too, is a farm, It's
Speaker 1: just not the one that we've been taught to look for.
Speaker 1: These were the sorts of farms that dominated North America
Speaker 1: prior to the arrival of Europeans. There's a famous saying
Speaker 1: by Michael Bloomberg quote, I could teach anybody to be
Speaker 1: a farmer. You dig a hole, you put a seed
Speaker 1: in it, you put dirt on top, add water up
Speaker 1: comes the corn end quote. It's a statement that didn't
Speaker 1: win Michael Bloomberg whole up votes, but encapsulates a broader
Speaker 1: and more dangerous misunderstanding, the idea that farming is simple.
Speaker 1: Anybody who's tried at tend a garden knows this isn't
Speaker 1: the case, and that Native Americans, because their farms didn't
Speaker 1: look like theirs of Europeans, weren't actually farmers at all.
Speaker 1: This is a trope that's even repeated in history classes
Speaker 1: today that Native Americans were say it with me, hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers and they just kind of wandered from place to place. Well,
Speaker 1: we know that that's not true. We've learned it from
Speaker 1: the Jamestown series. The Native Americans of North America were
Speaker 1: cultivating props, just in a different way. Native American agriculture
Speaker 1: wasn't primitive. It was both brilliant and adaptive, ecologically sophisticated,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, given the environment, it was sustainable. To
Speaker 1: understand where it came from, we have to start at
Speaker 1: the beginning. When the first humans arrived in North America,
Speaker 1: whether fIF teen thousand years ago or as some evidence
Speaker 1: now suggests, even earlier, they were hunter gatherers. They entered
Speaker 1: a continent rich in game and wild fruit and nut
Speaker 1: bearing trees, in rivers full of fish, and for a
Speaker 1: time this bounty was enough. But humans are always learning,
Speaker 1: always innovating. As populations grew and As people began to
Speaker 1: settle in particular regions, they started doing more than just
Speaker 1: gathering what nature offered. They started to shape it. They
Speaker 1: saved seeds, they transplanted favored plants closer to home. They
Speaker 1: learned which soils grew the best sunflowers, which slopes held
Speaker 1: the right moisture for squash. A farm is as much
Speaker 1: an ecosystem as is a forest or a prairie, and
Speaker 1: of course every ecosystem is complex. One of the earliest
Speaker 1: crops domesticated in what is today the United States was
Speaker 1: sump weed, a plant with small, oily seeds. It's not
Speaker 1: exactly a crowd favorite today, but for early Native American
Speaker 1: farmers it was an amazing source of food. Alongside some weed, cane, sunflowers,
Speaker 1: and goosefoot and other seed bearing plants. These were the
Speaker 1: early ancestors of what would become a sophisticated agricultural toolkit.
Speaker 1: But of course the game changed with the arrival of
Speaker 1: crops from further south. And I'm sure we all know
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here. We're going to get into
Speaker 1: corn maze, whatever you want to call it. The agricultural
Speaker 1: revolution of North America didn't begin in North America. It
Speaker 1: began in Mexico, where native farmers developed one of the
Speaker 1: most important crops in human history. Maze. Maize, or corn
Speaker 1: as we call it, didn't exist in the wild. It
Speaker 1: was painstakingly bred from a grass called Teyacinthe, a plant
Speaker 1: so unlike modern corn it's hard to believe that the
Speaker 1: two are even related. Developing maize into a prop on
Speaker 1: which entire your native societies could be based on took
Speaker 1: a lot of work and time. It was a masterpiece
Speaker 1: of agricultural engineering. It took hundreds of years to develop
Speaker 1: this correctly, and then it took hundreds of more years
Speaker 1: for corn to slowly move north from Mexico all the
Speaker 1: way to what is the modern United States as native
Speaker 1: peoples learned where it would grow and where it wouldn't. Now,
Speaker 1: alongside maze came beans and squash. This is the famous
Speaker 1: three sisters grown together in mutual support, and it does
Speaker 1: work to grow these three together, I've tried. The corn
Speaker 1: provides a stock for the beans to climb. The beans
Speaker 1: fixed nitrogen in the soil. The squash spread out below,
Speaker 1: shading the ground, holding in moisture into turning weeds. Together
Speaker 1: they form an ecological symphony. But here's their twist. Despite
Speaker 1: their brilliance, these gardens didn't look like what Europeans bought
Speaker 1: arms should look like. There were any plows, there were
Speaker 1: any fences. There were no ox and dragging furrows through
Speaker 1: square fields. Crops were planted in mountains, often in forest clearings.
Speaker 1: They were interplanted. They weren't road and as a result,
Speaker 1: when European colonists arrived in North America, they didn't know
Speaker 1: what they were seeing. To them, they looked around and said,
Speaker 1: this is wilderness. Unfortunately, this blindness shaped policy and engendered violence.
Speaker 1: Take the Cherokee, for instance. By the seventeen hundreds, they
Speaker 1: were deeply agricultural. They still raised corn as they had
Speaker 1: in previous centuries, though they now used plows and oxen
Speaker 1: rather than digging sticks. They had livestock, barns, fences, and
Speaker 1: still the US government insisted they were not properly using
Speaker 1: the land. Why because their farms didn't match the colonial ideal.
Speaker 1: This misunderstanding wasn't just an intellectual exercise and a failure
Speaker 1: at that, it was very deadly. During the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: American military campaigns to Live targeted Native American food systems.
Speaker 1: Heck We've seen this even in Jamestown with John Smith.
Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty one, British forces under Colonel James Grant
Speaker 1: destroyed Cherokee cornfields and orchards across the Appalachian South, driving
Speaker 1: thousands of people into the mountains to starve. American forces
Speaker 1: continued this practice during the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees were
Speaker 1: forced quote fled into the mountains, leaving behind their villages horses, cattle, dogs,
Speaker 1: and fowl, as well as forty to fifty thousand bushels
Speaker 1: of corn end quote. Destroying Native American agriculture wasn't just
Speaker 1: collateral damage. It actually was the strategy. The colonists needed
Speaker 1: a rationale for all this. We need this a lot
Speaker 1: in American history, and so they repeated a lie that
Speaker 1: Native Americans didn't farm, that they didn't improve the land,
Speaker 1: that they were savages wandering through unclaimed wilderness. And that
Speaker 1: lie still echoes today. Now we should also look at
Speaker 1: our modern agriculture esthetics, the way we prize flat fenced,
Speaker 1: square fields planted in vast monocultures. We actually adore this
Speaker 1: uniformity tried out. Look for a stock photo right now,
Speaker 1: if you're on a computer of a farm, there's going
Speaker 1: to be a lawn perfectly uniform except for maybe a
Speaker 1: couple of small weeds. There's going to be all kinds
Speaker 1: of squares and patterns. That's what we love. That obsession
Speaker 1: with order and control is deeply embedded in our American
Speaker 1: mindset because it was actually deeply embedded in the colonial mindset.
Speaker 1: It's the only way that we know how to farm,
Speaker 1: but it's not necessarily the best way. Traditional Native American
Speaker 1: agriculture was diverse, It was resilient and closely attuned to
Speaker 1: local ecologies. Fields were planted with many species. There was
Speaker 1: no reliance on chemical fertilizer or pesticide. Crops were rotated
Speaker 1: not just across years, but within years according to the
Speaker 1: rhythms of the sun and the rain. Forests weren't obstacles
Speaker 1: to farming to be flat, and there were partners in it.
Speaker 1: I think we need to think about, just like the
Speaker 1: colonial people, that how do we define farming? Because I
Speaker 1: think that that's a valuable exercise for us all to
Speaker 1: go about now, and I think it's something worth learning about.
Speaker 1: It's certainly something that the colonial Americans didn't Now next time,
Speaker 1: we're going to move from more broader exercises of how
Speaker 1: Native Americans farm and how they use the land. To
Speaker 1: look at more a couple of tribes a little bit
Speaker 1: closer up. If you're interested in more Western ZIV up
Speaker 1: until that point, please check out the link in the
Speaker 1: show notes, so it'll take you to Western SIEV two
Speaker 1: point zero. We're deep in the death throes of the
Speaker 1: Roman Republic at this point, moving on to the Empire
Speaker 1: a much more detailed fashion than I covered it the
Speaker 1: first time. You get your first week for free if
Speaker 1: you'd like to try it out, and it's the best
Speaker 1: way to support the show.