This year, the Idle No More movement called for Earth Day rallies to focus attention on the links between Indigenous issues and the environmental movement
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I think the idea that simply by being native to this continent that Native Americans are better at interacting with nature than white people is a bit problematic. And I am extremely skeptical that the extirpation of Indians in Mexico and in South America was any less a non-culture than in North America. In Peru and in parts of Mexico, to be sure, Native Americans have survived more than natives do in the Anglosphere countries.
I am not sure, however, that survival in *parts* of that continent make Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand 'cultures' when Australia, the United States, and Canada are not. After all, in Europe nationalism has obliterated with extreme prejudice no shortage of long-lived local cultures, but that's called progress in Europe.
IMHO it's rather unjust to replace the old ideas of the bad, fading Indian vanishing like snow before the summer sun with the Indian as the white cultural spirit-guide enlightening white people on the necessity to get along with nature. By definition human expansion is destructive to nature. Where are the gorilla sized lemurs, the American lions, the demon ducks of doom? The flaws in the modern Western approach to the environment are but the older, deeper flaws of wealthy civilizations magnified by the sheer power and lavish money to spend that the modern West has. There is no just, right, or easy answer to those problems. Adopting the solutions of Native peoples in Canada won't solve issues in places like Louisiana, where there is no shortage of coastal erosion plus things like sinkholes and the issue of how to fix a monocrop economy based primarily on oil and casinos.
The solutions of Canadian natives don't solve Australia's deep rooted issues of being overwhelmingly desert and inhospitable desert at that. Is there a good solution short of a self-inflicted collapse of civilization due to reaping the fruit of ecologically disastrous policies? I do not know. Would ideas like this help? At the very least it's hard to see how things could be worse than the way current industrial and post-industrial societies do things.
There are a lot of factual problems with placing cause for the megafauna extinctions squarely on the shoulders of humans and human expansion. The giant lemurs, and the rest of Madagascar's megafauna, went extinct thousands of years before humans ever reached the island.
I didn't say they were solely responsible, but that they go extinct invariably after human arrival is not a co-incidence. The idea that humans have no responsibility for that is rather problematic. Large animals tend to both breed slowly and have fewer offspring than smaller ones, and it's in a sense a relatively simple, if immoral, process to kill them off. It is literally so easy cavemen could do it and did do it.
I'm not saying humans and human expansion aren't destructive or problematic. I'm saying your examples are shit. The demon duck went extinct millions of years ago, long before apes walked upright, let alone before humans went hunting. The giant lemurs went extinct 9,000 years before people arrived on Madagascar. Humans may have contributed to the extinction of American lion, but as it was adapted for a glacial environment closer to Siberia of today than the temperate grasslands North America became, it's a stretch to point to people only or even as the main cause.
There is also something extremely troubling about painting morality over survival hunting.
The humans that hunted 11,000 years ago were no less human or intelligent than you or I or anyone else today. They were capable of abstract thought, incredible tool making it would take you years to master, complex strategy, and everything we think of as human. There is NOTHING easy about hunting megafauna. Saying so just shows either how little you know about them or how little thought you've given to what you've written.
I didn't say hunting them was easy, I said that the process of rendering them extinct was. Early modern humans did that to the dodo and the Stellar's Sea Cow in historic times, and it's extremely hard to attribute the extinction of the Moa to anything but the Maori. I admit to forgetting when the demon ducks of doom lived, so I concede that point.
Wherever humans have spread from Africa, the existing ecosystems were rapidly rendered unrecognizable, including the extinction of our closest evolutionary relatives in Europe, Asia, and Flores Island. That indicates that it's the scale and devastating power of extinctions that's changed, not the capability of humanity to induce them.
bad, fading Indian vanishing like snow before the summer sun
FWIW, I believe this is more of a US thing than a Canadian one. That's been my experience anyway. I agree it's the norm in the US though and I only live in one corner of Canada.
I *think* the idea is that if everyone would settle down and develop a connection to the land where they live, they would have more of an investment in deciding what damage and pollution they allow. I'm not sure how though this would avoid what we have now with resource stripping and pollutants going into the poorest places.
Still, that's sort of the background of this. Many First Nations have agreed to allow dumping and the like because it was one of the few ways they could make money but that's changing, at least in some places.
A non-Indigenous civilization is a complete rupture with the entire arc of human history. By the way, that doesn't mean all Indigenous civilizations were saintly or nice; it just means they were rooted. They may have uprooted others, enslaved peoples, created empires, but every human civilization (Inuit, Roman, Egyptian, Mayan, Haudenosaunee, Anishnawbeg, etc.) has had a homeland somewhere.
I'm not versed enough on Native American history to say anything about the Inuit or Anishawbeg, but the Haudenosaunee had less a homeland and more deliberate empire-building state formation via the league. This doesn't count against them as it's usually the state that makes the people, not the other way around.
Rome may have started in the city-state of Magna Roma, but by the end of that civilization in either 1453 or 1922, its inhabitants were either Greek Orthodox Christians or Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims, starting from a Hellenized Etruscan satrapy. Rome changed so much over the years that it was able to lose, well, Rome, without losing much of anything about that special brand of hubris that made up Roman imperial identity.
Like China, India, and Russia, Rome reinvented itself so many times that any link of that with the 'Kingdom'/Republic is debatable at best. Admittedly white people fail Native American history and nuances just as badly, so perhaps this was a deliberate irony or something, but still.
I am not sure, however, that survival in *parts* of that continent make Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand 'cultures' when Australia, the United States, and Canada are not. After all, in Europe nationalism has obliterated with extreme prejudice no shortage of long-lived local cultures, but that's called progress in Europe.
IMHO it's rather unjust to replace the old ideas of the bad, fading Indian vanishing like snow before the summer sun with the Indian as the white cultural spirit-guide enlightening white people on the necessity to get along with nature. By definition human expansion is destructive to nature. Where are the gorilla sized lemurs, the American lions, the demon ducks of doom? The flaws in the modern Western approach to the environment are but the older, deeper flaws of wealthy civilizations magnified by the sheer power and lavish money to spend that the modern West has. There is no just, right, or easy answer to those problems. Adopting the solutions of Native peoples in Canada won't solve issues in places like Louisiana, where there is no shortage of coastal erosion plus things like sinkholes and the issue of how to fix a monocrop economy based primarily on oil and casinos.
The solutions of Canadian natives don't solve Australia's deep rooted issues of being overwhelmingly desert and inhospitable desert at that. Is there a good solution short of a self-inflicted collapse of civilization due to reaping the fruit of ecologically disastrous policies? I do not know. Would ideas like this help? At the very least it's hard to see how things could be worse than the way current industrial and post-industrial societies do things.
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There is also something extremely troubling about painting morality over survival hunting.
The humans that hunted 11,000 years ago were no less human or intelligent than you or I or anyone else today. They were capable of abstract thought, incredible tool making it would take you years to master, complex strategy, and everything we think of as human. There is NOTHING easy about hunting megafauna. Saying so just shows either how little you know about them or how little thought you've given to what you've written.
Reply
Wherever humans have spread from Africa, the existing ecosystems were rapidly rendered unrecognizable, including the extinction of our closest evolutionary relatives in Europe, Asia, and Flores Island. That indicates that it's the scale and devastating power of extinctions that's changed, not the capability of humanity to induce them.
Reply
FWIW, I believe this is more of a US thing than a Canadian one. That's been my experience anyway. I agree it's the norm in the US though and I only live in one corner of Canada.
I *think* the idea is that if everyone would settle down and develop a connection to the land where they live, they would have more of an investment in deciding what damage and pollution they allow. I'm not sure how though this would avoid what we have now with resource stripping and pollutants going into the poorest places.
Still, that's sort of the background of this. Many First Nations have agreed to allow dumping and the like because it was one of the few ways they could make money but that's changing, at least in some places.
Reply
A non-Indigenous civilization is a complete rupture with the entire arc of human history. By the way, that doesn't mean all Indigenous civilizations were saintly or nice; it just means they were rooted. They may have uprooted others, enslaved peoples, created empires, but every human civilization (Inuit, Roman, Egyptian, Mayan, Haudenosaunee, Anishnawbeg, etc.) has had a homeland somewhere.
I'm not versed enough on Native American history to say anything about the Inuit or Anishawbeg, but the Haudenosaunee had less a homeland and more deliberate empire-building state formation via the league. This doesn't count against them as it's usually the state that makes the people, not the other way around.
Rome may have started in the city-state of Magna Roma, but by the end of that civilization in either 1453 or 1922, its inhabitants were either Greek Orthodox Christians or Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims, starting from a Hellenized Etruscan satrapy. Rome changed so much over the years that it was able to lose, well, Rome, without losing much of anything about that special brand of hubris that made up Roman imperial identity.
Like China, India, and Russia, Rome reinvented itself so many times that any link of that with the 'Kingdom'/Republic is debatable at best. Admittedly white people fail Native American history and nuances just as badly, so perhaps this was a deliberate irony or something, but still.
Reply
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