Hi All:
This review is forwarded w/ permission.
Stefanie Rixecker
ECOFEM Coordinator
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 10:11:44 -0600
From: Mark Stoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: REVIEW: Pyne on Boyd, ed. _Indians, Fire and the Land in the
Pacific,
Northwest_ (x:H-AmIndian)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Send reply to: "American Society for Environmental History (H-NET List)"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (February, 2000)
Robert Boyd, ed. _Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest_.
Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999. 313 pp. Figures, notes,
contributors list, index. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-87071-459-7.
Reviewed for H-AMINDIAN by Stephen J. Pyne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Department of Biology, Arizona State University
The Mystery of the Missing Fires
Anyone having even a casual familiarity with the Northwest landscape knows
that there are a lot fewer fires today than a century ago. The consensus
holds that "Euro-American" settlement is the cause. The naive explanation
is that the missing flames are those nature set and the newcomers
suppressed. A more sophisticated analysis places the decline with the
livestock swarms that cropped off the grasses and forbs that had carried
regular fire, and with the roads and farms that chopped up prairies into
fire-free chunks. A still richer understanding links the land's missing
fires with its missing peoples. When the indigenes departed, they took their
innumerable fires with them.
This is a book that explains much of what has vanished. The volume is a
compilation of twelve essays by assorted authors, tidily framed with an
introduction and conclusion by editor Robert Boyd. Of that suite, ten
contributions have been published previously, two written especially for
this volume. The book is by far the most comprehensive survey of North
American Indian fire practices available. It offers a rich broth of data
and disciplines -- written sources, sediment cores, fire-scarred trees,
interviews and oral histories, ethnographies, old maps, all scrutinized
through the lenses of anthropology, forestry, geography, fire ecology,
archeology, and environmental history. The book nicely complements Thomas
Blackburn and Kat Anderson's compendium on California, _Before the
Wilderness_, and Sylvia Hallam's Australian monograph, _Fire and Hearth_.
The book can well serve as a model for other regions or for any part of the
world where aboriginal economies, broadly interpreted, thrive.
So it may seem churlish to target its flaws. But if this study does become
an exemplar as it justly may, then we should explore its lapses as well as
its largesse.
The first is the decision to bury in the middle of the volume the one essay
that conceptually binds the rest. "Yards, Corridors, and Mosaics" by Henry
Lewis and Theresa Ferguson proposes that people burned along thoroughfares
("corridors") and over places of habitation and special use ("yards"). The
idea is at once simple and universal; the authors demonstrate it for the
Northwest, the boreal forest of Alberta, Tasmania, and even the wet-dry
tropics of northern Australia. The same practices express themselves
differently because of local conditions. I can think of no place where it
does not apply. The essay thus reminds us that demography is, for fire, not
destiny, that small numbers of fire-wielding people can exercise wide
influence, that people move, that fire propagates. Humanity's fiery reach
far exceeds its grasp. As an informing conceit, the model could have helped
pare the endless repetitions within the book as we learn how various tribes
burned the same species in the same ways. The piles of lists eventually
topple over rather than build toward higher insight.
Second, the authors fail to embrace the full spectrum of aboriginal fire
practices. Early Whites often denounced Indian burning as wanton and
promiscuous. In countering those charges, the authors insist that burning
was systematic, utilitarian, and controlled, as much of it was. But not
all. Burning also resulted from malice, play, war, accident, escapes, and
sheer fire littering. Kindled prairies sometimes flared instead of burning
out at night; spring fires that normally expired at wet treelines could
continue during times of drought; smoldering logs used to dry out
huckleberries might escape delayed rains and catch an east wind to send
flame roaring through dense canopies. In effect, ignition became constant
on the land. While fire litter might spread only when it coincided with
drought and properly aged woods and high winds, its ceaseless presence
explains how those lightning- free forests could incinerate from time to
time. Again, humanity's fire influence ranged far beyond patches burned for
berries or fire drives for grasshoppers. Remove that flame and the
structure of even seldom-visited forests would look very different.
Third, the book is content to meld all "Euro-Americans" and "Euro-Canadians"
into a single, pyrophobic lump. The cultural distinctions lavished on
tribes do not extend to the newcomers. This seriously distorts the history
of how Indian burning has been interpeted. Not all "Europeans" were hostile
to fire. On the contrary, those on the land exploited it extensively,
resisted efforts to restrain their fire usage, and dramatically enlarged
fire's domain by mincing whole landscapes into combustibles. Moreover, a
strong Western lobby emerged that sought to perpetuate indigenous fire
practices, that insisted that forest protection should mimic what they
openly called the "Indian way" of "light" burning. Proponents included
herders, timber owners, settlers, even the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The critical divide was not between Indians and Europeans but between city
and country, between those who resided on the land and those who lived in
urban areas distant from it, between those who grew up with their hand on a
torch and those who knew fire only in the stove or through books. The more
remote the critic, the more vigorous the criticism. The "light burning"
controversy pitted professional elites against folk practitioners, of all
ethnicities. Revealingly, the chief forester condemned light burning as
mere "Paiute forestry." The fight was bitter and lasted for nearly two
decades. Had the outcome gone otherwise, as it well might had the
Northwest's 1910 conflagrations not so traumatized the Forest Service, the
need to "recover" Indian fire practices today would not exist. They would,
with adaptations, be the norm. Yet none of this story enters into the text.
Finally, there is a curious but exceedingly common failure of perspective.
Eager to show the rationality of Indian fire - to see burning as it appeared
to resource-manipulating Indians - the authors fail to pick up the other end
of the firestick. They see fire through Indian eyes; they do not see
Indians through fire's eyes. The book opens with careful maps of ecoregions
and ecoprovinces and tribal homelands. It does not, however, map even the
most rudimentary index of fire. It offers no real explanation of fire
dynamics: fire simply happens between people and land. It treats vegetation
as "food resouces," not as fuel. It tracks burning within a cycle of
seasonal harvesting, not within a seasonal cycle of fuel availability. Yet
the latter made possible much of the former. The book places fire within
the context of Indian history, not Indians within the panorama of fire
history. The authors would bristle at the proposal to write Indian history
without interviewing Indians. Yet they have so chosen to write fire
history. No one asked the missing fire who abducted it.
Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker, Senior Lecturer
Environmental Management & Design Division
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 84
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
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