In the 1990s, there were repeated attempts to debunk the idea of an
ecological Indian. Scholars and activists with seemingly little in
common all sought to portray the Indian as wasteful of natural
resources, if not even worse than the European settlers who have left
the USA resembling a toxic dump as the 21^st century stumbles forward.
My first encounter with this trend was with Frank Furedi’s sect in the
early 90s that published a magazine called Living Marxism, better known
as LM. (They still exist as Spiked today, long after dispensing with the
idea that they are Marxist.) When I saw an LM article around that time
denouncing Survival International as a group that sought to keep the
Brazilian indigenous peoples “preserved in amber” like in the Museum of
Natural History, I could not believe my eyes. The Yanomami were in
danger of extinction as a result of mining and ranching excursions into
their territory and these self-described Marxists were attacking the
main group trying to protect them.
Furedi’s group in England was called the Revolutionary Communist Party
that shared a name with Bob Avakian’s cult in the USA but little else
politically except their belief that the left should not believe in the
“noble savage”. In a debate with leaders of the American Indian Movement
in 1980, Avakian’s spokesman referred to the “second harvest”, a
practice from around 7,000 years ago when some indigenous peoples stored
dried feces so that in the event of a famine, they could extract
undigested seeds and other products for food. In other words, Indians
ate shit.
The academic left wasn’t much better. In David Harvey’s 1996 “Justice,
Nature & the Geography of Difference”, he wrote that stone-age hunters
had no way of determining whether they were overexploiting prey. This
was the result of their inability to make connections between current
and future animal populations. This would account for the disappearance
of the Woolly Mammoth, for instance. He also fretted over Indian claims
for land that was stolen from them in the 1800s. He feared that such
“militant particularism” could can foster “nationalistic, exclusionary,
and some cases violently fascistic” elements.
Harvey’s book attracted little support and he even disavowed it a few
years after its publication. But one book stood out for its impact on
American Indian scholars, the broader academy, as well as on Jonah
Goldberg, the founding editor of National Review Online
<https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/indians-buffalo-fire-and-delong-jonah-goldberg/>.
That was Shepard Krech’s 2000 “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History”
that should have been properly titled “The anti-Ecological Indian”. It
was an assemblage of all the charges ever levelled against the Indian,
including the business about killing off the Woolly Mammoth.
full:
https://louisproyect.org/2021/06/16/was-american-indian-overhunting-responsible-for-the-near-extinction-of-the-buffalo/
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