Meagan Anthony

Native Americans: Conservation and Identity 

     With the progression of the class I, like many of my peers, came to question what I thought I knew about minorities. Growing up in Iowa I wasn’t introduced to many minorities as a child. However, as I traveled to Texas and began my college career, I was thrown into the path of many diverse minority groups. While, in starting this class, I imaged that I knew quite a lot about minorities, especially black and Hispanic, I still saw them as just that—groups. This was especially true for Native Americans. I didn’t know the difference between tribes or belief systems, and like most white Americans I classified Native Americans into one large group, “Native Americans.” When I began my research I was interested in the idea of conservation. Conservation and Native Americans seemed to go hand-in-hand, at least with the romanticized view of the Indian. Yet while researching I found not only that conservation is a difficult issue when speaking about Native Americans, but also that the grouping of Native Americans is another difficult issue in and of itself. This post is a look into the difficulties raised by Native American identity, as a group and as conservationists.

     Robert Alexander Innes, in his article “New Interpretations of Native Cultural Preservation, Revitalization, and Persistence,” introduces a series of articles to counter the main criticism of Native studies, which is that it does not have “universal applicability.” Innes is particularly focusing on the work of Frances Widdowson who asserts that all Native studies theories revolve around spirituality, and since a spiritual world has not been proven to exist that the “theories are not valid.” Innes finds that Widdowson’s views are signs of a lack of knowledge about Native studies. He argues that an imperative part of Native studies is understanding the Native culture and what is seen as important in that culture. He continues his argument by stating that Widdowson’s views are based on a static knowledge of Native culture, but that, “Native culture, like Native people, is not simply an artifact from the distant past but a living, contemporary culture.” This culture, Innes states, is complex and filled with cultural diversity. Diversities and tensions exist between city Indians and Indians who live on reservations. There are also diversities in religion; some are traditional, and some are Christian-based.

     Like Innes, John Gamber identifies the differences in Native American culture with his analysis of Craig Womak’s “Drowning in Fire.”  Gamber identifies Womak’s interest in “understanding Native texts within their specific tribal frameworks and traditions.” This approach is called “tribal nationalism.” In the instance of Womak, the tribe in question is the Creek tribe, and taking this into consideration, Gamber analyses Womak’s work with the Creek traditions in mind. Gamber shows the Creek people as a living culture, similar to the views of Innes, in that the Creek views are not stuck in past traditions but that they are a modern people. The Creek views on homosexuality and queerness are open and mostly accepting. In Womak’s book it is not the queer characters that are seen as the outsiders, but the tribally different characters, the Comanche. Gamber also touches on the topic of conservation in his article. He acknowledges the difficulties of the Native people being torn from their land, but he also asserts that it is not solely the local culture that defines the people but the global culture as well. The Native people are shaped by their migrations, and their identities are a product of those migrations.

     While the first two articles in my post reflect on the differences between the Native American communities, the next article, written by Matthew Preston and Alexander Harcourt explores the similarities between tribes and their connection with nature. In “Conservation Implications of the Prevalence and Representation of Locally Extinct Mammals in the Folklore of Native Americans,” Preston and Harcourt investigate the connection between conservation of biodiversity and conservation of culture. The authors find that these ideas are linked for Native American tribes. Preston and Harcourt found that “of the mammal species recorded…as extinct in national parks in western United States, all eight appeared in the folklore of Native American tribes.” This connection to nature is a trait common amongst most, if not all Native American tribes. The authors found that the folklore involving these animals were generally positive and respectful of the animals represented. This notion of Native American cohesiveness with nature is aligned with the general images in white America; however, Terry Anderson complicates these images.

     In the article “Conservation—Native American Style,” Anderson shows the realities of Indians as the “original conservationists.” Anderson does not disagree with the Preston and Harcourt findings that animals and nature were important to Native Americans, or still are, but asserts that the idea of natural conservation was not present in Native American history. According to Anderson, romanticizing the image of Native Americans and their “environmental ethic” is patronizing and restricts a full understanding of Indian culture, the good and the bad. The realities of historical Native Americans complicate the idea of their relationship to nature in many ways. Indians farmed and deforestation was sometimes necessary in largely populated areas. The idea that Indians used every part of the animal is complicated by Anderson’s description of herds of buffalo driven over cliffs, “tons of meat was left to rot or to be eaten by scavengers.” Anderson also asserts that Indians did have notions of property. There were terms for a private area of hunting for a specific hunter. Also, personal items were owned individually: teepees, arrows, horses, etc. Present day Native American conservation is presented by Anderson as erroneous as well, “on most western reservations, big game species are often almost nonexistent.” The current Native American population is over-hunting their land just like the previous populations.

     All of these articles opened up my mind to the real complications of Native American identities. The term “Native American” is not all encompassing, just like the term “white” is not all encompassing. There are different beliefs, religions, tensions, values and ethics that exist amongst Native American communities. It was also an eye opening realization that the common belief of Indians as the “original conservationists” may be more myth than fact. These articles may have their own bias, as most analysis does, but the act of writing and reading about other cultures is hopefully a step towards acceptance, tolerance and truthful understanding of one another.

Works Cited

Anderson, Terry L. “Conservation- Native American Style.” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 37.4 (Winter 1997): EBSCOhost. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Gamber, John. “Born Out of the Creek Landscape: Reconstructing Community and Continuance in Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire.” MELUS 34.2 (Summer 2009): Project MUSE. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Innes, Robert Alexander. “New Interpretations of Native Cultural Preservation, Revitalization, and Persistence.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34.2 (2010): EBSCOhost. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Preston, Matthew A., and Alexander H. Harcourt. “Conservation Implications of the Prevalence and Representation of Locally Extinct Mammals in the Folklore of Native Americans.” Conservation and Society 7.1 (2009): 59-69. EBSCOhost. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.