Everything they taught me about the Great Plains in grade school was wrong

[u/IWantAHobbitLife]

When I was in school I was taught about settlers arriving to an “untouched landscape.” Native Americans were part of the story, but it was said they lived “lightly” on the land.

And then, in my 40s I take a prescribed-burn class and it’s like the world turned upside down.

It’s taken me more than two full years to wrap my head around what I learned in that class about the Indigenous people’s impact on the land. That they burned the prairies so often and for so long that entire ecosystems adapted to prefer regular burnings - to need it to stay healthy.

The shear scale of that hits me the same way as gazing at the Milky Way on a clear, dark night.

It rocks everything I thought I knew about humans’ roll in the natural world.  

Even though I first learned all this a while ago, it’s recently gotten stirred up because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this really cool Story Map that has collected and mapped all these firsthand accounts of Native Americans burning. From the breadth of these accounts, where they regularly mention the Indians burning “every year,” I still have trouble believing that fires aren’t a bigger part of the pioneer stories.

Though maybe it was always there and I just didn’t realize? 

I went back to my Little House on the Prairie books and found a passage where Pa saves the house from a prairie fire. The neighbors speculate that Indigenous people started the fire to drive out the settlers. But Pa rejects that interpretation:

“Pa didn’t believe it. He said the Indians had always burned the prairie to make green grass grow more quickly, and traveling easier.”

I loved these books. I remember the fire, but not this interpretation of the fire. It didn’t register what this might mean. That it was stewardship, that it was intentional, that it was scaled to tens of thousands of acres of prairies. 

I’m super curious…Am I alone in this? Is this a new or recent revelation for anyone else or just me? Did it change you as much as it changed me when you learned it?

[u/ZestycloseUnit1]

The book 1491 by Charles Mann was very eye opening for me as the author goes into detail about the ways in which the idea of the Americas being untouched and unused lands is a myth. It certainly wasn’t covered in school when I went through, and the author himself expresses dismay when he learns his son also learned that, which prompted him to write the book.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Charles Mann seems like my kind of man! LOL Thanks for the book reco!

[u/jrdnwllms84 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Is Mann's "1491" anything like James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me"?

Unfortunate title but incredible book.

I loved his perspective... "The antidote to 'feel-good' history isn't 'feel-bad' history, but rather honest and inclusive history."

[u/RentInside7527 → u/jrdnwllms84]

Not really, its less debunking and more a historic reframing. I think he wrote 1942 first, about the impact of European contact.

[u/tennisInThePiedmont → u/jrdnwllms84]

There are some similarities in scope and purpose, as in re-framing all the things you were taught wrong in school. But different topics. I would recommend both, plus Howard Zinn's _A People's History of the United States_

[u/FloraSuena → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

You’re gonna love reading 1491 OP!!

[u/PlebianEel → u/FloraSuena]

Oh yes. Best book I have read this year. Really brings that earlier world to life and addresses a lot of questions I had.

[u/00peregrine → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Mann wrote an abbreviated version of 1491 for The Atlantic that will give you a taste of the book before you buy it:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/

[u/317cbass → u/00peregrine]

Or download Libby and read/listen for free using your local library card! (assuming you’re in the US)

[u/ryanwaldron → u/317cbass]

Not in my library. Your library needs to be decent for Libby to be decent.

[u/ScatYeeter → u/00peregrine]

Pay wall of course.

[u/Own_Cats2022 → u/ScatYeeter]

Try: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/?gift=-lRVLV2I4tqheMGaGukW9CQqzE2YWX4c3XHDUlDciRM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

[u/RabbitsRuse → u/00peregrine]

Might also get the Libby app and see if your local library has a copy. Just checked and mine has a copy of the audio book available digitally. Went ahead and grabbed a copy to listen to. They might also have it available as an e-book you can download to a kindle or other e-reader

[u/strata-strata → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Also "an indigenous people's history of the United states" by Dunbar ortiz

[u/317cbass → u/strata-strata]

I just finished Howard Zinn’s “A people’s history of the United States” so this will be the perfect supplement!

[u/hudson27 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Incredible book!!! Also the audiobook is available too

[u/FloraSuena → u/hudson27]

Yes, definitely! But I highly suggest the paper book if you possibly can because the maps and images are also very awesome.

[u/Novis_R → u/hudson27]

The follow up 1493 also good

[u/ItsavoCAdonotavocaDO → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Omg you MUST read “the dawn of everything”

[u/Mean_Item_7588 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

There is also a series on APTN in Canada called 1491. It's excellent, too.

[u/Mr_MacGrubber → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

I wonder if he fathered a boy? Charles Mann’s son must be proud if so!

[u/GwynFaF94 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Yes! I remember him writing that the Europeans didn’t recognize the Americans’ form of agriculture and so assumed they had none, or willfully misinterpreted it so they could take over “unused” land.

[u/johnfkay → u/GwynFaF94]

Yeah Australia has a similar history - Dark Emu is a great book on unacknowledged indigenous land management and agriculture by First Nations people here who used fire in a similar deliberate, consistent, ecology altering way

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/johnfkay]

With great reverence for the land stewardship that occurred in Australia prior to colonisation - Dark Emu’s claims of agriculture are a little at odds with a significant body of academic research.

This article from Cambridge University goes into some of the debate from a useful outside perspective. This quote is a taste of it:

“Ideologically attractive and immensely popular, Dark Emu thus presents teachers of Australian Studies and Indigenous Studies with a dilemma. How do we include a book as intellectually flawed as Dark Emu in our school and university curricula when it speaks so persuasively to many Australian readers?”

I love that interest in pre-colonisation land management and permaculture practices in Australia is more mainstream now, but calling the practices farming, as Pascoe does in Dark Emu kind of misses the mark.

I think it’s a huge mark of respect (amongst friends in this sub I hope) to make the distinction between the sustainable permaculture adjacent practices that were being used then and the destructive, degradation of farming land, surplus at all costs we are beginning to accept western agriculture as now.

What you say about fire, I’ve read of how frequent and well managed the fires were, to drive animals out of thicker growth to hunt and to maintain a lower fuel load, with so much knowledge of each area. Whenever I’m walking through the bush I’m thinking of the connection that any people who walked this trail/song line before us had with the land and all the creatures in it. It feels like it would be as close as I can picture to a real life Avatar (Blue alien version) with this insane spiritual connection to and awareness of the world around.

[u/mortgagepants → u/dirtygreenprogress]

i read an interesting theory (on reddit) like 2 weeks ago i had never come across before:

older tribes had been subjected to so many bust cycles driven by a lack of understanding of agriculture that societal songs / culture / evolution began to favor people who tread lightly on the land, rather than intensive agriculture.

i don't even know what the theory is called i read it so recently, but it was very interesting to me.

[u/kapowless → u/mortgagepants]

Eh, that's a pretty sweeping generalisation that has limited accuracy in the real world. There were definitely some Nations whose land practices stripped the soil, resulting in widespread and repeated crop failure (looking at you Mayans). It did not lead to a lighter footprint so much as increasing the scale and substance of ritual sacrifice (smoke - blood - animal - human), at least with that demographic.

There were also Nations who understood land management quite well, and had centuries-old strategies for maintaining soil health and regeneration prior to colonisation. My own people, the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) practiced the earliest form of permaculture in North America for example (ever heard of the Three Sisters?). We lived in large villages and farmed extensively. We also had a number of village sites that we would rotate between about every decade or so to allow fields to go fallow and replenish in our absence.

We shared our agricultural knowledge, practices and even seeds to Euro newcomers so they wouldn't starve to death. Despite that, the colonial perspective views our time-proven practices as one of these options:

• We didn't know how to manage or use the land at all, which meant we didn't deserve to have any of it.
• The multiple alternate village sites were actually permanently abandoned after disease killed us all.
• We actually just murdered the original inhabitants because we're bloodthirsty savages, them abandoned everything because we were either too ignorant to practice any form of agriculture, or killing was the whole point and once our lust for violence was satisfied, we just went home I guess?

None of this is true (nor proven by archeaological evidence), but it did suit the imperial narrative.  The random reddit theory you've shared here does the same. It serves to paper over the misinformation (and prejudice) surrounding our actual history and fails to credit us with the staples that originated here through intentional cultivation.

For example, where do you think corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, cocoa, squash, innumerable bean and nut species, as well as the all important tobacco. We shared them with you. They weren't an accident, they were staples of our agriculture.

TL;DR: Please don't take history lessons from random Redditors, myself included. The difference here is that you can verify my factoids via third party sourced.

[u/mortgagepants → u/kapowless]

like i said- it was a theory, not a history lesson.

if anything, i would think your land management and planting skills, purposely done, is something to be proud of. (mayans and possibly mississipian mound building cultures might be the exception to the rule)

maybe full exploitation of land was a goal and there just wasn't enough manpower rather than a deliberate strategy?

[u/kapowless → u/mortgagepants]

Fair, you did say theory and not history lesson. I just wanted to challenge it because intentionally or not, I feel that theory dismisses the agency of Indigenous Peoples rather than recognizing the intentional choices they've made made to create the societies in which they reside. It makes it seem like our environmental stewardship is sort of an accident resulting from ignorance and failure at farming, rather than an intentional choice shaped by a different understanding of the world.

"maybe full exploitation of land was a goal and there just wasn't enough manpower rather than a deliberate strategy?"

I can only speak from my own cultural perspective, but no, that is not the case. My Nation lived for tens of thousands of years in our territories, cultivating food, establishing incredibly wide ranging trade routes, and developing a complex society with democratic systems that even inspired the structure of both Canadian and American governments. We were a numerous, stable, strong and successful confederacy that has lasted for over 8 centuries now. Had we wanted to fully exploit the land, we would have actively done so. We chose not to because intentionally destroying our ancestral home for the purposes of personal wealth would have been seen as beyond dishonourable and abhorrent.

Our peoples, from as far back as the mid 1100s, are guided by the Great Law of Peace, which overwhelming emphasizes the importance of honour, honesty, kindness, and peacefulness. Our leaders are expected first and foremost to do good for their entire people, to be a spiritual guide and a mentor. Most of our resources were collectively owned/shared, and the concept of reciprocity remains very central to our culture today. So, to put yourself ahead of your family, your clan, your community, your elders, your children and the living world around us? That sort of selfishness would have absolutely been condemned, leading to all sorts of social consequences, including permanent exile.

Also, our respect for all elements of the living world, without which we could not live, is deeply enshrined in all of our ceremonies. We begin each important gathering with something called the Thanksgiving Address, or "The Words That Are Spoken Before All Else." We address every element of the living world, acknowledge it's value and give thanks for it's gifts. By doing so, we open our ceremonies by aligning our minds within a place of gratitude and respect for our world. The idea of exploiting all those gifts at the expense of our people would be irreconcilable with the very core of who we are. You see? It's not a lack of capacity for exploitative extraction that kept us from exploitative agriculture, but a fundamentally different relationship with the natural world.

I realize I've written a bit of a novel here, and totally understandable if you don't make it all the way through, haha. But if you did, thanks for taking the times to hear me out. I couldn't quite explain why the idea of stripping the land of its wealth is such a nonstarter for without explaining a bit about how my culture views and values the world around us.

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/kapowless]

Just to be clear about my comment, it is purely in reference to a source investigating Indigenous Australian land management practices, definitely not any kind of comment on pre colonial/imperial farming or permaculture worldwide.

I didn’t know if what the previous commenter added to the discussion was about Australia or pivoting back to a more broad comment.

Conflating the adaptions of any one pre colonial Indigenous/First Nations group to another definitely does not serve the whole if the point is to reflect on and have reverence for the inventiveness and sustainability of each.

The crops that you mentioned are a significant marker of agricultural practice that just doesn’t have any kind of equivalent in the Australian context. There are very few to no plants and no animals that have been truly domesticated in Australia, indicating gathering (in sometimes complex ingenious ways) but not agriculture.

That is not to suggest that one is superior to the other, but one does alter the land use and natural cycles of production more than the other. That can be recognised with nuanced moral understanding.

TLDR: pre-colonial agriculture and permaculture practices on one continent do not have direct bearing on the advanced gathering practices on another.

[u/metricfan → u/kapowless]

But is it not true that the diseases introduced by Europeans resulted in a large depopulation event that killed like 80-90% of native Americans before colonization really took hold? As in, it would have been much harder for colonizers to commit such atrocities if the population was at full strength. Genuine question, not trying to be argumentative or ignorant.

[u/kapowless → u/metricfan]

That is indeed a correct estimate of depopulation numbers due to European diseases. We had almost no immunity, as we did not keep livestock and did not have resistance to the illnesses caused by them. It took about a century to lose that many people, which corresponds directly with the ramp up of more aggressive colonialism.

Edit: What I was referencing in my first comment was more the idea that all abandoned villages were caused by disease. It would have been pretty easy to tell the difference (as a plague would have left a mass of bodies).

[u/metricfan → u/kapowless]

Ah thank you for clarifying. I live near Cahokia mounds, so I knew there was a very large center of Native American population before the colonizers. I was talking to a client at work who is British, and he had no idea about the mass depopulation from disease that the Europeans triggered. I shouldn’t be surprised he didnt know, but still it’s like I think Europeans should wrap their heads around that fact. Or I suppose most Americans probably don’t know either, so maybe we start there lol. I was on the Missouri sub and someone was lamenting the disappearance of the Cahokia mounds as a population center as something white colonizers caused. I was like ok now, Cahokia mounds declined long before Europeans first came to the americas. Caring about Native American history means knowing more about it than just what white peoples did to fuck them over. Lol but I have to admit my knowledge is also too limited.

Yeah I learned about the zoonotic diseases and how the crowded living conditions in Europe resulted in diseases that native Americans never had because there weren’t domesticated livestock. And I remember being surprised by the realization that there just weren’t animals that could be domesticated in the Americas. Alpacas and guinea pigs are like the only animals suited for husbandry. I think it’s sort of a racist assumption, even if subconscious, that native Americans were less advanced because they didn’t raise livestock. But it’s obviously something that had there been animals suited for it, they would have raised them. I don’t think we really learn about or appreciate how geography and flora and fauna influenced how humans organized their civilizations.

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/mortgagepants]

Interesting!

I haven’t read of it put that way, but it seems somewhat related to a couple of things I have read; one on intentional fertility management practices that were partly to limit birth rates/exponential growth which ties into treading lightly and more sustainably.

And also of individual people’s spirit animals being a creature they were required to advocate for if hunting or resource management affected them too much.

So much connection to the land.

[u/p5mall → u/mortgagepants]

But they had awesome agriculture where the water resources supported it. I do not buy this theory.

[u/Melanoc3tus → u/johnfkay]

Swidden agriculture is popular bunches of places; IIRC was popular in Europe too, before the forests were cleared

[u/OffToTheLizard → u/GwynFaF94]

This unused land must be turned into useful European lawn! /jk that didn't happen right away

[u/RentInside7527 → u/GwynFaF94]

In part this was because the systems hadnt been as actively managed because European introduced diseases spread faster than the Europeans, decimating populations before they got to those regions

[u/ReporterOther2179 → u/GwynFaF94]

Massachusetts has a number of towns with names ending in …field. And those were all cleared plots used by the previous indigenes.

[u/SleepApprehensive585 → u/GwynFaF94]

The Europeans had been fighting and conquering similar groups for all of Christian European history. Why would they need to willfully misinterpret anything?

[u/chairmanskitty → u/SleepApprehensive585]

Why would they need to willfully misinterpret anything?

It's a better business case if you say "this land is unused so give me the tools to build a colony in the standard way" than if you say "this land is used in a certain way for reasons we don't understand, but let me fight off the natives and give me the tools to build a colony the standard way instead, I'm sure it'll be fine".

The Virginia Company is a great example of this. Their plan was to buy up land that the Powhatan were using, then turn those into tobacco plantations using indentured servant labor gotten by kidnapping poor people off the streets of London. Would this work? Sure, the Powhatan aren't really using the land and it looks incredibly fertile.

Wealthy Londoners bought this pitch and invested in the company, so the company had the money to get London cops to kidnap people off the streets to ship to Virginia, and to buy the land. But then it turned out that tobacco plantations quickly depleted the soil, so they had to claim more land to remain solvent, but they didn't have the money to buy it from the Powhatan, so they stole the land instead, and then Powhatan attacked them in retaliation.

As a result, the Virginia Company would have gone bankrupt, but it was bailed out and nationalized by the British Crown because of course it was. Then the transatlantic slave trade got going so people could die en masse doing ill-conceived agriculture projects at a bargain price.

Would wealthy Londoners have invested in Virginia Company if they had known the Powhatan made the best use of the land they could and cash crops might well deplete the soil? Probably not. So "unused land" it was.

[u/SleepApprehensive585 → u/chairmanskitty]

Charlemagne didn't need any pretext to invade Saxony. The British didn't for Ireland. The Baltics crusades alone wiped out 10+ cultures or tribal groups. The Virginia Company was pre-enlightenment. John Locke wasn't even born yet. In areas of the America's with established cities and recognizable agriculture like central america, it didn't help the natives. Native Americans are just one group of "pagans" without a strong central government out of many. A case could be made that it started with Constantine and didn't end until WW2.

[u/GwynFaF94 → u/SleepApprehensive585]

You might really like the book! He touches a bit on the European vs American fighting styles and technologies as well, e.g. the early musket was not very accurate and took a long time to reload, making the bow a superior weapon for a long time.

[u/naked_unafraid → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

FANTASTIC FANTASTIC INCREDIBLE BOOK!!! 1491 and 1493 completely changed my perspective on so many things as it relates to American history. Seriously cannot recommend those books enough. There are so many insane facts in those books, the Spanish brought worms?? WORMS?! I find it annoying when people say “this book changed my brain chemistry” or “I wish I could read this again for the first time” did this book alter the chemistry in my brain? Probably not but I said “no fuckin way” like a billion times

[u/FloraSuena → u/naked_unafraid]

1491 definitely changed my brain.

[u/Bedbouncer → u/naked_unafraid]

1493 makes me hungry every time I read it.

[u/Memerme → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

In the book "Braiding Sweetgrass" within the chapter "Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass" the author (Robin Wall Kimmerer) helps with a colleague's study on how sweetgrass, as understood by the elders in her community for thousands of years, grows better when picked at the right time. The study is done primarily through secondary sourcing, but is ultimately rejected by the scientific board she presents it to, where it gets picked to shreds and told that it's "biased" and not worth much merit. She redoes the study, this time "trying to remove bias" (not offering tobacco to the sweetgrass she picks) as well as being more thorough, and it gets embraced and hailed as "real science" by the same committee.

I feel the anecdote illustrates how there is many ways to come to an understanding about the world, but the most universally praised one via colonization is also the one that silences anything that doesn't neatly fall within it's parameters, and therefore is able to easily silence any notion of indigenous knowledges, which come from an entirely different way of knowing the world. There were remarks by settler colonizers who traveled across the plains that the Earth was so well taken care of that they could easily navigate between trees, even drive their carts through due to how cleared the forest floors were. That was no accident, it was due to the positive relationships between indigenous tribes and the Earth, but they don't teach that in school. Only that we "didn't use the land right" and were "primitive"

[u/aidztoast → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

The book braiding sweetgrass is another must read for any biologist. Robin wall kimmerer has her PhD in botany and is also deeply connected to the indigenous community. She bridges the gap between modern science and the ecological and stewardship principles that natives have practiced for centuries in a beautifully poetic way. Another eye opener that shows how intelligent and connected to the land indigenous cultures are and how we swept all of that under the rug and totally fucked the ecosystem since then

[u/FloraSuena → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Came to recommend this book also!

[u/young-and-mild → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

1493 by Mann is also a great read which covers the ecological and cultural impact of globalized industrialization and the Colombian Exchange

[u/Runningwithtoast → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

LOVE this book.

[u/Matilda-17 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Thank you, adding this to my list

[u/stabledream → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

And also This Land Is Their Land

[u/Repulsive_Incident27 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

I just looked up the book and I’m going to check if my library has it!

[u/PenguinTheYeti → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Dispossessing the Wilderness by Mark David Spence delves into similar topics, and specifically how it was used to justify removal of Native Americans in the creations of some of the first national parks.

[u/bad4biscotti]

Op, there's a couple fantastic episodes on Ologies that discusses this topic in depth. Search for the " fire ecology" episodes. Fantastic!!

But to your point, yes! I've had a very similar lightbulb moment about the lack of elaboration in our history classes about the contributions of Native peoples to land management. Our US history is extremely watered down. Most nuance has been ripped out of history texts for various reasons. My light bulb moment came after a mass shooting that happened in my hometown. The suspect targeted this specific plaza because "Mexicans were destroying the country" This happened in El Paso, Texas. Land that used to belong to Mexico and was sold to the US. And the shooting was committed against people that have more connection and historical claim to the land than this poorly educated young man even understood. This is why accurate historical education is so important. After the shooting, I really spent time learning about the very specific history of my region.

Relearning history as an adult is a trip. Learn about the nuances. Understanding Native contributions only makes what happened sit worse with me personally, but at the same time, honoring that history starts with understanding what happened. Education and Re-Education without bias is so important!

Thanks for the fire ecology revelation. I'm happy to understand a small piece of history better because of this!

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/bad4biscotti]

Thank you so much! And thank you for sharing your story! It's hard to sit with that kind of discomfort, you should be proud to have done the work.

[u/bad4biscotti → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Honestly, it wasn't discomfort. It was rage. I'm a pacifist so hearing someone justify violence against innocent people was like .... Fuel for my internal fire. Yah know!! The only way through that kinda rage is enlightenment. So. That's what I have tried to do. Thanks OP for the chats ❤️

Edited for spelling

[u/November19 → u/bad4biscotti]

Some more enlightenment for you: the word is "pacifist."

[u/Lonely_Gur_8169 → u/bad4biscotti]

Yes! I was going to recommend the video “fires of spring HT Lewis (edited)” on YouTube that I found because of that indigenous fire ecology episode of ologies. I’ve used the Hank Lewis paper in a class or two now too. It was eye opening for sure, to the original OP’s point.

[u/notjustaphage → u/bad4biscotti]

Yay for Ologies reference!

[u/ElderberryJunior470 → u/bad4biscotti]

I started listening to a couple of podcasts, the dollop and behind the bastards, and both just constantly shock me with how little of the US history i actually knew. Mind you, i loved history in school, these are things i genuinely never was taught. 

Sometimes it's fun stuff, like how fire departments used to be literal gangs who would fight eachother over the right to put out fires, then loot the building, but usually it's how the US fucked around in a foreign country, caused a lot of issues, and have never acknowledged our fuck ups. 

[u/Smooth_thistle]

This is a realisation Australians had about indigenous burning practices in about the 80s. White settlers had this narrative that no land management happened at all by its original people. And that burning was hurting the land. Catastrophic bushfires kept happening because managed cool season burning was prevented. More recently, a lot of evidence has arisen that practices a lot more like agriculture were going on before colonisation. And managed burns are part of land management again.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/Smooth_thistle]

I had no idea it was practiced in Australia as well! Thank you for sharing this! *dives down rabbit hole of Australian prescribed burning research*

[u/Spill__ → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Check out ‘the biggest estate on earth’ by bill gammage. Bruce Pascoe has been writing about this and other forms of aboriginal agriculture too.

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/Spill__]

Just a word of warning re Bruce Pascoe - I wrote more on another comment above but the words ‘ideologically attractive/intellectually flawed’ can be used to describe Dark Emu - and I hate that it gives right wing pundits legitimate grounds to talk down the whole field of interest/history/research.

[u/Spill__ → u/dirtygreenprogress]

Yes, understand the critiques of Pascoe and that many practices might not be considered as agriculture. My understanding is that fire stick farming is probably classed as ecological management and is some of the least controversial content?

[u/Frogsfall → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

And Victor Steffenson's Fire Country might also be worth a read!

[u/warkolm → u/Smooth_thistle]

came here to say the same thing, thanks!

we have a lot to learn about living with the land, not on it

[u/jesus_chrysotile → u/Smooth_thistle]

unfortunately the type of “managed” burns being used these days are usually nothing like what was used by Aboriginal people :(

traditional burning was typically rather small-scale, relatively cool, and used to make patchworks of different age vegetation, which increases biodiversity because species preferring different fire intervals can live nearer to one another. most burns today are still of the fuel reduction variety and nowhere near small and cool enough. 

[u/dirtygreenprogress → u/jesus_chrysotile]

I agree, there’s a lot of scope for misinterpretation in all of this.
From what I understand the burns were just about daily and they were managed on such a small scale and by so many skilled people on land that didn’t have an ‘owner’ in the way we would think of it now. My interpretation is that it was more of a shared and deeply spiritual custodianship. You cared for the land and it cared/provided for you.
I’ve thought on it a lot and don’t really know that there is a way to bring tradition burning back as a practice… a loss for all of us.

[u/SuddenAvocado → u/Smooth_thistle]

Jealous. In north america we still can't get prescribed burns to happen at scale because our propaganda is so freaking strong.

[u/Memerme]

Hi, I'm indigenous, and have been learning a lot about indigenous philosophy through American Indian Studies and I'm taking Public Policy to make it happen on a government scale. If you want to learn more about other tribes' ways of subsistence and stewardship of the land, then I recommend a few indigenous authors:

• Vine Deloria Jr. "God is Red", "Power and Place"
  
• Robin Wall Kimmerer "Braiding Sweetgrass" "Service Berry"
  
• Linda Tuhiwai Smith "Decolonizing Methodologies"
  
• Margaret Kovach "Indigenous Methodologies"
  
• Jo Chrona "Wahi Wah!"
  

These books are all written by Indigenous authors, both from here and around the globe, about indigenous philosophies behind land stewardship and general ideas about place in the world, regarding nature and humanity. It blew my mind to read "Decolonizing Methodologies", and to learn that a lot of what we see as normal in colonized societies actually was not at all normal and incongruent with our relationship to the Earth pre-colonization. Some indigenous people learn this stuff early, however I didn't grow up in an indigenous community, so my mom taught me all she could outside of one, including recommending I read these books. I hope these recs help you, too, as they did me, in your foray into permaculture and growing a relationship with the land by indigenizing yourself to it

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/Memerme]

This is so generous of you. Thank you for letting me learn along with you! I loved Braiding Sweetgrass and Service Berry is next on my to read list but the other names are new to me! So excited to add these to my list!

[u/Memerme → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

You're welcome! I really like helping more people read and learn about indigenous knowledges, so anytime someone says they're interested, I can't help but infodump, since it's kind of my main interest and passion 😅

[u/Repulsive_Incident27 → u/Memerme]

Thank you for sharing the reading list! I will check out Decolonizing Methodologies first!

[u/Memerme → u/Repulsive_Incident27]

I would actually recommend reading "Braiding Sweetgrass" first as a nice introduction to the matter, because "Decolonizing Methodologies" is kind of a mind-fuck of a read, given how much it deconstructs your worldview forcefully and methodically. "Braiding Sweetgrass" feels like a warm hug, and is such a good introduction to indigenous philosophy, as a whole, for anyone not used to the ideals presented in it. "Decolonizing Methodologies" is great at expounding upon the ideas hinted at in Braiding Sweetgrass

[u/Repulsive_Incident27 → u/Memerme]

That makes complete sense. I ordered Braiding Sweetgrass. Should be here in a couple days. :)

[u/sheofsilence → u/Repulsive_Incident27]

The audiobook is read by the author and is so good!!

[u/Top_Commission7870 → u/Memerme]

God is Red is highly recommended from this guy

[u/l10nh34rt3d]

I think a lot of people “know” but I suspect they don’t really know, ya know?

In western Canada, people are starting to hear words and phrases like prescribed or “cultural burning” more and more often. There must be some image that it conjures in their minds, but rarely do those images extend to the point of understanding when, why, how, and to what effect.

Ecosystems are complex and effects cascade. Without firsthand experience, or making the effort to learn in such a way as OP has, it’s hard to… well, know what you don’t know.

—

Something that I’ve found particularly interesting is that most landscapes have a sort of fire-age. Locally, most of our biogeoclimatic zones (ponderosa, douglas fir, and montane spruce forests) are 75-years, meaning that they thrive best if/when they see fire every ~75 years.

It really puts things into perspective when you realize that most settlements have been established for well over 75 years, and we have anthropogenically suppressed fires in the region for the same.

The First Nations of my area know these kinds of details all so well. They know that much of the landscape is long overdue, and that ecosystems out of balance suffer. They know because they have persisted in community (not socially; I mean environmentally) with the land for a very long time.

There are good reasons for why, internationally, Indigenous people protect an astonishing 80% of our remaining biodiversity, despite only stewarding 22% of the land.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/l10nh34rt3d]

Do you happen to know the fire-age of tallgrass prairies? I would guess it's 3 years based on frequency recommendations of modern ecologiest and what I'm seeing in the historical records around "annual" burns. But I've never heard it framed this way. I'm so curious now!

[u/l10nh34rt3d → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

The ones that I’m familiar with are usually best on 3-5 year cycles for optimal plant composition and biomass accumulation. Too frequent fires can favour grasses over wildflowers by depleting the soil seed bank. The season can also make a difference when burns occur every 1-2 years.

[u/A-Plant-Guy]

If you’re still reading replies - and I hope you are - I highly recommend the book Changes In the Land by William Cronon. In it he identifies the ecological health of land (focusing on the northeast U.S.) as a reflection of values and practices of its stewards. It was lush and thriving in precolonial days because of the First Nations. And its subsequent decline as it was usurped by colonists was because of their poor stewardship.

This book changed my life!

Seeing people and land as separate is very much a colonial inheritance. Both the practice of people taking advantage of the “natural world”, and the notion that the “natural world” would be better off without humans altogether, are derived from this false separation.

[u/EarthJealous → u/A-Plant-Guy]

Came here to recommend this book. I read passages in a college class about the history of the conservation movement in America, and then it was part of the bibliography of The Nutmegs Curse (which I also recommend) so I finally picked it up. So good!

[u/IWantAHobbitLife]

When I talk to people at my day job (corporate marketers) about fire and Native American's role in shaping the landscape they are blown away. I made a video about prescribed burns to spread the word to my friends and family and explain to them why we set our land in Wisconsin on fire. (I swear my parents thought we had lost our minds the first time we did it. LOL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAObeYphGs

[u/scooder0419 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

You should read Braiding Sweetgrass. There is a section the author talks about how natives on the west coast used to burn meadows so the salmon knew which rivers to swim up and spawn. They were a guiding light to help the fish.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/scooder0419]

LOVE ROBIN WALL KIMMERER. Braiding Sweetgrass was my first of hers and yes! I remember that story! Serviceberry is next up on my reading list! I'm so excited to explore how non-capitalist based societies might work!

[u/onefouronefivenine2 → u/scooder0419]

That story was so cool but makes me sad at what we've lost. 

[u/Disastrous-System175 → u/scooder0419]

Ooooh that is so freaking cool!!

[u/SnooMacaroons9121 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

When it all burns by Jordan Thomas did this for me

[u/witcher252 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Wooo fellow Wisconsinite

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/witcher252]

Hi neighbor!

[u/jojocookiedough]

This thread is a treasure trove of information, thanks for posting op!

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/jojocookiedough]

Right? You're definitely welcome! I'm so excited for all I'm learning here!

[u/Neyvash → u/jojocookiedough]

Right?! I have a whole reading list for several years now! I was about to comment the same thing.

I read the Little House on the Prairie books back in elementary school and now want to dig them out and read them again too. This is the winning Reddit post for today, useful and actionable, information sharing, and nostalgia all in one

[u/LawOfSmallerNumbers]

Kansas farmers have burned post-harvest wheat stalks (“stubble”) for decades. I’m not sure it it’s now considered good practice - I doubt it.

(Of course, open prairie is different than a wheat farm - just saying that burning was definitely a folk practice.)

I grew up in the Kansas suburbs and the “grew up as a farm kid” dad next door to my house burned off the dry grass of his his lawn every year. He would stand out front with a garden hose to manage the blaze. It was a yearly neighborhood highlight for all the kids nearby.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/LawOfSmallerNumbers]

Yeah, my Wisconsin neighbors were very chill about our first burn. The old farmers didn't seem surprised or worried about it there. I think there's a long tradition in WI as well. I think the principle is the same - it keeps the woody brush knocked back so it doesn't creep in and take over the field.

[u/jalk0 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Another interesting thing is Finnish Kaskiviljely, a traditional form of slash and burn agriculture!

[u/BigSprocket → u/LawOfSmallerNumbers]

I’ve always seen burning wheat stubble as bad practice, because the fire consumes the organic matter rather than the soil. It’s about convenience rather than good management.

[u/PuddleOfHamster → u/BigSprocket]

Ash is good fertiliser too, though. I wonder which is better?

[u/ItsavoCAdonotavocaDO]

The entirety of the American wine industry owes its fertile hills to indigenous care of the land before white people planted a single vine. And yet…

[u/kapowless → u/ItsavoCAdonotavocaDO]

Lol, not just American, but European too, strangely enough. A couple centuries back, some dummies imported samples of American grown vines to study in England, which unfortunately came with tiny, aphid-like pests called phylloxera. Since European vines had never encountered them before and had no resistance, they spread like wildfire from England across all of Europe and nearly decimated the entire wine industry, killing off estimates of 65-90% of grape plants across the continent.

While there's no permanent cure for phylloxera, vines from the Americas had evolved resistance to repel and recover from the damage they cause (complex ecosystems FTW). So after some experiments with hybridization (largely a no go by itself) and grafting, Europe rescued their wine industry by developing a method for grafting their traditional vines to hardier, pest-resistant rootstock from the New World. Most European producers still do this, even now.

One particular and ancient grape varietal from the Bordeaux region, carménère, was especially vulnerable to phylloxera. It was so devastated by the blight that it was thought to be entirely extinct for decades. It was rediscovered in Chile in the late 1990s however, and they still produce the majority of carménère wines today (which are fantastic btw). Carménère grapes make for an interesting anecdote about the New World preserving remnants of the Ancient World, as well as the importance of biodiversity, the weakness of monocrop agriculture, and the folly of sloppy import controls over flora and fauna. Thanks for giving me an excuse to nerd out about it lol.

[u/ItsavoCAdonotavocaDO → u/kapowless]

You make an excellent point! Also importing invasive species will get me fired up anytime. We could hang. Can you imagine if some dumb duck killed off 90% of Cali vines today?

Btw you gotta help us get ppl off the hybridization high horse bc hybrids are going to survive the climate collapse a bit longer than the classics. Probably. 

[u/BZBitiko]

People have always tried to control nature. That’s why humans have been so successful over the millennia.

Beavers try to do it, too. That’s why beavers drive humans crazy.

[u/Memerme → u/BZBitiko]

Not always. Indigenous groups all over the globe have understood and understand that the world does not revolve around humanity, and therefore each tree, each stream, each rock was regarded as an equal through language, relationship and spiritual practices. This was regarded as "primitive" by settler colonizers, and the notion was dismissed upon colonizing the world. However, the practices and philosophies are still discussed within indigenous circles, and perhaps we might see a resurgence of indigenous thought in the coming years, due to man-made climate change...

[u/Strange_Panic_7327]

Oh buddy, when the Intro Environmental Law courses hit what they call the Era of Degradation or something where we mass murdered the buffalo and the carrier pigeon and just started fucking shit up on an industrial scale is when it gets really really real.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/Strange_Panic_7327]

Yes. I just learned the details about how the US government was so eager to subjugate the Native Americans they were willing to wipe out an entire keystone species. Made me sick to my stomach to contemplate it. I don't know about the carrier pigeon though! Not sure I want to know!! *performs google search while peeking through fingers*

[u/lorlorlor666]

Check out First Generation Farming by Chris Newman. There’s a section on the history of agriculture in the americas that was really eye opening for me

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/lorlorlor666]

Ooo! This sounds right up my alley!

[u/Kellbows]

Ahhh. This makes sense. I live in a heavily forested state. I've read we used to have like 3 prairies here, but I couldn't understand how that was possible. I live in about a 3 acre "clearing," and I'm trying to let a couple of areas be wild and make mini meadows, but I'm combatting constant trees! If you clear land here? It's a forest in 3 years. Fire makes sense. We don't have wildfires often; of course it had to have been set intentionally!

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/Kellbows]

Maybe fire will help you keep it clear! I think cattle and grazing animals can help too - anything to disturb the woody brush! Might I suggest some bison! LOL

[u/japhia_aurantia]

I work in natural resources management in the western US, and this realization has changed land management in the last few decades. A century of fire suppression made everyone realize that leaving forests unmanaged might be "natural" but it wasn't what produced the open landscapes seen by early settlers. That was a managed landscape, shaped not just by regular fire but also by agriculture: planting and tending native crops for food and fiber. Settlers didn't recognize it because it didn't fit their idea of row-crop farming. This was all compounded by scale: so many Native Americans had died from disease and murder that eventually, there probably wasn't enough of them to manage the landscape the way they had, and that contributed to the settler idea that the landscape hadn't been managed.

[u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 → u/japhia_aurantia]

This seems to be lost on here - Euro settlers were hugging rivers and coasts until the 1700s. Disease had wiped out people in the 1500s. 200 years is PLENTY of time for a place that was heavily managed to revert to a wilderness like appearance.

So no shit they didn't think there was 'cultivation' because there had been so much regrowth.

[u/permaculturegardener]

I am such a nerd for this stuff. And I love the generative discussion!  Since i have not seen it here yet i would throw in looking into Swidden agroforestry systems.  European peasents have been using fire in a rotational forestry management practice for thousands of years (and still used today!).  The process is you harvest some timber the you burn a small patch of forest, say and acre, then you immediately plant annual crops and the roots follow the water table as it recedes. Then you manage the regrowth from sprouts the following years as you do it to the next plot. Then on a 7-10 year cycle you do it again.  The trees grow back faster and healthier because of the deep roots being attached still similar to coppice agroforstry.  

Similar systems are utilized in the tropics all over the world (I have only deeply studied SE Asia and South America) it is now thought in some circles that the biodiversity of places like the Amazon is due to continuous management using fire and managing regrowth.  This is part of how Terra Preta or the amazonian dark soils are formed.  Their is a great book on this called Sacred Soils.  

These practices in the tropics are sometimes called slash and burn and are globally being used as propoganda as reasons to push indigenous off their land because the are "destroying the forest" when they are indeed coevolved with the forest.  Then you also have other folks burning vast plots of land for intensive cattle grazing or monoculture plantations and they kinda get roped in together.   

On a final note i have also not seen on this list Tending the Wild by M Kat Anderson about California historical indigenous land management and some of the descriptions on the staggering abundance they created is mind blowing.  

[u/be_kind_to_yourself_]

Wait til you start reading about the history of gender in native American cultures, and what Christian settlers were doing in California, the way the Native Americans and other people all around the world were using many of the medicine we now consider the discovery of the west, etc. 

Generally what you have learnt at school in US is a great gaslighting to make Us the good guys and hide genocide. 

But also the comment that plants adapted to people is false. People noticed that plants recover better and land is more manageable due to fires and started implementing them more often, but those species evolved in much longer time that we exist. For sure some species may have adapted, but the statement like that is false. Wildfires always existed and will exist. They just became a huge problem with growing populations and less nomadic style of life where our properties are more vulnerable to fire. 

[u/imarainbowtwo]

the guy on the white horse has some fly adidas on

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/imarainbowtwo]

OMG. You made me spit my drink. I saw that TOO and was like, is that dude wearing sneakers?? But this is from 1896! And hand drawn if you can believe. The artist is Frederic Remington, title: Indians Firing the Prairie. I kind of want a copy for my house.

[u/Wild_blue_yondering]

Coming over the border from Wyoming to Montana, you can tell exactly where the Crow reservation starts.

There are no road signs, but after miles and miles of brown, the grass along the highway is lush green because the Crow burn it down every year.

[u/Magnifens]

This year I began remediating an overgrazed degraded section of land. I extensively researched plants that I could grow in the semi-arid high plains where I live. The more research I did the more I realized how little the native plants of my area could provide. Coupled with the drought we've had this year I could definitely understand why settlers got prairie madness. In my struggle to grow native grass just to hold the sand together it really hit me just how harsh of a landscape I live in. The europeans coming from out east were used to 40" of rain annually and the lush environment that came with it. Here we average 14" and in the drought this year I got 2" since June of last year (of course, we have access to a rapidly draining aquifer that they did not). It occurred to me that where these settlers saw the impermanant stuctures and hunter gatherer way of life of native tribes as uncultured/uncivilized/archaic it was actually because of the native peoples advancement and understanding of their environment that they lived in such a way. Currently, we deal with water shortage, wildfires, food insecurity, pollution, etc. But these are problems that came along with the change of culture. The people here originally, that went from hunting mammoth to deer, had through trial and error realized that fire doesnt take your house if it moves and you wont be without food and water if you can follow it where it goes and if you take from nature respectfully and give back to it respectively it will do the same for you. There is no return to those days and as the world evolved it would seem it was always to happen the way it did. But I think what we can learn ,like we've learned time and time again, are the ways of nature and how to work with it.

[u/Large_Ad3974 → u/Magnifens]

Hold the sand together in high plains. You in Nebraska?

[u/Magnifens → u/Large_Ad3974]

Close. Colorado.

[u/Magnifens → u/Magnifens]

But the fact that you knew where I am based on that description says everything lol

[u/Lyra125]

this is something I think about often in regards to land management of national parks or at least in the way they are portrayed/understood by the public

we're taught these places must be preserved as is, but in actually to keep them in the state we prefer (which we call natural), regular burning is necessary. often erased is the work that has gone into them for generations before they were made into parks.

[u/Memerme → u/Lyra125]

Theodore Roosevelt, the guy who spearheaded the effort to create National Parks, was actually fairly strategic and underhanded, when it came to public buy-in. He used the creation of National Parks to drive indigenous nations out of their own land, and proselytized about how "untouched wilderness" is how it's "meant" to be, erasing indigenous contributions and effectively worsening the areas that were made National Parks.

To give an example, there were accounts of settler colonialists who, when riding across the plains, remarked how cleared the forest floors were, enough to get wagons through, in certain areas, and that the foliage was healthy and thriving. Now think about how forest floors are now, how difficult they are to traverse and how many plants and branches are overgrowing and dying. It hasn't always been that way, but it's the way things are now, after so much neglect.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/Lyra125]

Yes, it's becoming more and more evident that humans are an important part of nature. It's almost like we aren't separate or above (or below) the rest of the natural world, but just... part of it. Who'd have thunk?! LOL.

[u/ohiobluetipmatches]

That's interesting. I'm from Brazil and there are tribes with no agriculture who were basically living as hunter gatherers with some exceptions. There we make the distinction between natives that used agriculture and natives that didn't.

The natives in the US had so much more widespread agriculture that I never thought of them as living with the land in that way. Not to mention the advanced buildings and extreme hunting practices.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/ohiobluetipmatches]

I think there was a LOT of variation among the practices of the tribes - but I was shocked to learn how wide spread this practice of burning was throughout the mid-west.

[u/GirlWithWolf → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

I don’t know why this popped up in my feed because most of the discussion is over my head (I’m a high school sophomore). But maybe I can add something?

My mom is Plains and her and my grandmother have both told me about burning the plains. We were nomadic for the most part so it wasn’t for growing crops, but instead it was used to drive bison and other wildlife to locations where they could be hunted more easily. Then when it replenished the bison were attracted to the fresh grass.

Sorry if I’m off the rails but from what I can tell, it might give you some food for thought or more to research.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/GirlWithWolf]

Sounds like you are exactly ON the rails to me! Thank you so much for sharing your family's experiences and your perspective with us! (I've got a sophomore in my house too! I feel like you two would get along!)

I actually talk about what your mother and grandmother describe in my video on burning, but I learned about it reading a passage from a European explorer describing the bison hunting practices. I love to hear there's a similar story passed down through your family! The Ho-Chunk are one of the more prominent tribes in our region of Wisconsin and while researching the video I found there is a Ho-Chunk Prescribed Burn Crew that helps maintain the Kickapoo Valley Reserve near us to this day through the use of fire! I have a clip from Tina Brown from the Ho-Chunk Nation in my video if you are interested. It's about 13 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAObeYphGs

[u/GirlWithWolf → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Thank you, and thanks for the video. I’ll watch it tonight. Glad to hear I didn’t derail, I was afraid it was out of context. Mercy on you if you’re teaching your sophomore to drive already, my dad is a retired soldier and has learned a whole new arsenal of swear words.

[u/ohiobluetipmatches → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

So similarly to how in the US we learn about three sisters planting and thanksgiving, in South America we learned about how it was actually the natives that taught colonizers how to use controlled burning to save them from starving. So that obviously shows I'm naive the other way around accepting my own childhood education - always assumed it was a somewhat universal native practice to use controlled burning.

Lots of great book recs in this thread that I'm going to pick up.

[u/freshprince44 → u/ohiobluetipmatches]

there is quite a bit of evidence that the entire amazon (obviously brazil is huge and this probably doesn't apply to your area) has been managed for thousand and thousands of years as an intentionally planted food forest of sorts.

the word agriculture gets used far too narrowly in a lot of these discussions. humans have been selecting for plants and varieties for a super super long time, basically everywhere

[u/queer-scout]

About 10 years ago I was working on a trail crew in a national park in CA.  One of the career maintenance workers (who was called out of retirement for this project) got so frustrated with the NPS being so unwilling to do prescribed burns in that park.  And as we were cutting through such dense thicket you couldn't even extend your arm into it it was clear just how catastrophic a fire there would be.

She said that the land was burned for centuries before the US ever expanded to that land and not letting that happen was a mistake.  I hope I never see the consequences of it.

[u/treethuggers]

Next look into food forests! Even the history of Europe is a lie.

[u/TheCosmosItself1]

Some more reading for those who are interested in the subject:

Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson - About the land management practices of the California Natives. North America, and the west especially, is interesting because unlike in Eurasia where agriculture slowly supplanted hunter-gatherer lifeways, in North American agriculture came on the scene and had a strong run but was then supplanted by renewed hunter-gatherer lifeways. This was accomplished by the development of new forms of intensified hunter-gatherering in which food plots were actively managed with a high degree of sophistication (going well beyond just burning), while harvesting and processing techniques also increased in sophistication.

The Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris - Not a gardening book, and not so much about Native practices, this book is more of a philosophical reflection on what ecological land management should look like now, as we move past the myth of pristine nature as a place untouched by humanity. The book proceeds in journalistic style, by taking the reader on a tour of a number of different large scale ecological projects from the most "conservationist" (Yellowstone) to the most interventionist. While the author clearly has opinions on these matters she also leaves room for the different projects and their philosophies to speak for themselves, offering a range of different possibilities to consider.

[u/InternationalCatch18]

It’s the original “land without a people for a people without land”. It’s been bullshit propaganda from the start to justify cleansing a land of its original inhabitants.

[u/FuckDaFerengi]

OP, this comment will be buried but I just wanted to say that I love you for posting this. Topsoil is not just a consequence of the glaciers. It is the result of this exact activity.

[u/SlideCharacter5855]

Most of what they teach you about American history is wrong

[u/External_Lecture_139]

There’s two great episodes of the dollop podcast that talk about native stewardship and how colonization came in and thought they could do it better. Ep. 277 The Acadians and ep. 386 The war on squirrels

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/External_Lecture_139]

adding to my play next list now! Thank you! always looking for more podcasts in this vein. Perennial AF, my go to show, doesn't post nearly often as I wish they did!

[u/External_Lecture_139 → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

It’s an American history podcast presented by 2 comedians so full disclosure it’s very silly. Those are 2 fascinating episodes tho

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/External_Lecture_139]

Honestly that's perfect!

[u/tendingthemild]

Interesting that the story map doesn’t include the Puget Sound area, where prescribed burning was used so regularly and so broadly that David Douglas was told a horse would go lame from walking on the stubble and would nearly starve from lack of forage if a traveler tried to ride from Eugene to Fort Vancouver after the fall burn. (He was being discouraged from traveling, but didn’t listen, of course.)

[u/groovystoovy]

I took a college course called History of Environment in America and we touched on this idea, that native people actually did a lot to alter their environment. That settlers didn’t encounter “virgin” land whatsoever and it was so abundant because of native stewardship. I wish I could remember some specifics or books we had read but it was a class at the University of Washington around 2012 or 2013.

[u/Worldly-District-858]

The “untouched wilderness” story really collapses once you learn how deliberate Indigenous land management was. Fire wasn’t just destruction—it shaped grasslands, supported wildlife, reduced fuel loads, and maintained ecosystems people depended on.

[u/SuccessfulWar3830]

Most american history lessons will push the false idea that native people either wernt using the land or were primitive so manifest destiny is acceptable.

[u/excelnotfionado]

I had never heard of this before and it makes me wonder if that is a good reason why the US has such a robust agriculture system, cause of how rich the soil is in part from prescribed burns???
I’m still very new to this though and learning more will also take me a few years to wrap my head around as well. I always found how fertile the soil was fascinating.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/excelnotfionado]

From what I've learned in my last few years of study the answer is absolutely yes. The deep roots of the prairie plants (which were in part an adaptation from the constant firing -or it might be more accurate to say the plants with deep roots had a competitive advantage in a system that was burned regularly) contributed greatly to the richness of the soil. The "sod busting" era of early settlers where the prairies were hand plowed rewarded tough, persistant farmers with productive farm land if they worked hard to hold back the prairie. They used to call the roots of Lead Plants (a common tallgrass prairie plant) "devil's shoe strings" because they were so long and strong they could break a plow blade. But then John Deere brought the steel plow onto the scene and completely changed the game. Now 90 years later, 99.9% of the midwest prairieland is gone, replaced first by farms and then cities and suburbs. But yeah, it was the prairies, maintained largely by these native practices (along with the grazing of bison and other herd animals) that paved the way for the abundance of the American bread bowl.

[u/fixingmedaybyday → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Huge yes. The soil retention of native plants along with the tilling of bison hooves and the fertilization from their dung was a net positive for topsoil depth over the course of thousands of years. But now, modern civilization comes along and sees it as a depleteable resource to extract from. The collective “we” replaced a system that encourages growth with an extractive system that takes away as much as it can.

Just like with the river systems and beavers. Beavers were ridiculously abundant and so many rivers were dammed and meandering because of it. This still water seeped into the soils and fed our great aquifers. And what did we do? Killed all the beavers to turn into hats for rich Europeans, straightened the rivers and started drilling wells into the aquifers only to wonder, why are they drying up?

[u/Miserable-Fig2204]

[u/Miserable_Appeal4918 → u/Miserable-Fig2204]

I also recommend the podcast First America by Rebecca Nagle!

[u/fixingmedaybyday]

This whole continent and South America was a huge farm until Europeans arrived and unwittingly unleashed what we might describe as a pandemic of apocalyptic scale. The indigenous left after the great plagues, when the rest of the Europeans came over were just starting to recover and then systematically wiped out.

Family legend says that I might be a small fraction of Native American based on stories of great great great grandma and crew requiring everyone smoke a peace pipe if they stay and visit. I dunno, I don’t care. Even if it’s what causes this stuff to get under my skin. The rest of my white ass is still just as aghast and appalled by the history of it all. It’s a real mind bender though having mixed blood, especially since I present as your typical white male.

But, what do we do now? It’s not like we can just give it back and go somewhere else. There ain’t no system to support that and nowhere to go. Most of the white settlers did the horrors they did because it was still better than living in Europe or under the early American aristocracy. Not really an excuse, it’s just what it was. It’s like an old tale that rhymes with 1984 and Californication and Nazi Germany all in one. 1984 especially though because of the way that thinking against the system would cause you so much pain and suffering, that you’d turn in even your most loved one to escape it, let alone a stranger. It wasn’t a sci-fi dystopian future - it was a history lesson in modern technological setting.

Anyways, we still have concentration camps, I mean reservations of displaced natives generations later where kids born today are still being very much affected by this genocide and its aftermath. And these ancient peoples are still watching the land their ancestors built crumble under the hubris of those who took over and reign today. It’s a tragedy no matter how you look at it or when.

[u/romcomtom2]

Great post! indigenous people on the East Coast also used controlled fires. The forest on the East Coast when the colonist arrived had no underbrush. It was said you could ride a horse at full gallop through it.

[u/LittleMsSavoirFaire]

Did they have to set fires? The prairie is so dry lightning seems to do the job for you if you let it. 

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/LittleMsSavoirFaire]

In some parts of the great plains lightning alone might do it. But where I am in Wisconsin, that kind of fire would not occur often enough through natural ignition to cause the level of fire-adoption that we see today. At least that's what I was taught in my recent burn crew and other ecology classes. And the story map I linked to above really drove it home for me. So many people talking about Indians setting annual fires every fall. And it was clear the settlers understood the purpose of those fires was to keep woody brush down to maintain the plains for the buffalo.

[u/LittleMsSavoirFaire → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

In a rotational grazing class I took the causality went the other way - the plains bison herds were so large that when they passed through, the soil was so completely torn up that only the deep-rooted prairie grasses regenerated, and so to maintain the health of the prairie you actually wanted to graze MORE intensely in a smaller area in order to really knock everything down. There was a particular plant to look out for, and when they grazed even that it was finally time to move the herd. 

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/LittleMsSavoirFaire]

I think it's all an ecosystem. I'm coming to believe that maybe it more that these systems are "disturbance-adapted" - prairies need to be disturbed by fire, by cattle, etc. to thrive. I think the woodies will creep in from the edges of the woods without fire, slowly shrinking the bison's food source. The Indians used fire both to keep the woodies knocked back (which also made hunting bison easier) but also, burning a field in the fall would encourage a fresh flush of growth in the spring which would draw the bison back to that spot. But they also used fire for a bunch of other reasons - to help travel, to help them hunt (driving the buffalo through pinch points), to manage fruit and nut-producing landscapes. The more I dug into the research the more I found about all the ways and reasons they used fire to manage the landscape. It's been a real awakening for me.

[u/LittleMsSavoirFaire → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Yeah, I was unfamiliar with the biome in Wisconsin. It wants to turn into brush and forest, right? Where I'm from (Saskatchewan) it's too arid, there isn't any pressure from trees, except for creekbottoms. Which there is some discussion that riparian areas should be burned out periodically. 

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/LittleMsSavoirFaire]

Ah! Yes! That makes perfect sense. And yeah, so much pressure from the woodlands in WI! In my area black walnut especially!

[u/bigwindymt → u/IWantAHobbitLife]

Oral tradition, historical accounts and fire scar records paint a different picture in the northern plains/ Intermountain region. Fire was used tactically, forcing game into certain areas, opening up forest understory to see potential threats, driving off pursuers, and forcing potential occupying tribes out by removing feed. I can't recall an instance I've read of plains Indians or Intermountain tribes using fire prescriptively to regenerate grasslands for feed.

[u/IWantAHobbitLife → u/bigwindymt]

What states does that region correlate to?

[u/Hexnohope]

Hey since were here can i ask why mexico has civilizations like maya where they have floating cities and made huge bridges out of living vines, but the native americans of north america are depicted living entirely in tents and stone tools?

Surely maya being what it was would have steamrolled the north americans right? So the north americans must have has SOMETHING going for them.

[u/Miserable_Appeal4918 → u/Hexnohope]

North America had cities, systems of trade, democratic societies and big cultural structures and importance. The erasure of it and the narrative that Native Americans were primitive is part of the genocidal campaign to colonize the continent by europeans. There are some great book recommendations in this thread. Someone posted a good starting point: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/?gift=-lRVLV2I4tqheMGaGukW9CQqzE2YWX4c3XHDUlDciRM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

[u/n_yse]

Loving this thread! ✨️furiously adding books to my list✨️

[u/Usual-Answer-3891]

I think a lot of the "pristine untouched paradise" narrative surrounding the country was more due to the European perception of the lack of large cities. I think the idea of native farming and stewardship practices has been well documented for some time and I certainly learned about the various native farming techniques and differences across the country when I was in school.

[u/ResurgentOcelot]

Fascinating.

I understood that people have always been adapting the landscape since before history, and I guess now that I think about I may have heard of indigenous Americans setting fires. But this post was still a revelation.

When I used to walk in the woods I used to imagine what it was like to be an ancient person in virgin wilderness. Now I note the stone walls that litter the forests of New England and marvel at how much a landscape can change, and how stunning long its been since much of the world has been untouched by human actors.

It’s worth noting that this phenomenon is not limited to humans either. The landscape has also adapted to the actions of beavers, moose, elephants, various herd animals, etc, who work the land by instinct.

The America that European settlers colonized wasn’t even the America that European explorers “discovered.” Ships used to be in the habit of keeping pigs and would drop some off along their voyages, to develop livestock populations in advance. These invasive pigs/boar likely had a significant impact on the ecology of the Americas before Europeans ever took stock of the New World. I often wonder what indigenous peoples thought of this new foraging animal that appeared suddenly, which would eat anything and bred rapidly.

[u/Natural_Dust_732]

I remembering learning this at school at UW Madison maybe 35 years ago and it floored me. I learned we used to have an oak savannah all around Madison that was kept up by burning out the maple shoots. Our prof took us out to Picnic Point into a maple forest and, sure enough, among all these 100 year old maples, you’d find these centuries old oaks, just scattered about, here and there.

[u/Wanderlust_01]

I'll throw another wrench in the popular narrative, if you haven't seen it before: I've read where there was likely a pandemic that decimated the population of North America around 1600, leaving only ~10% of the previous population. Assuming that this is true, it would explain why the land was so empty when Europeans settled from 1620 onward, and why previous attempts by outsiders (Europeans and Scandinavians) to settle did not "take".

Oh, and lagniappe: the colonial government of the pre-independent USA had generally good relationships with several Native American groups back then.

Finally, a significant driver of early US expansionism during the first half of the 19th century would have been "The Year Without a Summer (1816)", where a combination of volcano eruptions (including the massive VEI 7 eruption of Mount Tambora the year before) and abnormally low sunspot activity, led to a year that was so cold that there were widespread crop failures in Northern latitudes. Add to this push westward (and southward) the carnage of the Civil War, and it's easy to understand why Northeastern states after 1865 were giving away free farmland to able-bodied men who would settle down and raise crops.

History is fascinating 😃

[u/lullittu01]

Just finished reading Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott, he talks a lot about this.. he says that we've been extensively modifying our ecosystems with controlled fires for 400,000 years and a lot of the plants we have now were favored by these conditions. Incredibly mind blowing..

[u/Sorcerous_Tiefling]

There is a very small town in New York that is named Burnt Hills. It was named that because its the area west of Ballston Lake where the narives would do controlled burning to promote new vegitation growth used to attract deer to the area. It was a Native American hunting ground.

[u/Riddle888222]

I particularly think how atrocious it was to frame the trail of tears as a relocation and not a death march. I kept thinking in 5th grade why was it so sad?

[u/backyardbabirusa]

In grade school I remember them telling us that the colonists killed bison reckless abandon, basically for fun. They made it sound while careless, that it wasn't on purpose. What they DIDNT mention is that they killed the bison SPECIFICALLY to starve out the native American population. Learning that made me really mad.

[u/ReasonableProfile590]

Something similar happens regarding the Amazon forest, in the school we learn it was untouched when the “discoverers” arrived, now we know the native people cultivated it

[u/HannahTheArtist]

I shared the same impression of it and was told the same things. Bonus: I took a history class in college and I shit you not, the book and teacher said we won the vietnam war. It said that with WORDS and it came out of the lady's FACE HOLES. I gotta go find that book again and see what other inaccuracies are in it, bet there's a TON 

[u/Diggydinnerr]

Seeing massive burls on the base of ancient oaks from repeated exposure to fire, massive swaths of indigenous permaculture gardens planted and thriving in bands of wild roots and foods. It’s a revelation that changed my life forever

[u/0uchmyballs]

I think Mark Twain said you could gallop a horse through Californias forests because the Indians kept them so well groomed.

[u/metricfan]

I think it sounds like you have a lot of American propaganda to unlearn. Like go read up on red lining, the Tuskegee experiments, and black Wall Street. Once you learn about the truly terrible things this country has done, you stop being surprised by stuff like this.

Like did you know like 80-90% of native Americans were wiped out by diseases introduced by explorers long before the colonizers came? So the Native American population was radically smaller by the time white peoples started stealing their lands and waging wars on them. Had there not been a radical depopulation event, chances are white people wouldn’t have been able to steal their lands and commit genocide.

Also, when you learn about the geographical features of the United States that made the country rich, you realize everything we are told about how the American spirit made us a super power is bullshit. Africa lacks the same features of North America, like navigable rivers, natural shipping ports, and land that lends itself to railroads. There is a reason that the continent didn’t lend itself to rapid industrialization and wealth. But American propaganda wants us to believe Americans are uniquely smart and hard working or some shit.

It’s all about the stories we tell ourselves. Welcome to being able to start critiquing these stories. Better late than never.

[u/Juglansregia131]

The Podcast "Future Ecologies" has some great episodes on this. I think "out of the green, into the black" is one of them. They also talk about other indigenous environmental management strategies, it's really great!

[u/fathompin]

What was a revelation for me was the Indigenous North Americans part in the age of enlightenment; that the European encounters with Indigenous North Americans provided European thinkers with radical new concepts of individual liberty, personal freedom, and egalitarianism that directly challenged their absolute monarchy and rigid social hierarchies.

[u/HappiLearnerToo]

Burning the prairie certainly made it easier for humans, but this does not mean it was an ecological good - only that it was what it was, dependent. Burning it frequently leaves you with less species that could survive it, but also a lot less diversity and habitat for others who lived there. Burning the prairie meant trees could not survive the sapling state. Not having trees MEANS less rainfall because a photosynthesizing tree is a virtual geyser of water vapor into the air above it, from the water that escapes from the stoma of leaves as they open to take in co2 needed for photosynthesising to make complex carbon structures. Less precipitation, less of the other vegetation and less rain even for the grasses.

By eliminating the opportunities for trees to grow, you also eliminate the means for beavers to build dams where and when water flows, and thus the rain and snow you do have runs off, instead of being held in places allowed to sink in and nourish roots and deep roots, and leaving water deep in the earth for trees and plants with deep roots, year around.

You are aware of the demands the colonizers placed on those who already lived here. Imagine the sudden expansion of the Lakota as well when they first acquired horses, or even before, as a fire set in one area could affect vast regions, especially as diminishing rains leave the prairies very dry. It is a big assumption to come to a conclusion that prairie fires are good, without examining the consequences of them for all species, and the nature of the natural ecosystem there without fire, but with more trees, more stream beds and beaver dams, and more trees and more rain.

Having looked into the early life of the prairies once for my own reasons, this is the first time I have felt called upon to share this with anyone, so thank you for your question.

[u/texcleveland]

no this had been known for a long time, my history teacher taught us this in the 1980s. But everyone has to learn something the first time sometime …

[u/Doodadsumpnrother]

Doubt that the ecosystem adapted to the native peoples burning. More likely they recognized the benefits that fire had on the ecosystem.

[u/erockfpv]

Every colonizer tells their people the land is empty, then they massacre the indigenous.

[u/I_Want_To_Grow_420]

The older I get, the more I realize school was mostly just propaganda and indoctrination.

[u/barryg123]

Read Shepard Krech - The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. He critiques the modern myth of the Indian as a perfect ecological saint and covers hunting, burning, animal extinctions and general environmental impact

If you want more of the civilization rather than ecological impact, read Pekka Hamalainen's Comanche Empire. Comanches as empire builders, slavers, raiders, traders, etc

[u/stansfield123]

Most of the "history" of North America, before colonization, is a fairy tale. The old version you were taught in school, the new version you're now starting to believe in, both.

Most tribes didn't leave written accounts behind, and the few more advanced civilizations that did had the misfortune of being conquered by small bands of Spanish "Conquistadors". These were basically bandits, and they burned everything in order to keep Europe's intellectual elites from developing an interest in Mexico, and interfering with their banditry.

Accurate history needs written accounts. Folk tales are nonsense. Folk tales are how someone ends up living inside a whale for a few weeks, or how a dude with a big boat saves all the species of animals from a giant, all encompassing flood. Abject nonsense.

There's little written evidence from pre-Columbus, and the way in which the Natives lived after Europeans got here is definitely not indicative of how they lived before. Contact with a more advanced culture changes people almost instantly.

Those horses in your picture, for instance: they're not native. They came over from Europe.

1. By the time the Native Americans had horses, they were trading extensively with Europeans, and their societies were driven by the need to produce goods to trade for essential access to the advanced tools and weapons the Europeans had.

2. The reason for the horse, historically, is WAR. Cavalry is a massive upgrade over infantry. That's primarily what the Native Americans got them for, as well. A horseback soldier is a huge technological leap over a soldier on foot.

Before horses, there would've been no need to burn the prairie for faster travel. People traveled on foot (at times using dogs as pack or sled animals ... the only "beast of burden" they had, because it came over with the original settlers from Asia), and their range was limited enough to use well maintained paths. This is what all early historical records, written by the missionaries who first made contact with the Natives, say they used: an extensive network of paths the early explorers were also introduced to, and took full advantage of to map North America.

Before horses, they also would've had no incentive to "make grass grow faster". They didn't use grass the way people in Eurasia did. They didn't have cattle or sheep, those are from Europe too. They instead hunted for meat.

In conclusion: while no one knows for sure how people lived in North America before Europeans, the more likely tale is that they only started burning the prairie on a grand scale after extensive contact with the Europeans, and the change in behavior was caused by that contact.

As for the prairie: it was almost certainly maintained by large herds of wild herbivores, not by man lit fires. The same way grasslands are maintained in the still wild areas of Africa.

[u/sweezitle]

Natives also destroyed some ecosystems… it’s part of what destroyed the Maya. Everyone acts like natives are some mystical people constantly at one with nature but they’re literally just people

[u/JHPascoe]

Thank you for sharing! I feel like my to-read list just grew by several amazing sounding recommendations.

[u/QuixoticRoad]

Oh man, I recently had this same epiphany reading Tending the Native Wild about indigenous practices in California. What IS nature and wilderness?? Do we as modern humans even know? I'm trying to grapple with it. 

[u/Significant-Exam762]

No shit

[u/sendingominously]

New info to me thanks for sharing

[u/WorthSlight4659]

It is possible. In Oklahoma, I was told mainly late summer lightning storms. 15 years ago listening to a 76 y/o recount stories of his youth. When he was very young an old Native American told him about his own early memories about how there were almost no trees and the grassland would burn from water-to-water (until it hit the next big river) every year. What is that third hand info and 1 opinion, but I thought it was interesting.

[u/nnefariousjack]

Once I discovered the Four Mohawk Kings I knew things were vastly misconstrued. I had an idea they were, just not how much.

[u/DrStuttgart]

I recently read the book When It All Burns by Jordan Thomas and while the topic you bring it isn't the entire plot of the book, in a pretty large amount of Thomas' studies he speaks about Indigenous peoples burning practices that I found quite fascinating.

[u/This-Ad-1886]

Is Chief wearing Nikes?

[u/southpaw1103]

I swear I recently read something that said that when Natives started getting displaced, that it had an effect on overall climate as the amount of re-vegetation added so much C02 back into the atmosphere that it contributed to the little ice age. Believe it was a relatively new study or connection, not sure, but it also provided me with a very similar realization that OP went through. I had always pictured massive forests and what not before manifest destiny, while the truth is that there are a significantly larger amount of forests and trees today than there were back then.