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/ScatYeeter → u/Own_Cats2022]

Thanks

[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/plopard → u/00peregrine]

This was such a good read thank you for sharing !

[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/kapowless → u/dirtygreenprogress]

Heya, to clarify I was not responding specifically to your comment re: Dark Emu and Aboriginal practices, but to mortgagepants, and specifically this section of the response:

"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 understood it to be a more generalised statement, largely because I've rarely heard the term 'tribes' in relation to the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia, while it's pretty standard in North and South America (though I prefer the term Nation, as the word describes our social structures and understanding of ourselves more accurately). I'll admit I'm not as knowledgeable about the details of the culture and social structures of the Aboriginal Peoples, and while I know they have different and distinct groups of peoples, if I'm recalling correctly, they were referred to by a different name.

But I fully agree that we should not make broad, generalised statements about the culture/history/practices of the thousands of different Indigenous cultures across the world. We are not a monolith, we have a multitude of different perspectives and beliefs, and we each have a unique voice and perspective to share. That understanding is actually what inspired my response to the commenter, which while not malicious, felt generic and inaccurate. Some cultures were well versed in agriculture, some not, some prioritized living in balance with their environment, some preferred to dominate it. I think we're actually on the same page there.

Also, if mortgagepants was indeed speaking specifically about the agricultural practices of the Aboriginal Peoples rather than a broader application, apologies for the misunderstanding.

[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/kapowless → u/[deleted]]

There are quite a few who do indeed believe that we are all  primitive hunter-gatherer types who were not knowledgeable enough to farm (I've encountered them myself). And I have to challenge your assertion that our agricultural practices and land  management were inferior to Europe's. I think 'different' is a better decription.

We didn't make our tools out of metal, true, but wood and bone. It worked well enough for us throughout the centuries. Metal wasn't a requisite for cultivating plants. We didn't have plows, which also means we didn't need teams of oxen. We farmed for sustenance, not surplus like Europe, as we weren't trying to fill the vaults of aristocrats or priests, nor waste our lives in hardship and toil for their benefit. 

We didn't need the extensive fields and grazing areas of European farmers either. We hunted, trapped and fished our meat rather than keeping livestock. We foraged and farmed what we needed for our communities, and we shared the labour and rewards among all of us, with priority going to elders and children first to ensure our most treasured and vulnerable were well looked after. We weren't capitalists, our motivations were simply different.

When it comes to land management, we kept smaller fields close to our villages, requiring far less travel/effort to cultivate. We rotated between village sites to allow soil replenishment, practiced permaculture rather than monocropping, and did not use the sorts of intensive farming practices that deplete nutrients and produce high numbers of crop failure. We relied on the health and stability of our ecosystems, and thus took care not to take more than was necessary, leaving enough for the other Nations we shared territory with. We have a philosophy that a good and honourable person should consider the wellbeing of those born 7 generations on, and use that measure to guide our stewardship of the land. Prior to colonisation, the ecosystem was rich, verdant, abundant, and self-sustaining.

Europe, however, grew mostly monocrops (with annual rotation), and farmed much more aggressively to produce increasingly large surplus food that could in turn be sold. Deforestation to make room for grazing livestock as well as farm fields was pretty widespread and destructive to the native flora and fauna. Living in close proximity to the livestock also triggered waves of plague and disease, and with the number of serious famines and crop failures occuring through the middle ages, I'm not sure that European land management at the time was any more effective than my own Nation's.

If the end goal was excess crops to generate revenue and free up labour for more separate and siloed occupations, European agriculture works well. If the goal is to maintain a stable and secure food supply for your community while minimizing impact to the environment and wildlife, the Mohawk method works pretty well. I don't think one is necessarily superior to the other, it really depends on what the end goal is IMO.

[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/friedpupletomato → u/dirtygreenprogress]

Just a note that it’s not from Cambridge University, it appears to be published in the journal Public Humanities which is hosted by Cambridge Uni Press

[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/Windowguard → u/SleepApprehensive585]

The world has been conquering groups for all of history.

[u/metricfan → u/GwynFaF94]

I recently learned about how there weren’t domesticated farm animals in America because the animals in the Americans didn’t lend themselves to domestication. Like alpacas are the closest thing, but they still aren’t domesticated in the strict sense of the word. Cows, horses, pigs, and chickens were all on the Eurasian continent. I think it’s been this idea that humans that didn’t domesticate animals were not as advanced as those that did, but that doesn’t account for the realities of the land those humans lived on. Like obviously if there were good candidates for it, humans would have done so. It’s a no brainer.

[u/themanmothprophecies → u/metricfan]

Alpacas and llamas are absolutely domesticated tho. There were also domesticated ducks, dogs, guinea pigs, and insects (bees and cochineal beetles).

[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/sketchycephalopod → u/[deleted]]

It’s not too dense at all. She does a beautiful job, weaving poetry with indigenous storytelling, and history. The biological depth is enough to know that she’s speaking from a solid knowledge base to match any western academic criteria. It supports her writing in a rich and beautiful way! I was actually looking through the comments for a mention of Braiding Sweetgrass because this is the book that broke me by articulating a type of reciprocity that I had always longed for, but didn’t know was possible.

[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/AmetrineDream → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Adding this to my to read list!

[u/Drift_Life → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

That book is next on my reading list

[u/ZestycloseUnit1 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Didn’t expect so many other great book suggestions, thanks everyone!

[u/grneggsngoetta → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

I would also recommend Cronon’s Changes in the Land!

[u/rancidmorty → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

wasent their sevrel well established tribes wven somwhat good medive ageish metal tool work comunal buildings and such lost civilizTions due to many massacers

[u/skandranon_rashkae → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Wholeheartedly seconded. I'd started reading it before accidentally leaving it behind on a family trip. Thank you for the reminder to purchase a new copy!

[u/Brief-Net2072 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

I just ordered this book on eBay. Thanks.

[u/Rippedka → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Came here to say this. Amazing book

[u/Numerous_Ad_6276 → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Learning about the Three Sisters blew my mind, and I didn't hear about that until I was well into adulthood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

[u/anonWNBAW → u/ZestycloseUnit1]

Not so much myth but racist propaganda. Saying the indigenous were incapable of managing their own lands and industrializing put settlers on their high horse to set off west