- 3 - Indians and the Environment

Every people adopts environmental strategies permitting its life as a distinct entity; when these strategies fail the individuals may survive, but their society is condemned. Sometimes even the individuals may die: this is the case of the "political" suicides in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where destitute Kaiowa Guaranis, plagued by suicides, have threatened to commit mass suicide if the Brazilian government does not respect the agreements on their land.

Survival strategies offered to the indigenous peoples are two: the "minimax option", where the exploitation of the resources guarantees the minimal needs of the population. This strategy, adopted by most of Pierre Clastre's "societies without State", has a very soft impact on the environment, but the population must use an enourmous territory for the rotating exploitation of the resources. This strategy is being seriously threatened all over the world by Western civilization.

The second strategy, typical of modern societies, tries to develop all the resources and maximize the production of food. This produces a surplus for meager years and its efficacy depends on the environmental impact, that can be very distructive. We have been shown the political revitalization of societies considered "backward". How much vital are these revitalized societies? Is Subartic hunting still maningful if it is based on aircrafts and snowmobiles? Is it meaningful refusing agrobusiness in Ecuador and Chiapas and proposing the continuation or restitution of the old way of life, while using politically computers and info highways? We have no answer to these questions, but they are worth giving due consideration.

Mesoamerican peoples interacted with thir territory in a way similar to that of other Neolithical populations, but it is surprising to see how water resources, an obstacle to overcome as well as wealth to exploit, become ways for transport and trade. On the highlands the Aztec organized an amphibian city, whose remains are the canals of Xochimilco; the great "lagoon" of Tenochtitlan was exploited rationally with floating fields called "chinampas" and the canals, regularly cleaned, permitted an easy transport of people and goods. Even if the Aztecs could control water well, sometimes the city was flooded so the history of the city is also the story of the building of dams and barrages. The Spaniards admired the vanquished Tenochtitlan and compared it to Venice, but failed to understand its amphibian nature and let its canals be obstructed, with devastating consequences for the city during the centuries.

The Aztecs were only the last major pre-columbian civilization; the Olmecs knew how to exploit their waterways for transport and were perhaps the first to regulate streams and artificial canals. The Lowland Mayas exploited rationally, if not scientifically, their water resources, sailing along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and up the rivers and streams, developing a wonderful trade and communication network. This waternet favored also agriculture and fishing, especially in the lagoon areas of Belize. There NASA satellite recognitions revealed a network of canals even wider and more complex than that we actually can experience by boat. The relationships between the Mayan peoples and water can be also perceived as a conscious education of nature, a passage from chaos to cosmos. Symbols of this relationship are the cults of the rain god Chac and the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue. The need to shape the land totally can be observed in the mounds for healthier houses and the emerging of the temples from the forest, houses for the gods that emphasized what men were doing for themselves. Water regulation gave safety to Mayan housing and economy; it was also a powerful tool of communication, especially when the organization of the forced labor, favored by the prestige of the political and religious elite, moved great masses of population.

The Hohokam culture flourished in today's Phoenix and Tucson basins and in the so-called Papagueria. The desert in Southwestern USA and Northern Mexico comprises various ecological systems of which the Sonora Desert is the richest for its variety of animals and plants. The Hohokam culture developed in the northeastern part of this desert, where there are two different botanical habitats: the lower Colorado region and the western part of the state of Arizona.

The hilly areas of Arizona offer a differentiated and somewhat luxuriant landscape. In the desert there are many species of animals, while rivers and streams have fish and waterfowl. A characteristic of the perennial drainage basins of southern Arizona Basin Range is that they can "disappear" for a reach, where they simply run under the ground. This is caused by the permeability of the superficial layers of ground: the stream disappears when it meets the permeable layers, while it is forced to run on the surface when its bed meets or is made of impermeable rocky layers called reefs. These reefs, that guarantee water even in periods of drought and the formation of marshes or cienegas, determined Hohokam settlements and water management. In the mountainous areas of central Arizona the streams cut the bank walls and run for a long distance on relatively impermeable rocky beds until they sink in the porous plains ground. Another area rich of water is found at the confluences of the tributaries of the Gila river.

The Hohokam culture probably came from Mexico to Arizona, where it fused itself with the Cochise culture between 300 B.C. and 1 A.D. It brought to the new country high yield maize, many types of beans and squashes, irrigation techniques, pit houses, developed pottery and an elaborate art of stone goods and shell ornaments. As sedentary orticulturalists settled in the desert, the Hohokam had to cope with the fact that the beginning of the agricultural season coincided with the dry phase of the rivers. Therefore they created a network of canals that, in the late Formative (500 - 1100 A.D.) spread along more than 1500 kilometers of main irrigation canals. The Hohokam built this network demonstrating a great knowledge of their territory and their capacity of labor to modify their environment. They exploited the natural hydraulic gradient offered by the reefs along the Salt and Gila rivers and constructed the topography of their valleys choosing the sites of fields and villages. Hohokam irrigation system first appeared in 600 - 700 A.D. and reached its most complex phase in the valley of the Salt river, near Pheonix, where three types of irrigation can be found: principal, distribution and lateral canals. In spite of their canal network the Hohokam never built complex hydraulic structures such as permanent dams or weirs nor used artificial lining material to delay water infiltration extensively. Consistently, there was a series of villages with multiple platform mounds situated along the canals at five miles' distance, beginning with the first village five miles downstream from the derivation of the principal canal. The distance between the village clusters varied, but the larger village was usually situated at the end of the system of canals irrigating the area, generally on the upper bank of the river. There were clusters of villages also in the Tucson Basin, but in this much drier area they were much closer to water.

Hohokam settlements had four types of structures: first, the village permanently settled for centuries, with a population of more than 100 individuals, sometimes flourishing to more than 1000 inhabitants. These villages had platforms and ball courts. The second type of settlement was made of hamlets inhabited by less than 100 people, even if they lasted for many decades. Then there were the farms, often inhabited by a single social unit and occupied seasonally for many years; finally, there were individual shelters occupied only during the sowing and harvest seasons.

In the very arid Papagueria two other agricultural techniques were practised: flooding and the so called Ak-chin (stream mouth). The Ak-chin technique is still used by the Papagos and utilizes the flooding caused by heavy tropical rains for irrigation. This technique appeared in 900 A.D. and favored the colonization of the slopes of the bajadas, far from the canals and the perennial and semi-perennial streams, but rich of flood conoids that could be transformed into fields. This type of cultivation requires a lot of labor; therefore it is similar to the dry farming techniques, also practised in Hohokam area, but it is different for the instability of field location and the higher flow of silt.

The Papagos reacted as they have always had, appliyng their minimax strategy, while the Pimas have tried to find a technological solution to demographic growth and scarcity of water. While the Papagos have retained their decentralized organization of authority, consistent with their economy, technological change has forced the Pimas to adopt western democratic forms of government. This choice has favored them in the 19th century, with the boom of wheat crops, but changes in the sorrounding economy undermined their wealth, while the technological control of their harsh desert environment has proved very hard to get. Both the Pimas and Papagos lack indigenous social structures able to cope with their present situation. Concluding, while they have been independent agriculturalists for most of their history, in the Nineties none of them is still such. (from R.A. Hackenberg)

The main contrast between Indians and non Indians has been determined historically by the different meaning and role the land has in the two cultural worlds. While the land is a resource to exploit for the Euroamericans, one that can be sold,rented and owned, for the native Americans it is a mother to respect and cannot be owned privately, since it is the main source of communal spiritual and material wealth. Indian relationship with the land is more a moral link than a mystic one, because sharing the land implies responsibilities.Interaction between native peoples' culture and land is not a static one; it is a dynamic, vital relationship enabling Indian nations to survive as social and cultural entities. The belief to belong to the American land from time immemorial gives clarity and widens Indian voice. This voice has begun to assert itself since the first half of the 20th century, freeing itself from cumbersome interpreters. Indian artistic and literary development is such that many critics call it "Indian Renaissance" in the mid-60s and Indian identity asserts itself deliberately,telling their side of the story, not ours.

S. Momaday's House Made of Dawn, set in the wonderful background of Jemez Pueblo, is the highest point in contemporary Indian literature. The main character, Abel, is the victim par excellence; he comes back home from the 2nd World War alienated by horrors Momaday builds up throughout the novel using a complicated pattern of flashbacks, flashforwards and oneiric suggestions, deeply entrenched in the most profound layers of his Indian heirloom, unveiling the cause of Abel's disease.The main story is Abel's, but others intersecate it: his grandfather Francisco's and fragments of Fray Nicholas' s story, occurred about a century before and timeless songs and storytelling. Events are not told chronologically, but in a circular manner, suggesting that no story is more important than the others.

Abel experiments an extraniating linguistic paralysis in Los Angeles, where he has been relocated; Los Angeles is described as a place of noises that alienate and frighten Abel. Momaday compares these meaningless noises to the sounds of Indian land; in Los Angeles a character, Benally, helps Abel showing him the quest for the "center", that is the place everyone and everything has in a meaningful, precise cultural and personal setting. The songs and poetical lines inserted in the monologue contribute to create the atmosphere of the storytelling, the epiphany of oral tradition. The song "house Made of Dawn" belongs to a Navajo health chant, whose purpose is to attract the Good and ward off the Evil, restoring universal harmony. This song refers also to a precise cultural and geographical place, Tségihi, the White House. Abel's disease is the consequence of a separation from a space of vital importance for his personal and tribal identity. Violence, alcoholism, degradation and racism can be found in Momaday's novel, but a stream of strength opposed to annihilation runs through it: Indian life keeps going on, there are some possibilities of survival. This is represented by the main theme of Native American literature: "going back home", a symbol of escape from a hostile and alienating reality in metropolitan slums and outside the reservations.The reservation is the only place associated to collective and tribal memory, necessary to the well being ad growth of the Indian person. So Abel comes home and the memories of dying Francisco link two lives, beginning this way a healing process in Abel's mind. It is not a happy end, only cluing the possibility of survival.

During the 19th century Bodmer, Catlin and other artists painted Indians holding horn bows. The horn bow originates in the Plateau - Great Basin area, where the big horn sheep live; the Indians traded their precious bows at the tribal rendezvous at a fine price: a bow against two horses. The article goes on describing in detail the making of the bow, from the softening of the ram horns to the finished bow. Today these horn bows are not made any longer by the Indians, but they live among the non-Indian lovers of Indian artifacts, the Old Timers.

The Algonquian speaking Ojibwa are one of the largest Indian nations in North America and live on a wide area of boreal forest, from the Great Lakes region to the plains of Manitoba and Montana.Their ethnical boundary line is rather shaded down with their northern, eastern and southern Algonquian neighbors, but it is more definite with the western Siouan tribes. The Ojibwa or Anishinaabe, never formed tribal units, but organized themselves in bands culturally linked by linguistic and clan ties. The Chippewa, that is the Ojibwas living in Wisconsin and Minnesota, have a story of relatively peaceful contacts with the French, who began colonizing the area at the end of the 16th century. These newcomers sent young Frenchmen to live with the Indians, in order to learn their language and way of life. These coureurs de bois spent their summers at the Chippewa villages organizing the delivery of beaver pelts to their trading forts, then they went back to their country, but after some years more and more Frenchmen began to stop at their Chippewa wives' villages all the year round, favoring the birth of a French-Indian high country culture. This was made possible by Indian inclination to assimilate the European newcomers, but European demographic pressure during the 18th century, animal depletion on Chippewa hunting grounds, the establishment of missions and urban development, provoked serious changes for the native inhabitants.

In the 18th century the Chippewa and other Indian nations were involved in the colonial wars between Britain and France; pushed westward by the wars the Chippewa began a century long conflict with the Sioux tribes that lasted well into the mid-1860s. From the 1820s to the 1860s Wisconsin and Minnesota Chippewa signed many treaties with the USA, selling most of their lands and the mining rights of the rich Lake Superior copper lodes. The treaties recognized the Indian right to hunt and fish in the ceded territories, however, but when they were confined in their small reservation, they discovered that the meager resources had made them even poorer. In 1850 the yearly payment of the ceded lands was transferred from La Pointe, on Lake Superior, to a much more western location in Minnesota, Sandy Lake. This obliged the Wisconsin bands to move there walking for hundreds miles. The reason was usual bribing and exploitation of Indian alcoholism, so delay in payments, bad whiskey and a terrible winter journey in 1850-51 provoked the death of many Wisconsin Chippewa in the so called "deadly march". Desperation during these terrible years was relieved by the failure of trasferring the Chippewa west of Mississippi: Chief Buffalo succeeded in gaining the support of Wisconsin liberal and democratic people and avert this breaking of the treaties. This success has permitted the Chippewa to stay on their ancestral lands and, even if very poor and destitute, they could overcome diseases, starvation and underemployment and survive on a strict margin of economical self-sufficiency for some time.

This historical introduction enable us to understand the present situation in Chippewa reservations, where a strong push to assimilation coexists with the memory of the traditional way of life and a revitalization of old traditions. So the Chippewa exploit the forest and the many lakes of the region. The Chippewa have elaborated their identity on the birch ( for canoes, domed houses called wigwams, and containers), the maple tree (sugar) and wild rice (Zizania palustris). The Chippewa still hunt (especially deer and bears) and fish (especially night spearfishing of sturgeons and other fish attracted by torches) not only in their reservations, but also outside of them, reviving the old treaty clauses. Recently revived Indian spearfishing has provoked the reaction of local groups of non Indians, but international support has favored the Indians in court.

The Subartic Shield is an ethnographic unit, even if linguistically divided into Athapaskans and Algonquians; it is geologically dominated by the Canadian Shield to which three main vegetation regions are superimposed: from north to south the tundra or barren, the northern transitional forest or tundra-forest ecotone and the closed boreal forest proper. Even if the barren areas are exploited seasonally, no Indian group lives permanently there. The uniformity of the Subartic environment has caused a substantial uniformity of way of life, which revolves around the summer-winter cycle. Especially winter has marked the inhabitants, requiring the greatest effort to survive. The Algonquian and Athapaskan peoples of the Subartic were big game hunters and animals supplied most of their food and raw material for colthes and tools, while the rest had vegetal origin. The most important animal game were the Barren Ground caribou, woods caribou and moose; other big game ruminants had very restricted distribution: elk, white tail deer, woods bison and musk - ox. Bear can be found everywhere in the forest but was not often killed, even if it was an important quarry for its fat and religious importance. Beaver was part of the diet especially in the eastern part of the Subartic and other small animals were killed, such as porcupine and hare. Birds and waterfowl were captured only seasonally in certain areas as well as fish. Small fur animals were killed only after the Indians entered the European fur trade, and waterfowl became a more important food resource only after the adoption of rifles and twines.

Subartic hunters needed a great quantity of meat for themselves and their families: in fact a hunter might "starve to death on rabbits", since their meat is lean all the year round. Big game supplied most meat with minimum effort, but when it was scarce the Indians' needs were satisfied by small game and fish, that required much more work. Starving periods are remembered in the reports and hinted by the windigo cannibal of the stories. Periods of bounty and scarcity were complicated by the need of saving food in shelters, while the Indian hunters could rely only on their small dogs for help. Only the Chipewyan used them for transport, while the strong dogs of British origin to draw tobogas were adopted by the Indians only at the end of the 19th century, even if the "sledge dog complex" had been a characteristic feature of the Great North since the 18th century, together with the Métis, the Hudson Bay Company factories and the other fur companies. Dog teams required a large quantity of food; they required rifles if fed with meat and a lot of time and twine nets if fed with fish. Even if it is true that if you are starving you can eat your dogs, while a snowmobile is not edible (and also requires fuel - food), snowmobiles have become common among Indian hunters, together with small areoplanes that transport them on the hunting grounds and avoid very dangerous back and forth journeys. Therefore the Indians find themselves in a very contradictory situation: they exploit technology to ameliorate their living conditions in a very harsh environment, keeping up a way of life which has been traditional for about 300 years. On the other hand they must face the threat posed by the industrial development of the Subartic and market economy, from which their present living tools come; they have less and less to sell on this market economy, beacuse their pelts are more and more losing value, while wearing fur has been contested by that economy's urban animalist children.

Even so called traditional native social organization and its idea of territory derives from the history of the fur trade: the name of "nation" given to the Indian groups is European. Cooperation almost never involved the whole "nation", but it involved smaller units, that sometimes united together in regional bands, whose composition was very amorphous. The local band composed of some families linked by blood ties was the most common hunting group. The settlement of the trading posts gave origin to the post band while the need of controlling the trapping lines favored family dispersion. Also the idea of territory changed: until 1850 "family hunting grounds" did not exist and access to land resources was "free"; the developing of the fur trade and especially of trapping favored the idea of family hunting grounds. They are considered a traditional division of the territory today; however the Indians have not been able to live on hunting without the help of the government for more than 50 years. The closing of most of the Hudson's Bay posts and the fur trade slump has been and is a tragedy for the native peoples of the area, while the efforts to disrupt "traditional" economy has almost destroyed native social organization and favored social collapse and degradation. In fact the Subartic does not offers many jobs to the Indians, discriminated racially and not educated to urban types of jobs. The fur trade, that softened the impact of European contact during the centuries, has proved an obsolete way of life: does this consideration give non Indian society the right to sweep it off as economically useless and culturally meaningless?

The lot of the Native Americans is various: exterminated, glorified or both. Innu lot is being invisible. Goose Bay is the gloomy capital of a world "at the end of the world" for NATO pilots in the middle of Canadian wilderness and has become, for more than 10 years, the main NATO low flights base for German, English and Dutch pilots. Italians and Belgians are going to join them. Those pilots consider this area a "no man's land", but Indians have been living in Nitassinan (eastern Quebec and Labrador) for thousands years. These Algonquian speaking small communities have always lived on hunting caribou, trapping fur animals, killing geese, fishing and berry gathering. The Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) see their quiet, silent country violated by the terrible, shocking noise of foreign armies jets. In the crisis of Innu traditional economy connected to the fur trade and Catholic missions, some Indians have managed to revitalize their hunting culture. Now this effort is threatened by NATO. "Our way of life seem outlawed; the only thing we are allowed to do is getting drunk", says a Sheshatshit Innu inhabitant. Jet sound shocks not only have serious psychological consequences on people and particularly children, but can produce the effects of an explosion on the human body. Also environment is endangered: animals either have miscarriages or stop milkimg or hatching. Waterfowl and fish have been found dead on river and lake shores. This disaster threatens Innu survival in the wilderness. Some Innu community have been forced to leave their hunting grounds and move elsewhere, settling in permanent villages. Many Innu communities have not given up fighting this imposition, especially now that the flights are going to be doubled or tripled on Nitassinan. Though Canadian government has answered repressing Innu protest, the Innu are going to resist.

A report of the Indian revolt that paralyzed Ecuador for a week in June 1994.It was the second time the Indians united to paralyze the country's economic activity and this time they were supported by non Indian workers and peasants. Notwithstanding army intervention they succeeded in having reformed agrarian law in August.

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