I'm watching "how the west was won" with Ray Mears, and at one point he talks to a Blackfoot group as they hunt bison.
While talking to them, there is an undertone of environmentalism being spoken about. E.g. They take only what they need, and they use all parts of the bison so as not to be wasteful.
It's my experience that this theme of natives = environmentalists is echoed in a lot of modern pop culture.
But thinking about it, it seems kind of strange. Environmentalism seems like a very modern concept to me. And on top of that, while efficiency obviously would be a concern in terms of using all the bison, but it seems like the lifestyle wouldn't lend itself for the same kind of moral concept of environmental conservatism that we have nowadays.
So can anybody expand on this for me? And what of the other North American native groups?
And if environmental conservation wasn't a traditional concern, when did they adopt it?
Sounds like anachronistic moralism to me. Only take what they need? Hunting and foraging isn't a simple walk in the park, it's a significant investment of resources and time, and nobody wants to do it more than they need to. Use all parts of the bison? Almost every pre-modern society does that. You don't waste food and resources out of necessity, not environmentalism.
[Here is the truth about about Native Americans, in the continental US at least: before Columbus, they burned almost the entire country every 1-3 years. That's right, they set fire to most ecosystems around the US almost annually, thereby turning most of the forests in the US into grasslands and savanna.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire)
Native Americans have been enormously shaping, modifying and exploiting nature for thousands of years. Without them burning off the forests annually the landscape of the continent changed immensely.
So yeah this environmentalist image of the Native Americans is really nothing more than new age mumbo jumbo, as well as confusing the actual necessities involved in hunting and gathering societies with modern environmentalism. Note that many Native American societies were sedentary before they got horses, so this nomadic buffalo hunting lifestyles is actually a very recent adoption for many of them.
The association of Native Americans and environmentalism is also a form of perverse racism where the Native Americans are essentially viewed as savages who never left a mark on their environment and as such are almost animals rather than human. Not to say people who believe in such a link actually hold such discriminatory beliefs, but that such beliefs descend from some incredibly racist logic of the past.
Not to mention Native American agricultural developments and techniques are some of the most advanced in human history up to Columbus. That is really very contradictory to the idea of them being super environmentalist.