This isn't a trick question or a joke. I'm not referring to the well-known Beaver Wars of the 1600s, which were intertribal conflicts of about the same period.
I'm basing this on what I remember from an article 30 years ago. I thought an online search would be a cinch. But I can't find anything about it - either the article or its subject matter. Maybe someone who specializes in this might know.
The gist:
The native American populations believed in totem-like figures for each species. In their mythology, there was supposed to have been a general conference among the species that established that no one species would try to overtake the others. Subsequently, there was a massive population explosion of beavers and their structures somewhere in New England or Canada that led the native American peoples [no, I don't remember which tribe(s)] to claim that the beavers had breached the covenant and to declare war on the beavers. This happened maybe 10 or 20 years before Europeans began the fur trade and provided a strong noneconomic incentive for the native Americans to cooperate with the European fur trade when it showed up (again, can't say which Europeans, although I suppose it was the French).
It was an interesting article and an interesting theory but I can't find anything about it. I think that a lot of my difficulty is in the other intertribal Beaver Wars, which overwhelms the search with irrelevant responses. Or maybe the idea was simply discredited?
I was just curious about this and wondered if there had ever been any followup.
The author is Calvin Martin and it's Chapter Four: "Contact and Nature's Conspiracy" of Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade. Martin's an important figure in North American enviromental history / the economics of the fur trade, but this chapter in particular strikes me as . . . I'll be charitable and say odd.
It makes a big leap from one Cree man's reported story of a legendary war on beavers to a continent wide urge on the part of native people to subdue defeat the wildlife.
Martin's work was really controversial, and his book spawned a whole new volume of essays: "Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Calvin Martin's Keepers of the Game" edited by Shepherd Krech, and including essays from the leading academic experts on various cultures, which then included a response from Martin to his critics.
The above has been pretty hard to write neutrally because I'm actually pretty upset by this, and on reflection, I think I'm completely right to be. The marginalization and ill-treatment of indigenous peoples is a real ongoing aspect of our society and in my opinion, Martin went about thoughtlessly fanning the flames of bigotry towards indigenous people. There has always been a strong popular sentiment that indigenous people are at fault for their own suffering, and need to stop "whining", and Martin's chapter reinforces that narrative.
If he honestly thought that he was reading the historical evidence correctly, and soberly weighed a lot of evidence for and against his theory, that'd be one thing. However, that's not what happened. In his response to his critics, Martin complained that they didn't understand that his book was "an exercise of controlled imagination" and refused to respond to their specific criticisms saying his book "rang true" to him. (This is all in the Shepherd Krech volume.)
I think that aside from what a horrible attitude this is in historical debate, such a sensitive area with potential real-life hurtful consequences for real people was not the place for unconstrained imagination exercises. Honestly, that should be common sense. But then this was the 70s, and apparently my idea of common sense wasn't common.