One of the interesting things about pre-Columbian history is that we see some examples of conservation ideologies taking root earlier than you might expect going by the Euro-centric trajectory of environmental science's development. One of my personal favourite examples is the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon's complex of buildings was a massive architectural undertaking, built in what is currently New Mexico between the 10th and 12th centuries. Its most impressive building, Pueblo Bonito, remained the largest building north of Mexico until the 19th century. The exact purpose of Chaco Canyon is not fully known, but many believe it was a spiritual hub in the Southwest. It was connected by massive roads to pilgrimage destinations all over the area.

The Ancestral Puebloans lived in a harsh environment, and they were masters of trying to manipulate it for their survival. They developed many different farming and irrigation techniques to be as adaptable as possible to environmental change - if the weather changed so that one was no longer viable, they had backups upon backups ready. However, there is one area in which they overreached. The buildings of Chaco Canyon required massive amounts of timber to support their adobe construction. Once the local timber sources were exhausted, much of the timber was sourced from the Chuska Mountains, which were significantly deforested in the effort to build up Chaco.

In the 12th century, however, Chaco Canyon was abandoned. It's thought to have been due to environmental problems, including the deforestation. The Ancestral Puebloans dispersed to related communities in other parts of the Southwest, including the area around Mesa Verde where they would later build their magnificent cliff palaces. While some of the climate challenges that the Chacaoans faced were not manmade, in other ways they really had degraded the topsoil and unbalanced the ecosystem through deforestation.

Here's the interesting thing though: Puebloan peoples today have maintained traditions about why Chaco Canyon was abandoned, including that they had too much power over natural forces and caused bad changes to occur to the natural world. This is in keeping with what we can determine about the Chacoans themselves - Brian Fagan, for example, has argued that a lot of the power of Chaco Canyon derived from its ritual specialists' position as the intermediaries between humans and the gods especially in the matters of surviving in the arid landscape.

In other words, from what we can determine through oral history and archaeology, the Chacoans exploited natural resources to the point of making their formerly great city uninhabitable. Even if not all of the environmental changes going on at the time were their fault, enough of a sense of culpability must have been felt to encourage an oral tradition warning against the Chacoans' excessive manipulation of the natural world. What we're seeing here is an example of Native Americans learning from their mistakes and implementing conservation ideologies in their cultures to make sure it didn't happen again. To date, I know of no examples of Puebloan peoples exploiting the landscape to the degree that the Chacoans did, so something must have stuck.

That's the thing to keep in mind when reading about Indigenous relationships with the landscape. It's not that Indigenous people are magically more in tune with nature so they intuitively know not to exploit it! Rather, it's often the case that their ancestors either exploited the landscape themselves and learned their lesson, or felt the ripple effects when powerful civilizations did so with negative consequences. It's a matter of cultural teachings learned through trial and error, not of some innate connectedness to the land that other humans lack.

Another motivator for improved environmental outcomes from Indigenous stewardship of the land is communal land ownership. I wrote about this recently here; the relevant part right now is this passage I quoted from a chapter by Chris Anderson:

Communally held land is not easily sold or purchased and often requires extensive communal discussion. Communally held land makes it more difficult to use as collateral for individual debts or investments since it cannot be repossessed. Perhaps most important, however, communal ownership also makes short-term or extensive resource extraction more difficult, as lands are subject to more extensive conservation measures.

Collective responsibility over land does seem to be a very old cultural value in a great many Indigenous societies. For example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was founded sometime probably between the 10th and 12th centuries, teaches in their Great Law of Peace that any decision the community makes should keep the next seven generations of the community in mind. Again, this is not some special innate quality of Haudenosaunee humans: It is simply a law they have considered foundational for centuries. But think about how different your approach to environmental stewardship as a government is when that is your 'Bill of Rights'. These are decisions that Native peoples made, often many hundreds of years ago, and which their descendants have often continued to apply as legal and cultural principles.

So the answer to your question is that Indigenous societies in North America have overstepped environmental boundaries and threatened local ecologies. They hunted giant mammals into extinction, they cut down too many trees, they redistributed water in a way that eroded soil in other areas. BUT! Many Indigenous intellectual traditions show evidence that they learned from this way earlier than European and Euro-American societies did (when they did at all). There are so many cases in post-contact period when environments were being managed just fine by their Native inhabitants only to be totally mismanaged by the new arrivals. And Native peoples often noticed this and tried to enact conservation methods to counteract what the white Americans were doing. For example the Makah in the Pacific Northwest traditionally relied on whaling as a central aspect of their culture. However, in the 1920s they noticed that American and European industrial whaling was drastically depleting the whale populations. So they decided not to whale anymore until the population recovered. True to their word, they did not start whaling again until the early 21st century when right whale populations recovered, and even then they only aimed to kill about one whale a year. These are the actions of people for whom conservation has long been a built-in cultural practice: Not one they are innately born with, but one which they have nevertheless used for centuries to live sustainably with their environment.

Recommended reading:

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Chaco Canyon by Brian Fagan