After watching Disney’s Pocahontas with my kids, I was thinking about whether the trope of the “in sync with nature” Native American is respectful or just a ‘benevolent’ stereotype. Not that I’m trying to lean into the “European colonists did nothing wrong!” position, but I wonder if the whole “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money” proverb is just the opinion of First People formed after their near-obliteration and relocation or whether there was some evidence of a prehistoric EPA/endangered species conservationist attitude at the time of European arrival.
I am most interested in the indigenous relationship with forestry/agriculture in this regard (had the Americas had clearcut events prior to Christopher Columbus? Would they almost certainly have if the steel axe and ox plow been available?), but would also love to know more about fauna (were beavers being hunted with some kind of tagging system? Were the mammoth extinctions accidental, and did anyone learn anything from it?)
I answered a related question a while back about wildlife in California pre-European contact:
My and /u/CaprioPeter's responses list some basic ways the native population treated nature quite differently than the Europeans. I also touch on the myth that the area was a vast, untouched "wilderness" prior to the arrival of Europeans, when in fact it was a heavily populated area where the residents had a major influence on their natural habitat. It's fair to say that the Europeans had little regard for prior practices and that their actions had sudden and drastic consequences for the natural environment, primarily via the killing of a large portion of the native population. But I'll let someone else weigh in on whether that makes the natives "conservationists" and whether that label is/isn't a trope itself.
OP is inspired by Pocahontas, and much of this thread is about California, so I will try to pivot it back to Virginia (where Pocahontas was from).
When the English colonized Jamestown in 1607, they saw "great smokes of fire" which were caused by the Indians burning grasslands and swamps. (George Percy). This is consistent with first hand accounts for the next 100 years, which consistently show large open grasslands in Virginia and the Carolinas. Anyone familiar with that area will know that, if left to a natural course, cleared land in most of the mid-Atlantic/Appalachian states will quickly become impenetrably thick brush, and then succeed into forest.
Each Indian village in Virginia would have had between a few acres of cleared land, up to hundreds of acres of cleared land, to support corn, beans, and squash. (Archer, 1607, Smith, 1624, Roundtree, 1989). These trees were probably felled by slash and burn techniques, girdling, felling, and other fire techniques. Once the soil was depleted (fertilizer was not used), the local hunting stocks depleted, etc., then the slash & burn fields area would be expanded by clearing new fields, until the settlement was too large to efficiently live on. The local forest was felled for firewood, new farming plots, and building materials until the woods were too far away for convenient use, at which point the tribe would relocate. They might return to that site several decades later. For example, at Seneca Rocks at the headwaters of the Potomac River (around the WV/Va border), there is evidence of a farming village that lasted for 20 yeas, was abandoned for 200 years, and then re-settled on the same site and then abandoned again within about 15-20 years of use (Brinker, 1998).
This continual slash & burn (and then move) pattern left a patchwork of successional forestland. A single village might be "actively" using 50 acres of land, but multiple hundred acres of surrounding land on widely scattered tracks would show a disturbance pattern; which also impacted game populations. For example, in Virginia, overhunting of whitetail deer caused the Powhatans to organize expeditions for hunting deer into the interior of the state and into grounds claimed by the Monacans, leading to bloody turf wars. (Strachey 1612, Roundtree 1989). Strachey also explained in 1612 (and Smith in 1624) how the Indians used fire to hunt; basically setting fires to drive game toward nets or pre-positioned hunters. [aside - using fire to drive large game to their peril is a technique probably used by prehistoric/proto-indigenous man (box canyons and cliff jumps) and similar to modern day deer drives which are still used by hunters in some parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Great Lakes region (who have replaced fire breaks and lines with hounds or skirmish lines of men)]
The actual landscape of much of Virginia and the Carolinas was visibly and physically different when encountered by the English. Much of it was described as barrens or savannah with widespread grasslands. Samuel Argall in 1613 spotted bison after marching into northern Virginia (near Washington DC) and bison were known to live in central North Carolina until the early-mid 1700s. John Lederer in 1672 mapped a savannah through western Virginia's piedmont region, and Robert Beverly in 1705 also described areas of large meadows and savannas of several hundred acres without a single tree, but instead grass and reeds of great height. In 1733, William Byrd described the area around the Dan River as "bare of timber" but found scattered bison. John Fontaine in 1716 found grasslands in the Shenandoah Valley, populated by elk and bison. No less than a young George Washington, working as a surveyor in 1752 (after Indians were no longer in the Shenandoah Valley) found many "barrens" with burnt stumps and patches of hardwood saplings. This is not a natural landscape for Virginia and North Carolina, but one that was consistently burned by humans to create an open, prairie situation.
Returning to the OP and Pocahontas, Henry Spelman in 1613 wrote that the "the country is full of wood in some parts" which implies that it was open and without forest in others. He wrote that the Powhatans had open small fields where "their" deer, goats, and stags feedeth." These fields would have been maintained with fire.
Finally, first hand accounts indicate that the forests themselves were modified by fire. Robert Beverly in 1705 reported that the trees did not have any lower branches until 70 feet above ground. Smith in 1624, Strachey in 1612, and others reported that the forests floor was clean and passable by horse and on foot, and that the woods near the Potomac River had trees spread so far apart that a carriage and four horse could travel through the woods (Andrew White, 1634). The Spotswood Expedition rode horses up river to the Blue Ridge and were able to see long-range vistas while still in the forest (Fontaine, 1716). You cannot ride a horse through most areas of the Eastern woodlands today, without constantly dodging low branches, and the density of trees (in basically all of Appalachia) prevents sweeping vistas.
You get the idea. The Indians in Virginia and the Carolinas were absolutely clearcutting forests and using a lot of fire management to maintain large prairie conditions (such that elk and bison lived there). When the soil was depleted, they would move to new areas and continue these practices. This was mostly sustainable for thousands of years, because of the much lower population density. But it did not mean that they were complete preservationists in harmony with nature. Whether measured by first hand observations or the scientific/archeological record, they were engaged in a cycle of using-depleting-moving across the landscape, and using fire to shape the ecosystem.
Archer, G. 1607. A relation of the discovery of our river.
Archer, G. 1607. The description of the now-discovered river and country of
Virginia.
Argall, S. 1613. Letter to Hawes, June.
Fontaine, J. 1716. The journal of John Fontaine.
Lederer, J. 1672. The discoveries of John Lederer.
Percy, G. 1607. Observations gathered out of a discourse of a plantation of the southern colony in Virginia by the English, 1606.
Smith, J. 1608. A true relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath hap’ned in Virginia.
Smith, J. 1612. A map of Virginia.
Smith, J. 1624. The generall historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles. Book II, part I.
Spelman, H. 1613.
Rountree, H.C. 1989. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their traditional culture. Norman, OK, London: University of Oklahoma Press
I have an interest in, and can maybe help, with your question about clearcutting and environmentalism in the ancient Americas in general. Pre-Colombian North America saw the rise of multiple complex societies that engaged in monumental construction and other engineering feats; while most people are aware of Nahuatl (Aztecan) sites such as Tenochtitlan, there are countless others. Even a basic map of “Mississippian” sites in what is now the U.S. will blow most people’s minds, as will learning of sites such as Moundville or Cahokia, the latter of which was truly urban - and similar in size to many European cities, at the same time.
Super quickly: mammoth extinction is a consequence of the rise in global temperatures that accompanies the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene epoch, and can be set aside (Holocene transitions resulted in multiple extinctions of giant fauna, and the proliferance of smaller woodland creatures like roe deer, red deer, rabbit, hare, fox, etc., and Indigenous hunting practices shift to accommodate).
Teotihuacan is one of the most overlooked ancient sites and was abandoned far before the Aztecs (Nahuatl speaking) discovered it- and is one of the largest (I believe ten square miles in extent; at least eight square miles for its urban core). I think it gets overlooked because of its similar name to Tenochtitlan- because it was re-named by Nahuatl-speaking groups. However a lack of royal tombs or writing mean that we don’t yet know many of the details of the societies that ruled and lived here. I’m a little behind in the most recent interpretations of Teotihuacan, but from what I understand, there is now quite a lot of discussion of the city seeing a significant revolution and dissolution of top-down power structures at some point, and the population possibly installing a new form of government altogether- one with a much more representative in its ruling structure. They may actually have ousted hierarchical and generational leadership, and started something new- though this would very much be the rare exception to how large centers of the ancient world often worked. I refer you to the book, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow- one of their later chapters in the text is devoted to this new interpretation of Teotihuacan, and the archaeological evidence.
In general, there is a tendency to regard all Pre-Colombian social structures in North America, and especially in what is now the U.S. and Canada, as nascent, egalitarian, developing, and nowheres near the complexity of what is seen in Europe and the Old World. However nothing could be further from the truth. There were complex, hegemonic, rigid and very likely exploitative social systems that reached enormous heights - and often collapsed, too- far before European colonization.
I can’t speak to the ecological impacts of these social systems such as deforestation or whatnot. However, there were multiple centers with large scale public works projects, long distance exchange systems stretching from the Southwest to Michigan to the Southeast (esp of the Mississippian period), and strikingly similar iconographic styles and materials amongst the elite (see the ‘Southeastern Ceremonial Complex’) at specific time periods. Keep in mind that I’m only discussing this in general terms: if we were to lay out a timeline of even only the most notable sites evidencing large scale monumental architecture in what is now the U.S., we would see some sites established, flourishing, and ending thousands of years before others- an ebb and flow across millennia. North America has an incredibly rich prehistory of such sites that rose and fell across an enormous period of time. And if we’re talking about just Mississippian sites, the presence of elite exchange networks with craftsmen producing prohibitively expensive goods with materials from hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away does suggest that wealth differences and exploitation are a very real possibility. This isn’t an area of archaeology that I specialize in, so I’m not aware of the specific nature of social systems at the time- but I do think it is enough to illustrate that the nature of societies in North America prior to European colonization cannot be rounded out to the narrative that most popular culture presupposes: that all were simple, hunter-gatherer, and egalitarian. Humans are incredibly complex creatures, as you know- and so too are their social systems. Likewise, Indigenous humans in those societies get to be all things that humans are: loving, peaceful, but also: hot-tempered, greedy, and domineering, and over the thousands-year prehistory of North America quite a lot is possible. You will see more research fill in this understanding as sites are investigated and studied further.
The optics that tint our impressions of what life was like before European colonization come largely from Europeans themselves: that societies progress from simple to complex, and that they always develop in one direction (decidedly false); and thus that Indigenous peoples as they were upon European arrival were advanced from something that was necessarily lesser or more simple (also decidedly false). There are a million other ideas in there, too- noble savage, yes, but also the tendency for Victorians to see Indigenous people as the opposite of themselves- that if they were civilized, Indigenous people were not; if European societies were advanced, Indigenous societies were simple; if Europeans were corrupted by industrialization and progress, then Indigenous peoples were not (that last one: arguably not Victorian per se, but still a construction that continues from a reliance on opposites).
Probably very likely that someone will also comment here about Native nations that banded together at various points in the historical period as confederacies. The Haudenosaunee (fmrly Iroquois) Confederacy is the most famous example- but there were numerous others. It was also a long-standing tradition in many areas for various Native societies to unite as a confederacy when needed- a tradition that stretched back far before European arrival. The system for dispute settlement and negotiation in these confederacies was complex, too, and in the Haudenosaunee example, tied to matrilineal kinship systems and matriclans.