Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Indigenous Nations! Dr. Larry Gross (White Earth Anishinaabe) uses the phrase 'postapocalyptic stress syndrome' to describe the lived experiences of many Indigenous people. He describes how many have 'seen the end of their respective worlds.' Concurrent to those experiences, Indigenous people have built, created, and defended nations. This week is dedicated to Indigenous Nations, in whatever form that may take.
The prompt quote from Dr. Gross reminds me of a similar discussion of how 'wilderness' and 'remoteness' has been historically constructed within the (primarily white) American environmentalist movements. Within the popular imagination, 'wilderness' exists devoid of human interaction, in a sort of pristine, primordial space that sidelines or wholesale discounts the roles of Native peoples in shaping those landscapes. A recent paper from Fletcher et al. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022218118) does a great job of summarizing this tendency on a global scale. The reality, of course, is more complex, and shows that many 'wilderness' areas were shaped by long-term, vibrant cultural practices on and across the landscapes by indigenous peoples.
While it's become pretty widely accepted in the last couple of decades that many Native peoples across the American West used fire to shape their environments to better suit their needs (a la Boyd 1999 Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest), the extent of indigenous relationships with areas that would be typically considered "remote" or "wilderness" are still being studied. Archaeological, ethnographical, and ecological studies conducted across the Northwest Coast of North America bring awareness that not only did (and still do) Indigenous communities hunt large mountain game across these landscapes (such as discussed by the NPS at Mt. Rainier and Denali here: https://www.nps.gov/mora/learn/historyculture/archaeology.htm and here: https://www.nps.gov/articles/denali-prehistoric-upland-hunting-site.htm), but that 'remote' montane landscapes were the locales for many, many different activities for millennia. Turner et al (2011, https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-31/issue-1/0278-0771-31.1.4/Up-On-the-Mountain--Ethnobotanical-Importance-of-Montane-Sites/10.2993/0278-0771-31.1.4.full) discusses the importance of montane landscapes for cultivating and harvesting a wide variety of food and medicinal plants across the Northwest Coast, while ethnographical and archaeological investigations have discussed the stripping of of cedar bark for weaving, clothing, building, and basketry. Historical accounts from railroad and USGS surveyors discuss the importance of hiring Native peoples to guide them through mountain passes, as these valleys were main thoroughfares by which Native peoples visited relatives on opposite sides of the mountain ranges. All of these interactions had varying degrees of impact upon the environment, and together created the 'remote' landscapes that so entranced many of the founders of the American conservation movements.
Wide-spread recognition of these histories and relationships to 'remote' landscapes has been growing in recent years, and has contributed to some major policy shifts by federal and state agencies. These include active consultation with indigenous communities during the decision making processes, increased awareness of the importance of traditional hunting and gathering practices on public lands, and use of traditional knowledge and practices to support environmental sciences in policymaking.
Here are a couple of previous posts of mine about Indigenous nations.
The history of false white claims of Native heritage in the US
Why was Edward Prince of Wales made a Stone Creek Indian chief?
Why does it seem like no one knows what Native American language was spoken in Precolumbian Ohio?
Jack Wetherford in his book, Indian Givers, makes a claim that the US form of government is primarily based upon ideas from Native American tribes like the Iroquoi.
I love his books, but:
How accurate is this?
Here is an old post that I prepared on the antiquity and spread of bow and arrow technology in the New World that is one of my favorites. Edit: also, here is one on Did Native Americans know that European Diseases were killing them off?.
At this point, it's pretty much established that indigenous thought had a deep influence on Enlightenment era moral philosophy (as Graeber and Wengrow show in The Dawn of Everything).
Is there any work that explores the same connection in terms of natural philosophy? Hope did indigenous thinkers from or before the 18th century approach questions of being, knowledge, causality and the like?
Is Comanche depiction in new Predator movie accurate?