In 1954, Omer Stewart wrote a massive report about how grasslands were the result of deliberate burning practices on indigenous populations. This was in contrast to the general view that the habitats that Europeans discovered upon reaching North America were "wilderness", strictly the result of natural processes like soil chemistry and rainfall.
Stewart didn't have any luck getting the report published, rejected by two different publishing houses and a third that managed to lose the paper for two decades. In the early 2000s, with at least some acknowledgement that Native Americans had actually impacted their natural surroundings, Henry Lewis and M. Kat Anderson streamlined the now-deceased Stewart's work a bit (he had written more briefly about grasslands outside North America, and these parts were removed), added chapters offering critiques on both anthropological (Lewis) and ecological (Anderson) grounds, and here we are. Lewis and Anderson's chapters cover the first 60 pages (~20% of the book.) Discussing the value in Stewart's work and how bold of a stance it was at the time, when there might only have been one or two other authors advancing similar notions.
Stewart's approach is to start in one particular section of North America, then go state-by-state or region-by-region, describing or quoting every source he can find that either directly mentions Native Americans burning, or any studies done in the first half of the 20th Century about what happens if you burn or stop burning a particular area. He cites reports from as far back as the 1500s, from a Spanish sailor taken as a slave in present-day Texas, and up to a "Cultural Element Distribution" study from the University of California, which involved surveying members of several different tribes throughout the West Coast about various cultural practices, including burning. And if they burned, or were told about their ancestors burning, why was it happening?
The problem is, this makes for incredibly dry reading, with Stewart sticking to a rote pattern of, "in Year X this person said this, while this person said this X years later, and this person said. . ." At one point, 10 of 11 pages of Stewart's report is just an excerpt from Miller Christy's 1892 work on why Canadian grasslands are treeless. Keep in mind, Christy's paper was only 22 pages to begin with, so Stewart plunked half in his own paper. Stewart mentions plates or photographs in certain sources, but apparently didn't include them in his paper. When he cites scientific studies on tree growth in areas isolated by fire, he rarely cites any data, and never includes a graph or chart that might illustrate the idea (or just break up the walls of text.) Anderson adds some photographs and the occasional chart to illustrate her points (and Stewart's), which helps a fair bit. She and Lewis are also more concise, so going from them to Stewart really doesn't do his writing any favors.
Instead, Stewart limits himself to pulling all these disparate sources together, then concluding periodically that there are clear reports that various tribes burned either to drive game, clear undergrowth for easier travel, to encourage new growth of food sources for themselves or their favored game species, among other things. And based on how these observations may cover the several different areas within a given tribes' historic range, this means they obviously burned everywhere within their range.
As Anderson notes, that's a dodgy conclusion, since there would be variations in local conditions that could make burning ill-advised. I suspect Stewart was trying to be strident to counter what he saw as decades of dismissing the facts that seem so plain, but he may push it too far the other way. He acknowledges that some of the respondents in the Cultural Element Distribution admit no one ever told them about doing any burning, but he never really addresses it. Might just be their older relatives didn't see the point, but maybe there really wasn't burning there. Stewart doesn't seem to pay that notion any mind whatsoever.
He will cite writers who dismiss fire, or fires set deliberately, as having any effect, then attempts to point out how they often provide evidence contrary to their own conclusions. So when Clements (repeatedly) dismisses fire as forming grasslands, in favor of either rainfall or soil chemistry preventing the trees from establishing, Stewart will point out how Clements or someone Clements cited as support acknowledged that trees were moving into places where fire had been suppressed or eliminated, even in drought conditions.
The work is impressive for the sheer amount of research he did in finding all these accounts and studies, and he methodically goes through them so the audience gets as full a picture of the evidence as he can provide. But his approach doesn't make for gripping reading.
'My thesis is we must consider the plains and prairies in the light of at least 25,000 years of human prehistory, while projecting trends thousands of years into the future, if we are to properly evaluate man's part in the formation of grasslands.'
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