Stanley A. Rice

For a long time, immigrant Americans have tried to tell themselves how their ancestors came upon a “virgin wilderness” which they then “civilized” and “developed” appropriately to provide all kinds of resources and benefits.

Yet, as Stanley Rice ably presents in Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn From It (galley received as part of early review program), in general, America was anything but a “virgin show more wilderness.”

The author began by telling a very different story of a land full of Native inhabitants who well cultivated and maintained the land in order to provide consistent produce (which immigrants would often benefit from generations later). The author considered how Natives used fire to manage the environment, and how many parts of the American prairies probably only existed because of controlled burns. He considered how Natives controlled animal populations through hunting and fishing, and what happened after the Natives were reduced and/or the animal populations boomed or busted. He considered how Natives practiced agriculture in very different ways from Europeans, and how Europeans dismissed Native agricultural practices as agriculture. He also considered how Natives irrigated some lands. Toward the end he described how Natives were brought low by disease, and used the San Joaquin Valley in California as a way to compare and contrast Native vs. immigrant use of the land. He concluded by considering the various forms of wisdom inherent in how the Natives used the land — things like controlled burning, avoiding monoculture and cultivating complementary crops, and the like — as models for us to use moving forward.

It is certainly high time for us to reconsider how we view the history of North America and confess the value of many aspects of Indigenous wisdom regarding how to well live with the land and among its flora and fauna. Highly recommended. show less

The Natives of North America were not about historical preservation or permanence of any kind. It has been difficult to piece together what North America looked like pre-Columbus, but it certainly was not empty, as white governments would have everyone believe. Stanley Rice, a plant ecologist and Cherokee now living in France, has gathered the facts in numerous fields to fill in the gaps. His newest book, Forgotten Landscapes focuses on the environmental, but the entire picture will be a show more revelation to most.

Native tribes lived in cities of substantial size. Cahokia, at 20,000, was comparable in size to many of the major European capitals in the 11th century, when it peaked. There was an entire Mississippian civilization that thrived, faded, and has left all but no trace.

A gigantic difference from European cities was that Cahokia was clean. In Europe, people did not bathe, and poured their urine into the streets. They would commonly defecate out the windows onto the street (and any pedestrians) below. In Europe diseases like Plague swept through one after another , while in Cahokia and America in general, no such events occurred. And rather than cover themselves with perfumes and powders, North American Natives bathed. They also had more balanced diets, because in addition to hunting and gathering, they farmed. Natives were visibly taller, stronger and fitter than the white European immigrants.

This is typical of the many ways we currently get Native North Americans wrong, says Rice: “People in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would look to Native tribes for ideas about how to save the land, looking right past the benefits of Native land management to see a vague spirituality based largely on the gathering and use of Indian medicinal plants.”

Native tribes had different architectural and design styles. Visiting them would have been like touring foreign countries within North America. Except that the Natives would welcome such visitors and host them. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, they built apartment buildings several stories high, some of which still exist. The nomadic tribes employed tepees for ease of transport and setup. In the north and the east, longhouses housed numerous families. Much like the Mayan empire to the south, North American cities centered around large flat-topped mounds they built, where meetings and ceremonies took place.

Women played a far bigger role than they did in Europe, where they were kept out of everything except raising children. Some tribes were matriarchal altogether, but even in the patriarchal ones, women’s views were sought and respected. Rice cites a story of a Native chief brought to London as a showpiece, who was dumbfounded that there were zero women in evidence in government.

Rice’s main focus, as readers should expect, is on land and water management, where they excelled. Natives in the southwest built reservoirs and canals to deal with the parched conditions. The city of Phoenix uses the original Native network for its own water system today. Natives also knew about water falling, giving it pressure to create public fountains in cities, long before King Louis XIV and the palace at Versailles stunned Europe with their (decorative) use.

They understood plants best of all. Rice spends a lot of time on the management of agriculture, employing the understory of fruit trees to raise vegetable crops. Where European monocultures featured square plots and endless perfect rows of one single crop, Native farms looked like European gardens, positively wild, benefitting the land, the insects, and the variety of crops. The earth thrived rather than drained itself of fertility. And if a farm looked like it needed a rest, they gave it one to recover, rather than smother it in fertilizers. Insects favoring different plants would keep each other in check, disease could not wipe out the entire farm, and bees could be occupied all summer long.

Among the tactics used by whites to rid the continent of Natives was to burn a village and then come back to chop down all their fruit trees, returning the land to wasteland, and starving the escapees. This is another reason there is little trace of Native agriculture.

Rice employs history to show that Native management of fire changed the ecology. Burning grasslands increased them while reducing forests, giving the buffalo room to run. They could not negotiate the branch-strewn woods, so it is thanks to Native fires that their favorite resource eventually came to number In the billions before the Natives were killed off by European diseases and slaughtered by white immigrants so that the annual fires stopped. Then of course, the government offered bounties for killing off the buffalo in order to decimate the remaining Natives’ main resource.

He has similar stories about water-based crops, whose annual burning made them come back thicker and more numerous, providing more sustenance for the tribe without the active management of fertilizers and herbicides.

Another reason for the fires was it was easier to track prey like deer in the open, burnt areas. It also helped hunters to be unheard, instead of breaking twigs and crunching leaves underfoot as they prowled. Fire was a tool of land management in Native hands. Today, after decades of not employing fire, it has taken on a life of its own, out of control.

When the whites arrived, they had no use for community water management, and everyone had their own wells. This has inevitably drained the aquifers, and after a century of it, is causing the land to subside, filling in the dry hollows underground. In places, it a subsidence of as much as 30 feet, wreaking havoc on the surface.

The stories of ownership in common are better known. Natives owned their homes, but not the land underneath. Crops came from common lands. It was only at the insistence of the US government that the common land of the reservations was divided into private lots and families got their own plot. This encouraged the gridlines and identical little houses that, like the farms, were the sign that Europeans were in charge, and society became everyone for themselves.

Rice’s tribe, the Cherokee, was the biggest, at about 30,000. They were pushed around the USA, losing their agriculture and their infrastructure, and starting over, again and again. They went from the southeast up to northern Oklahoma, becoming poorer and sicker with each forced move.

But they were far from savages. One important Cherokee scholar, Sequoyah, had his name assigned to the grandest, largest, oldest trees in the world. He developed a written language for the Cherokee, a most rare development in Native history.

Ironically, I suppose, it was one of the biggest Indian haters in government, Senator Henry Dawes, who looked at what the Natives had accomplished, and knew that they had to go, because: “There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”

At the opposite end is Stanley Rice: “Native cultures have insights that could help to save the world. They are not vague spiritualistic insights based on the use of Native herbs, either; they are concepts, such as habitat management and the promotion of biodiversity within agriculture [.…] by which Natives positively transformed the American continent in the past. We did it before, and we can do it again.”

David Wineberg show less

I found this book to really challenge some of my pre-conceived notions of Native American life. Rice shows how the pre-contact Native American societies thrived by working with nature, not against it as the European arrivals tried. He covers everything from the use of fire, community water sources, waste management, and interplanting rather than monoculture. The societies at Cahokia and in Oklahoma are covered, including the use of mounds for ceremonial purposes.
This was a book that really show more made me think. I found myself drifting off while reading, going into long daydreams imagining the sight of pre-contact communities. It was very enjoyable. And I learned a lot.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this great little book. show less

Nothing very revolutionary, but quite a comprehensive and convincing treatise on why we need plants, and what services they provide to other living organisms and us.
Reads almost like a series of lectures: Plants and the Environment 101.
A very good explanation of photosynthesis at the molecular level.