Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

By David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a “middle ground” of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780821444115

Book preview

Part I

Middle Ground

CHAPTER 1

Looking Like a White Man

Geopolitical Strategies of the Iowa Indians during American Incorporation

David Bernstein

IN THE winter of 2007, ninety-one thousand people visited an innovative exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago that explored the history of maps and mapping around the world. Midway through the exhibition, these visitors would have come across one of the most uncommon maps ever created (see fig. 1.1). Named after the Iowa Indian leader who presented it to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett in 1837, Notchininga’s Map is unique for a number of reasons. First, it is one of a handful of artifacts that remain from a time and place in which Native spatial knowledge was primarily transmitted orally. Graphic aids—sketches drawn in the sand or ceremonial performances—generally lasted only a few hours or until the next steady rain. Second, unlike most other examples of North American Indian cartography that were created explicitly as navigational aids, Notchininga’s Map represents a more generalized spatial construction, allowing us a slightly larger window into the worldview of its creator(s).¹

The map depicts the river systems of a large section of what is now considered the upper Midwest of the United States, and with it, the historical migration of the Iowa people and the villages they had occupied since the fifteenth century. A dotted line begins near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, and continues south to the Iowas’ village on the Wolf River where they lived in 1837 when they presented the map to the Americans. This is the route of my forefathers, Notchininga stated at the meeting. It is the land we have always claimed from old times—we have always owned this land—it is ours—it bears our name. Unfortunately, according to the accompanying label, the map failed to allay the pressure from either other Native Americans or white settlers, and the Ioway were further displaced to Kansas and Oklahoma. At first glance, then, the map seems to be a graphic distillation of what we have come to expect from nineteenth-century Indian-white relations; Native assertion of ancestral territorial claims violently subsumed in an incompatible clash of cultures, resulting in Indian displacement and dispossession.²

Fig. 1.1. Nothcininga’s Map, 1837, Size of the Original 41 x 27 inches. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Cartographic and Architectural Branch, Washington, D.C. RG 75, Map 821, Tube 520.

Yet first glances are deceiving. What appears to epitomize a traditional narrative of antagonistic Indian and white worldviews in fact confounds such simple categorizations. Notchininga’s Map was part of larger set of social and political tactics the Iowas employed that cannot be placed into such binary categories. Faced with declining wildlife resources and the continued encroachment of more-powerful Indian neighbors, the Iowas in the 1820s began reshaping the economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future. At the same time, they adopted new geopolitical strategies aimed at gaining support from American representatives, most notably conscientious appropriation of Euro-American territoriality and cartography. By creating a document in the discourse understood by the colonizing culture, a Ptolemaic map drawn on paper, the Iowas distanced themselves from other native groups. Rather than a dichotomous vision of Indian-white relations, Iowa leaders understood that their communities had potentially much to gain from aspects of white expansion. They met with Secretary of War Poinsett and other American officials to mitigate their recurring and immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries. The primary purpose of this article, therefore, is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian-white relations by highlighting this new strategy and to explore how the Iowas used diplomatic—most significantly cartographic—tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. In so doing, I suggest a new evidentiary source for a growing number of scholars who have gone beyond traditional narratives in which Indians are forced to choose between the extremes of acculturating to or resisting American westward expansion.³

In addition to illuminating specific geopolitical maneuvers made by the Iowas, by highlighting the Indians’ appropriation of certain aspects of Euro-American territorial constructs, I address a larger issue within the study of Native American cartography. Though there has been no lack of interest in the map—in addition to the exhibit, it has been reproduced in at least six scholarly and popular works, including volume 2 of the seminal work of David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, The History of Cartography—it has received limited historical analysis. While non-Native maps have come under close post-structuralist scrutiny as documents that contain political and social agendas particular for a historical moment, indigenous maps have been viewed as authentic cultural snapshots; pure representations of how a group of Indians understood their spatial existence. Thus, while virtually all of the pieces have noted the similarities between the map and modern, scientific depictions of the region’s hydrography—a western projection is unique among Native maps—scholars have simply accepted this irregularity as a characteristic of Iowa spatial constructions. This paper argues that extant examples of Indian cartography, including Notchininga’s Map, contain the same hidden agendas as their Euro-American counterparts and must be considered in the same deconstructionist light if we hope to fully grasp their historical significance. In other words, in order to understand the importance of Native maps, we must do what we do with any document; consider it in the context in which it was created.⁴

Native Mapping in Historiographic Context

Since the 1970s, historians of cartography have utilized the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Anthony Giddens to resituate the map as a form of discourse that contains power, rhetoric, and value, rather than as an objective representation of reality. Two articles by J. Brian Harley exemplified this epistemological shift. In Deconstructing the Map, Harley called for the examination and acknowledgment of the omnipresence of power in all knowledge, even though that power is invisible or implied, including the particular knowledge, encoded in maps and atlases. A deconstruction must occur whereby the map is examined within broader movements and structures. In this way, the rhetoric of maps will become much more apparent. Stating simply that cartographers manufacture power, Harley concluded that the map’s most important rhetorical function lies in its subjectivity.⁵

A second article by Harley more explicitly explored the political power contained within maps. Building on the premise that maps need to be understood within the larger family of value-laden images, Harley explored how maps facilitated the geographical expansion of political systems. Tying map creation into other imperial processes such as military expansion and exacting taxation, Harley determined that cartography was (and remains) a "teleological discourse, reifying power, reinforcing the status quo, and freezing social interactions within charted lines. And unlike music, art, or other expressions employed by those without alternative forms of resistance, maps have almost exclusively been used as a form of oppression by those in power. Thus, Harley argued, mapping’s ideological arrows," flew only in one direction.⁶

Though some criticized Harley’s approach for its designation of maps as texts (which disregards the process of map creation), scholars began to follow Harley’s lead by exploring maps’ hegemonic functions—the way in which colonizing powers gain and maintain control—in specific historical circumstances.⁷ In 1992, for instance, Gregory Nobles published an article in the Journal of American History that focused on mapping as a form of spatial control in colonial America. Examining the political order of the Anglo-American Frontier, Nobles proposed that Euro-Americans established political and social boundaries well before actual settlement patterns. By creating what appeared to be a priori plans of what the North American interior looked like, Anglo-American mapmakers established a vision of future dominance. Nobles states, By drawing lines across the continent and imposing themselves in print, they literally mapped out a New World order. Nobles’s article was accompanied by explorations into the hegemonic function of maps in a variety of colonial settings.⁸

At the same time that scholars were examining maps as tools for colonial and imperial powers, there was a resurgence in the study of maps made by Native North Americans. Led by G. Malcolm Lewis and followed by such scholars as Richard Ruggles, Barbara Belyea, and Gregory Waselkov, this group used post-structuralist models to investigate indigenous maps on their own terms. Rather than immature versions of the measured, mathematical spatial representations of European scientific cartography, these scholars viewed Native maps as sophisticated cultural documents that revealed an entirely different understanding of the world around them than those created by contemporary Euro-Americans. This new understanding of Indian maps has led to reexaminations of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, land transfers in colonial New England, and Spanish explorations of the American Southeast, to name just a few examples.⁹

As scholars revisit documents long dismissed as having little evidentiary value, three related lines of inquiry have emerged: (1) evaluating and comparing Native American spatial constructions; (2) exploring these constructions’ influence on maps made by Euro-Americans and their incorporation into imperial territorial appropriation; and (3) Native American maintenance of indigenous spatial constructs in the face of colonial oppression.¹⁰ A fundamental premise running through all three explorations is the belief that we can identify and isolate epistemologically unique forms of indigenous spatial knowledge.

G. Malcolm Lewis has argued, for example, that all Native maps created after 1925 can at best be considered as pidgins, as they have been too acculturated to afford evidence of traditional forms. Scholars such as Keith Basso and Hugh Brody—whose work documents the continued use of Native place-names—would no doubt refute Lewis’s assertion that contemporary Indian spatial and territorial constructions are pidgins, but they would certainly agree with his underlying premise of the existence of a uniquely Indian way of interacting with and representing geographical knowledge. Barbara Belyea goes so far as to say that not only are Indian and Euro-American constructions of space and place different, but there is no ‘common ground.’ . . . Instead of continuing to translate the native cartographic convention into our own, we must acknowledge a gap between these conventions is essentially unbridgeable. Thus, while there has been considerable—and sometimes heated—debate about the definition and characterization of Indian mapping, this divisive rhetoric has masked a common assumption: Native constructions of space, and their representations, are inherently different from Euro-American constructs.¹¹

While the existence (or lack) of an epistemologically indigenous worldview is beyond the scope of this paper, I will demonstrate how an unconditional acceptance of such a view limits our understanding of Native cartography.¹² By essentializing Indian spatial understanding to either a knowable or unknowable other, we are continuing the practice of idealizing Indian knowledge as something that lies outside of history. While historians and anthropologists have generally gone beyond the segregation of ethnology and history, most cartographic scholars have maintained strict intellectual boundaries around Indian maps, considering them ahistorical cultural documents.¹³ For example, the 131-page entry on Native North American Maps in The History of Cartography considers nothing beyond the cultural characteristics of Indian maps. The volume on Renaissance mapping, on the other hand, has separate sections for the political economic, military, and religious contexts of maps made in Italy, Portugal, Spain, German lands, Low Countries, France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, East-Central Europe, and Russia.¹⁴ I argue that without taking the historical context into consideration—the specific political, economic, and social circumstances in which a particular map was created—we relegate the creators of Indian cartography to a timeless distant past rather than taking them seriously as historical actors.

There have been a number of works that have astutely examined the political context of Indian mapping. Yet these pieces have invariably reified a dichotomous vision of Native and white concepts of space by exploring how Indians, either consciously or not, used their constructs to maintain Indianness in the face of colonial hegemony.¹⁵ In so doing, these studies limit our historical analyses to the well-worn path of cultural continuity. By placing Notchininga’s Maps in a particular historical moment, within a specific geopolitical landscape, we can continue to move beyond the Native/non-Native binary to explore the various ways the Iowas shaped their rapidly changing world. It is to this geopolitical landscape we now turn.

The Challenges of Imperial Incorporation and a New Political Alliance, 1700–1815

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Iowa Indians lived in semipermanent villages in present-day Iowa and Kansas, controlling much of the region.¹⁶ They subsisted by hunting; farming maize, beans, and pumpkins; and, to a lesser degree, trading deer, beaver, otter, and raccoon skins with English and French traders. From fall to early spring, bands established seasonal camps in what is now southern Wisconsin and northern Iowa to hunt and make maple sugar. They returned to their villages in the early summers to tend small garden patches, then moved to the plains west of the Missouri for the summer buffalo hunt. Finally, the Iowas returned once again to their villages in late summer and early fall for harvesting.¹⁷

Recalling the Iowas’ strength in the eighteenth century, future commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Mckenney declared, Of all the tribes that hunt between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers . . . next to the Sioux . . . the Ioway were once the most numerous and powerful.¹⁸ In the first years of the eighteenth century, French explorer Pierre Charles Le Sueur also reported that the Mississippi was under control of the Scioux (Sioux), the Ayavois (Iowas), and the Otoctatas (Otoes). Le Sueur claimed that for the Indians, it was not their custom to hunt on ground belonging to other, unless invited to do so by the owners. To travel the river without following this protocol, the Frenchman continued, put one in danger of being killed.¹⁹ Along with the Teton and Yanktonai Sioux, the Iowas controlled the land between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Le Sueur’s comments not only illustrate the authority the Iowas wielded in the region, they also indicate a system of land use in which groups controlled fairly defined territories. While anthropological investigations into Indian land claims before the reservation era have highlighted the fluidity of property ownership throughout the upper Mississippi, these studies also affirm that conquest through warfare was a viable form of land acquisition.²⁰ For smaller groups to compete with larger bands for resources, therefore, they had little choice but to attach themselves to larger populations and create what anthropologist Patricia Albers calls a merger.²¹ According to Albers, such mergers fell into a four-step continuum. In the most developed stage of complete ethnogenesis, once-distinct groups became socially and culturally indistinguishable. Albers terms the least developed merger a polyethnic alliance formation, in which groups remained culturally separate but cooperated in the exploitation of resources in the region, performed various ceremonial activities together, and engaged in joint military action.²² The Iowas employed such alliances throughout the 1700s.

This period of military strength, however, was cut short by the now well-known story of virgin-soil epidemics. As France, Spain, and England vied for colonial control of the Mississippi, the diseases their traders and explorers brought with them recalibrated an already elaborate system of alliances between various Indian groups and imperial powers.²³ By the middle of the 1760s, the first of two smallpox epidemics struck the Iowas, halving their population.²⁴ Recounting this period decades later, Iowa leaders explained, Although once the most powerful and warlike Indians on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, [we were] reduced to nothing, a mere handful of that Nation that was once masters of the land.²⁵ When a second wave of smallpox struck in the first years of the nineteenth century, the Iowas numbers were once again halved, leaving just eight hundred people.

Unlike the Iowas who lived in two or three major villages where germs and bacteria spread quickly, Teton and Yanktonai Sioux lived in small nomadic groups and thus were less vulnerable to disease. These western Sioux quickly used their numeric advantages to become the dominant trappers and traders in the region, acquiring European guns and forcing smaller groups such as the Iowas, Omahas, Otoes, and Missouris to either merge with one another or look for protection under more populous groups of Indians. For the Iowas, that protection came in the form of the merged Sac and Fox peoples, who themselves had only recently formed an alliance when the Sacs offered the Foxes refuge from massacring French armies at the end of the seventeenth century. Major Zebulon Pike reported the Iowas’ new alliance in 1807 when he wrote that they "hunt on the west side of the Mississippi, the river De Moyen, and westward to the Missouri; their wars and alliances are the same as the Sauks and Reynards [Foxes]; under whose special protection they conceive themselves to