Oki all,
Alx Dark's "A Comment" in soc.culture.native is simply a classic. I've a few
points to add however (don't I always?). Gary, if you or Alx havn't picked
up his post for native-l, I recommend it highly.
[ Actually, the articles Eric refers to originated on NATIVE-L. --Gary ]
First, the deep-e's dicotomy of "traditional" vs "industrial" sounds as if
it comes right out of the States briefs in the (US) Ojibway and Puget Sound
fishing cases. One is tempted to infer that a deep-e would be disapointed
if one used a graphite rod, or an Envenrude, while balencing precariously
in one's authentic birch-bark ChrisCraft. The mind simply boggles at what a
deep-e makes of snowmobiles, or float-planes, in the arctic, let alone nets
made with petroleum byproducts.
Second, the deep-es appear to have figured out how to be "indians", they just
have to find some, and if not yet completely quiessent, put them in a bottle
with a few drops of formaldahyde, before mounting them for display. Not being
especially keen on being mounted, other than by my partner, this tired and
utterly dull bit of essentialist euro-quackery is a disapointing find in any
ecological soup. Sort of a bad nut meat.
Third, it is a pity that to be a deep-e means to be neither a working fisher
or hunter or logger or miner or rancher or furrier or ... on indigenous lands
and on indigenous terms, _but_, being a deep-e requires pissing off middle
class settlers who engage in pot hunting and/or fishing. This leaves the idle
rich and folks too poor to gather berries as "natuarl" deep-e intake, and some
volunteers from neither extream of the economic slide... not a winning, nor
a winsome combination.
Fourth (and the real reason I'm setting electrons to phospher), it is utterly
daft to assume that even at the height (in fact, especially at the heights)
of the Beaver Wars period, that indegenous fur take for the European market
resulted in regional species exterminations.
It is simply not the best way to spend a valuable tribal resource, either as
Alogonquins or as Iroquoians or as eastern Siouxians, that is, male resource
(game or fur) gathering, suboptimally wasted on getting the last few members
of a species.
Basically, the assertion is that jrandom tribe not only caught _just_about_
everything_, and then when the bottom of the virtual barrel was "in sight",
were too stupid to move or trade (or go to war for) "richer pastures", leaving
the last (female) beaver behind (as the Blood Clot stories go), to make more
beavers. Not likely.
What is more, this is ahistoric, since precisely for the reason I've just
set out is why the Beaver Wars period is called, surprisingly, the "Beaver
Wars". No one, certainly not the coastal Algonquins, or the Five Nations,
wanted to trap the "last beaver" in New England, when there was all of the
Canadian interior furs to contend for.
If there were an archaeology of beaver or species extinctions in the americas,
I suspect that aside from the Passenger Pigeon, the Woods Bison, and a few
other total extinctions, habitat distruction would be the primary cause, not
hog-wild Indians smelling nacent capitalism. Oblig note: No Virginia, it was
not a Santa Claus or any of the elves who shot the last of any of the above,
it was your Anglo states founders... the white hats.
I don't suppose I can guess what friend Orton et alia would say to a bit of
Innu whaling.
Finally, the deep-es don't get a solo in my salon of seriously stupid ideas.
I was at the BHA and personally heard some heroic types commit some heroic
typos -- remember a Mother Jones Cover Person doing the "don't plow" speach?
Try selling starvation as a plausible, politically possible, anti-nuclear
organizing pitch. We're still trying to stop nukes. Almost two decades later.
A "No deep-es on Indian Land" button, kind of like Aunti Nuke's familiar
barred circle appears to be called for.
Kitakitamatsinopowaw (I'll see you again)
-- Eric Brunner