The Way of the Human Being

Natural History, Oct, 1999 by Colin G. Calloway

The Way of the Human Being, by Calvin Luther Martin. Yale University Press; $27.50; 256 pp.

More than twenty years ago, Calvin Martin wrote a provocative little book called Keepers of the Game, Among other things, he argued that the overkilling of animals by Native Americans in the fur trade was due not to economic incentives but to spiritual chaos. Blaming angry animal spirits for new epidemic diseases, Indian hunters, asserted Martin, had abandoned traditional hunting restraints and turned to slaughter.

The book won a prestigious award from the American Historical Association but sparked controversy. Subsequently, Shepard Krech III edited a critique of Keepers of the Game in which he and half a dozen other anthropologists attacked the book as thesis-driven, insufficiently nuanced, and faulty in its use of evidence. Martin remained "unreconstructed."

Two decades later, these two still find much to disagree about. Martin continues to be something of a maverick historian, having given up academic life for writing and involvement in Native American concerns. Like his earlier books, The Way of the Human Being presents stimulating ideas, but the arguments are sometimes conjectural and the scholarly apparatus is thin (fifteen pages of minimal endnotes). By contrast, Krech, director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, served for a decade as editor of the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory. His writing is scholarly, the arguments are balanced, and the evidence he musters in The Ecological Indian is weighty (eighty-seven pages of dense endnotes).

Martin has long argued for embracing a non-Western, mythic imagination. By suspending learned analytical tools and listening to "stories out of step with time and history," he writes, "one may begin to perceive ... the way of those people who beheld the first Europeans splash ashore five hundred years ago" Native Americans, asserts Martin, "did not regard time or reality or even words themselves in the way those newcomers did then or we do now, and [have] struggled mightily with this strange new western philosophy ever since." Most Westerners, however, are ill equipped by heritage, modern life, and academic training to venture into the indigenous world of myth.

Martin says that when he wrote Keepers of the Game, he "knew no Indians and had never laid eyes on a living beaver." But now, after spending a summer on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and two years with Yup'ik Eskimo in Alaska, he may be in a stronger position to speak about the different realities of Native America. In a sometimes elegant and gentle book, the author shares the embarrassments, mistakes, and myopia of his personal journey through an elusive world, as well as his discoveries along the way.

There is no question that in many traditional native cultures, humans maintained complicated and respectful relationships with animals. But hunters may stray from hunting codes, just as Christians stray from the Ten Commandments. In The Ecological Indian, Shepard Krech explores a popular image of the Native American as ecologist, and he begins and ends his book with a famous commercial featuring the actor Iron Eyes Cody, a tear rolling down his cheek, under the headline "Pollution: it's a crying shame." Krech discusses the portrayal of Indians as preservationists, conservationists, and keepers of Earth, but also shows, through case studies and substantial evidence, that they have managed, shaped, and, on occasion, degraded their environment.

Native peoples employed fire to stimulate new plant growth and attract game. The ancient Hohokam constructed ingenious canal systems that irrigated the Sonoran Desert but also caused waterlogging and salinization. Indian tribes of the Great Plains practiced mass killings of buffalo before the systematic slaughter initiated by white hunters in the second half of the nineteenth century. Woodland Indians contributed to the extinction of beaver populations in large areas of the North and decimated deer herds in the South.

Some non-Indians have always attributed to Native American cultures things their own society lacked, lost, or corrupted. And end-of-the-millennium environmental crises have perhaps made it fashionable to contrast the ways of native peoples with Western avarice, materialism, and environmental destruction. Many people, determined to discover wisdom whether or not it is there to be found, look to Indian societies (which often have names that translate as "real people" or "true human beings") for keys to living in a better way. Being at one with Earth is often regarded as an essential attribute of Indianness. Yet some Indians actively promote development, occasionally at the expense of traditional ideals. Krech asks whether this makes them less Indian and quotes a twentieth-century Choctaw who sees more than one way of being Indian and human: "Just because I don't want to be a white man doesn't mean I want to be some kind of mystical Indian either. Just a real human being."