Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources
by M. Kat Anderson
an exceprt
The California landscapes that early explorers, settlers and missionaries found so remarkably rich were in part shaped, and regularly renewed, by the land management practices employed by native peoples.
Much of the landscape in California that so impressed early writers, photographers, and landscape painters was in fact a cultural landscape, not the wilderness they imagined. While they extolled the "natural" qualities of the California landscape, they were really responding to its human influence. The chalk drawings and paintings of Thomas Ayres, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Hill, among others, reveal centuries of fire management. The wildflower displays they depicted were edible plant gardens. The parklike appearance of Yosemite Valley and the incredible fecundity of parts of the great Central Valley were marks of centuries of human management.
Ironically, many of the first non-Native American visitors and settlers described the countryside in ways that hinted of human intervention. They regularly compared the landscapes to gardens, parks, or orchards. The Belgian gold miner Jean-Nicolas Perlot wrote that the oak woodlands near Stevinson (the acorn collection grounds of the Yokuts) "presented an appearance of a prairie earmarked for Century Magazine, wrote of "a great variety of evergreen and deciduous trees, planted by Nature's landscape gardeners" and observed that because "the undergrowth was kept down by annual fires while the ground was yet moist, to facilitate the search for game, the Valley at the time of discovery presented the appearance of a well kept park." But according to the European rationale, only raw, unspoiled, unused nature was capable of emanating this kind of beauty. It did not occur to them that the size of the trees and open pattern in which they grew were products of human intervention.
Romanticizing Nature and the "Noble Savage"
The perception that California was a primeval wilderness free of human influence has its roots in this period of California history. By the eighteenth century, wilderness areas in Europe had come to be viewed as places for self-renewal, where one could escape the hectic, burdensome life of the cities for the tranquility and purity of nature. The splendor and nobility of nature had become linked with God's creative energies and omnipotence. Coupled with this favorable view of wilderness was the idea of the "noble savage" - a kind of wild man uncorrupted by the vices of civilized life - who lived a simple, harmonious, unfettered existence in nature.
During the nineteenth century, this view of nature, a central part of the Romantic movement, began to receive attention from American writers and philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Many of the late-nineteenth-century Americans who would figure prominently in the state's history, including John Muir, were strongly influenced by Romanticism and its proponents. Muir and those with similar views responded to the destruction and exploitation of California's natural resources with a preservationist ethic that valued nature above all else but which defined nature as that which was free of human influence. Thus while he championed the setting aside of parks as public land, Muir also contributed to the modern notion that the indigenous inhabitants of the state had no role in shaping its natural attributes.
Muir was clearly troubled by the Native Americans he encountered, unable to fit them into his worldview. He wanted them to be natural, like animals, but they disappointed him by showing some of the qualities he disliked in his fellow whites. Muir longed to experience the wildness of raw nature; the utility of the biota did not interest him. "just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need," he said during his first summer in the Sierra Nevada, "not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment." Yet more than once, he faced starvation when food supplies from civilization did not arrive on time to his shepherd outpost in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. A sentiment that would trouble him constantly was the oddness of feeling "food-poor in so rich a wilderness." Muir showed admiration of the native peoples' knowledge of ethnobotany, but he preferred the society of woodchucks and squirrels to that of the Native Americans and never seriously considered the possibilities for wilderness living offered by California Native American ways.
Muir's view of California nature was a necessary counterweight to the view that had prevailed before - that nature was there to be used, exploited, and commodified - but it left us with a schizophrenic approach to the natural world: humans either conquer nature and destroy its integrity, or they visit it as an outsider, idealizing its beauty and largely leaving it alone. These seemingly contradictory attitudes - to idealize nature or commodify it - are really two sides of the same coin, what the restoration biologist William Jordan terms the "coin of alienation." Both positions treat nature as an abstraction - separate from humans and not understood, not real.
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