Nicolas Pol: Response to Chapter 24 of Ecology of Eden

 In Chapter 24 of Ecology of Eden, we looked at the Westernized view of indigenous Americans. 

Thanks to the wonderful presentation today, it was made clear that there was a distinct dichotomy between American settlers and indigenous cultures: 

To white settlers, America was wild.

To Americans (native), the land was already cultivated. 

Why the difference in viewpoints? In the class discussion, we talked about how the native populations were dying off before settlers came. This abandoned America would have looked "untouched" to the untrained European eye. 

However, I think that the answer is much more complex than that. I think that the difference between white settlers and Americans, in terms of land viewpoints, is power. 

I am not saying that white settlers were more powerful than American natives. Rather, Europeans view land as the physical manifestation of power. If we turn back to the Middle Ages, the Edict of Minton (1215 A.D.) took land away from peasants in England and were gifted to the nobility. Why did the nobility need all this land? They already made money from taxing the commoners. The answer is power. The more land, the more political control one has over the social landscape. 

Even though the Edict of Minton only survived for several decades, its mentality would snowball into imperialism, which reached a peak in the 19th century. During the rise of imperialism, natives were subjected to unfair treatment, such as the Indian Removal Act of President Johnson and the displacement of the Hawaiian Queen during the end of the 19th Century.  

Queen Liliuokalani was forcibly removed from her kingdom by the U.S. Federal Government in 1893.

This is not to say that land did not equate to power for the Native Americans. The difference, though, was that most American cultures valued the land as something more than a political weapon. The Algonquian-speaking tribes, for example, were well known for its vast territory of the Chesapeake Bay, Eastern Canada, and pockets of the Great Plains. However, the Algonquian tribes are not remembered for being imperialistic. Their lands were used for the sake of habitus. In other words, the lands were an exchange of wisdom between generations and tribal cultures. We see this enacted through the cultivation of the entire Chesapeake Bay through several Algonquian tribes. 

Simply put, power corrupts the mind. Especially if power originates in social institutions, humanity fails to regain and maintain the wisdom of the land.