Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape

by Thomas Vale (Editor)

For nearly two centuries, the creation myth for the United States imagined European settlers arriving on the shores of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Over the last two decades, however, a contrary vision has emerged, one which sees the country's roots not in a state of "pristine" nature but rather in a "human-modified landscape" over which native peoples exerted vast control. Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape seeks a middle ground between those conflicting paradigms, offering a critical, research-based assessment of the role of Native Americans in modifying the landscapes of pre-European America. Contributors focus on the western United States and look at the question of fire regimes, the single human impact which could have altered the environment at a broad, landscape scale, and which could have been important in almost any part of the West. Each of the seven chapters is written by a different author about a different subregion of the West, evaluating the question of whether the fire regimes extant at the time of European contact were the product of natural factors or whether ignitions by Native Americans fundamentally changed those regimes.An introductory essay offers context for the regional chapters, and a concluding section compares results from the various regions and highlights patterns both common to the West as a whole and distinctive for various parts of the western states. The final section also relates the findings to policy questions concerning the management of natural areas, particularly on federal lands, and of the "naturalness" of the pre-European western landscape.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Tomek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do yourself a favor. Skip the middle 2/3 of the book wherein authors repeatedly describe specifics of the fire ecology of various western geographic regions in an attempt to determine whether western landscapes are pristine wilderness, completely cultural artifacts, or somewhere in between. The chapters become repetitive as almost all of the authors come to the same conclusion (hint: it's the latter) due to the same reasoning: both ethnographic and physical evidence demonstrates indigenous utilization of fire but not to the extent of completely modifying entire landscapes and vegetation communities. Environmental heterogeneity at these broader levels of analysis can be attributed to climatic variables. That said, Vale's introduction and conclusion chapters are excellent. They effectively contextualize the debate and summarize the findings. He points out that this does not undermine the importance or veracity of indigenous fire and natural resource management, but provides a more nuanced view of its use, effects, and extent. As he writes, "If both the intensely humanized landscape and the untouched landscape seem naively inaccurate as models of past ... environment, and if the mosaic landscape captures the essential character of the physical landscape, the inhabited wilderness landscape may describe the cultural meaning of that pre-Columbian landscape of home.