Indians, Conservation, and George Bird Grinnell Richard Levine

indians, conservation, and george bird grinnell richard levine Academic discussion of Indians and environmentalism has been largely confined to the question of whether Native Americans really conserved their resources. Few authors have attempted to explore the origins of the prevailing identification of conservation with Indians, and little is known about the sources of Indian influence on modern conservation Conservationists of the early twen tieth century did not iconize Native Americans as models of devotion to the preservation of the natural world to the extent that this is done today. Never theless some authors felt that Indians had things to teach us about conservation. Especially in regard to hunting practices, conservationists urged Americans to consider the Indians' aversion to waste. But these publicists were restricted by their own assumptions in their appreciation of native environmental practices. Not only did they fail to understand some Indian practices, especially burning the woods, which contradicted turn-of-the-century beliefs, they also imposed their own business-oriented views on the Indians they presumed to explain. A case-in-point is George Bird Grinnell. Any study of the origins of American conservation in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century or the ethnography of native Americans of the same period will quickly turn up the name Grinnell. His credentials in both fields are impressive. Grinnell was the editor of Forest and Stream, a hunter's magazine which campaigned for conservation. He editorialized and lobbied for decent administration in Yellowstone National Park. He founded the Audubon Society to provide a group of advocates for birds which were being hunted to extinction for the millinery trade. He also founded the Boone and Crocket Club, an organization of big-game hunters. Grinnell originated the plan for an Adiron- 0026-3079/87/2802-041 $01.50/0 41 *~\ FIGURE ONE: George Bird Grinnell making Pawnee sign. (Cracked photographic plate.) Photography by George Bird Grinnell. Courtesy Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. 42 dack Preserve which Theodore Roosevelt advocated in the New York State Legislature. Glacier National Park in Montana was GrinnelPs idea.2 GrinnelTs involvement with the West was not just from a journalistic dis tance. He was a zoologist at Yale and collected fossils on a six-month trip out west with Professor O. C. Marsh. In 1874 he was sent to the Black Hills with Custer as a naturalist on the expedition that discovered gold and led to the second war with the Sioux. He went to Yellowstone in 1875 with the Ludlow Expedition. After that, he went west virtually every summer. On these trips he made friends among the Pawnee, and later the Cheyenne and Blackfoot. He published many books and articles about Indians, especially their stories and myths. His most important was the two-volume 1923 work, The Cheyenne In dians. It is considered the basic work on Cheyenne ethnology, and Llewelyn and Hoebel relied on it heavily in the 1940's. Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel still valued it in 1960, writing, "Of all the books written on Indians, none comes closer to their everyday life than Grinnell's classic monograph on the Cheyenne. Reading it, one can smell the buffalo grass and the wood fires, feel the heavy morning dew on the prairie."3 As both ethnographer and conservationist, Grinnell is clearly the person to begin with to find out how the conservationists of 1900 felt about the Indian. Actually, Grinnell wrote very little on the Indians as models for conservation ists: two articles on the subject and a number of shorter references in his other works and letters. But the fact he did so at all is notable considering that he believed native people to be—according to the prevailing social Darwinist dogma—decidedly inferior and marked for extinction. In a typical passage about the Blackfoot he wrote, A few Blackfeet still exist, the pitiful remnant of a once mighty people. They are striving to earn their living as the white man earns his, by toil. It is the meeting of the past and the present, of savagery and civilization. The issue cannot be doubtful. Old methods must pass away. The Blackfeet will become civilized, but at a terrible cost. To me there is an interest, profound and pathetic, in watching the progress of the struggle.4 Nevertheless, Grinnell did write about Indian conservation. In a 1916 Forest and Stream article titled "What We May Learn from the Indian," Grin nell argued that among Indians, "game protection was for economic reasons." He explained "it was for the greatest good of the greatest number of his people that this game should not be wasted." Specific conservation practices included forbidding individual buffalo hunting to avoid scaring the herds, allocating family hunting territories, keeping close count of the game so that "only a certain proportion was taken," and letting zones lie fallow for a year after a year of hunting. Grinnell concluded that these were "methods of economy that American sportsmen may well take to heart"5 The question of hunting territories, or whether Indians held property in land, has been a subject for debate in anthropological circles since Frank Speck described this practice. Its importance in the current context is as a conserva tion practice, which by giving an individual family custodianship over a particu lar area, keeps them from overutilizing its resources. Grinnell may have pub lished the first article on the subject, in American Anthropologist in 1907. While the point of the piece was to advocate a modification of the federal policy of land allotment to individual Indians then in effect, he also discussed the history of land tenure among Indians. He argued that, among Indians, land sales "were always regarded merely as permits to use the land for a term and on conditions," and that they did not include subsurface rights. He concluded that "the Indians looked forward to a time at the end of the loan when the land should be returned to them, when nature would heal the scars made by the white man, when the animals and the birds would reestablish themselves and the fish would increase in the rivers."6 The modern reader of these articles is immediately struck by the absence of phrases about "harmony with nature" or "balance among living things" which we have come to expect in discussions of Native American conservation prac tices. Instead we read about game counts and land-use permits. One envisions rows of visored Indian clerks going over their ledgers of game species and fastidiously entering credits and debits and acres transferred. This is a book keeper's paradigm. Is it an accurate model? As a progressive conservationist, Grinnell was predisposed to see Indian environmental practices in such a light. In his influential 1959 work, Conser vation and the Gospel of Efficiency, Samuel P. Hays argued that what was progressive in the conservation movement was the aim to have "a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it." Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's chief forester, put it this way: "The object of our forest policy is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful ... or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness ... but for the making of prosperous homes . Every other consideration comes as secondary."7 To clarify conservationism, Hays counterposed a preservationist camp which was more concerned with scenic beauty than with natural resources. The position of the preservationists was epitomized by John Muir, who wrote, "I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do." Muir was part of the romantic tradition of Thoreau while Pinchot was a utilitarian. Roderick Nash described the difference: "For all his love of the woods, Pinchot's ulti mate loyalty was to civilization and forestry; Muir's to wilderness and preser vation."8 The specifics of political program would appear to place Grinnell outside of the conservationist trend. Pinchot's Forest Service opposed the creation of Glacier National Park, for which Grinnell labored twenty years. In fact, the Forest Service opposed the formation of a National Park Service, wishing to administer the Parks themselves for timber and resource management. Grinnell, on the other hand, was the president of the National Parks Association, which 44 favored preservation, rather than utilization of the Parks. Hays explicitly placed the Boone and Crockett Club, which Grinnell founded, in the camp of the pre servationists, who derided "forestry for profit," and wanted to preserve wilder ness for esthetic reasons.9 The neatness of Hays's scheme breaks down when we realize that Theodore Roosevelt was another founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, and that Pinchot was a member. They were both close friends of Grinnell's, and Grin nell and Pinchot once became lost climbing ML Rainier together. Despite differences in program, Grinnell shared a common language and set of assump tions with Pinchot, and therefore Hays' Progressive conservationists. His rea soning was utilitarian. Already in 1901, in his Century article advocating the creation of Glacier National Park, he argued that the destruction of the forests of the Chief Mountain region would ruin its value as a reservoir, and that water was the most important question in the states around the Rockies. While Grinnell initially thought about Glacier Park in 1891, he didn't open his cam paign until ten years later when it became clear that there were no copper deposits there.10 Grinnell argued that in some areas, not minerals nor lumber, but simply being left alone, was the "highest possible use" of the land, using the language of the Forest Service itself.

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