User:Vsreeves/sandbox

“Hands-Off” Hunter and Gatherer Misconception
Anderson breaks down common misconceptions surrounding the way in which Native Americans lived among nature and shows that their true impact was often one that attracted and invited others to the land they inhabited. Native Americans, regardless of location, were privy to wildlife management such as, “coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting.” These practices were acted out in calculated intervals according to season and by witnessing the signals conveyed by nature to do so and, “on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries.” Anderson’s writing focuses specifically on Natives established in California and emphasizes these techniques applied by them to be essential in maintaining, and even creating, the rich Californian landscapes settlers later happened upon, such as: the coastal prairies, valley grasslands, and oak savannas.

Overall, the Native’s practices were nature conserving and sustaining due to the specificity of their environmental knowledge which was learned through more than twelve-thousand years of trial and error. Anderson also establishes that the Native’s practices were most likely not always beneficial or environmentally friendly. Though he asserts that there is no real evidence of their destruction available, it is possible that the Indigenous peoples in California may have been responsible for the extinction of early regional species.

In discussing California Native’s “tempered” land tenure practices, Anderson deconstructs the idea of Native Americans as hunter-gatherers who’s sparse population and nomadic ways left little to no mark on the land they traveled. When European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs established themselves in that same land, the concept of their surroundings that they perpetuated was one of an uninhabited wilderness, untouched by man. Though as Anderson points out, this was never the case. This “wilderness” was carefully tended to by the Natives for hundreds of years who had both negative and positive impacts on its conservation. It is theorized by Anderson that without the Natives' calculated intervention, real wilderness in the form of thickets, dense understory, and wildfire would have deemed the land uninhabitable. In establishing this belief, the foreign settlers not only erased the Native’s long history of masterful cultivation from the land, but they pushed their people out of the land as well, establishing a new, Eurocentric construction of the American’s continent. This constructed history has not only diminished Native ancestry and culture, but also the land, which is no longer maintained or protected by strategic resource management. The European way of mitigating resource and land depletion follows a “hands off” model, which comes from the misconceptions of “leave no trace” mentioned previously.