Political correctness portrays untamed America before European invasion as a natural paradise, where Indians maintained an exquisite ecological balance, living in a harmonious, idyllic relationship to the natural world. According to conventional wisdom, this pre-Columbian Eden flourished for peaceful millenia until brutal disuprtion by thoughtless, menacing and mercenary white colonists. Stewart Udall, one-time Arizona Congressman and later Secretary of the Interior for President Kennedy, became an early advocate of this point of view in his influential 1973 article, “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists,” urging modern citizens to follow the native example of treating the landscape with love and respect.

Udall’s arguments received powerful support from the popularization of the moving speech of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish elder who addressed a meeting in 1854 in the raw settlement in Washington Territory that ultimately took his name. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” Seattle supposedly told his listeners. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.” Later, the aged sage assaulted the insensitive ways of the new arrivals. “There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities,” he lamented. “The clatter only seems to insult the ears…I’ve seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a train.”

Actually, it’s unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw even a single buffalo, either rotting or otherwise, or ever looked at a train for that matter, since buffalo never lived in his verdant corner of the Pacific Northwest, and railroads (along with “the clatter” of white the man’s cities) only arrived several decades after the alleged speech. His poetic remarks (immortalized in a bestselling children’s book, “Brother Eagle, Sister Sky”) represent an internationally influential hoax-- a more or less whole-cloth invention by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a now-forgotten 1972 TV documentary, based very, very loosely on an account in a Seattle newspaper (twenty years after the kindly chief’s death) of a real talk he may (or may not) have delivered in his largely indecipherable native language to the drenched but respectful pioneers.

In the same era that school kids learned to memorize the bogus words of Chief Seattle, another aged Indian emerged in the pop culture with the sacred purpose of protecting the North American environment, and cementing the widespread image of Indians as eternal guardians of the sacred landscape. In 1971, a brilliant “Keep America Beautiful” public service announcement offered an eloquent plea for ecological consciousness, with the tag line “people start pollution; people can stop it.” The commercial showed garbage thrown from a speeding car landing at the moccasined feet of an elderly native in traditional garb who looks toward the camera with a fat, glistening tear flowing down his weather-beaten cheek. The actor featured in the commercial, a Hollywood veteran with the marvelous name “Iron Eyes Cody,” became famous for those few seconds of video, which easily overshadowed his more than 200 films (including Indian roles in “The Big Trail” with John Wayne (1930), “A Man Called Horse” with Richard Harris (1970) and many more. Iron Eyes became an impassioned advocate for Native American causes and a regular on TV talk shows before his death at age 95 in 1999. Only with his obituaries did the truth emerge about the cherished Native American symbol “Iron Eyes Cody” – whose parents (Antonio De Corti and Francesco Salpietra) both immigrated to the United States from Sicily, and possessed no hint of Indian blood.

The cherished notion of Indians as ecologically enlightened protectors of the natural order actually carries no more authenticity than Chief Seattle’s ruminations on rotting buffalo or the purportedly Cherokee identity of the Sicilian-American “Iron Eyes Cody.” In a densely researched 1999 monograph from Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs (“Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Eco-Savage”) Robert Whelan blasts the popular but puerile proposition that before 1492, Native Americans lived as blissful stewards of pristine environments they cherished and protected .

The truth is that native peoples, like all other aboriginal societies on the planet, did anything and everything to their surroundings that might help them to survive. "There is now a very considerable body of research," Robert Whelan writes, "which demonstrates conclusively that the Indians made a massive impact on their environment before the arrival of the white man, and that much of this impact was damaging and showed no conception of a conservation ethic."

For example, to hunter-gatherers who lived in temporary structures, trees constituted an impediment that separated them from the animals they wanted to eat. As forests grow, "The open savanna that once supported bison, elk, deer, antelope, beaver, bears, birds and wolves becomes the closed boreal forest inhabited by squirrels, ravens, and pine martens, but little else." So naturally, the Indians (particularly on the Eastern Seaboard) did whatever they could to get rid of the leafy interlopers. Early white settlers expressed surprise to see vast tracts of forest deliberately wiped out: "The Savages are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a year, vixe at the spring and the fall of the leafe," recorded the Puritan Thomas Morton (an outspoken admirer of the Indians) in 1637. Lewis and Clark reported in their 1805 diaries that "Indians in the Rocky Mountains would set trees alight as after dinner entertainment; the huge trees would explode like Roman candles in the night." In response to a 1992 earth summit, BL Turner and Karl Butzer researched the environmental impact of Native Americans, and found that "Deforestation in the Americas was probably greater before the Columbian encounter than it was for several centuries thereafter."

In fact, in their pursuit of succulent suppers, Indians did a great deal of collateral damage, even driving some species extinct. In 1998, our family accepted an invitation to spend a few days at an historic Wyoming ranch where the couple that owned it took us on an unforgettable tour of their property. They brought us to a red-earth outcropping that rose like a wedge from the surrounding terrain. "This was an Indian Buffalo Run," they explained. The local tribes developed a means to frighten huge herds of buffalo and to direct their stampede —right off the edge of the cliff into a heap of meat more than a hundred feet below. There, awaiting tribesmen could collect as much of the carcasses as they could eat and preserve. They left the rest to rot, creating a mountain of bones still visible (and formidable) below us. Continued...