suring future hunts and catches. The frugality with which Plains peoples
used the bison—they left nothing on the ground, using meat, sinew and
fat, blood, bones and teeth, and hide—is legendarily illustrative.^20
Thus Indians are set apart from the Europeans they encountered from
onward. Europeans understood the notion of commons, but their
laws of private property fated white men ever to compromise and then to
despoil and eliminate common resources. For resources they were, sanc-
tioned for appropriation by no less a power than Jehovah himself, as re-
vealed in Genesis :–. Here humankind is separated from the rest of
nature and granted ‘‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
thing that creepeth upon the earth.’’ Plant life is mentioned, too: ‘‘Behold,’’
exclaimed God, ‘‘I have given you every herb bearing seed...every tree, in
which is the fruit of a tree bearing seed; to you it shall be for food.’’ In retro-
spect, or maybe even prospect, Jehovah not only separated humans from
the rest of the natural world but invented the commodification of nature
and capitalism. Most native Americans resisted Jehovah for a long time;
some do, still, in great part owing to their cosmology’s stunning incompati-
bility with the dominion-without-respect of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Here, then, is the frame and foundation for natives’ legendary status as
‘‘ecological’’ and ‘‘conservationist.’’ ‘‘Ecological’’ means not the interdisci-
plinary science established early in the twentieth century, but something
similar and compatible: that Indians understood systemic relationships in
nature. ‘‘Conservationist’’ means almost precisely what was meant by Euro-
Americans who adopted the term about the same time that ecological sci-
ence was established. Theodore Roosevelt and his friend Gifford Pinchot,
chief forester of the United States, and many other elite eastern conserva-
tionists insisted that natural resources must not be wasted but used wisely,
thus ensuring a future without want. Native Americans, then, may be seen
as conservationist in that they not only had respect for the earth and all its
features but that they did not waste.
An enduring exception is the legend of fish fertilizer in native agricul-
ture. Supposedly the Plymouth settlers (early s) were spared starvation
not only by native generosity in the so-called First Thanksgiving but by the
Indian Squanto’s instruction to place a fish in each hill of corn. Here was a
method of treating the littoral’s notoriously infertile (as well as acidic) dirt.
If indeed Squanto so instructed the English, he probably acquired the prac-
tice not from his own people but from the Spanish, with whom he lived
during –. Several nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographers