ESPM 50 Weekly reflections week 7

Fall 2016

1. Shepherd Kreck III questions the empirical validity of the ecological Indian stereotype. He argues
that historical Native American resource management made sense according to the ideas and myths
through which Indians understood the world, and particularly their relationship to nature. He
emphasizes that this cultural basis for resource management was not essentially the same as
contemporary ecological science and did not always lead to practices that conform to contemporary
conservation ideals. Kat Anderson, on the contrary, argues that California Indians by keeping
ecosystems in a modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological
harmony with nature. Answer one of the following questions.
A. Which argument is more compelling? Use specific examples to support your claims.
B. Krechs argument has triggered a strong response from critics such as Sioux Indian historian and
legal scholar Vine Deloria, who calls Krechs argument anti-Indian and others who have
accused Krech of implying that American Indians must be stopped from controlling their own
resources at any cost. Why has Krechs argument, which reviewer Kimberly Tallbear describes
as well researched and largely valid, elicited such strong responses? And do you think that
Krechs argument has any ethical and/or political implications regarding contemporary Indian
claims to authority over natural resource management?
2. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner described the frontier as a process along the line of most
effective and rapid Americanization. Answer one of the following questions concerning this statement:
A. How does this statement reflect Manifest Destiny and the agrarian myth?
B. Patricia Nelson Limerick and other New Western historians contend that the American frontier
should be understood in terms of place-specific histories, rather than as a universal process that
defines American identity. How does this argument reflect the perspective of historians writing
in the context of the multi-cultural society of late twentieth and early twenty-first century
America?
3. James Scott describes the advent of forestland governance under the principles of scientific forestry
as an example of seeing like a state. First, summarize Scotts argument in this regard. Then describe
at least one way in which, during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. federal government
used scientific forestry to render landscapes legible, drawing on Catton (2016) and/or the film The
Greatest Good.