Native American Use of Fire - Human-shaped Landscape

Human-shaped Landscape

Many people believe that North America, before the coming of the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers, was a totally pristine, natural, wilderness world with ancient forests covering the landscapes. This ideal world was populated by millions of Indian people who, somewhat amazingly, “were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance.” This peaceful, mythic, magical ideal — sometimes referred to as tabula rasa — has symbolized the thinking behind much of the modern environmental movement. However these impressions of a "benign people treading lightly on the land" is wrong in its view of an entirely natural landscape: natives played a large role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystems.

Fire scientists and ecologists often find old fire scars in trees going back hundreds of years. Geographers studying lake sediments often find evidence of charcoal layers going back thousands of years, attributing the data to prehistoric fires caused by climatic warming and drying conditions. Since the trees and sediments cannot document how the fires started, lightning becomes the easiest “natural” explanation. Early researchers thought that no large burning was carried out by natives, but research during the latter half of the 20th century has shown that many or most of the presettlement fires were intentionally caused.

Keeping large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth and small trees was just one of many reasons for using fire in ecosystems. Intentional burning has greatly modified landscapes across the continent in many subtle ways that have often been interpreted as natural by the early explorers, trappers, and settlers. Many research scientists who study presettlement forest and savanna fire evidence tend to attribute most prehistoric fires as being caused by lightning (natural) rather than by humans. This problem arises because there was no systematic record keeping of these fire events. Thus the interaction of people and ecosystems is down played or ignored, which often leads to the conclusion that people are a problem in "natural" ecosystems rather than the primary force in their development.

Romantic and primitivist writers such as William Henry Hudson, Longfellow, Francis Parkman, and Thoreau were major inventors of the The Pristine Myth, which became part of American heritage. Influenced by Western prejudice against primitivism and hunter-gatherer societies, many people still believe that Native Americans lived in complete harmony with the environment and neither disturbed nor destroyed but took only what was absolutely needed for survival. One of the powerful technologies which Native Americans had was fire, and they clearly changed the landscape with it. Sometimes to clear the woods, sometimes to create a berry patch, the changes spread across the continents.