People are fond of comparing and contrasting Native American (or other indiginous lifestyles) to the lives we lead today, and lament how removed we are from Mother Earth.
"The Indians never wasted any part of an animal, they put it all to use!" they exclaim, as a model for us to follow in our inefficiently gluttonous times. It's as though indiginous people had a lock on some kind of connection or magical power over/with nature that led them to be peaceful, happy people. If we could only live more like them, we'd be happier too.
Putting aside the fact that we did live like them once, this kind of mythology has been around for awhile; nearly as long as Europeans saw indiginous people as barbarians or savages. It really took flight in the 1960s with the hippy movement, a generation's attempt to reject the materialism of their parents (which was in turn a post-war movement borne out of the have-nothing of the Great Depression). Live closer to the Earth, make your houses out of dung and mud, and you'll find inner peace.
If you feel like you're not connected to mother Earth, thats a paradigm you've created and fostered yourself. As my previous posts suggest, I know I live in a world that wouldn't be possible without the resources we extract from our environment. I live in an Earthen home; it is made from volcanic cinderblacks and concrete, two types of "dirt." I've lived in homes made of bricks; baked dirt. The gypsum drywall under the paint in my home is "dirt." The screws that hold the drywall to the wood two-by-fours connected to the cinderblocks are made of metals mined from the Earth, while the lumber came from trees. Etc, etc. To my knowledge, there is nothing in my home or my life that did not originate somewhere on or in this planet.
In this sense I live no different than my ancestors, who cobbled stones or wood together with mortar or mud to make houses, or the Native American tribes who lived on the plains in skin teepees held up by wood poles; you dont live any different either.
The greatest difference between our lifestyles and that led by indiginous peoples lie in our numbers and our use of resources. Because of our larger populations we've had to become more efficient in the production of food, as one example. I've seen estimates of the native population of North America pre-Columbus as anywhere from fifty million to a hundred million inhabitants. We now have over 300 million in the US alone, and we can feed them. With the limitations of their technology, they supported at least two-thirds fewer in the same area.
This is not just a function of food production, but I use food as an example. Through technology we have other options available to us that were not available to natives in the production of tools, too. We have diviersified our dependence on resources.
Take the indiginous people of the Amazon Basin, practically deified for their proximity to the Earth in the movie The Emerald Forest. These people use blowpipes constructed from the roots of Walking Trees to hunt small game, as well as simple bows and arrows. They are a stone-age people, not using metals of any kind except that which they have traded with outsiders; mining is not something they know much about. These wooden bows and arrows come from the Earth and are a resource for them. If their population swells, so will their demand for Walking Tree roots to make blowpipes. It is conceiveable that the population could swell so large that Walking Tree roots become scarce, generating competition for them among tribes. Some families may lose or break their blowpipe, either causing them to starve or depend on others for food. This reduces the caloric intake of the next family, and so on, with a cascading effect throughout the tribe. Based on the resources available to them, this tribe might have reached its growth limit, and all because of a lack of diversity in resources. The dominant culture of the tribe may have to shift to actively growing Walking Trees so they have enough roots to make blowpipes; does doing so make them more or less in tune with nature?
To impose this analogy on our lifestyle, if any one of us breaks a wooden blowpipe it might be an opportunity to make one made of metal, or plastic; we have more options available to us to make the tools we need to survive. This is due to our increased population, but has also supported its growth. Hunting-gathering offered less options to our ancestors than the introduction of farming did, while primitive farming offered fewer options to our ancestors than massive economy-of-scale farming offers us now. Globalization has offered the most variety, since a regional drought or seasonal change does not mean the end of food in that area (with noteable exceptions that are more logistical than availability in nature). This is not to say everything in our food-industrial-complex is great, I recognize the problems; I'm saying that we've engineered ways to support larger numbers of people, and that engineering doesn't mean we are less connected to the Earth than the Australian Aborigines or the tribes in The Emerald Forest, despite what popular culture would have us believe. That difference is neither inherently good or bad, since good and bad is a matter of perspective. Two examples:
Australian Aborigines have a right-of-passage ceremony for males--their first kangaroo hunt. Sometimes the kangaroos are hard to find, so to make it easier, the older men in the tribe start a grassland fire to encourage the collection of kangaroos in one smaller area. They can burn down miles of grassland and trees in their attempt to capture kangaroos. They have this tradition and are able to do this because their populations aren't so large that burning down forests and grasslands impacts the resources of someone else. It is clearly not an efficient way of hunting, however, and may be why their numbers are as small as they are (certainly among other reasons, such those based in European racism).
As anyone who has watched Dirty Jobs or How It's Made can tell you, it is amazing how many different ways you can use stuff. Take a cow, for instance. The cow is slaughtered for its meat, but that is not the only use we have for it. We tan its skin to make shoes and jackets. We grind its bones down to make bonemeal feed and gelatin. The brains are blown out of the skull with an air compressor and canned for sale in Latin America. The meat not fit for human consumption is used in pet food. We literally do not waste a single part of a cow, and why? Because under capitalism, any waste is lost money. If after your production process you have material left over, you can make money finding a use for it--and we have. Compare that to the Navajo tradition of deer hunting where the animal's bones are buried in the spot where it was killed in an act of gratitude. Those bones might not be considered a waste to the Navajo, but they could be used to make gelatin instead.
Waste and closeness to the Earth or nature are perspectives and paradigms. We dont live like indiginous people do or did, but thats not to say that one lifestyle is better than another, for that assigns judgement and places value on actions that always depend on paradigms.
The appearance of indignous people being closer to nature than we are is actually a function of their populations and dependence on a limited series of resources. If that's a lifestyle you want to choose, go on ahead. It's not better or worse than my lifestyle, it's just different.
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