A Fire-Stick Farm of One's Own, Part 2
Jaguars, Wolves & Livin’ the Anthropocene Dream
“Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them…
“…at night, when Laura lay awake in the trundle bed, she listened and could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. Then he came nearer, and howled again.” — Laura Ingalls Wilder, Chapter 1 of Little House in the Big Woods [Harper, 1932]
The above quote relates an 1860-1870s version of the ever-evolving myths I addressed in Part 1 of this essay, here told in semi-autobiographical children’s novels written during the the 1930s and 1940s—themselves decades of widespread environmental/social upheaval and its inevitable displacements and conflicts. The author was descended from immigrants who’d arrived in North America over 10,000 years after the extinction of the continent’s mega-fauna, but the culture of humans re-shaping wild habitat remained. So too, the restlessness with status quo. Here’s another quote, from the most well-known book of the series:
“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.
They were going to the Indian country. Pa said there were too many people in the big woods now.” — Laura Ingalls Wilder, Chapter 1 of Little House on the Prairie [Harper & Brothers, 1935]
After a few years in ‘Indian country’ (in this case a part of the Osage Nation’s treaty-protected homeland in Kansas), the Ingalls family—in fiction and real-life— moved on, as part of a human diaspora too complex for one myth’s telling. It was an era that included broken treaties, Congressional shenanigans, the forced removal of tribal groups from their homelands—albeit some of these lands recently wrested from other tribal groups—to be ‘contained’ in the general region now known as Oklahoma, at the expense of other refugees from their own formerly uncrowded, wolf-haunted Big Woods of “Once upon a time…”
By 1885, the Osage tribal reservation in present-day Kansas had been been traded for a piece of Indian Territory, which the 1887 Dawes Act would partition into a patchwork of ownership still being haggled over today. I came across this succinct, yet still cryptic synopsis on the Osage Nation’s Historic Preservation site: “The Osage Nation has a rich and varied geographic history. The ancestral map below shows our migration over a period of more than 1,000 years, towards our modern day territory in Northeast Oklahoma.” The above link will take you to a more complete summary of Osage history.
These are chapters of the myth-infused, restless saga of humans. My own family’s history has chapters in several of the regions Osage people migrated through, and I come into the story a few counties northwest of this old schoolhouse which I visited a few months back, at the western edge of ancestral Osage territory.
Left out of most migration narratives, except as howls in the night and ceremonial depictions, is the disruptive effect of human migration on the species and habitats whose relationships predate humans’ arrival. A recent article in Current Biology put it this way,
“The extent to which individuals of different species co-occur within a shared habitat space, termed interspecific spatial associations, is crucial to understanding species distributions and has important consequences for ecosystem integrity.
Spatial associations can manifest as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on whether species aggregate or segregate in space. Disruptions to the spatial arrangement of wildlife can upset the competitive balance between species, increasing the risk of displacement or even extinction.” — from Habitat modification destabilizes spatial associations and persistence of Neotropical carnivores, by Valeria Boron, et al [Current Biology, Sept. 11, 2023]
The universal human trait of modifying landscapes to suit their own uses and desires has a profound effect on all life-forms in an ecosystem, and the study describes in some detail the destabilizing effects of human occupation on predator-prey distribution, and eventually on ecosystem stability and resilience in northwestern South America. Jaguars and pumas, the formerly apex predators, are reduced in population by forest loss and fragmentation, causing a cascading effect on other predators (the mesocarnivores) and prey species, that leads to over-browsing of habitat and eventually hindering natural and/or human-engineered forest regeneration, thereby perpetuating the degraded habitat. My lifelong rambles of North America have revealed a similar story of human-engineered habitat disruption, featuring players drawn from multiple ethnic, racial, and economic pools, along with the ample evidence of another universal human trait, the extraction of natural resources—water, minerals, meat, vegetation, etc.—for comfort and profit.
As an adult, I eventually migrated to my chosen home range on the edge of the Colorado Plateau, which features its own chapters of the ‘fire-stick farm’ sagas I’ve addressed so far in this series. Somewhere along the way, I began to read and learn from another migrant to the Southwest’s drylands, who has articulated the complexities of his own relationship with the continent’s cultures and landscape in a calm way not often seen in our current era’s discussions of ecologically/economically driven interactions and conflicts. N. Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Kiowa country, a few counties southwest of modern day Osage territory in Oklahoma, and grew up in NE Arizona and NW New Mexico. Here are two short excerpts from his essay, A First American Views His Land:
“In our society as a whole we conceive of the land in terms of ownership and use. It is a lifeless medium of exchange; it has for most of us, I suspect, no more spirituality than an automobile, say, or a refrigerator. And our laws confirm us in this, for we can buy and sell the land, we can exclude each other from it, and in the context of ownership, we can use it as we will…”
“As an Indian, I think, “You say that I use the land, and I reply, yes, it is true; but it is not the first truth. The first truth is that I love the land; I see that it is beautiful; I delight in it; I am alive in it.” — from N. Scott Momaday’s book The Man Made of Words [St. Martin’s Press, 1997]
Unlike refrigerators or (in most cases) automobiles, how I or you use our own little patch of land has a cascading effect on our human and non-human neighbors, whether we think of them as equals, or not. No matter which individuals or groups claim ownership, it is true that we all use—and depend on—the land. Momaday’s ‘first truth’ is a good place to start from, when exploring some choices that our warming planet is forcing all of us to face. This shared responsibility, this love is too often missing from heritage/ownership/tradition/profit-driven narratives, sagas and myths—at a profound cost to all involved, and to the detriment of ecosystems we all inhabit.
Next up, I’ll re-visit Australia, southern California, and some dryland points closer to my home range in: A Fire-Stick Farm of One’s Own, Part 3—Fires, Floods, Droughts and Migrations. Until then, let’s help each other enjoy our still beautiful home planet. - B.
To learn more about the stated purpose and actual effects of 1887’s Dawes Act, this National Archives page is a good place to start.
Here’s a map of post-Dawes Act ‘Indian Territory,’ printed in 1891 from General Land Office information.
For a an in-depth profile of N. Scott Momaday’s life, work and philosophy, here’s a 2018 article in New Mexico Magazine.
Though written for the U. S. children’s book market of the 1930s-1940s, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” novels addressed many issues discussed in this essay—displacement, adventure, encroachment, prejudice, and hardship—as seen through the eyes of a child migrating with her family from Wisconsin to Kansas, then Minnesota, and to the Dakota Territory before statehood. A final novel, published after the author’s death, ends as the main protagonist, Laura, is a young mother married to a farmer, attempting to recover from the family’s bout with illness and the loss of their house to a fire. Here are synopses of the novels.
Beautifully written. My mother married into the Pawnee tribe and I, her moody and rebellious son, had the benefit of a Native American influenced youth force few years. The Pawnee, like the Osage, had been relocated- from their ancestral range in Nebraska to the red earth of present day Pawnee county south of where the Osages wound up. BTW, the latter tribe became fabulously wealthy when substantial oil was discovered in their new lands. They were very canny and managed their financial affairs quite well. The same can't be said of the Pawnee whose affairs followed a more tragic course. My mother wrote two ethnohistories on the tribe and it's trajectory: Pawnee Passage and Some Things are not Forgotten. We whites have a lot to be ashamed about. But it can't be said we didnt love the land too. Many did immensely and I was and am one to this day. I get a sickness of the spirit if I live away from the drylands and the great skies there. The emptiness, the lack of the plague of people....
Thank you for your thoughts and consideration of this topic, Michael. Our various perspectives, stories and family histories can help us all to navigate the paths ahead, and are a large part of the reason I post these essays and reflections.