Like Grass Afire
17th January 2025
One of the legends that developed in the United States, almost as early as the first Romantics began writing about American Indians and the landscape, was that of the noble Indian living in peace and harmony with the land and with other Indians, never killing more than he could use, using every bit of all animals, and having a special knowledge of the place. By the 1960s and ‘70s, this became “Native Peoples left no footprints on Mother Earth,” meaning that they didn’t cause environmental degradation or change, and that prior to the coming of Europeans, all of North America was pristine wilderness.
To which some brave souls said, “Pick one. Was it home to Native Americans, or untouched land?” Because a few environmental historians had gone back to looking at Indians as people, people who managed their landscape and who occasionally fouled up the landscape. The earliest records about the North American landscape described fires gone wild, foul stenches that covered miles because so many bison had been run over a cliff that at best twenty percent of them could be used at all, and so the remaining hundred rotted, polluting the water and land under them.
Not a Romantic mental picture, is it?
Alma Boykin has a number of excellent fantasy series available on Amazon. Check ’em out.