It has been common knowledge for me that colonizers hunted off the bison in North America to cut the supply of sustenance to Native Americans, but I didn't know of the attempts in recent years to bring populations back to their native lands. When Carlisle was painting the picture of what the prairies once looked like, I couldn't help feel sad, as that image will likely not be restored to it's former glory in any of our lifetimes.
Humans, white ones specifically, have meddled so deeply in the fabric of nature, that we have to meddle our way out of it but now with many more obstacles from other meddling-projects we have done. We can bring back the bison, but must appease ranchers that we forced to ranch, shake hands across borders we invented, work around infrastructure that did not exist two, three, four hundred years ago. It was easy for the colonizers to go about hunting bison down, but to try to reverse those attempts at the same level of ease is impossible. I can't help but wonder what the state of the world would be had the British been less of colonizers and more of cooperators, community builders. By trying to dominant the planet, we have just created endless loops of problems for ourselves. This is evident when looking at the differences between cattle vs bison ranching. The bison dwell much better in the disparate Montana weather than cattle. Of course they do, they have evolved for thousands of years to live in that landscape. Had they simply learned something from the natives, maybe we wouldn't be in such an agricultural mess right now.
1 comment:
I agree that it is sad. The pattern seems to be that western culture believed they could “dominate” nature, and do whatever they wanted. In this process they brought atrocities to native peoples, whose cultures were built with a deep connection and reciprocity with nature, and destroyed the balance of precious ecosystems. The greed for money and power, and therefore the desire to “conquer territory” removed all value of the land and the peoples living there. Western culture (generalization) thought that land and nature could be conquered: bent to the will of white (generally) people?? Look how that’s worked out for us now.
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