Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change.

Around 2,000 B.C., native North Americans began to domesticate plants in what is now the American southwest. By A.D. 700, they practiced horticulture in all parts of the continent where the length of the growing season and the supply of rainfall permitted. Yet almost invariably Anglo-American observers classified native peoples as "hunters," who required instruction in agriculture to become civilized. The initial absence of domesticated animals from their households explains in part why they appeared to require instruction, but the main problem lay in the fact that their farmers were so often female. As Albert Gallatin put it, "'to impose on women, that portion, which can be properly performed only by man, is a deviation from the laws of nature.'" (p. 11) Societies where women planted and men hunted were hunting societies. One could not, naturally, classify a society by the labor its women performed.

David Rich Lewis analyzes the practice of directed cultural change - directed toward producing independent Anglo-style farmers - in three western Indian societies. The Northern Utes of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico; the Hupa of the Trinity River valley in northern California; and the Todono O'odham, or Desert People of the Papagos in Arizona represent tribes using quite different environments in idiosyncratic ways. Yet all of them illustrate the process by which misdirected attempts at changing other peoples' cultures resulted in their assimilation as dependents on the periphery of the U.S. economy.

All these tribal groups practiced subsistence strategies entailing seasonal movement that maximized their use of environmental resources, and all were confined to reservations that included "only a fraction of the biotic diversity of their original homelands." (pp. 170-1) There, ultimately, they had to compete with one another and with white settlers in a manner that depleted their resources through erosion, timber-cutting, and overgrazing and challenged their social organization with factional strife over a narrowing range of adaptive alternatives. All proved both adaptive in their selection of viable practices from the civilizers, and resistant in the protection of core values: diversified subsistence approaches aimed in most cases at secure subsistence rather than maximal accumulation, ancient forms of political organization in novel guises, and ritual and ceremonial observances (some incorporating the Catholic pantheon) designed to keep environing spirits friendly and generous.

Like most students of directed culture change among Native Americans, Lewis often emphasizes the negative: the failure of government officials to appreciate sophisticated subsistence strategies proven by ancient usage; the failure of allotment to encourage any practice other than leasing; the gradual reduction of the people to dependency. Often American Indian history reads like a handbook on how to create a poverty problem. Yet Lewis's rich evidence permits many more positive readings. Farmers in charge of the Desert People of the Gila River valley found the Tohono O'odham very good people to work with. "'We cannot go into their country with the idea of teaching them farming or irrigation under conditions as we find them. Rather should we go to them to be taught.'"(p. 147) BIA officials learned a good deal from the Desert People about both irrigation methods and crops. They tended to draw the line at ceremonies employing syrup made from the fruit of the cactus, or tiswin, to encourage the clouds to descend and bring rain. The Desert People responded by doing their ceremonies in out-of-the way places until the early 1930s, when the ceremonies re-emerged, enriched by the visions of a 90-year-old Keeper of the Smoke. The Northern Utes, nominal Mormons and Episcopalians who regularly did their Bear Dance, responded to the BIA banning of the more recently acquired Sun Dance by renaming it the Harvest, or Thanksgiving dance. When their agent attempted to reform their religious practice by moving them from their sacred Hoopa Valley, the Hupa held an unprecedented six-week White Deerskin Dance in the spring of 1876. Their agent left, their friends the soldiers stayed, and so did the Hupas.

Although all the tribes were in varying degrees and contexts willing to experiment with farming and ranching, and some individuals became modestly prosperous experimenters, none adopted either practice as an exclusive subsistence strategy. Instead, they found multiple opportunities in ever-changing environments to expand their subsistence rounds, preferably at government expense. The Hupas took to agriculture as wage work, and quit when the agent refused them wages. Naturally their government farmers found them lazy, and resorted to doing most of the work themselves. The Hupas decided that their spirits had provided them with white men whose nature it was to work for the Hupas. The Desert People, for whom individual farming and individual ownership, supplemented by cooperative work and exchange, had long proved a way of life, welcomed allotment. Their only complaint was that when flooding and erosion changed the value of some of the allotments, the government would not permit them to re-allot the land for the sake of equity.

When, like most small farmers and ranchers of the 1950s and 60s, the tribes had to give up on full-time farming and ranching, they found a mix of wage labor in extractive industry, agriculture and ranching, hunting, fishing, gathering, government and tribal relief, employment and per capita payments from claims cases or resource leases to sustain them. Maintaining core values worked well along with flexible strategies of adaptation to the ever-challenging environment.

Mary Young University of Rochester