Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1983

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William Cronon

Historical ecologist William Cronon maintains a balanced evaluation throughout the text by drawing on writing by European visitors to New England and on settlers’ accounts of early settlements there. Cronon’s work remains remarkable to scholars because it was the first ecological history of the pre-colonial period. Cronon virtually created the scholarly discipline of ecological history. Additionally, one of Cronon’s chief accomplishments in the field of scholarly historical research lies in his use of direct Native American sources wherever possible. No other work, up to the publication of Cronon’s book, had pursued historical scholarship from the Native American point of view.

The Colonists

The early European settlers to New England were primarily English, and they brought their cultural beliefs and farming and animal husbandry practices with them. The settlers’ methods proved disastrous to the existing ecosystem, but the settlers saw this destruction of the existing natural world as appropriate: taming the land and forming it into familiar replicas of the towns and farms of England. A few contemporaneous European visitors saw the ecological changes as a disaster, but the vast majority of Europeans viewed New England as a land to be exploited for its natural resources.

The colonists, who misunderstood the Native Americans’ ways from the beginning, nevertheless copied some of their practices, particularly in farming maize. However, the colonists’ environmental misuse caused trauma to the ecosystem, which did not survive in its plentiful bounty, primarily due to the colonists’ deliberate overuse of the land and sea in every possible manner. They did not care why the Native Americans lived and harvested the land in the ways that they did: for example, the selective and careful burning of forest underbrush was used to create open spaces in the forests for other wild crops, such as berries. The settlers adopted only those practices from the Native peoples that they saw directly tied to their survival and to a market economy that depended on selling surplus goods both within New England and in the Old World.

The Native Americans

The Native American tribes who lived in the area under pre-colonial settlement in New England were decimated and their livelihood stolen by the practices of the European colonists. The Native Americans attempted to gain the upper hand with the Europeans through several means over the pre-colonial period. First, the Native peoples participated in the fur trade, and more specifically in the trade of wampum. Next, they traded maize, wampum, and furs for European goods, such as metal pots and guns, that improved the Native Americans’ way of life. They also negotiated land deals in which they retained rights to hunt, fish, and gather plants from land sold to Europeans.

Wherever possible, the Native Americans sought to benefit from their dealings with Europeans, but they were at a severe disadvantage in nearly every case. For example, contact with Europeans during the lucrative days of the fur trade also brought Native Americans into contact with European diseases that killed up to 95 percent of their people, as during the 1633 smallpox outbreak.

Additionally, in every encounter between Native Americans and European colonists in the region, the colonists acted in bad faith toward the Native Americans. Many European settlers did not like the fact that the Native people acquired guns from the fur trade. When one of their leaders, a sachem named Miantonomo, realized that his people were being forced onto undesirable scraps of land, he spoke out against the terms of land use his people had received from the Europeans. Rather than allow the Native Americans a fair amount of the good land, the settlers assassinated Miantonomo and massacred the Pequot Indians (165, 97).

Cronon points out: “If Indian communities were no longer autonomous political entities by 1800, it was because English colonists had made them so, denying them access to the land and resources which would have allowed them a more independent existence” (164). At every turn, the Europeans sought to dominate the Native peoples and eventually simply overpowered the Native Americans, who remained decimated by disease and poverty; once the colonists destroyed the natural bounty of the land, they robbed the Native Americans of access to what remained.