Monday, September 08, 2008

Waking Up (and Burning) Again Again







That "Burning Question" was on my mind again this morning when I woke up (on Turtle Island again).

Much of my own personal library is old textbooks from relatives and tag sales (Maybe yours is too), and that's very true of my Indian related stuff. So I looked at the oldest of relatives text books first, checking the index of each for "burning." Back around 1976, UCONN was using Trigger's 1969 "Huron: Farmers of the North" as a text my brother John paid $4.95 for. "Slash + Burn," he wrote in the margin. Compare that to the many entries in Cronon's "Changes in the Land," that my sister Joan was using a dozen years later at the same school, possibly the same or a similar course (I'd add the photo, but I failed to put the book back on the shelf and will soon surprise my self by finding it in a strange place - and where is "1491' where the number of entries is staggering?)

That's OK, because I know that you've seen Norman's comment and are probably planning on stopping by either the library or bookstore to get a copy.

Then I spied my copy of "Manitou" and found the entry in the index of that book.

They were onto the same idea, starting really on page 124, under the sub title "Ecology..."

3 comments :

pwax said...

I did not catch the name of the book. What was the one with a reference to "celestial bodies"?

Tim MacSweeney said...

The first photo is Trigger's "Huron" and the second is from "Manitou."

Gerald Zani said...

Written in the journals of Lewis and Clark from the 1804 expedition is the eye witness evidence that again and again as they crossed the western American landscape inhabited by the Indigenous Native Americans they encountered wild fires burning the land and the grasses, intentionally set by the native people. They describe seeing the smoke from the fires in the distance. The fires moved across the land and in one case a wild grass fire tragically killed some NAs, caught by a fire that they had themselves started.