Land: Indians, Colonists, and the

¶ … land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England William Cronin's Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England is not a book about geography alone, as its title might suggest. Rather it is also a historical analysis of the different conceptions of land rights held by the English colonists of the New World and the New England Indians of the Americas. The English colonists viewed the land as something that must be bought and sold and 'owned' by someone.

In contrast, the natives had no concept of personal, possessive property rights and ownership was conveyed via use rather than title. However, Cronin's thesis is not that the Native Americans lived in simple harmony with the land, as is sometimes portrayed. The natives did change the land through their husbandry and hunting, although Cronin makes the case that ultimately the native methods of altering the environment were less harmful than the methods used by the Europeans.

One of the exemplary paradoxes discussed by Cronin is the Indian's acceptance of seasons of 'want and plenty.' The Indians, particularly the hunter-gatherer tribes, lived in abundance in the summer and spring, when there was rich hunting and fishing. However, they accepted that during the lean seasons of winter they would be hungry. When asked by the aghast colonists why this was so, the Indians pointed out that they never starved to death from year to year.

Cronin believes that this method of instinctive husbandry kept population densities low, and thus did not tax the land. The agricultural Indians also engaged in practices like burning the forest in a controlled manner so they could plant, which actually enriched the soil and limited wide scale destruction from more rampant forest fires with dry tinder. Burning the underbrush also made it easier to flush out game (Cronin 51).

The natives did till the soil, but did so with clamshell hoes, which minimized erosion, versus the more intrusive methods of European tilling (Cronin 49). To substantiate his thesis, Cronin is faced with the problem that the Europeans, as the 'winners' of the struggle to dominate the land, have written history, and thus it is difficult to get a complete picture of how the native tribes actually behaved, in their own words.

Cronin must use the words of European observers and attempt to glean the facts about Native American behavior behind the tone of judgmental prose. Cronin admits that some of his history is impressionistic, to some degree, given that the hard data about the ecology of the Americas is not available to him, as even extant documents did not contain the meticulous detail he might have liked about the native land (Cronin 179).

For example, in attempting to demonstrate how the Indian methods of growing were more sustainable, Cronin quotes a European traveler who was shocked by the apparent scattered diversity of Indian methods of planting crops, versus orderly European monoculture (Cronin 50). By not having a monoculture system, however, the Indian methods did not deplete the soil to the same degree as the Europeans. The benefits of diversity also yielded better nutrition.

However, monoculture systems of agriculture are typical of capitalism, where more than the individual can eat is raised, so the crops can be sold or traded for other items. That is why the Europeans looked down on native farming methods, as well as saw native hunting practices as laziness.