Native Americans Were Clean People

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about how pre-contact Native American cities were clean, which corresponds to chapter 1 of my book.

When they came to North America, Europeans thought of themselves as the clean, bright representatives of godly society. But the facts do not bear this up.

European cities were mired in sewage, which flowed freely in the streets. Europeans threw their garbage into the street, and let free-roaming pigs process it. Meanwhile, Native American cities (some of them, like Cahokia, quite large) were clean. If they were dirty, they would have bred diseases, of which there is no evidence.

There is eyewitness evidence that Native American cities were clean. William Bartram, a botanist, visited Cherokee territory about 1776. He observed the Cherokee green corn festival. (Green corn is what we usually call sweet corn, eaten without being dried and ground.) The Cherokees would sweep any garbage out of the streets, then burn all their old possessions (which might have had fleas in them). Then they would all run to the river to bathe. These were clean people, unlike the Europeans who conquered them.

When Europeans captured Natives and took them to display to kings and queens, the Natives had to endure weeks in filthy European ships. The first thing they did when the ship docked in Europe was to run to the nearest river to take a bath.

The “dirty savage” image of Native Americans was wrong not only because they were not savages—they had cities and farms and trade networks—but they were also not dirty.

Native Americans kept other animal populations under control, not just passenger pigeons

In a previous essay, I explained that Native American hunting kept passenger pigeon populations under control until the Natives had a population crash due mostly to European diseases. Then, as explained in chapter 3 of my new book, passenger pigeon populations surged prodigiously.

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a second video about the impact of Native American hunting, which corresponds to chapter 3 of my book.

It was not just passenger pigeons but also alligators and fish whose populations were kept in check by Native American hunting until their populations crashed. I conclude this from reading William Bartram’s account of his 1776 visit to the American Southeast. He saw huge populations of both groups of animals, larger than could be supported sustainably over the long term.

Chapter 3 of my book also explains why bison and deer populations did not explode when Native populations crashed. This was because in the 1700s Cherokees (and other tribes), who had been hunting deer as food, began to hunt them as commodities to sell to white traders. The decrease in the number of hunters was compensated for by the increase in the number of deer killed per hunter. The chapter also mentions that bison populations were large even before the die-off of Native hunters.

Native Americans did not just live in North America; they had a significant impact upon its ecology. This is something that white historians and readers who think of Native Americans as savages have overlooked.