American Indians and Environmentalism: The Problematics of the Land Ethic Stereotype
Abstract
These alternative perspectives attributed to Native Americans result in large part from representations imposed on American Indian cultures by non-Natives. And these perspectives are at work both in the somewhat facile but popular and long-enduring collections of Native American excerpts, works such as Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence 1971 compiled by T. C. McLuhan, or the more recent collections such as Joseph Bruchac’s Native Wisdom 1995 , or Anne Schaef’s Native Wisdom for White Minds 1995 . Native American Wisdom 1993 , another work, is a tiny, toy-like book which includes photographs by Edward Curtis. Although many of the Curtis photographs were taken in the early twentieth century Curtis completed his multi-volume study The North American Indian in 1930 , they are meant to represent the subjects as they supposedly existed in some imagined pristine, pretwentieth-century state. The photographs are meant to preserve what Curtis saw as dying cultures
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