Summary

Indigenous peoples have had profound spiritual and ethical relationships with their environments, but they necessarily altered ecosystems as they fed, clothed, and sheltered themselves and traded goods, long before European colonists arrived. Their impacts became broader in scope and scale under settler colonialism, which corrupted and constrained their environmental relationships. The history of Indigenous peoples and their environments, to be sure, is not a single narrative but a constellation of stories that converge and diverge. Nonetheless, an analysis of the environmental histories of only a fraction of the more than 575 Indigenous groups, including Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, reveals major trends and commonalities. The environmental historiography of the First Peoples from their beginnings in what is now the United States roughly through the 19th century provides an opportunity to address such topics as the myth of the “Ecological Indian,” ancient urban societies, the introduction of European livestock and disease, and subsistence through agriculture, hunting, and fishing. The history of dispossession in the late 19th century and the environmental history of Indigenous peoples in the recent era may be found in “Indigenous Peoples and the Environment since 1890.”