Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

To European eyes, the Native Americans lived in unexplained poverty, moving from place to place apparently at random. Early visitors who recorded their experiences in New England reinforced this misconception and established a belief that a person could extract a living from New England’s natural resources with little effort (35). These two misconceptions, concerning how the Native Americans lived and how easy a living could be in New England, quickly attracted settlers who mistakenly counted on “strawberry time” lasting all year long (35).

Some misconceptions were communicated innocently: visitors most frequently experienced only the spring and summer in New England, which were, indeed, times of great plenty. However, settlers quickly learned that many of the written accounts about New England exaggerated to some extent. For example, the weather of New England was very different than what European settlers might expect: early visitors to New England wrote that the winters were longer and colder and the summers hotter.

The winter weather and preparations to survive the winter were serious matters that the earliest settlers found were a threat to their survival. In fact, failure to take into account the winter weather and short growing season caught the earliest settlers unawares. Consequently, large numbers of settlers died during their first winters in New England, including half the settlers in the original Plymouth colony. Many settlers arrived thinking that they could subsist as the Native Americans did, simply living off the land until they could establish a farm. Others failed to heed any warning and did not use the summertime to collect provisions for the lean times during the winter. Many settlers died due to their expectation of plenty year-round. More experienced settlers attempted to send warnings back to England, telling newcomers to bring sufficient provisions for the year and a half before they could expect their first harvest.

What the early settlers also did not understand was that the Native Americans had adapted to the seasonal cycles and variations in abundance surrounding them. Having learned where and when during the year the most plenty could be found, the Native Americans moved where the food was. Early settlers lacked this knowledge and as a result suffered starvation until they mastered the New England ecology and got their farms firmly established.

As the European settlers arrived, the Native Americans maintained their mobile lifestyle, assembling into larger bands when there were hunts or other group activities required, but otherwise living during the winter in small family settings. The Native Americans knew to eat less during the winter months as a survival strategy. The colonists could not understand or adapt to that lifestyle variation. The colonists believed that the Native peoples should simply store more food for use as winter rations; the Native Americans believed they should only gather what they needed and no more. Native peoples focused on acting responsibly by using nature’s resources sparingly and ensuring the future of New England’s natural resources.

This fundamental difference in attitude and in use of resources widened the gap between Native Americans and the settlers. Furthermore, the colonists viewed Native American men as lazy: colonists believed that their only legitimate work was hunting and fishing while their wives did all of the other work by caring for children, farming, and, in southern New England, cooking, and handling all aspects of preparing the hides and meat from hunting and fishing expeditions. The Native American men, to their credit, understood that their wives were valuable assets in their lives because they did the vast majority of work in keeping the family fed and clothed. In turn, the Native American men wondered at the sight of the male colonists planting and raising crops, which they viewed as women’s work.

Ultimately, the colonists took advantage of the Native Americans’ mobility in following seasonal food resources, which allowed the colonists to establish farms and towns—a process the Native Americans viewed as bizarre. In the Native American belief system, no man could own the land. However, within this clash of cultures and misunderstandings, “European perceptions of what constituted a proper use of the environment thus reinforced what became a European ideology of conquest” (53). The colonists took advantage of the Native Americans’ mobility to establish their own settlements and farms.

To the colonists, the Native Americans lived in a puzzling state of poverty. They were forced to move wherever adequate food resources existed, and they endured winter hunger rather than gathering more food during the summer and fall to avoid winter’s hunger, as the colonists attempted to do. Thomas Morton, an early settler who wrote about New England, expressed that “the leisurely abundance of Indian life suggested that there might be something wrong with European notions of wealth: perhaps the English did not know true riches when they saw them?” (55). Such challenges to the European point of view were few, and the New England Puritans banned Morton for his apostasy (55).

Cronon uses many examples from contemporary sources, such as John Winthrop and William Bradford, to explain the settlers’ logic and socioeconomic views concerning the settlement of the land. This includes analysis of the methods the settlers used to delegitimize the Native Americans’ use of the land and to justify the Europeans’ wholesale claiming of it. Criticism of the Native American way of life by contemporaneous writers was widespread and consistent—claims that Native Americans were not making efficient or sufficient use of the land. The European critique of Native American land usage allowed Europeans to claim that Native Americans did not own the land, and that therefore, the land was available to any settler who could claim it, own it, farm and hunt on it, and call it his own. In short, the Europeans assigned property rights to themselves without regard to Native American views.

In loosely governed Native American communities, the “sachem” held a position of authority (59). The sachem resolved disputes and achieved power through his interrelationships with others, typically extended family members. This loose political structure enforced the property rights of the temporary or seasonal Native American villages according to the rights of the sachem for each area.

Property rights arose within an ecological imperative, allowing other Native American people outside of a particular sachem’s area to use the land or the seashore, ensuring access for all to food and other resources. This complicated but fair-minded system allowed Native Americans to share hunting grounds, for example, giving all people an equal chance to achieve sustenance and survival. The same flexible system applied to fishing grounds and to, fields of wild fruit, other edible plants, and grasses.

The notion of ownership of the land comprised two elements: individual ownership and a collective sovereignty over the land, as with a village (58). Native Americans tended to enforce ownership in the sense of the items on the land, such as grasses or animals, while Europeans sought ownership of both the things on the land and the land itself. These different meanings created conflict.

The settlers gained ownership over the land through two methods: purchase of the land from Native Americans or the granting of land by the English Crown. In early dealings with Europeans, Native Americans gave settlers only the right to inhabit the land alongside them, retaining all rights to hunt, fish, and gather nuts or other food from the land they deeded to the Europeans. Collective approval of multiple Native Americans, including approval by the sachem or sachems who had rights in a given territory, appeared to be required in order to make any agreement with Europeans concerning land. In many recorded cases, the agreement of upwards of thirteen people was required for a deeding of land (66).

However, the most significant manner in which European and Native American views of ownership diverged lay in the sovereignty of the English crown. Eventually all land ownership in New England became subject to the laws of the crown of England, with the settlers retaining only the personal aspects of ownership. Native Americans had no rights whatsoever under this system: to claim ownership of land by this method, one requirement was the “improvement” of the land through such activities as planting or livestock grazing. Only the planting of corn and other crops by Native Americans occupying southern New England qualified as ownership under the European system. Cronon goes on to describe the evolution of the terms of land ownership during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in New England: the concept of buying the land for what was on the land was superseded by a system that measured the location and shape of the land—mapping it.

Through this European assessment and estimation of the land, New England entered into a capitalistic system regarding land and its value.