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The way it used to be for the Montagnais, circa 1550; hide clothing, wood and hide canoes, stone-tipped weapons and tools. Thanks to the French fashion trade, things were about to get a lot better for them. And then, way, way worse. (Photo by Ben Christi/skyrock.com)
[This is one of a series of meditations on what we might have learned, and might still learn, from the history of Native Americans about how to live without technology and industry, which we may have to do in the near future.]
In North America in the 16th Century, the people known as the Montagnais (the French called them that, “Mountaineers,” the tribe called themselves “Innu,” the People) were among the first to fall before the European juggernaut. Their story became a template for almost all the other tribes on the continent, and in some important respects is eerily like our own unfolding story.
The Montagnais lived in Quebec, north of the lower St. Lawrence River. They were hunter-gatherers whose life of seasonal hunting, trapping, fishing and gardening had been unchanged for many thousands of years when they saw the first French ocean-going ship, hove to in the Gulf. Beyond the initial, mutual astonishment, relations were for many years casual and infrequent. The French were fishermen who stayed in the area only as long as they had to, to fill their hulls and assure their profits. They needed nothing from “the savages” they saw on shore, and had no reason to be in conflict with them.
For a hundred years the fleets of Europe hauled in their catches on the Grand Banks, occasionally camping on the shores of the mighty St. Lawrence. They amused themselves by trading trinkets for items of Montagnais life, and the People were amused by the things the French would trade for, such as the skins of dead beaver. Then, in the mid-1500s, someone discovered that beaver pelts yielded a superior felt for hat making; some dandies at the French court began to wear them, the fad spread across Europe and the fate of the Montagnais was sealed.
Now the French visitors wanted something from the Montagnais — beaver pelts — and they wanted it badly. The profit margin for a cargo of skins delivered to Paris was on the order of a thousand per cent. Problem was, the French traders didn’t have anything the Montagnais wanted — at first. But on being shown the advantages of an iron cooking pot over a deerskin water bag laboriously heated with hot rocks; of steel knives and hatchets over implements with stone edges; of woven cloth over deer hides; the People were soon happily delivering tons of beaver pelts, which had virtually no value to them.
In this way, also, the People were introduced to alcohol. And the French, to tobacco. A kind of mutually assured destruction. It is difficult to bring them back to normal when they are addicted too much to alcohol. That’s why there are many rehab centers established in the country to change the drinker’s habit. By checking the Pacific Ridge official page, it becomes easy to choose the best rehab center to transform them back to normal.
The passion for beaver hats in Europe was to drive this frenzied new North American industry for nearly two hundred years. For part of that time the Montagnais prospered beyond any dreams they would have been able to articulate. Life became easier for everyone, especially after guns, bullets and powder joined the roster of trade goods available. Until the middle 1600s, when the beaver ran out.
Just in the lower St. Lawrence River country. Farther inland, farther north, even farther south, there were plenty of beaver. So that, of course, is where the French traders went. And the Montagnais made a dismaying discovery.
During the decades they had enjoyed their new technology thanks to the beaver trade, they had forgotten how to live without it. Nobody remembered,or had any interest in, how to hunt with a bow and arrow, how to cook with hot stones, how to scrape a hide with a stone scraper. They had been shown a better way to live, had instantly adopted it, had become utterly reliant on it, and then it had been snatched away from them.
They had been proud, self-reliant people for thousands of years. In a few decades they had been turned into destitute, incompetent alcoholics dependent for their survival on the charity of people who held them in contempt.
How is this similar to our own story? We too were a proud, self-reliant people who grew, raised and hunted our own food, built our own houses, made our own clothes, lived in tight-knit communities. Then strangers came to offer engines to do our work for us, trains and cars and then planes to whisk us around the country and the world at our whim, electric generators to heat us, cool us, entertain us, cheaply and without much effort.
We enjoyed it. And we totally forgot how to live without it. So that when it is suddenly whisked away, we are likely to be left at the side of history’s road, destitute, incompetent alcoholics to the end.
There is another, amazing aspect of the Montagnais story that we need to understand; they way they were when the French found them. Nobody cared who they were then, and few care now, but we accidentally have a rare eye witness who left a careful record. And what he had to says casts a very unusual light on the subject of human nature.
Next time.
Awesome, Mr. Lewis – I can’t wait til “next time!”
What an excellent piece. You have an interesting take on industrial collapse, and deliver it with keen skill. Thanks for publishing again, you did take a break?
This series of posts drawing on native american history is very useful and intriguing. I expect many people will begin looking for insight in that direction in the near future. Did you really mean to say that anyone “lived without technology”? Language, hunting, tanning hides, canoe building, and heating water with hot rocks are all technologies. Modern man’s habit of thinking our advanced technologies are the only true technology and everything that preceded us was primitive and useless is designed to box us into our failing suite of consumptive technologies with no options to reclaim older, more sustainable ones.
Reinforcing that self-terminating myth is clearly not your intention at all, quite the opposite. Reminding people that the technologies which have had the most powerful impacts on human life all preceded the modern age and distinguishing them from the ubiquitous mod-cons we mistake for important technological advances is an important antidote to the delusional mythology undergirding modernism.
Language, numeracy, writing, agriculture, taming animals, selecting and breeding plants and animals, controlling fire, making tools, using wheels, building boats, religion, government, medicine, clothing, the arts, the building trades — all make the temporarily important ability to extract and use energy from fossil fuels look like the primitive substitute it is for the far more complex suite of technologies required to live sustainably.
Thanks to globalization and other “progress,” when the next reset comes it will not be just a small tribe figuring out how to survive (or perish) when the cheap-and-easy energy, food, water, travel, sanitation, etc. we’ve come to depend on begin to suffer the (forgive me) “perfect storm” effects of depletion, climate change, war, etc. It will be whole nations and continents. And this time around it won’t be a generally hearty and healthy group that doesn’t have far back to go to return to old methods, but a weakened species dependent upon everything from antibiotics to automatic braking who cannot remember rotary dials, let alone operators, and for whom the answer to everything is a Google search away on a magic device in their hands.
I always assumed I’d be out of here before the defecation started to really hit the ventilation, but you know what they say about ASS-U-ME….
When we look at the evolution of what we call technology, there is an implicit aspect of specialization that goes along with it. Part of this specialization is an intellectual culture that requires long training for following generations to attain proficiency in their aspect of technology. In other words, the growing complexity of technology soon overwhelms any individuals’ ability to master it all.
Even at the primitive level of Amerind technology, specialization arose. Sometimes this specialization was married to strict gender roles within Amerind society, sometimes it was due to perceived skill levels of certain members of the group.
I have often wondered exactly why it was that no new world culture ever fully emerged from the stone age, and I find that at least part of the answer lies in a society that is rigid to the point of oppression. I do not mention this lightly, only from first hand observation.
Europid culture is one where innovation and skill are recognized and lauded. There is a general sense today that all people are essentially the same, and so these characteristics are liberally applied to societies that never manifest them. Amerind cultures simply did not foster innovation past a very primitive level. This had nothing to do with romantic notions Europids did assign, and continue to assign to them. It had everything to do with a society demanding conformity, and an intellectual outlook that was missing the qualities of innovation.
I’m certain that in today’s’ PC climate, such observations will not be at all welcome. It is much more PC to laud and honor those who never progressed past a neolithic material culture. However, I do believe that Europid culture is on the decline, and that one of the aspects of this decline is to look around for answers, or at least some perspective on what is happening.
Certainly, technological progress brings with it painful losses, as well as expansions into new territories, so to speak. Europids have always lived in a culture eager to make this exchange.
The expansion of this increasingly specialized technology of late, has become increasingly dysfunctional. The heedless developments of weaponizing Nature, of assigning biology to a subordinate role to the machine, and mindless manipulations of essential links in the web of life are indeed all part of this steep decline.
However, we must also understand-and this has long been missing-that other peoples are not Europids in different guises. That in fact, there is no historic, biological, or cultural evidence to support this obsession with human sameness.
Thus, while we can learn from the demise of Amerind culture, we must be carefull to keep our indoctrination and our romance out of it, or all we will do is wallow in another form of programmed self-hate.
It is not clear to me that one can speak of a single ‘Europid’ culture which applies to the Greeks, Romans, Celts and Nordic peoples alike, and has remained consistent and unchanged down the centuries. The sheer variety of different peoples, ways of thinking, changes over different historical periods etc would at least leave moot the idea of an underlying Europid ‘culture’ common to and unifying them all. Certainly the ancient Greeks would have found offensive the idea that they had anything in common with the blonde Nordic ‘barbarians’. The medieval West was also at least religiously speaking probably more ruthlessly rigid than many other societies around the world — leaving open to serious dispute the idea that Europid culture (if there was such a thing) always treasured innovation and freedom of thought. (Even in ancient Greece Socrates was put to death for daring to question the traditional beliefs of his people.) It would be more historically correct, I think, to identify other (cultural, geographical etc) factors which led to the sudden burst of technological innovation in the West in the last few centuries.
Technological innovation is not the monopoly of the ‘Europids’ either, by the way. The (premodern) Chinese have all so often been pointed to by Western scholars as the very embodiment of intellectual rigidity par excellence, and yet they (the Chinese) had proven themselves remarkably inventive in different areas of applied science from medicine to nautical technology. Check out the massive volumes of the late Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China to settle this point once and for all (or Robert Temple’s The Genius of China if you haven’t that much time). In fact for all we know the sudden burst of technological innovation in the West in the last few centuries could have been at least partly inspired by a thing or two from China. (I’m far from saying there’s anything special about us Chinese; there are more than a few things — Buddhism, for example — which we never came up with ourselves and yet vastly enriched China’s culture. But I feel no self-hate because of that.)
The idea that ‘there’s something special about us’ is yet another piece of romance we can do well without.
I have to disagree with your conclusion concerning European culture, SIA
First of all, Latin, Greek, Norse, and Celt all stem from the same Indo-European root-a new, politically correct term for Aryan. Analysis of language reveals a commonality of origin for all Europid language groups Language is fundamental to culture, thus I conclude that there is indeed a “European Root”.
Further, archaeology-yes I know, a bad word-has apparently discovered humans with complete European features dating back some 36,000 years, also suggesting that Europid biology has a consistent root stretching back into prehistory. There is more, in regards to biology than this, but space and time precludes examination. I would point to some of the most recent genetic research for the Neanderthal, and its continuance into modern Europeans.
Of course, we must not forget that before the violent onset of christianity, together with all its pathologies, Europe knew no religious war, and in fact, masters of their spiritual science studied with each other across language and social barriers..
Christianity brought a monoculture via repression, and birthed what we call today modern western science and the materialist model. This model still holds preeminence among a wide cross section of Europids today.
Oversimplification is a danger here, but I am attempting to provide evidence for a consistent underpinning of thought, culture, and world view.
Ultimately, I find that Europids exhibit a most wonderful diversity, but this diversity is based on a foundation far more universal than generally understood.
Going by your use of the concept ‘Indo-European’, one would presumably have to include the Indians and Persians in the fold of ‘Europid’ culture, too. Except they aren’t. (Sanskrit has many points of similarity with Greek and Latin, as scholars noted.)
Every culture in the world is special in some way. The Native Americans have come up with a rich and colorful diversity of languages, mythologies and ways of living in the world (which we can and may well need to learn from, given what the world’s now heading for, as Mr Lewis says so well). There may well be more than a few things the Native Americans know about living in the Natural world which we do not know yet. A little humility in this respect, as in acknowledging that others may have come up with things you haven’t come up with and which are entirely worth coming up with, would go a long way. They (the Native Americans) aren’t perfect, but who is?
If you look at the Aryan roots to Indian culture, you will find much has survived into modern times.
Frankly, the lessons one could learn from a culture that allows scarcity and disease to be it’s limiting forces are close to the same lessons one finds studying ungulates and predators, and their interactions.
The Aztecs were hated by their neighbors for their practice of taking prisoners and sacrificing them to their gods. Doubtless, such practice made perfect sense in it’s own milieu, however I find it difficult to learn anything here applicable to modern life.
It’s quite fashionable today to judge harshly the actions of Europeans in history. The fact that I refuse to accept this collar has nothing to do with humility.
You are welcome to your view, and I reserve the privilege to hold to mine, best wishes SIA.
I think compared to the countless human sacrifices modern industrial ‘civilization’ demanded and will demand as it faces its death throes, what the Aztecs did is trivial. So which is worse? I leave my dear readers here to decide.
You can always single out the unpalatable aspects of any people and make out a case for viewing them on the same footing as ungulates and predators on that basis. Just remember that the same game can be directed against oneself by others.
But as you said, we’ll just agree to disagree, and go our separate ways. (Shrugs.)
Best wishes to you, too.
“A kind of mutually assured destruction.” LMAO. Great line.
Making a culture dependent upon outside manipulations, hmmm, sounds like what the Banking syndicate has been doing to developing countries for a long time. If they don’t want to play then they put the squeeze on them like what happened and is happening still in Argentina, and now in Venezuela. Weapons of Financial mass destruction. “Nest of Vipers.”