Beyond “The Ecological Indian” and “Virgin Soil Epidemics”: New Perspectives on Native Americans and the Environment

Abstract

AbstractIndians figured prominently in many of the now‐classic works that helped to define the burgeoning new field of environmental history during the 1970s and 1980s. Although a great deal of new and interesting work on Native Americans and the environment has been conducted since 1990, most of it has been produced not by scholars who think of themselves as environmental historians, but rather by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of Native Americans, and Native people themselves. This essay surveys this new, multidisciplinary literature, and suggests some ways in which non‐specialists, and particularly environmental historians, might fruitfully engage with it.