Did Indigenous People Really Live In Harmony With the Land?
That indigenous people historically "lived in harmony with the land" is a very common claim for indigenous groups the world over. I've previously been sort of suspicious of it in a lofty and high-minded way, treating it like a kind of gentle propaganda circulated by well-meaning liberals with various guilt complexes. Surely the truth is more complicated than that.
I've come around a bit. To see why, here's an analogy: you endeavour to "live in harmony" with your home, yes? You do dishes and laundry (or have another system) to ensure that you have clean bowls and underwear when you need it. When you run low on salt or eat the last of the blueberries, you try to make a note to pick up more from the grocery store. You know where the spare blanket and the ibuprofen is, and you know the guest parking procedures for when your friends visit. You try to live in your home in a way that is well-suited to you and your way of life.
To think of pillaging it for short-term gains or ruining the equilibrium is absurd; you'd only be making more trouble for your future self. You might do so anyways when pressed; leave a tornado of clothing for your future self to clean up when you have to pack last-minute for a trip, for example. But it is you who have to live with the consequences (and if you have roommates they might also get pretty upset at you).
Indigenous groups (and other groups too, occasionally, like Amish farmers) think of the land as their home, and my mistake was taking this in a spiritual sense rather than a literal one. People who live off the land invest a remarkable degree of effort into understanding the specific patch of earth that they find themselves dependent on for survival - where the nicest berry bushes and mushroom colonies are, where to get fresh water and the circumstances that might lead to it being spoiled, the alternate and more annoying source of fresh water one can go to when the primary source is spoiled, the precise conditions and omens that portend good fishing or hunting.
If a group moves, they have to pay a high information cost to figure all this out again for the new place (and also those new areas might already have other people living on them who would not appreciate them barging in), so it makes sense to keep the land that is traditionally yours in the best condition possible; to steward it responsibly. To ruin it is to make trouble for yourself and your children and your clan. So of course you do not do that unless you really need to.
(To clarify, indigenous groups generally do not think of their traditional way of life in the above terms; instead they often have a layer of religious and cultural conventions that inform their ways of living and encode many other values, rich frameworks which are often not reducible to simple cost-benefit analyses.)
If some strange aliens come from far-away lands and give you horses and knives and guns, the equilibrium shifts in both intuitive and unintuitive ways.
If those strange aliens are carrying some disease that you are vulnerable to, such that everywhere they make first contact, within a generation or two, 70%, or 90%, or 99.5% of people in your civilization dies, the equilibrium will collapse, because all of that accumulated knowledge also goes into the dirt.
If your mourning rituals assume some sort of stable equilibrium - for example, if they involve a larger group that is unaffected consoling the smaller group that is, you will not even be able to mourn the collapse. For the sake of your survival and the survival of your children, you may be forced to rapidly familiarize yourself with the strange equilibrium that the aliens have brought with them instead. But even if you do, thereβs a very high chance that you die before your time, anyways.