Loss of Innocence

The Indians had a daily exercise of obtaining of food, which was year-round. Their survival depended on the sun and the rain; without the sun, the crops would not grow to a healthy size, and without the rain, the crops would not get its nutrients. The Indians depended on many forms of getting their intake of food from the environment and instead of going from area to area they began to "confine their subsistence activities to a define territory. Although they moved from site to site fishing, hunting, or gathering wild foods, they depended on locally available resources and become more sedentary than their ancestors." Native Americans did not just hunt, they also had a great farming system: "Throughout the region, Indians tended to use farming in conjunction with hunting and gathering, demonstrating a remarkable ability to blend agricultural innovation with traditional means of acquiring food." Indians were not wasteful by any means. They needed as much food as possible for their village when they hunted. When they killed an animal, they would use every piece of its body so it would not go to waste. They were conservationists, trying to preserve as much of as they possibly could with the materials they had. Hu Maxwell, a member of the United States Forest Service in 1910, describe the Indians as ""wasteful and destructive savages," who were "by nature incendiary" and squandered the region's resources like pirates plundering a treasure ship." This is such a lie. It was more like the Europeans were the "wasteful and destructive savages" in America. The Native Americans would not kill a buck and only take it's antlers. They would consume its entire body so the animal would not have died in vain. .
             Indians had a physical relationship with their environment, and they depended on it entirely. Yes, both Europeans and Native Americans altered their environment, but the distinction between the two is the religious relationship with the animals and the environment the natives possessed.