 I'm Judy Lee, a stream biologist by training, and all my experience in the field has given me a great appreciation for the diverse landscapes in the American West. I think that our familiarity with landscapes helps us understand them better, what we know intellectually and what we appreciate culturally and the values we imbued with them. Cultural ecology is the interaction of people and places. Environmental historians tend to look at this kind of thinking as developing a sense of place. Now it could be said that anybody could identify with objects or buildings, but I think there's a special sense of place that develops from an appreciation of the natural things. The natural landscapes have been changing with climate and with peoples for millennia, and we are going to be looking at some of these phenomenon. Interacts with culture, in part by distributing resources that humans will follow. There are cultural patterns in which people develop a livelihood and ways in which are a little bit less obvious to us now in our modern world. Technology and innovation help determine the scope and magnitude with which cultures impact resources. And then finally, in this continent especially, blended cultures, cultures that come together from other parts of the world working together with Native Americans here have created new patterns as well. Fort Rock is a very old place on the northern tip of the Great Basin that is in eastern Oregon. It's hard to imagine that once long ago there were lakes and wetlands here. The Paleo-Indians who came here over 10,000 years ago were hunters and fishermen using those wetlands. This is a picture of a sandal that was retrieved from the cave at Fort Rock. Well, there isn't wetland or marshes there anymore and there have been dramatic changes in climate. And so the people who once lived there had dispersed such that we don't have any idea of their identity. It is very likely they became the peoples of the Great Basin or of the Columbia Plateau. We are still learning about how they came and when they came to this North American continent. There are some other signs of changes related to climate that interact with culture that are little more recent and for which we understand a bit more of how people lived there. On the banks of the Missouri as it meets up with the Mississippi is the current city of St. Louis. But a thousand years ago there was a thriving city there of about 20,000 to 25,000 people all dependent on a culture of corn. This particular place we now call Cahokia. Some people call it monks mound and that comes from more contemporary uses in the 19th century. It was a society built on a strong hierarchical organization. And if you could imagine for three centuries slave labor carried buckets of dirt to create these enormous mounds. They have a particular configuration that's reminiscent of Mexico, but we don't know of any particular connections. Corn however, which is something which this culture depended on, came from Central America. In the Ohio valleys there were early agricultural groups that learned to use the corn, but it was here at Cahokia that used the trade routes of the rivers, the flood plains for the corn that developed such a sophisticated society. But climate changed. At least that's what we think happened. Consider that there were in those times more than 20,000 people who had to go far and wide to find the wood to build their structures and find sufficient game to supplement their corn diet. Can you imagine that there might have been a stockade built here, a stockade of two miles long built of about 20,000 oak and hickory trees. Oak and hickory trees that's kind of hard to find in this part of the country these days. It was rebuilt three times over a 200 year period of time and probably contributed to the demise of available resources. Not only were the trees being cut down, but the wildlife that was associated would have disappeared at the same time. At any rate, in the 14th century there was apparently a continental wide drought, which resulted in the great numbers of people from here moving out into the Mississippi flood plain. Some of them would have gone south towards the area of the present city of Natchez. These are the remaining mounds there now, and you can see they're not particularly distinctive. But they tell us that this particular group of people was probably the last remnant of the Mississippian cultures. The Spanish conquistadors first saw them when they arrived in this part of North America. And the French settled here near the present city of Natchez. They studied them a bit, that is, they studied the native populations, and within 30 years annihilated the entire tribe and enslaved the few that were left. So there are no longer any remnants of this culture other than the artifacts we find in their mounds. This is a more distant picture which shows you the view of the flood plain at the same time. About the same era in the North American continent, there were great civilizations developed in the dry Southwest. The Anasazi were a group of people that lived primarily in the Four Corners region, and this map gives you an indication of a variety of arid climates. The Anasazi were right in the middle of it. They lived at first in the Mesa's and the Ho-Ho-Kam and the Moguyan were other groups of early Native Americans who took advantage of the river flood plains in the very hottest deserts, along the Salt and the Gila rivers, particularly. This is a picture of one of the ruins atop a Mesa, which was characteristic of the kinds of villages that the earlier Anasazi, maybe around the year 1000, the kind of villages that they occupied. They hunted for game in the nearby forests and grew corn to survive. It wasn't long before, for reasons that we don't quite understand, they moved down into the cliffs. And this is a picture of Mesa Verde, which survived for about 200 years. Now when you think about survival in a cliff, one has to imagine that there were some significant reasons for changing their lifestyle. It was likely that there were marauding other tribes, which made it impossible to survive easily on the Mesa tops and the cliffs more defensible. They had to bring their water down, they had to still go up into the Mesa tops to hunt, and you can imagine that farming would have been a pretty tricky operation as well. In about the same time that the people abandoned Cahokia on the Mississippi River Plain, the people that we call the Anasazi also moved from their cliff dwellings, moved down onto the river flood plains, such as the Rio Grande, and became the peoples of the Pueblos. This is a picture of the Zuni Pueblo, the people who named the Anasazi the ancient ones. There are no historical or even strong oral traditions which tell of this movement of people from the cliffs down onto the river flood plains. But when I was visiting in the Puyah dwellings, which is one of the early pictures I showed you, our tour guide told us about a story of the Tihuah Pueblo that explains that the people of their tribe came up from the earth and wandered for some time until they found the perfect settling place of their present Pueblo. And to symbolize that, this spiral and ones like it in other petroglyphs indicate the importance of this journey. I think it's a nice blend between the oral tradition and what we know from archeological information. Surprisingly, there were many very dense populations of Native Americans before Europeans arrived on this continent. In California, in the Pacific Northwest along the Columbia, in the Great Lakes are examples of some of those locations. Their oral traditions and the artifacts that they left behind give us an idea of what their use of landscapes might have been like. But we can turn to some more recent peoples to learn more about how the lifestyles of Native Americans adapted to our American landscape. They show us how humans are adaptable and mobile. The fact that while we don't see anybody at Cahokia any longer or in the Anasasi dwellings, we know that humans are flexible and move when pressed by climate. They can also move as a result of simple seasonal change and develop patterns of lifestyle that sometimes we call hunter-gatherers. In the Columbia River Basin, there were numbers of tribes, particularly in the Columbia Plateau, the more eastern end of the Columbia River Basin, where hunting and gathering was core to their lifestyle. They depended most of all on the great runs of salmon coming up all through the spring, summer and fall. Their villages were concentrated near the river, but soon enough as the spring came on, they would move along. This is a historical picture of Sililo Falls, which is now inundated by one of the great dams on the Columbia. But it shows the last season where the fishing platforms were used by the Native American tribes. This would have happened by some tribes much more of the year than those that were further east. Those peoples depended on moving with the fish. They would move up over the foothills into the mountains nearby, going as far up to the high tributaries in the summer as they could, following the great runs of Chinook and Steelhead. At the same time, the women would be gathering berries. These are pictures of huckleberries almost ready to pick. And also, kinds of resources that they need to build their baskets. The men would be hunting as the season moved along. But by fall, these small family groups would gather up and return back to the river. They were careful in the way in which they used the landscape because they didn't want to overharvest. This is an overlook in the Wallawa Mountains that is used as a place still for collecting special roots. If they were to return to the same place every year, the roots would be gone. And so they are very careful in the way that they manage their seasonal rounds in this landscape. When they return back to the river's edge in the fall, the women dry the fish and prepare for the long winter. The tribes that are much closer to the ocean have a slightly different resource base. First, many of them have access to the marine resources as did this oyster picker. But in addition to that, these are people who have an advantage of using salmon that have more calories. The fish haven't run upstream yet. So what happens is that those people were able to stay in more sedentary villages. They did not use the landscape as widely as did those who lived further upstream needing to follow the fish in a different pattern. Similarly, the people of the Willamant Valley, who didn't get as many fish as those in the large Columbia River, depended on a greater variety of resources, particularly camas. This is a picture of camas roots that were managed, actually, through fire. A very common tool used by Native Americans all over the North American continent. Fire would allow for the burning of the grasses, opening the clearings so that the wildlife could use it for their grazing and be very convenient for the Indian hunters to be able to catch them when they were doing so. It also encouraged roots like camas and berries. So in general, the wetlands of the Willamant were productive in part because of the management of the tribes that were there. This may also have been true in California to the south of Oregon. This is a picture of oak woodlands that are there today. And in the old times, there were oak woodlands everywhere. And it was acorns that provided the main staple for Native Americans in California. There were almost 100 California tribes, all of which depended at least to some extent on acorns. There are 20 species of oaks in the region, but only nine of them are really useful for food. We don't even think about acorns as food, yet this was the absolute staple for most of the Native Americans because of the rich calories that acorns provide. I interviewed a Miwok Indian who told me that here were peoples who depended very much on foot to move between tribes and across landscapes. They were practically marathon runners and thought nothing of walking 100 miles in a very short amount of time. They were communicating with each other and gathering the acorn crops which they would store in granaries like the one you see here. There were also places where they would gather to mash the acorns. There were great outcroppings of bedrock with little holes in them where they would mash the acorns and make it readily usable for a variety of foods that they could make with them. The oaks were of a resource which we don't really see in the same way anymore. Still they are a dominant vegetation in the metges of the foothills of the Sierra and the coast ranges in California. The meadows themselves provided grasses as well and seeds which the Indians would use to supplement their diet. In the marshes of the Central Valley and in the northern part of California there were important activities of hunting for game and fishing. This is a picture of a fishing weir in northern California and shows the extent to which fishing was a very important enterprise. Those lucky tribes who were located along the great rivers depended also on the migratory runs of fish. And some of the pictures that come from these days give us an idea of how great those runs once were. They also infer the importance of the entire ecosystem of the whole landscape through which the fish had to migrate from the oceans into the bay up the estuaries and to the rivers where the weirs might be able to catch them in this way. With the arrival of Europeans particularly the Spanish, California changed in a very dramatic way. In part it was the way in which people perceived the space that was the landscape. About the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence Spain decided to take possession of what we now call California. They did this spurred on by the activities of the Russians and they were very much afraid that the Russians who were interested in the fur pelts might decide to take California for themselves. And so they brought their missionaries to establish churches all along the coastal route in California. Associated with them there were pueblos that had the importance of developing the foodstuffs to support the missions. These particular landscapes were still very large and in the entirety of California during the Spanish era there were only 30 land grants given by the King of Spain to worthy soldiers. Can you imagine in the entirety of California there were only 30 but what that allowed for was plenty of space for the long horn cattle to roam around independently and take care of themselves. It was a very different place than what was to come. This is a picture of the San Jose Pueblo right after the Gold Rush era. And it was during this period of time that the land grants of the Mexican and Spanish families which had been promised by the U.S. government as permanent land holdings disappeared practically. There were squatters there were people who swindled land away and people just found all kinds of unscrupulous ways of acquiring land in that chaotic period associated with the Gold Rush. And suddenly the landscape got divided up into many small parcels. Those remnants of these rancho lands still exist in a few spots in California. The way in which we perceive the land has changed dramatically. It's not just that we grow different crops or that we've put a few new towns in but we just don't think of these wide open spaces as landscapes in California. There are other places in the country though where we still have fairly wide landscape views and this would be in the Great Plains of the Middle West. Here we have examples of ways in which innovation and technology worked with the ways in which culture can use those technologies to dramatically transform those landscapes. Now, if I were to ask you what kind of technology do you think was important in this landscape? Remember these? This is the Great Plains, the Midwest. Perhaps you would say the railroads. And they certainly were important in delivering the buffalo across the plains to the market in the east. You might think it interesting that in the background on this drawing done in the 1800s in Harper's Magazine is a picture of Cahokia. Trains which brought people and hunters to the west helped them cross the country and also delivered livestock and buffalo. Now, there would be a good argument to say that trains weren't a very important technology. Another way you might think about it is the way in which agriculture changed dramatically in the Great Plains and perhaps you would say that something like barbed wire and fencing made all the difference in the way our culture sees and uses this landscape. And there would be an argument perhaps for the use of the metal axe or the hoe that changed the ways in which people have used the plains of the Midwest. But I would like to suggest that it was the horse that transformed what we do in that landscape even more dramatically or at least in a similar fashion. The horse was reintroduced to the North American continent by the Spanish. Prior to that the Indians had been hunting for buffalo on foot using dogs as their beasts of burden. And you can imagine it was a good bit slower requiring a lot more stealth to capture the buffalo. However, the horses were brought by the Spanish in the 14th century but not given access to Indians until there was a revolt of the pueblos in 1680. Up to that point the Spanish had been very careful not to allow the Indians to acquire them. Within 20 years of that revolt the various tribes had traded and stolen horses among each other such that they had moved well up into the Midwest. And by 1730 the Nez Perce who used the Great Plains and also traveled into the Columbia Basin were using horses in their hunting activities. So it didn't take long when the horses did arrive to transform what Indians could do. What this implies is that what we associate with the great horsemen of the Great Plains who pursued the buffalo was a pretty recent event in this continent. The historian Richard Manning who studied these plains a good bit notes that grasslands are an environment and ecosystem which encourages nomadicism. Because of the irritity that it's not possible to stay in one place long and survive. On the edges are the farmers the ones who farm along the rivers a little like what we talked about for Cahokia. But in the Great Plains themselves that one would expect there to be great mobility. It happens that a number of the tribes which we associate with the Great Plains arrive there fairly late in the history of humans in the North American continent. Not much before European Americans. This is an indication of the route in which they traveled during the period from 1680 to 1780. And you can see from the beginning of the arrows that the Cheyenne were originally inhabitants of the woodlands of the Great Lakes like the Lakota. These tribes and others had been pushed westward by warring tribes of the east who had been fighting with white settlers. So armed with more ammunition those eastern tribes were able to shove progressively these tribes into the Great Plains. So you can see that there were several stopping points along the way as these fundamentally farming tribes tried to find a location. And where you see that they joined the Mandan and Arikara who were farming tribes along the Missouri it was about 1780. Not short long after that they moved down into the Great Plains and if you think about this date these were the times when the horse arrived on the plains. And the Cheyenne became great buffalo hunters like the Lakota and many other tribes that adopted the use of the horse for hunting their prey. What happened as a result of these activities was that the there were tribes pursuing these buffalo along the routes that became important for immigration of American settlers. Some who were going to the gold fields of California others to farm farms that they would homestead. The the Indian tribes had established new routes for where they expected to find their buffalo and became very angry when they were unable to continue these patterns of hunting and led to natural kinds of animosity and warfare. So the Great Plains were a place where the horse provided a complete technological change for the Indians. The iron horse provided technological innovation for the settlers who would come across. And to to another extent the federal government provided the kind of legislation which made many of these changes possible. I think one of the most interesting facets of looking at changes on our landscapes have been those instances in which cultures have blended their their skills and ways of doing things to provide a whole new way of using their resources. Early in the settling of the East Coast there was a lot of movement required of the Native Americans. The Creek were Indians of Georgia and the Carolinas who were shoved out of their homelands by the European settlers. Forced to move south into the unoccupied lands of Florida. Now in those days it wasn't maybe so surprising that there was no one there because at that time they were marshlands not particularly suitable for farming. But the Creek were farmers of corn and they needed to find a way of surviving there. The key to their success may have been their collaboration with runaway slaves. By the time the creeks had moved down into Florida the other groups had begun to call them Seminoles that is the runaway tribes. And the Seminoles were joined by the runaway slaves in order to make a success of making these wetlands work for them as ways in which a place where they could farm. The African slaves had come over with skills for farming just that kind of situation of wetlands for rice. And so they helped in farming these lands converting the lands so that they could have both corn and rice. And the Indians the fierce warriors that they were provided the defense that these agricultural communities needed to survive. Defended to the extent that when the American government decided to move the southeastern Indians east to a place that they called Indian territory the Seminoles would have none of it. And there was a war that lasted for more than 40 years. The first attack on the Seminoles was conducted by General Andrew Jackson. And it was when Jackson became president that the move for these tribes east became even more active. And they eventually became what we know as the five civilized tribes in Oklahoma. Originally they occupied the lands along the Arkansas River and wider landscapes than that. But eventually their lands were very much whittled down as white settlers began to move out there. So people from the southeast learned to adapt to all those climate conditions of Oklahoma and the more arid Midwest. One of the best examples of cultures blending I think is in the southwest. It is still obvious today and it comes out of a long history of the Spanish settlement there mixing with the Pueblo and other Indian tribes in that region. The Spanish arrived in New Mexico long before they were even interested in California. This is a picture of the Las Trampas church that was established probably in the 1600s. In this period of time the Spanish had settled along the Rio Grande. And their highest the thing of greatest importance to them during this settlement was finding water and making it usable for farming. The Spanish and the Portuguese came with skills that are related to their arid homeland in Iberia. They came during a period when Spain and Portugal were still one country together. They brought with them not only techniques but also ways of distributing water that they combined with the cultural ideas of the Indians who were also accustomed to irrigating in this very arid land. This is a picture of the little town of Valdez nestled between two foothill ranges and it illustrates some of the important criteria which the Spanish set out when they were making their settlements. The king required that they would have fertile areas with good land, grasslands, forests and good plentiful water supplies. This in order for them to survive in such a landscape. What they did was establish a system of ditches that are called Assecius. They are a communal system of distributing water that still exists today. The main attributes of this way of doing things is that it provides water for subsistence farmers. That's different than corporate farmers perhaps that we might be more familiar with in the Midwest or in California or even in the Pacific Northwest. These are often unincorporated areas and the social structure provided by Assecius are the way in which these areas are organized. They provided the form of government for these small rural towns. An important thing to remember about Assecius was that they were so fundamental to the way things were done that they were provided as a carryover from the Spanish to the Mexicans, Mexicans to the American governments. Such that they still have standing in legal courts today. They are ditches that run primarily on gravity and they're dug by hand and all members of the particular ditch system or Assecius are required on an annual basis to help maintain them. Water is allocated according to the needs of the community. It's provided equally to everyone according to how much is available. It does not have to do as much with who got there first, who has the most land. But instead the community works to find ways in which they can grow crops that will work if the year is thought to be a dry one, then they don't grow the same crops as they would in a wetter year. So it's a very different way of looking at property, a communal aspect that is almost foreign to the way we think about allocating water. The way we do things in much of the American West comes from the mining days when the first person there got the most of what there was. And in the Southwest there still exists this other way of doing things. This is a picture of the town of Valdez now and you can see these lateral ditches that flow according to gravity which provide for all the subsistence farmers there. Admittedly, this is one of the poorest counties in the entirety of the United States. And so it's a system that is very much a part of that rural subsistence existence that is different than other kinds of agricultural enterprises. There is another aspect to cultures which we're not going to get to in any detail but what gives a lot of power to how cultures operate. That is in our political systems we establish boundaries on these landscapes. In the history of the United States certain treaties were important in the ways in which we allocate resources. We've just spoken about Spanish Ezekias and how people are given rights to water that is different than an appropriative law. And in the Indian tribes those who were able to sign treaties were given reservations. And also lands were ceded to them for continual hunting and gathering purposes. The Indians recognize that this is really the fact that they were giving up their lands. It was not a matter of the federal government giving land to them. There were many other federal legislative acts which had a lot to do with the ways in which we see and use our landscapes. Homesteading which was a way in which the federal government divvied up those lands acquired from Native Americans to small farmers. There were water laws that determined how the water would get there that would also influence the ways the amount of water that would come from places that were very arid. Places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas for example come out of the kinds of legislation dictating water law. And another way in which federal government impacts the landscapes are in their trust lands. In our contemporary world we're very familiar with the forests that are owned by the federal government and the parks. In the 19th century the railroad grants were important. They became part of what is legislated by the Bureau of Land Management today. There are a host of things which our government has set aside that create the boundaries we perceive in landscapes. But this isn't the only way of looking at resources. And communal properties which we've just talked about are quite different than the kinds of lands that are set aside through homesteading and establishing private properties. Communal lands may happen also in tribal enterprises in both the United States and in Canada. So the resources that we acknowledge today have changed a bit from a number of the cultures that we've just talked about. We may not appreciate acorns or camis in the way that the Native Americans do, but we do have an appreciation for the importance of biodiversity and for connectivity among landscapes that we depend just as they did on those resources providing ecosystem health for us all. Thank you.