The Natives of North America were not about historical preservation or permanence of any kind. It has been difficult to piece together what North America looked like pre-Columbus, but it certainly was not empty, as white governments would have everyone believe. Stanley Rice, a plant ecologist and Cherokee now living in France, has gathered the facts in numerous fields to fill in the gaps. His newest book, Forgotten Landscapes focuses on the environmental, but the entire picture will be a revelation to most.

Native tribes lived in cities of substantial size. Cahokia, at 20,000, was comparable in size to many of the major European capitals in the 11th century, when it peaked. There was an entire Mississippian civilization that thrived, faded, and has left all but no trace.

A gigantic difference from European cities was that Cahokia was clean. In Europe, people did not bathe, and poured their urine into the streets. They would commonly defecate out the windows onto the street (and any pedestrians) below. In Europe diseases like Plague swept through one after another , while in Cahokia and America in general, no such events occurred. And rather than cover themselves with perfumes and powders, North American Natives bathed. They also had more balanced diets, because in addition to hunting and gathering, they farmed. Natives were visibly taller, stronger and fitter than the white European immigrants.

This is typical of the many ways we currently get Native North Americans wrong, says Rice: “People in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would look to Native tribes for ideas about how to save the land, looking right past the benefits of Native land management to see a vague spirituality based largely on the gathering and use of Indian medicinal plants.”

Native tribes had different architectural and design styles. Visiting them would have been like touring foreign countries within North America. Except that the Natives would welcome such visitors and host them. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, they built apartment buildings several stories high, some of which still exist. The nomadic tribes employed tepees for ease of transport and setup. In the north and the east, longhouses housed numerous families. Much like the Mayan empire to the south, North American cities centered around large flat-topped mounds they built, where meetings and ceremonies took place.

Women played a far bigger role than they did in Europe, where they were kept out of everything except raising children. Some tribes were matriarchal altogether, but even in the patriarchal ones, women’s views were sought and respected. Rice cites a story of a Native chief brought to London as a showpiece, who was dumbfounded that there were zero women in evidence in government.

Rice’s main focus, as readers should expect, is on land and water management, where they excelled. Natives in the southwest built reservoirs and canals to deal with the parched conditions. The city of Phoenix uses the original Native network for its own water system today. Natives also knew about water falling, giving it pressure to create public fountains in cities, long before King Louis XIV and the palace at Versailles stunned Europe with their (decorative) use.

They understood plants best of all. Rice spends a lot of time on the management of agriculture, employing the understory of fruit trees to raise vegetable crops. Where European monocultures featured square plots and endless perfect rows of one single crop, Native farms looked like European gardens, positively wild, benefitting the land, the insects, and the variety of crops. The earth thrived rather than drained itself of fertility. And if a farm looked like it needed a rest, they gave it one to recover, rather than smother it in fertilizers. Insects favoring different plants would keep each other in check, disease could not wipe out the entire farm, and bees could be occupied all summer long.

Among the tactics used by whites to rid the continent of Natives was to burn a village and then come back to chop down all their fruit trees, returning the land to wasteland, and starving the escapees. This is another reason there is little trace of Native agriculture.

Rice employs history to show that Native management of fire changed the ecology. Burning grasslands increased them while reducing forests, giving the buffalo room to run. They could not negotiate the branch-strewn woods, so it is thanks to Native fires that their favorite resource eventually came to number In the billions before the Natives were killed off by European diseases and slaughtered by white immigrants so that the annual fires stopped. Then of course, the government offered bounties for killing off the buffalo in order to decimate the remaining Natives’ main resource.

He has similar stories about water-based crops, whose annual burning made them come back thicker and more numerous, providing more sustenance for the tribe without the active management of fertilizers and herbicides.

Another reason for the fires was it was easier to track prey like deer in the open, burnt areas. It also helped hunters to be unheard, instead of breaking twigs and crunching leaves underfoot as they prowled. Fire was a tool of land management in Native hands. Today, after decades of not employing fire, it has taken on a life of its own, out of control.

When the whites arrived, they had no use for community water management, and everyone had their own wells. This has inevitably drained the aquifers, and after a century of it, is causing the land to subside, filling in the dry hollows underground. In places, it a subsidence of as much as 30 feet, wreaking havoc on the surface.

The stories of ownership in common are better known. Natives owned their homes, but not the land underneath. Crops came from common lands. It was only at the insistence of the US government that the common land of the reservations was divided into private lots and families got their own plot. This encouraged the gridlines and identical little houses that, like the farms, were the sign that Europeans were in charge, and society became everyone for themselves.

Rice’s tribe, the Cherokee, was the biggest, at about 30,000. They were pushed around the USA, losing their agriculture and their infrastructure, and starting over, again and again. They went from the southeast up to northern Oklahoma, becoming poorer and sicker with each forced move.

But they were far from savages. One important Cherokee scholar, Sequoyah, had his name assigned to the grandest, largest, oldest trees in the world. He developed a written language for the Cherokee, a most rare development in Native history.

Ironically, I suppose, it was one of the biggest Indian haters in government, Senator Henry Dawes, who looked at what the Natives had accomplished, and knew that they had to go, because: “There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”

At the opposite end is Stanley Rice: “Native cultures have insights that could help to save the world. They are not vague spiritualistic insights based on the use of Native herbs, either; they are concepts, such as habitat management and the promotion of biodiversity within agriculture [.…] by which Natives positively transformed the American continent in the past. We did it before, and we can do it again.”


David Wineberg

A very very good book! It was informative and interesting, well written and engaging. A good book for all levels of interest to read.

Before European contact, North America thrived with sophisticated indigenous civilizations. This book reveals their advanced agricultural practices, urban planning, and extensive trade networks, showcasing a rich and productive world often overlooked.

Fascinating and enjoyable, this easy-to-read book brings to life a long-overlooked world. The advanced cultures of pre-Columbian North America profoundly influenced the founders of the US. Their land management practices have much to teach us as climate change transforms our modern landscapes.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

A sweeping narrative of Native American history from pre-and post-European contact. The missing link in the North American historical record that has always been there and has finally been brought to light.

Stanley A. Rice sets out to show, through both archeological evidence and the historical record, how Native Americans shaped the North American landscape, achieving feats attributed to the most sophisticated civilizations known to man, which has so far proven elusive in the vast majority of scholarship concerning the First Nations.

Rice begins by describing the civilizations of the Mississippian culture at Cahokia. This is located in St. Louis Missouri. I've been here recently and have seen first hand, and climbed to the top of the ruins of the steppe pyramids and they are absolutely incredible. To deny that Native Americans did not have the same architectural genius as other ancient cultures during this same time period is mind-boggling, and yet, that is exactly what the European-American account has repeatedly stated over and over again to justify the annihilation and disenfranchisement of First Nations.

Rice doesn't stop here though, he goes on to challenge the assertion made by white settlers that Native Americans were incapable of properly "managing" the earth by showing how Native Americans did in fact, manipulate their environment to benefit their people through such practices as irrigation, controlled burns, crop growing, migration, and many many other practices. He goes on to examine the writings of various historians who recorded the environmental impact post Native American removal to further show the effects the First Nations had on the North American landscape.

These are just a few of the things Rice discusses in this book. I highly recommend anyone interested in Native American history or North American pre-Columbus to pick up this up and read it. I'll be purchasing a copy for my home library, as I believe this is a crucial history to know and understand and pass on.

I received an ARC for this book, courtesy of the publisher and Netgalley, and am leaving this review voluntarily.

I learned so much from this little book by a Cheerokee botanist and educator! I don't know much about US history, and even less about the continent's history before Columbus arrived on its shores, and I feel this completely changed everything I thought I knew. I did grow up thinking that Native American people left in effect no trace on the land, that they lived nomadic lives and didn't build anything, and this book completely challenges that and talks about agricultural practices, forest management, wildlife management, stone buildings built by the Mississippian civilization (I had never even heard of them!)... There's a lot about how this vision of Native American people not really using the land was used by the colonists to justify stealing the land and displacing and killing its inhabitants, and I felt disappointed with myself to realise that while I knew how unfair and awful the land grabbing and genocide was, I wrongly believed the narrative of them "leaving now trace".
It was a well-researched and well-written book, very accessible with illustrative pictures, I definitely recommend it.

Forgotten Landscapes dispels the myth that indigenous populations didn't significantly impact and shape their physical environment in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. Stanley Rice shares his own direct observations and photographs while also incorporating biological, anthropological, and historical evidence highlighting some of the ways the indigenous groups in an area utilized the land to meet their needs but in a manner that wasn't (isn't?) necessarily recognized from a European-centric lens. I initially learned some of this from other sources but this definitely wasn't covered in my history textbooks in junior high school and high school. I appreciate that the writing was approachable and straightforward even in sections that were a bit more technical and scientific. Some parts felt like a lot of conjecture (educated guesses to be sure, but still mostly a guess, I think). but overall Forgotten Landscapes does make you think twice about the ways we impact the environment and possibly make you question some long-held and antiquated assumptions.

Many thanks to NetGalley, The Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Inc. and Prometheus Books for the e-ARC.

An interesting mix of US history, a smattering of world history, some general science, and the author's own reflection. I do find that occasionally Rice ended up meandering a little bit from the meat of the book, in a way that sometimes unfortunately took away a little bit. However, overall I found this to be a interesting, fairly in-depth read about the extent to which Native peoples shaped the lands they called home.