Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians, a collection of essays compiled by Thomas C. Blackburn and Kat Anderson, is an enlightening, troubling, and at least minimally hopeful investigation of the management of natural resources by American-Indians in mid-nineteenth century California. It is enlightening because it turns on its head the common misperceptions that American-Indians were a crude people who had developed no system of dealing effectively, efficiently or wisely with the environment, and that Euro-Americans were responsible for establishing the beginning of such a system. It is troubling because it makes the reader realize that he has been duped by the biased educational system into believing such misperceptions, and because the land still suffers from what the "settlers" and their successors have done to the ecology of California. And it is hopeful---at least moderately so---because a number of the essayists argue that the approach to the use and preservation of natural resources developed and utilized by the American-Indians can still be applied to our diminished environment today.
The essays were collected in order to pay honor to the respectful, effective and efficient relationship of American-Indians with the natural environment of Native California and to lead
to a growing recognition that the rigid and rather monolithic conceptual dichotomy traditionally drawn between the seemingly passive 'food procurement' lifestyle of 'hunter-gatherers' and the apparently more active 'food production' adaptation of 'agriculturalists' is inadequate, overly simplistic, and dangerously misleading (15).
Euro-American history has painted a picture of American-Indians as generally lazy people with only a crude relationship with the environment, and has painted Euro-Americans as sophisticated agriculturalists who entered Native California in the mid-nineteenth century and turned a wilderness into a t...