Changing Landscapes

By: Sally

The morale and physical health of a culture deteriorates, so to do the traditions by which it maintains its values and belief systems. Cultural anthropologists concern themselves with uncovering dead traditions and preserving endangered ones. An example of this in American history the work done by Alice Fletcher, which she published in paper in 1904 entitled “The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony”. In it she documented the details of ritual she had observed to be gradually disappearing among the tribes of the Omaha, Ponka, Dakota and Pawnee Indians. Her study revealed a complex set of rituals, the intricacy of which indicate the profound relationship between nature and Pawnees culture.

Richard White, in his essay “The Cultural Lanscape of the Pawnees”, discusses the interaction of nature and culture, using the term “landscape” to mean an environment seen through the lens of a particular culture. He points to interaction between Quakers and Pawnees. The Quakers wanted the Pawnees to give up hunting Buffalo and turn their energies entirely to agriculture, while the Pawnees saw hunting buffalo and the offering of meat to the Great Spirit as necessary in order to be able to continue harvesting corn. They were not able to come to an agreement because neither understood the landscape of the other. Alice Fletcher’s record of the Hako Ceremony gives insight into the Pawnee cultural landscape but it in itself elucidates the nature of our own cultural landscape. Her many-year study produced a meticulous record, with every detail of the ceremony recorded in writing or by gramophone. And yet, complete as it is, the modern-day reader cannot miss what is lacking about Fletcher’s effort: the Pawnee themselves. Fletcher was able to write down what they did, but she was not able to preserve their cultural landscape, which began to change with the influx of white missionaries in the 1840s and continued lose its ancient ways as their population declined.

It is doubtful that Fletcher herself believed that her record could capture exactly what the ritual was. More likely she saw it disappearing as the moral and health of the tribes deteriorated and believed that by preserving the objective, the observable, details of the ceremony, somehow the emotional, cultural and spiritual power it contained could also be preserved. Her paper “The Hako: A Pawnee ceremony” foreshadows a modern-day a problem American culture now faces. As our understanding of environmental problems grows, we believe that our problems can be solved by external actions alone. Hence we see an explosion of green technologies and political mechanisms aimed at minimizing human impact on our forests, oceans and skies. However, in our zeal for action we forget something that perhaps the Pawnees understood. The impact of technology and the power of law will be insubstantial and short-lived if not rooted in a cultural landscape that sees humans as within rather than above nature. We cannot “save the environment” with technology and legislation alone anymore than Fletcher was able to save the Hako Ceremony by simply writing it down.