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All the evidence indicates that America's native people lived immersed in art, stories and observations designed around the grand theme of understanding themselves in a sometimes impenetrable world. A fundamental way to probe those kinds of understandings is through stories of gods. The oldest named characters in North American history, in fact, are the deities who created the continent and its life and set in motion human life with all of its victories and tragedies. Stories of these deities make up the continent's oldest literature. With few exceptions, ancient American gods were animals, although the stories describe some as anthropomorphic animals. In Western America, for example, the deity who acquired the universal epithet coyote stood upright on its legs and brandished human hands, but had the fur, sharp nose, erect ears, and the tail of a coyote. The deities who made it into modern English as Coyote, Raven, Spider, Man, Skeleton Man, Master Rabbit, all shared a background basic human nature with their followers. Our vices, our lusts and our jealousies, our selfishness and our narcissism resided in America's ancient gods, there to witness, and there for good reason. More about this in a later episode. But the deities not only explained to listeners why North America was the kind of world it was, they taught lessons, often uncomfortable or funny ones, about human behavior and motives. They were gods, creators, also thieves, liars and lechers, classic professors of human nature. Coyote, who emerges from the stories as a kind of whirlwind biophysical force with an enormous appetite for pleasure and sensuality, was one of the most widely known gods out of ancient America, an avatar for human in the world. And we'll devote much of an episode to him and his stories. Like Raven, he Is the on the scene conductor of a master plan set in motion by an aloof first cause. This more knowable, approachable God was common in Native America. And if there are mysteries in the world you've wondered about, let Raven's adventures explain them. Raven was yet another merged animal human deity who told the Tlingits, I was born before this world was known. Uttering his monosyllabic gah, Raven proceeds to shape each animal in a slightly different way and to name them whale, seal, eagle, bear, caribou, beaver, salmon, sea otter, land otter, wolf. The birds he paints in bright colors because he wants them to be pretty. There is one worrisome thread that runs through Raven and Coyote stories, though. In early times, the Inuit explained, Raven becomes concerned that humans are becoming too numerous. Human villages are growing too large, and subsequently their residents are killing too many animals. The Inuit first man, agrees and tells Raven, if the people do not stop killing so many animals, they will kill everything you've made. In Coyote's case, as both the Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest told the story, humans have to die, because if they do not, human overpopulation will result in the destruction of all the animals and even of Earth itself. In the early 1930s, a historian of religion named Joseph Epps Brown became fascinated by native religions. He interviewed traditional Lakota elders, including the legendary Black Elk, and ultimately set down the ideas that made up part of hunter gatherer knowledge about America's animals. Brown's informants perceived the essential nature of animal species as much through dreams and visions as through native science. Bears ruled the underground as bison did the surface and eagles the air. Certain animals illustrated particular traits useful to the human animal. Members of a wolf clan sought to invoke the wolf's cooperative skills in hunting and killing. If a young man on a vision quest heard a bull elk bugle for cows in the crisp air of autumn, he might then regard the elk as a totem whose potent sexuality he could internalize. These elders also recalled a connection involving energy flow between creatures. These were connections neither 18th century Linnaean science or 21st century Genetics science would ever think to link together. What the Lakotas called umi or yum was whirlwind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds. They remembered whirlwind power as much sought, in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack in battle. But only a small number of special animals spiders, also moths, dragonflies, and bears. Elk and bison possessed the whirlwind secret. As for bison Seasonal winds coming from the north or south seemed part of their mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon, but they could entirely disappear, which led to a widespread belief in Native American that bison had their origins underground. And sometimes they returned there, as had been true of our first hunting ancestors in Africa, true of the Neanderthals, true of the Clovis people. Native ceremonial lives centered on an ancient human desire to control nature. But they did so primarily as part of a religious philosophy, not a scientific one. Managing animals based on population, modeling, carrying capacity of landscapes, or selective sustainable harvests, as modern ecologists and biologists do, would have been incomprehensible because Native cause effect explanations for why things happened relied on completely different premises. The religions through which Native people understood animals were, however, social superb at apprehending the kinship between animals and humans. Crucial in Native America was knowledge about how to influence animals in a realm usually defined as supernatural, an essential part of religion. A friend from my years in Montana, Professor Rosalind Lapeer, has done the best insider account so far of the invisible reality that was central to to this 10,000 year old world. Rosalind's own Blackfeet people possess what she calls a powerful worldview that suggests the Blackfeet desire to manipulate animals and nature is a deep seated human impulse available through the assistance of supernatural allies. The degree of power one possessed to call on those allies determine how much you could make happen. Human beings could become vectors of power from these supernatural realms if a sacred being sought them out, or through a vision quest or other effort to find a sympathetic animal ally, or even by purchasing power from someone who already had it. Another intriguing look at Native religious traditions with respect to animals comes from the work of an anthropologist who lived with the Athabaskan speaking Koyukon peoples of Alaska. The Koyukons preserve an ideology with powerful echoes of how life in the 10 millennia span of Native America must have worked. Keen observational naturalists with a highly refined knowledge of animal behavior. The Koyukons trace their link with animals back to what they called distant time when animals were human and spoke human languages. The deity animal was ever watching raven. Raven rarely missed anything and was always alert to violations of taboos about how to treat animals and respect them. Many raven stories were about the bad luck that befell people who transgressed against the animal world. Animals were critical to a major life force, luck that could make or break a person's life. Luck was an award from ever watching Raven as a result of correct behavior towards animals, and the most correct behavior of all was treating them as kin. 10,000 years ago, the entire human population of planet Earth numbered only about 4 million across all the Americas. Humans then likely made up only a quarter of of that number. North America probably had barely 500,000 people then, fewer than a single large city. In our time, agriculture changed that. But because big parts of the continent were unsuited to farming, and because farming was a new development, America wasn't entirely remade by agriculture the way Europe or Asia were. By 500 years ago, the best guess is that America, north of Mexico had grown its population to just under 4 million people. 4 million people spread across a landscape that in the 21st century supports 400 million, seems explanation enough for why humans and wild animals coexisted well for so long in Native America. That might be an argument that for hunting and gathering and subsistence farming economies, 4 million people was just about the carrying capacity of of the American landscape. The effects accumulated though, across the final 1500 years of native America before Old Worlders arrived, a cumulative total of 150 to 200 million people lived out their lives north of Mexico. America was no howling wilderness. It was a long inhabited lived in world human. Humans are biological after all, and no species gets a free ride in nature. In some American archaeological sites, animal remains show a significant decline over time. The massive Emeryville Mound site on the shore of San Francisco Bay portrays a steady decline in the bones of sturgeon, salmon, deer, elk and pronghorns, demonstrating a drawdown of local wild wildlife as human populations grew in Native California, Elk remains in many continental archaeological sites are so scarce that some scientists suggest that elk numbers must have been suppressed and the almost certain cause was human hunting. There was also at least one human caused wildlife extinction in Native America. As humans spread around the world, flightless birds were always particularly vulnerable. And the Pacific coasts of California and Oregon, along with the Channel Islands, held one, a flightless sea duck and the genus Chindites. In the past decade, researchers dating the remains of these goose sized ducks from six coastal sites concluded that humans began killing them 10,000 years ago, just as the Pleistocene gave way to Native America. Wiping them out was hardly the three century blitzkriegs that took out mammoths or later passenger pigeons or bison. But by 2400 years ago, people had hunted Pacific flightless sea ducks to extinction. Judging from the stories people preserved of their cultural heroes. The most common environmental overreach, though, was what the Inuit ran raven story feared over hunting brought on by growing Human numbers coyotes in ravens. America existed for 75 times longer than the United States has so far. So it shouldn't be a surprise that a history reaching beyond human memory would provoke a religious awe from its human inhabitants. Native America's cultural heroes taught that the key to the animal human relationship was kinship. Animals were people. They had families and societies, opinions and cultural memories. Like people, they also possessed something essential to them, a breath or a spirit that survived death. Respect came from honoring that humans and animals were kin and acknowledging that we and they could move between one another's cultures because we sprang from the same source. This became the key when, because of some human hubris that violated the arrangement, the animals retaliated by withdrawing from human's presence, pleading with bison, elk, deer to return and rebalance the world. Thus became a focus of some of the grand ceremonies native peoples developed in North America. When Old Worlders arrived in America 500 years ago, Central and South America held more than 50 million people. But in what is now the United States and Canada, hunting and gathering culture still prevailed across vast stretches. And here the human population had not not yet reached 5 million. Even with human numbers seemingly so slight, 500 generations of humans had physically transformed North America to the native peoples. The continent was occupied, settled, its birds and reptiles and mammals all intimately known and considered kin. Even with fewer than 5 million inhabitants, parts of America had held large enough numbers of people that wild animals weren't always abundant. But save one, all the species that had survived the Pleistocene extinctions still existed. Beavers continued to engineer a watery landscape. Shorebirds and ducks filled the skies, and bears, wolves and other predators still played their crucial roles in American ecologies, even with thousands of years of human harvest. And bison and passenger pigeons were still among the most numerous species on Earth. But the change that was coming was on a scale no one could possibly fathom. Since the Ice Age ebbed and northern seas flooded Beringia, America's animals and humans had lived in near total isolation from the rest of Earth. No one on either side of the Atlantic had any inkling the Earth other existed or that such biological isolation sat ready to deliver one of the most profound tragedies in history. When the planet's human population finally rejoined after parting thousands of generations earlier, the America of Clovis and Folsom and Chaco, of bison and passenger pigeons confronted a staggering transformation. Raven and coyote would never be able to turn things back to the way they had been.
