Each November 1, the Chicago Transit Authority turns on its largely ineffectual heat lamps. Come the first cold snap, pigeons gather to huddle in the scant pools of warmth, heads tucked under wings, apparently confident no one will swoop them up for mass barbecues. Chicagoans of the human sort stand shivering around them, cast out of the heat but loath to disturb their feathered fellow city dwellers.
Red-tailed hawks are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Pigeons are not. The gulf between majestic, soaring birds and gray doves who seem to do little more than poop a lot may seem obvious.
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Domestic cats also create havoc by hunting birds: Hello Kitty becomes a marauding killer, in turn felled as a “trash animal” by gun-toting avian enthusiasts. Animals can become trash if they’re not attractive enough or because of behaviors we consider disgusting—like eating the trash, our trash, they’re driven to consume to survive. The nearly three-inch-long prairie lubber grasshopper (also known as the “plains lubber grasshopper”), to which Jeffrey A. Lockwood devotes a chapter filled with many fascinating if repugnant details, will copiously and stinkily deposit massive amounts of vomit and feces on any predator.
Such a figure, the product of decades of white guilt coming after centuries of brutal genocide, persists in North American nature writing. It’s not that Native American relationships to nature should not be noted or praised. But it’s discomfiting, in the 21st century, to fix Native Americans in this by now limited role. Instead of constantly dwelling upon them as elemental caretakers, what might it mean, for instance, to consider the history of reservation ecology or the creation of Indian casinos in cities and deserts, and the subsequent effects on our relationships to animals? What might it mean, in other words, to think of “the Native American” not as outside but within capitalism? That’s a question bigger than this book, but nature writing needs to move beyond what has become just another reductive stereotype.
Ed. Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II (University of Minnesota Press)
