To the Editor:

When is it acceptable for responsible Native Americans to celebrate a past culture that history has shown to have supported and facilitated wanton and systematic destruction of the natural environment - Mother Earth - on time and space scales never experienced before, or since? Anyone with a sliver of knowledge of Native American culture, traditions, and lifeways and a thimbleful of respect for those immutable principles would answer unhesitatingly, "Never."

Yet that apparently is what a few members of the Sault Tribe did in St. Ignace in August 2007 when they staged a powwow as an integral part of a public event called Rendezvous at the Straits. The rendezvous event, staged by the St. Ignace Visitor's Bureau, was billed by that office as a "cultural heritage celebration (emphasis added) that brings together the history of the Straits' early years of fur trading." Early years was subsequently defined in the September 21, 2007, edition of the Sault Tribe newspaper, Win Awenen Nisitotung, as "the 1600s and 1700s, when the French fur trade was flourishing."

The fur trade in the area of the western Great Lakes was initiated in the mid 17th century when Wemitigoozhi (French) trappers searching for a new source of animal fur and hides to satisfy the demands of European hat makers "discovered" the Great Lakes homeland of the Anishinaabe peoples (Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomie). At that place called Michilimackinac (also Mackinac) where the waters of Lakes Huron and Michigan join, amid a thriving multi-ethnic Native American populace, they established an important trading and provisioning post.

Thus began an assault on the environment of staggering proportions. The assault would continue for more than a century and a half - about seven generations. And it would not end until the beaver and most other small endemic, vulnerable fur-bearing species - critical players in a well-balanced virgin forest and aquatic ecosystem - had been pushed by over-trapping to the threshold of extinction. In that sense, the fur trade as orchestrated by the Wemitigoozhi in the 1600s and 1700s was, quite simply, ecocide conducted on a regional scale.

The ferocity at which Wemitigoozhi trappers and their Anishinaabeg trading partners went about the destruction of Great Lakes terrestrial and aquatic fauna is revealed in a statement by James Cornell, an historian of the Chippewa, who noted that in 1670 "hundreds of canoe loads of furs were being shipped to Montreal and Quebec from Sault Ste. Marie and Mackinac." Documents at the Canadian Museum of Civilization indicate that in 1689, 800,000 pounds of beaver pelts were brought to Montreal in 160 canoes, even though the French market could support no more than 40,000 to 50,000 pounds per year.

As noted by Charles Cleland in his book, "Rites of Conquest," the decades-long fur frenzy in the final third of the 17th century resulted in a glut of furs that forced the French government to suspend trade, but not before "the storage houses in Quebec and Montreal had a ten year reserve" (emphasis added). While the officially sanctioned trade would not reopen until well into the 18th century, the unlicensed and unauthorized Wemitigoozhi coureur des bois continued to trap and to trade with the Anishinaabeg throughout the closure period, further reducing the animal population and worsening the fur glut in the east.

The history of the Anishinaabeg, not the Euro-centric-mind-filtered one recorded by white men, but the true history as reflected in the visions and dreams of the Natives, had the landscape of the homeland always as a backdrop. Dramatic landscape changes brought about by the fur trade had effects on the Native dreamscape, as well. With regard to dreams of the Anishinaabeg near the close of the 18th century when the fur trade was winding down, the noted Native American historian and writer Richard White wrote in "The Middle Ground," "Now they (the Natives) dreamed of once-familiar animals and places, but those animals and places remained trapped in their dreams. In many villages, dreaming of beaver or dreaming of deer eventually could not yield material beaver or deer, because beaver and deer were disappearing from large sections of the pays d'en haut (literally the upper country; the Great Lakes region) by the early 19th century. They had vanished both at the hands of white hunters and at the hands of Algonquian (Anishinaabeg) hunters themselves, who killed them for their skins and left their rotting carcasses to the wolves." (Emphasis added.)

Today, more than seven generations after the end of the fur trade, beaver populations in the area known previously as the pays d'en haut have been estimated as only 15% of those that existed at the beginning of the episode. A decrease in population of 85%, sustained over a period of almost 200 years, must certainly qualify as ecocide.

Native American expert John Fahey capsulized the ultimate effect of the fur trade on the Anishinaabeg when he wrote, "The fur trade, without intending it, largely destroyed the Indian way of life." So celebration of the fur trade is not a celebration of a culture, but rather a celebration of the destruction of one - ours. Is that an event to be celebrated? Thoughtful Natives should say, "gaawiin gaa wiikaa." Memorialized in dreams perhaps, and lamented, but never celebrated.

Charles Adams Laughlin, Nevada