Tending the Wild — The Original Land Management
Indigenous peoples of North America did not merely live in a wilderness — they actively tended, cultivated, pruned, burned, and managed landscapes over millennia, creating the abundant biodiversity that European colonizers mistook for untouched nature.
One of the most consequential myths of colonization is that the Americas were a vast wilderness before European arrival. In reality, Indigenous peoples across the continent were sophisticated land managers. The Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa of northern California conducted controlled burns for thousands of years, creating the mosaic of grasslands and forests that maintained deer, elk, and plant biodiversity. The Anishinaabe managed wild rice lakes with precise harvesting protocols that maintained genetic diversity. The Maya created sophisticated wetland agriculture systems (raised fields) covering millions of acres. The prairie landscape itself — which European settlers called 'wilderness' — was actively maintained by Indigenous burning. Ecologist M. Kat Anderson's research in Tending the Wild documents hundreds of Indigenous land management practices that created and sustained the biodiversity Europeans encountered.
We are not conservationists. Conservation means keeping something the way it is. We are caretakers. We make it better.
Anderson's exhaustive research demonstrates that California's plant biodiversity at the time of European contact was actively created by millennia of Indigenous land tending — not a natural baseline state.
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources
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- What Native American wisdom says about land and belonging
Much of what colonists called wilderness had been burned, pruned and replanted for generations. On this account belonging to a place is work you do to it, not a view you have of it.