Addendum...Noble Savage

I just wanted to add a brief qualification to my post entitled "Noble Savage?" A friend brought it to my attention that what I wrote could have been perceived as an assertion that Native Americans are not environmental stewards or that Native Americans were not ecologically aware. I did not intend to insinuate, assert, or any other way suggest any of those things as a rule. I merely was echoing and agreeing with Shepard Krech III's argument that we may have over-exaggerated the universality of ecological knowledge among native people in the United States in an effort to create a marketing image to promote environmental stewardship and a pretty picture of a people that European-Americans otherwise oppressed (and in some cases, decimated). 

Hopefully, it is clear that I was trying to relay a particularly well-argued thesis in a book that comments on an issue that we tend to gloss over, accept unquestioningly, or otherwise ignore in our debates about environmental stewardship.