Smashing Mother Nature's Head In

One of the more absurd contemporary popular delusions, among many, is the idea that Native North American societies, and hunter-gatherer societies in general, were more respectful of “nature” than European or Modern Western culture. “Nature” itself, as we now think and speak of it, was pretty much an invention of 19th century European Romanticism. Most other cultures have no similar concept. So was the myth of the “noble savage,” of which this idea that hunter-gatherers are more respectful of nature is the modern expression.

This cliff is not really here.

True, the modern descendants of North American hunter-gatherer cultures will as often as not endorse this view themselves. That only shows how completely European their sensibilities have become. They are apparently unaware of what their ancestors' traditional religion was. Which is entirely unsurprising, since their ancestors had no written records, and converted to Christianity pretty much to a man, woman, and child at least a century ago, more often several centuries ago.

But we know from a lot of anthropological evidence that they had far less respect for nature than European civilization traditionally does. 

Cliff? I don't see a cliff...

Witness Canadian World Heritage Site Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, in use for 5-6 thousand years. Entire herds of bison were driven off the cliff, far more than the local tribes could consume. Sometimes they would take only the tongues of slain buffalo, the greatest delicacy, and leave the rest of the massive animals to rot.

In the Eastern Woodlands, some tribes hunted similarly: they would set a forest on fire, then pick what they wanted of the animals fleeing the flames.

The reason is simple: most of the world's cultures, including those of the native North Americans, did not believe that the physical, sensed world was real. The spirit world was the real world. Therefore they were not inclined to give their physical environment great importance, and therefore they were not inclined to keep it in especially good order. 

But those are definitely wolves back there...

The Judeo-Christian tradition is an outlier in giving a real, independent existence to the physical, aka natural, world. This is why science—the serious, systematic study of nature--developed in Western Europe, not elsewhere. The Romantic worship of nature, in turn, is a byproduct of science.

Nothing could have been further from the mind of the North American shaman.