Indigenous people may come in indigenous sub-types. I'll always remember a kindly, jaded, old anthropology professor of mine teaching a class on a certain indigenous language, once chuckling about the difference between the reservations of different tribes. It seems that the "Civilized Tribes" of the Southeast, like the Cherokee, kept very tidy homes and reservations, with not a speck out of order. "But go across the border to the [northern Plains tribe]s, and it looks like a bomb went off!"
So the long-established farming Indians, by his experience, were clean and orderly. But the nomadic Indians, who travelled great empty distances hunting buffalo for a living, had never developed those habits. And it makes sense. The romantic notion of the Indian in the wilderness being raised culturally to keep the land pristine is nonsense. His wilderness was pristine because he didn't dominate it enough to worry about making a mess of it. And because his small presence in it never generated enough waste to be a problem, he could just drop his small bit of trash anywhere. Settle him on a small bit of land, and it will become a dump. People whose very recent ancestors were hunter-gatherers are just not bred with the habits of cleanliness. That is largely an innate neurological trait, and it takes many generations of settled living to evolve.
Indigenous people may come in indigenous sub-types. I'll always remember a kindly, jaded, old anthropology professor of mine teaching a class on a certain indigenous language, once chuckling about the difference between the reservations of different tribes. It seems that the "Civilized Tribes" of the Southeast, like the Cherokee, kept very tidy homes and reservations, with not a speck out of order. "But go across the border to the [northern Plains tribe]s, and it looks like a bomb went off!"
So the long-established farming Indians, by his experience, were clean and orderly. But the nomadic Indians, who travelled great empty distances hunting buffalo for a living, had never developed those habits. And it makes sense. The romantic notion of the Indian in the wilderness being raised culturally to keep the land pristine is nonsense. His wilderness was pristine because he didn't dominate it enough to worry about making a mess of it. And because his small presence in it never generated enough waste to be a problem, he could just drop his small bit of trash anywhere. Settle him on a small bit of land, and it will become a dump. People whose very recent ancestors were hunter-gatherers are just not bred with the habits of cleanliness. That is largely an innate neurological trait, and it takes many generations of settled living to evolve.
As in "Little Big Man"-.... "Where are the dumps!?" (Bad quote...he says something before this but it eludes me at this time!)