Q, you'll find that practice of gift exchange in many places, but it operates on a grand scale in the Northwest, and is called Potlatch. It was outlawed for many years by various governments who didn't understand the practice and found the beggaring on oneself, only to be enriched by reciprocal or greater gifts the next year to be too confusing.

The jury is still out as to how long humans have inhabited the New World. It is pretty certain that they didn't all arrive via a land bridge. Some South American sites are dated back I think as far as 40-50,000 years. The standard number tossed around in anthropology classes for North America was 27,000, but I think that is now considered incorrect, that populations were here longer.

The populations that have lived here have always had an impact on the environment. Technology has also been present, but the North American technology was not as universally destructive as the European technology, and the impact was different. Both New World and Old World had some massive building projects (pyramids and temples abound in parts of both worlds) and there are many other parallel activities.

But the biggest difference between cultures and their environmental attitudes and behavior is, largely, that the industrial religions lost touch with the beneficial relationships with the natural world and the idea of gift exchange as it existed between humans and non-humans, such as the animals they hunted. Cultural practices evolved to help serve as a form of game management. It has been suggested by people like Calvin Martin that even this could be a skewed argument: his theory is that both New World humans and animals caught and spread some European diseases in such a way that the diseases spread long before Europeans set foot on much of the New World. By the time explorers and pioneers arrived, the human population had dropped so much and so many years earlier that the land was more lush and the animals more populace because the humans who usually hunted them had experienced a huge die off.

This is one of many theories about what was going on here before colonization.

SRS