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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Shepard Krech III '67 Among the indelible images of the early 1970s, one picture stands out: the Crying Indian. Ecological awareness was awakening in that decade, and an organization called Keep America Beautiful needed a surefire symbol for its antipollution campaign. The group found one in a Cherokee Indian named Iron Eyes Cody, and the posters, magazine ads, and television spots of the Native American shedding a tear over the sorry state of the environment touched the nation and helped change attitudes. “Through the Crying Indian, Keep America Beautiful cleverly manipulated ideas deeply ingrained in the national consciousness,” writes Shepard Krech III '67, a professor of anthropology at Brown. The central idea is that “on matters involving the environment, [the Indian] is pure, and white people are polluting.” This has long been the dominant image, but is it, in fact, correct? Were Native Americans exemplars of conservation, taking only what they needed and carefully preserving the natural landscape, or is this notion, however deeply held by whites and Indians alike, a Rousseau-esque fiction? About 180 years ago, lawyer and amateur archeologist Henry M. Brackenridge cautioned that those “who look for primitive innocence and simplicity in what they call the state of nature” are “mistaken.” Krech, armed with an increasing amount of anthropological and archeological research, draws the same conclusion. The notion of the necessarily ecological Indian, he argues, “distorts culture,” “masks cultural diversity,” and, because it is seen as a “fundamental truth,” it deflects “any desire to fathom or confront the evidence for relationships between Indians and the environment.” In examining such matters as the way various Indian tribes dug canals and used fire as land management tools and exploited buffalo, deer, beaver, and other animals, Krech shows that this relationship varied through time and place. California Indians, for example, regularly set the scrubby chaparral environment ablaze to “produce better forage for deer, increase yields of berries, ease the collection of seeds and bulbs, and suppress the destructive consequences of lightning-caused fires.” And yet, in other parts of the country, “the evidence that Indians lit fires that were then allowed to burn destructively and without regard to ecological consequences is abundant,” writes Krech. The author demonstrates that conservation is surprisingly often not the proper word to describe how Native Americans used the large animals with whom they shared the continent. “Waste is ancient,” notes Krech, offering examples of buffalo killed well in excess of any tribal needs, and sometimes only for their tongues and humps, which were considered a delicacy. And though Indians certainly possessed an abundance of knowledge about the ecology and behavior of their prey, whatever religious beliefs they might have held about the natural world did not, in many cases, stop them from seeing animals as valuable commodities for trade and pursuing their quarry to, at times, local extinction. “In recent years native people have not been of one mind on resource issues,” writes Krech. “They probably never have been.”
David
Elliot Cohen '77 “Shortly after my fortieth birthday, I began to experience the first twinges of spiritual uneasiness,” writes David Cohen '77. The author is hardly the first person to come face-to-face with a midlife crisis, and the idea of ditching one’s job and traveling the globe is not exactly an uncommon response to middle-aged ennui. But Yale graduates are nothing if not creative. For example, when Chris Goodrich '78, '87MSL hit the midlife doldrums, he decided to hit the road in a sports car—one he built himself. And when Cohen felt that pressing need to find out what else life had to offer besides suburban satisfaction, he went off to roam the planet—but he took along his wife, Devi, and kids Kara, Willie, and Lucas, who were 8, 7, and 2 respectively when the journey began. This being the 1990s, he also took his laptop, on which he wrote nearly two-dozen progress reports that were distributed, by e-mail of course, to his followers. The first of these dispatches, which began like a routine family newsletter, went out on December 15, 1995. “We recently decided to make some—how should we say it?—radical changes in our lifestyle,” Cohen wrote. “I know this is going to sound insane, but we’ve decided to sell our house, close down Cohen Publishers, Inc. [Cohen put together the best-selling A Day in the Life of America and similar coffee-table books], take the kids out of school, and travel internationally for a while.” Precisely where they were going and for how long was up in the air, but that was fine by them, and, after a longer-than-anticipated disengagement process, the family left the U.S. in the beginning of August 1996. Their itinerary took them from Central America to Southeast Asia, from the Museum of Torture in Greece to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and is filled with both high and low adventures, travel tips—to thrill a 7-to-12 year old child, “nothing beats a wildlife safari,” but “leave your 3-year-old at home”—and revelations. Lighting matches inside the Buddha caves of Pak Ou in Laos, Cohen was struck by a possible meaning to his journey: “To learn that we have only one pack of matches. To understand that we have to be in the best possible place when we light each one. To know that we must make each brief combustion a bright, shining moment that pierces the darkness and illuminates a thousand gods.”
Carmen
L. Cozza, Special Assistant in Athletics, with Rick Odermatt “I am convinced that in his own quiet way Carm Cozza is a genuine American hero,” says Rick Odermatt, a sportswriter for the New Haven Register, who teamed up to collaborate on the autobiography of the man whose football fortunes he covered for more than three decades. But while readers may find themselves quibbling with the Coach’s gridiron strategies, they are very likely to agree with Odermatt’s assessment. Cozza begins his story by recounting perhaps the worst moment in recent Yale football history: The Tie, that ignominious game in November 1968 in which an undefeated Yale team journeyed to Cambridge and watched in horror as Harvard knotted the score at 29-29 in the last two minutes and 40 seconds. “When you are as heavily favored as we were., anything less than outright victory has the sting of a loss,” he wrote. “And believe me, I felt the sting as severely as anyone. I still feel it.” But there are plenty of good memories to temper that bitter one, and football fans will find much to smile about as Cozza recounts a litany of great games and great players, among them Dick Jauron, John Pagliaro, Kevin Czinger, Rich Diana, and, of course, Calvin Hill and Brian Dowling. This is a tale of a man who explains that “family is the strongest thing you can have in life, and… a football family is an extension of your real family.” In the finest coaching tradition, Cozza lived for his charges and did right by them, whatever the cost to his program’s national stature. “Yale has a right to be proud of the extraordinarily high character, academic standing, and graduation rates among its athletes, and if we were left behind when other schools sacrificed their standards and invited excesses in the name of athletic excellence, so be it,” says Cozza. “Colleges should not be used as minor leagues for professional sports.” But he is clearly saddened by his sport’s fall from the prominent position it once enjoyed—and could enjoy again. The coach calls for a modest program of merit scholarships for athletes. In the modern context of Yale and Ivy League athletics, this “sounds like heresy,” he admits. “But why should a small accommodation to competitive factors be viewed as anything other than a wise strategy to ensure success? I’ll tell you what heresy is—letting that magnificent football stadium behind the Walter Camp arch waste away three-quarters empty on Saturday afternoons … Yale football has too great a heritage, and is too important in the lives of hundreds of wonderful young men, to allow it to wallow in the mediocrity of recent years.”
Brief Reviews Sylvia Brownrigg '86 Dean Chadwin '86 Jesse Green '80 William J. Poorvu '56, with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank Richard A. Posner '59 Ellen Lerner Rothman '94
More Books by Yale Authors Tim Bachmeyer '64PhD and William A. Snyder Eve Blau '78PhD Marshall Edelson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, and David N. Berg '71, '72MA, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Eric Freeman '97PhD and Susanne Hupfer '96PhD, Fellows, Yale Center for Internet Studies Courtland W. Howland '79JD, Editor Jeff Humphries ’81PhD Jonathan Hufstader ’60 Christine Hunter ’74 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Associate Professor of American Studies and History Arend Lijphart ’63PhD Fredrik Logevall ’93PhD Stephanie Merrim '78PhD Julie Mertus '88JD Thomas L. Pangle '66 and Peter J. Ahrensdorf '80 Helle Porsdam '87PhD Robert F. Reid-Pharr ’89MA, ’91MA W. William Reisman, McDougal Professor of Law Deborah L. Rhode ’74, ’77JD Ralph Schmidt ’69, ’79MFS, Joyce Berry, and John Gordon, Pinchot Professor of Forestry Leon V. Sigal ’64 L.A. Smolley ’72 and Debra Fulghum Bruce William C. Summers, Professor of Therapeutic Radiology William Ury '75
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