Invasive Species

I pressed the tiny play button and was delighted by a whimsically sketch-like animation with a talking rodent (called a Nutria).  I at first expected the New York Times video to be an environmental reprimand telling me to quit being so negligent of my surroundings, but towards the end of the clip, the little rodent says this:

I know that us Nutria have a bad habit of overpopulating areas and over-harvesting the edible plants in a small area resulting in the die-off of desirable plant species, but that sounds a lot like someone else I know of.  I know I'm not really supposed to be here, but neither are you.  [The animation then focuses in on a drawing of a Caucasian man.]

As you can tell, I somewhat just happened to stumble across this little video editorial.  But it raises some profoundly significant issues pertaining to some of our purposes and actions as human beings, specifically many Americans.  It's difficult to tell what the author was trying to get across by saying we're not really supposed to be here, but it definitely argues that many are hypocritical for despising invasive animal and plant species.  Perhaps it is trying to get people to understand a past wrongdoing and hypocrisy within our society's groundwork.

The video focuses a little bit on the prominence of the fur trade in North America during pre-colonial and colonial times.  In looking back on this portion of the animation, I couldn't help but see some criticism of our colonial predecessors.  A massive amount of money, time, and energy was spent on fur trading in North America; the video says that our neighboring 3-million person metropolis of Chicago was started because of rodents' fur.  The author of the video's script might be wanting us to look at the triviality of some of America's beginnings.  We wanted to spread our population, steal the homes of millions of Native Americans and animal species so to more easily trap for luxury fur coats and hats?  And now we're upset at the animals we used to (and sometimes still) trap and kill?  Of course it doesn't make sense, but were our predecessors wrong in their actions?

In an interview with PBS, Donald Fixico, Professor of American Indian History and Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, said:

...all of the North American continent has been taken away, except for about two percent that American Indians still have that they call their homelands.  The American Indian almost disappeared with the buffalo when less than a thousand buffalo were left by the turn of the 20th century, and only 225,000 Indians had survived the deadly new diseases and more than 1,000 wars. 

Notice how Fixico uses "has" instead of "had" in the first sentence.  The land was and still is stolen from the original owners.  America has been colloquially dubbed "the land of opportunity", but is it really?  Maybe it really is just the land of opportunity for those willing and able to push themselves forward and beat out others.  Were the white colonists and especially settlers wrong in seeking out opportunity on already claimed land?  And as I look at the video's opening shot of the Nutria rat's river-home under a maze of highways, I wonder: are we wrongful and invasive species?  On one final thought promulgated by the end of the video, does all of this matter at this point even though we can't change the past?  As the rodent said, "I'm here now, you're here now, let's just be friends."