Browsing Tag: colonization

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full
of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a
closer look at the strange big boat. When
Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawak’s ran to
greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
THEY BROUGHT US PARROTS AND BALLS OF COTTON AND SPEARS AND MANY OTHER THINGS, WHICH THEY
EXCHANGED FOR THE GLASS BEADS AND HAWKS’ BELLS. THEY WILLINGLY TRADED EVERYTHING THEY OWNED. THEY WERE WELL-BUILT, WITH GOOD BODIES AND
HANDSOME FEATURES. THEY DO NOT BEAR ARMS, AND DO NOT KNOW THEM,
FOR I SHOWED THEM A SWORD, THEY TOOK IT BY THE EDGE AND CUT THEMSELVES OUT OF IGNORANCE. THEY HAVE NO IRON. THEIR SPEARS ARE MADE OF CANE. THEY WOULD MAKE FINE SERVANTS. WITH FIFTY MEN, WE COULD SUBJUGATE THEM ALL
AND MAKE THEM DO WHATEVER WE WANT. These Arawak’s of the Bahama Islands were
much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say
again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe
of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government
of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger
to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. Columbus wrote:
AS SOON AS I ARRIVED IN THE INDIES, ON THE FIRST ISLAND WHICH I FOUND, I TOOK SOME OF
THE NATIVES BY FORCE IN ORDER THAT THEY MIGHT
LEARN AND MIGHT GIVE ME INFORMATION OF WHATEVER THERE IS IN THESE PARTS. The information that Columbus wanted most
was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the
king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would
be on the other side of the Atlantic -the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other
informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order
to get to the Far East .
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France , England
, and Portugal . Its population, mostly poor peasants,
worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of
the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic
Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world,
Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land
because it could buy anything. There was gold in Asia , it was thought, and
certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and
others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople
and the eastern Mediterranean , and controlled the land routes to Asia , a sea
route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working
their way around the southern tip of Africa . Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across
an unknown ocean. In return for bringing back gold and spices,
they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands,
and the fame that would go with a new tide: Admiral of the Ocean Sea . He was a merchant’s
clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part time
weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing
ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine
crew members. Columbus would never have made it to Asia,
which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller
world. He would have been doomed by that
great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an
unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia-the Americas. It was early
October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands,
off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating
in the water. They saw
flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo
saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean
sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to
get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedi for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening
before. He
got the reward. So, approaching land, they were met by the
Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawak’s lived in village communes, had
a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no
horses or work animals. They had no iron, but
they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous consequences: it
led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they
guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed
to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the
Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers,
and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild
visions of gold fields. On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa
Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in
the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad
(Christmas) and left thirty-nine crew members there, with instructions to find and store
the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them
aboard his two remaining ships. At one
part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows
and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled
to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the
Azores and Spain. When the weather turned
cold, the Indian prisoners began to die. Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was
extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia
(it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part
fact, part fiction: HISPANIOLA IS A MIRACLE. MOUNTAINS AND HILLS, PLAINS AND PASTURES,
ARE BOTH FERTILE AND BEAUTIFUL THE HARBORS ARE UNBELIEVABLY GOOD
AND THERE ARE MANY WIDE RIVERS OF WHICH THE MAJORITY CONTAIN GOLD. THERE ARE MANY SPICES, AND GREAT MINES OF
GOLD AND OTHER METALS. The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive
and so free with their possessions that no one
who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they
never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with
anyone.” He concluded his report by
asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his
next voyage “as much gold as they need and as many
slaves as they ask.” He was full of
religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His
way over apparent impossibilities.” Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and
promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred
men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean,
taking Indians as captives. But as word
spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they
found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the
Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and
children as slaves for sex and labor. Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent
expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill
up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of
dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave
raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them
in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to
load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two
hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put
up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that,
although the slaves were “naked as the day they
were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let
us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back
dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with
gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he
and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or
older to collect a certain quantity of gold every
three months. When they brought it, they were given copper
tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their
hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust
garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs,
and were killed. Trying to put together an army of resistance,
the Arawak’s faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged
them or burned them to death. Among the Arawak’s, mass suicides began, with
cassava poison. Infants were
killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation,
or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were
dead. When it became clear that there was no gold
left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on
huge estates, known later as Encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and
died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty
thousand Indians left. By 1550,
there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the
original Arawak’s or their descendants left on the island. The chief source-and, on many matters the
only source-of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome
de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which
Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became
a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las
Casas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, began a multi volume History
of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long
distances, especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because
they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties
seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some
grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings. Women in Indian society were treated so well
as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas
describes sex relations: MARRIAGE LAWS ARE NON-EXISTENT MEN AND WOMEN
ALIKE CHOOSE THEIR MATES AND LEAVE THEM AS THEY PLEASE, WITHOUT OFFENSE, JEALOUSY OR
ANGER. THEY MULTIPLY IN GREAT ABUNDANCE; PREGNANT
WOMEN WORK TO THE LAST MINUTE AND GIVE BIRTH ALMOST PAINLESSLY; UP THE NEXT DAY, THEY BATHE
IN THE RIVER AND ARE AS CLEAN AND HEALTHY AS BEFORE GIVING BIRTH. IF THEY TIRE OF THEIR MEN, THEY
GIVE THEMSELVES ABORTIONS WITH HERBS THAT FORCE STILLBIRTHS, COVERING THEIR SHAMEFUL
PARTS WITH LEAVES OR COTTON CLOTH; ALTHOUGH ON THE
WHOLE, INDIAN MEN AND WOMEN LOOK UPON TOTAL NAKEDNESS WITH AS MUCH CASUALNESS AS WE LOOK
UPON A MAN’S HEAD OR AT HIS HANDS. The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion,
at least no temples. They live in: LARGE
COMMUNAL BELL-SHAPED BUILDINGS, HOUSING UP TO 600 PEOPLE AT ONE TIME MADE OF VERY STRONG
WOOD AND ROOFED WITH PALM LEAVES. THEY PRIZE BIRD FEATHERS OF VARIOUS COLOURS,
BEADS MADE OF FISH BONES, AND GREEN AND WHITE STONES WITH
WHICH THEY ADORN THEIR EARS AND LIPS, BUT THEY
PUT NO VALUE ON GOLD AND OTHER PRECIOUS THINGS. THEY LACK ALL MANNER OF COMMERCE, NEITHER
BUYING NOR SELLING, AND RELY EXCLUSIVELY ON THEIR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT FOR MAINTENANCE. THEY
ARE EXTREMELY GENEROUS WITH THEIR POSSESSIONS AND BY THE SAME TOKEN COVET THE POSSESSIONS
OF THEN; FRIENDS AND EXPECT THE SAME DEGREE OF
LIBERALITY. In Book Two of his History of the Indies,
Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by
black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when
he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment
of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique
account and deserves to be quoted at length: ENDLESS TESTIMONIES PROVE THE MILD AND PACIFIC
TEMPERAMENT OF THE NATIVES. BUT OUR
WORK WAS TO EXASPERATE, RAVAGE, KILL, MANGLE AND DESTROY; SMALL WONDER, THEN, IF THEY TRIED
TO KILL ONE OF US NOW AND THEN. THE ADMIRAL, IT IS TRUE, WAS BLIND AS THOSE
WHO CAME AFTER HIM, AND HE WAS SO ANXIOUS TO PLEASE THE KING THAT
HE COMMITTED IRREPARABLE CRIMES AGAINST THE INDIANS. Las Casas tells how the Spaniards “grew more
conceited every day” and after a while refused to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were
in a hurry” or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry
large leaves to shade them from the sun and others
to fan them with goose wings.” Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing
Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them
to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas
tells how “two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying
a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun
beheaded the boys.” The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves
failed. And when they ran off into the hills they
were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, “they suffered and
died in the mines and other labour’s in desperate silence, knowing not
a soul in the world to whom they could turn for
help.” He describes their work in the mines: MOUNTAINS ARE STRIPPED FROM TOP TO BOTTOM
AND BOTTOM TO TOP A THOUSAND TIMES; THEY DIG, SPLIT ROCKS, MOVE STONES, AND CARRY DIRT ON
THEN: BACKS TO WASH IT IN THE RIVERS, WHILE THOSE
WHO WASH GOLD STAY IN THE WATER ALL THE TIME WITH THEIR BACKS BENT SO CONSTANTLY IT BREAKS
THEM; AND WHEN WATER INVADES THE MINES, THE MOST ARDUOUS TASK OF ALL IS TO DRY THE MINES
BY SCOOPING UP PANS FULL OF WATER AND THROWING
IT UP OUTSIDE. After each six or eight months’ work in the
mines, which was the time required of each crew
to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to
the mines, the wives remained to work the soil,
forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava
plants. THUS, HUSBANDS AND WIVES WERE TOGETHER ONLY
ONCE EVERY EIGHT OR TEN MONTHS AND WHEN THEY MET THEY WERE SO EXHAUSTED AND DEPRESSED ON
BOTH SIDES THEY CEASED TO PROCREATE. AS FOR
THE NEWLY BORN, THEY DIED EARLY BECAUSE THEIR MOTHERS, OVERWORKED AND FAMISHED, HAD NO
MILK TO NURSE THEM, AND FOR THIS REASON, WHILE I WAS IN CUBA, 7000 CHILDREN DIED IN THREE
MONTHS. SOME MOTHERS EVEN DROWNED THEIR BABIES FROM
SHEER DESPERATION IN THIS WAY, HUSBANDS DIED IN THE MINES, WIVES DIED AT
WORK, AND CHILDREN DIED FROM LACK OF MILK AND
IN A SHORT TIME, THIS LAND WHICH WAS SO GREAT, SO POWERFUL AND FERTILE WAS DEPOPULATED. MY EYES HAVE SEEN THESE ACTS SO FOREIGN TO
HUMAN NATURE, AND NOW I TREMBLE AS I WRITE. When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las
Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on
this island, including the Indians; so, that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people
had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I
myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.” Thus, began the history, five hundred years
ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even
if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians
to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated,
or 8 million as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history, books given to children
in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure-there is no bloodshed-and
Columbus Day is a celebration. Past the elementary and high schools, there
are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian,
was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi volume biography,
and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus,
Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement
and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by
Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.” That is on one page, buried halfway into the
telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last
paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus: HE HAD HIS FAULTS AND HIS DEFECTS, BUT THEY
WERE LARGELY THE DEFECTS OF THE QUALITIES THAT MADE
HIM GREAT-HIS INDOMITABLE WILL, HIS SUPERB FAITH IN GOD AND IN HIS OWN MISSION AS THE
CHRIST BEARER TO LANDS BEYOND THE SEAS, HIS STUBBORN PERSISTENCE
DESPITE NEGLECT, POVERTY AND DISCOURAGEMENT. BUT THERE WAS NO FLAW, NO DARK SIDE TO THE
MOST OUTSTANDING AND ESSENTIAL OF ALL HIS QUALITIES, HIS SEAMANSHIP. One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to
unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the
story of mass murder; indeed, he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide. But he does something else-he mentions the
truth quickly and goes on to other things more
important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the
risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against
the writer. To state the facts, however, and
then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain
infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important-it should weigh
very little in our final judgments; it should affect
very little what we do in the world. It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis
of some facts and not of others. This is as
natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical
purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the
bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this
or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification,
emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker’s distortion is a technical
necessity for a common purpose shared by all people
who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more
than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where
any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian
means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or
national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is
not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a
Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you’d better use a different
projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of
history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not
intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and
knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for
contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his
successors as navigators and discoverers, and
to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It
serves-unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history,
accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless
scholarly exercise in morality. But the
easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress
(Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save
socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these
atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts,
as radioactive wastes are buried in containers
in the earth. We have learned to give them
exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the
most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming
from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes
from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their
victims (the Arawak’s)-the quiet acceptance of
conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to
history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors,
diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal
acceptance, as if they the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson,
Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme
Court-represent the nation as a whole. The
pretence is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional
conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is
as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial
expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development
of capitalism, the culture of education and the
mass media. “History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry
Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored^ in which he proceeded to tell the
history of nineteenth-century Europe from the
viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from
those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe
had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy
of a few national leaders. But for factory
workers in England, farmers in France, coloured people in Asia and Africa, women and
children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger,
exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated. My viewpoint, in telling the history of the
United States, is different: that we must not accept
the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have
been, The history of any country, presented as the history
of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often
repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers,
dominate-rs and dominated in race and sex. And
in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking
people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which
comes from selection and emphasis in history, I
prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawak’s,
of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the
Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen
by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the
rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in
the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of
the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern
farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by
pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the post war American empire as
seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any
one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the
standpoint of others. My point is not to grieve for the victims
and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that
anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not
always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far,
human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and
tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims. Still, understanding the complexities, this
book will be sceptical of governments and their
attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of
nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that
victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I
don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a
statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just,
but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know
what justice is.” I don’t want to invent victories for people’s
movements. But to think that history-writing
must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians
collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate
a possible future without denying the past, it should,
I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past
when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together,
occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only
hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather
than in its solid centuries of warfare. That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach
to the history of the United States. The reader
may as well know that before going on. What Columbus did to the Arawak’s of the Bahamas,
Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English
settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the
Powhatans and the Pequots. The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out
of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone
tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this)
the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the
gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not
erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a
bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought
that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with
the promise to return-the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so, they welcomed him, with munificent
hospitality. That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain
with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of
God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the
mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about
whether Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes,
bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty,
but at the same time begging him to go back. (The painter Durer a few years later described
what he saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition-a
sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.) Cortes then began his march of death from
town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind
of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyse the will of the population by a sudden
frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited
the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of
unarmed retainers, Cortes’s small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with
cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they
were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the
Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands
of the Spaniards. All this is told in the Spaniards’ own accounts. In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro,
used the same tactics, and for the same reasons-the frenzy in the early capitalist
states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of
the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the
monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money
economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call “the
primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate
system of technology, business, politics, and culture
that would dominate the world for the next five
centuries. In the North American English colonies, the
pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in
the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English
settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with
seven ships. The Indians he met were
hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the
whole Indian village. Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory
of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his
people’s land, but did not attack, maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their
“starving time” in the winter of 1610, some of them
ran off to join the Indians, where they would at
least be fed. When the summer came, the governor of the
colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereupon
Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with “no other than proud and disdainful
Answers.” Some soldiers were
therefore sent out “to take Revenge.” They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed
fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down
the corn growing around the village, took the
queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children
overboard “and shortening shooting out their Brains in the water.” The queen was later taken off
and stabbed to death. Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as
the English settlements kept growing in numbers, apparently decided to try to wipe
them out for good. They went on a rampage and
massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able
to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early
Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom: SINCE THE INDIANS WERE BETTER WOODSMEN THAN
THE ENGLISH AND VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TRACK DOWN, THE METHOD WAS TO FEIGN PEACEFUL INTENTIONS,
LET THEM SETTLE DOWN AND PLANT THEIR COM WHEREVER THEY CHOSE, AND THEN, JUST BEFORE
HARVEST, FALL UPON THEM, KILLING AS MANY AS POSSIBLE AND BURNING THE CORN. WITHIN TWO OR THREE YEARS OF THE MASSACRE
THE ENGLISH HAD AVENGED THE DEATHS OF THAT DAY MANY TIMES
OVER. In that first year of the white man in Virginia,
1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it
is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken
as, if not the rough letter of that first plea,
the exact spirit of it: I HAVE SEEN TWO GENERATIONS OF MY PEOPLE THE. I KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR
BETTER THAN ANY MAN IN MY COUNTRY. I AM NOW GROWN OLD, AND MUST THE SOON; MY
AUTHORITY MUST DESCEND TO MY BROTHERS, OPITEHAPAN, OPECHANCANOUGH
AND CATATOUGH, THEN TO MY TWO SISTERS, AND THEN TO MY TWO DAUGHTERS-I WISH
THEM TO KNOW AS MUCH AS I DO, AND THAT YOUR LOVE TO THEM MAY BE LIKE MINE TO YOU. WHY WILL YOU TAKE BY FORCE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE
QUIETLY BY LOVE? WHY WILL YOU DESTROY US WHO SUPPLY YOU WITH
FOOD? WHAT CAN YOU GET BY WAR? WE
CAN HIDE OUR PROVISIONS AND RUN INTO THE WOODS; THEN YOU WILL STARVE FOR WRONGING YOUR
FRIENDS. WHY ARE YOU JEALOUS OF US? WE ARE UNARMED, AND WILLING TO GIVE YOU WHAT
YOU ASK, IF YOU COME IN A FRIENDLY MANNER, AND NOT SO
SIMPLE AS NOT TO KNOW THAT IT IS MUCH BETTER TO EAT
GOOD MEAT, SLEEP COMFORTABLY, LIVE QUIETLY WITH MY WIVES AND CHILDREN, LAUGH AND BE MERRY
WITH THE ENGLISH, AND TRADE FOR THEIR COPPER AND HATCHETS, THAN TO RUN AWAY FROM THEM,
AND TO LIE COLD IN THE WOODS, FEED ON ACORNS,
ROOTS AND SUCH TRASH, AND BE SO HUNTED THAT 1 CAN
NEITHER EAT NOR SLEEP. IN THESE WARS, MY MEN MUST SIT UP WATCHING,
AND IF A TWIG BREAK, THEY ALL CRY OUT “HERE COMES CAPTAIN SMITH!” SO I MUST END MY MISERABLE LIFE. TAKE AWAY YOUR
GUNS AND SWORDS, THE CAUSE OF ALL OUR JEALOUSY, OR YOU MAY ALL THE IN THE SAME MANNER. When the Pilgrims came to New England they
too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian
land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the
land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to
it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing. The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms
2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost
parts of the earth for thy possession.” And
to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive
to themselves damnation.” The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the
Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they
wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish
their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murder of a white trader, Indian kidnapper,
and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequot’s
in 1636. A punitive expedition left Boston to attack
the Narragansett Indians on Block Island, who
were lumped with the Pequot’s. As Governor Winthrop wrote: THEY HAD COMMISSION TO PAT TO DEATH THE MEN
OF BLOCK ISLAND, BUT TO SPARE THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN, AND TO BRING THEM AWAY, AND TO TAKE
POSSESSION OF THE ISLAND; AND FROM THENCE TO GO
TO THE PEQUOT’S TO DEMAND THE MURDERERS OF CAPTAIN STONE AND OTHER ENGLISH, AND ONE
THOUSAND FATHOM OF WAMPUM FOR DAMAGES, ETC. AND SOME OF THEIR CHILDREN AS HOSTAGES, WHICH
IF THEY SHOULD REFUSE, THEY WERE TO OBTAIN IT BY FORCE. The English landed and killed some Indians,
but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island
and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they
sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops
again. One of the officers of that expedition, in
his account, gives some insight into the Pequot’s they encountered: “The Indians spying
of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen,
what cheer, what do you come for? They not
thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully.” So, the war with the Pequot’s began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English
developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes and later, in the twentieth century,
even more systematically: deliberate attacks on
noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the
enemy. This is ethno historian Francis Jennings’s
interpretation of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village on the Mystic River
near Long Island Sound: “Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, which would
have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy
an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with
less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.” So the English set fire to the wigwams of
the village. By their own account: “The Captain
also said, We must Burn Them; and immediately stepping into the Wigwam brought out a
Fire Brand, and putting it into the MaIts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams
on Fire.” William Bradford, in his History of the Plymouth
Plantation written at the time, describes John Mason’s raid on the Pequot
village: THOSE THAT ESCAPED THE FIRE WERE SLAIN WITH
THE SWORD; SOME HEWED TO PIECES, OTHERS RUNE THROW WITH THEIR RAPIERS, SO AS THEY WERE
QUICKLY DISPATCHED, AND VERY FEW ESCAPED. IT WAS
CONCEIVED THEY THUS DESTROYED ABOUT 400 AT THIS TIME. IT WAS A FEARFUL SIGHT TO SEE THEM THUS
FRYING IN THE FRYER, AND THE STREAMS OF BLOOD QUENCHING THE SAME, AND HORRIBLE WAS THE STINK
AND SENT THERE OF, BUT THE VICTORY SEEMED A SWEET SACRIFICE, AND THEY GAVE THE PRAYERS
THEREOF TO GOD, WHO HAD WROUGHT SO WONDERFULLY FOR THEM, THUS TO ENCLOSE THEIR ENEMIES IN
THEIR HANDS, AND GIVE THEM SO SPEEDY A VICTORY OVER SO PROUD AND INSULTING AN ENEMY. As Dr. Cotton Mather, Puritan theologian,
put it: “It was supposed that no less than 600
Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.” The war continued. Indian tribes were used against one another,
and never seemed able to join together in fighting the English. Jennings sums up: THE TERROR WAS VERY REAL AMONG THE INDIANS,
BUT IN RIME THEY CAME TO MEDITATE UPON ITS FOUNDATIONS. THEY DREW THREE LESSONS FROM THE PEQUOT WAR:
(1) THAT THE ENGLISHMEN’S MOST SOLEMN PLEDGE WOULD BE BROKEN WHENEVER OBLIGATION
CONFLICTED WITH ADVANTAGE; (2) THAT THE ENGLISH WAY OF WAR HAD NO LIMIT OF SCRUPLE
OR MERCY; AND (3) THAT WEAPONS OF INDIAN MAKING WERE ALMOST USELESS AGAINST WEAPONS OF EUROPEAN
MANUFACTURE. THESE LESSONS THE INDIANS
TOOK TO HEART. A footnote in Virgil Vogel’s book This Land
Was Ours (1972) says: “The official figure on the
number of Pequot’s now in Connecticut is twenty-one persons.” Forty years after the Pequot War, Puritans
and Indians fought again. This time it was the
Wampanoags, occupying the south shore of Massachusetts Bay, who were in the way and
also beginning to trade some of their land to people outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their chief, Massasoit, was dead. His son WamsuIta had been killed by Englishmen,
and WamsuItas brother Metacom (later to be called
King Philip by the English) became chief. The English found their excuse, a murder which
they attributed to Metacom, and they began a war of conquest against the Wampanoags,
a war to take their land. They were clearly the
aggressors, but claimed they attacked for preventive purposes. As Roger Williams, more
friendly to the Indians than most, put it: “All men of conscience or prudence ply to
windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive.” Jennings says the elite of the Puritans wanted
the war; the ordinary white Englishman did not want it and often refused to fight. The Indians certainly did not want war, but
they matched atrocity with atrocity. When it was over, in 1676, the English had
won, but their resources were drained; they had lost six
hundred men. Three thousand Indians were dead,
including Metacom himself. Yet the Indian raids did not stop. For a while, the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The
Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would
ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would the from
diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherlands wrote
in 1656 that “the Indians affirm, that before the arrival
of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times
as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease,
whereof nine-tenths of them have died.” When the English first settled Martha’s Vineyard
in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by
1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps
1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one. Behind the English invasion of North America,
behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special
powerful drive born in civilizations based on
private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need
for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous
epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed
into the murder of whole peoples. Roger
Williams said it was: A DEPRAVED APPETITE AFTER THE GREAT VANITIES,
DREAMS AND SHADOWS OF THIS VANISHING LIFE, GREAT PORTIONS OF LAND, LAND
IN THIS WILDERNESS, AS IF MEN WERE IN AS GREAT NECESSITY AND DANGER FOR WANT OF GREAT PORTIONS
OF LAND, AS POOR, HUNGRY, THIRSTY SEAMEN HAVE, AFTER A SICK AND STORMY, A LONG AND
STARVING PASSAGE. THIS IS ONE OF THE GODS OF NEW
ENGLAND, WHICH THE LIVING AND MOST HIGH ETERNAL WILL DESTROY AND FAMISH. Was all this bloodshed and deceit-from Columbus
to Cortes, Pizarro, the Puritans-a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery
to civilization? Was Morison right in burying
the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive
argument can be made-as it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial
progress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of
Dresden and Hamburg, and Truman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment be
made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned
or mentioned quickly? That quick disposal might be acceptable (“Unfortunate,
yes, but it had to be done”) to the middle and upper classes of the conquering
and “advanced” countries. But is it acceptable to
the poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor camps, or
the blacks in urban ghettos, or the Indians on
reservations-to the victims of that progress which
benefits a privileged minority in the world? Was it acceptable (or just inescapable?) to
the miners and railroaders of America, the factory
hands, the men and women who died by the hundreds of thousands from accidents or sickness,
where they worked or where they lived casualties of progress? And even the privileged minority-must it not
reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish,
the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed,
whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual
acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state? If there are necessary sacrifices to be made
for human progress, is it not essential to hold to
the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves? We can all
decide to give up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the
children of others, or even our own children, for a progress which is not nearly as clear
or present as sickness or health, life or death? What did people in Spain get out of all that
death and brutality visited on the Indians of the
Americas? For a brief period in history, there was the
glory of a Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere. As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus:
His Enterprise: FOR ALL THE GOLD AND SILVER STOLEN AND SHIPPED
TO SPAIN DID NOT MAKE THE SPANISH PEOPLE RICHER. IT GAVE THEIR KINGS AN EDGE IN THE BALANCE
OF POWER FOR A TIME, A CHANCE TO HIRE MORE MERCENARY SOLDIERS FOR THEIR WARS. THEY ENDED UP LOSING THOSE WARS ANYWAY, AND
ALL THAT WAS LEFT WAS A DEADLY INFLATION, A STARVING POPULATION,
THE RICH RICHER, THE POOR POORER, AND A RUINED PEASANT CLASS. Beyond all that, how certain are we that what
was destroyed was inferior? Who were these
people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew,
who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside, who peered out of the forests
at the first white settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts? Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated
the size of the earth. In this book
we too call them Indians, with some reluctance, because it happens too often that people are
saddled with names given them by their conquerors. And yet, there is some reason to call them
Indians, because they did come, perhaps 25,000 years ago, from Asia, across the land bridge
of the Bering Straits (later to disappear under
water) to Alaska. Then they moved southward, seeking warmth
and land, in a trek lasting thousands of years that took them into North
America, then Central and South America. In
Nicaragua, Brazil, and Ecuador their petrified footprints can still be seen, along with the
print of bison, who disappeared about five thousand years ago, so they must have reached
South America at least that far back Widely dispersed over the great land mass of the
Americas, they numbered approximately 75 million people by the rime Columbus came,
perhaps 25 million in North America. Responding to the different environments of
soil and climate, they developed hundreds of different
tribal cultures, perhaps two thousand different languages. They perfected the art of agriculture, and
figured out how to grow maize (corn), which cannot grow by itself and must be planted,
cultivated, fertilized, harvested, husked, shelled. They ingeniously developed a variety of other
vegetables and fruits, as well as peanuts and chocolate and tobacco and rubber. On their own, the Indians were engaged in
the great agricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe, Africa were going
through about the same time. While many of the tribes remained nomadic
hunters and food gatherers in wandering, egalitarian communes, others began to live
in more settled communities where there was more food, larger populations, more divisions
of labor among men and women, more surplus to feed chiefs and priests, more leisure time
for artistic and social work, for building houses. About a thousand years before Christ, while
comparable constructions were going on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Zuni and Hopi Indians
of what is now New Mexico had begun to build villages consisting of large terraced
buildings, nestled in among cliffs and mountains for protection from enemies, with hundreds
of rooms in each village. Before the arrival of the
European explorers, they were using irrigation canals, dams, were doing ceramics, weaving
baskets, making cloth out of cotton. By the time of Christ and Julius Caesar, there
had developed in the Ohio River Valley a culture of so-called Mound builders, Indians
who constructed thousands of enormous sculptures out of earth, sometimes in the
shapes of huge humans, birds, or serpents, sometimes as burial sites, sometimes as fortifications. One of them was miles long, enclosing
100 acres. These Mound builders seem to have been part
of a complex trading system of ornaments and weapons from as far off as the
Great Lakes, the Far West, and the Gulf of Mexico. About A.D. 500, as this Mound builder culture
of the Ohio Valley was beginning to decline, another culture was developing westward, in
the valley of the Mississippi, centred on what
is now St. Louis. It had an advanced agriculture, included thousands
of villages, and also built huge earthen mounds as burial and ceremonial
places near a vast Indian metropolis that may have had thirty thousand people. The largest mound was 100 feet high, with
a rectangular base larger than that of the Great
Pyramid of Egypt. In the city, known as
Cahokia, were toolmakers, hide dressers, potters, jewellery makers, weavers, salt makers,
copper engravers, and magnificent ceramists. One funeral blanket was made of twelve
thousand shell beads. From the Adirondacks to the Great Lakes, in
what is now Pennsylvania and upper New York, lived the most powerful of the north
eastern tribes, the League of the Iroquois, which
included the Mohawks (People of the Flint), Oneidas (People of the Stone), Onondagas
(People of the Mountain), Cayugas (People at the Landing), and Senecas (Great Hill People),
thousands of people bound together by a common Iroquois language. In the vision of the Mohawk chief Iliawatha,
the legendary Dekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois: “We bind ourselves together by taking
hold of each other’s hands so firmly and forming a circle so strong that if a tree
should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so
that our people and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and
happiness.” In the villages of the Iroquois, land was
owned in common and worked in common. Hunting
was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses
were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of
private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who
encountered them in the 1650s wrote: “No poorhouses are needed among them, because they
are neither mendicants nor paupers. Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not
only makes them liberal with what they have, but
causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.” Women were important and respected in Iroquois
society. Families were matrilineal. That is,
the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family,
while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a
“long house.” When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her
husband’s things outside the door. Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen
or more clans might make up a village. The
senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal
councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who
were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind
the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed
the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women. The women tended the crops and took general
charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and
food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military
matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his
fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: “Thus power was shared between
the sexes and the European idea of male dominance and female subordination in all things
was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.” Children in Iroquois society, while taught
the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity
with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality in status and the
sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use
harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training,
hut gradually allowed the child to learn self-care. All of this was in sharp contrast to European
values as brought over by the first colonists, a
society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For
example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners
how to deal with their children: “And surely there
is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride,
which must, in the first place, be broken and
beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and
tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.” Gary Nash describes
Iroquois culture: NO LAWS AND ORDINANCES, SHERIFFS AND CONSTABLES,
JUDGES AND JURIES, OR COURTS OR JAILS-THE APPARATUS OF AUTHORITY IN EUROPEAN SOCIETIES-WERE
TO BE FOUND IN THE NORTHEAST WOODLANDS PRIOR TO EUROPEAN ARRIVAL. YET BOUNDARIES OF ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOUR WERE
FIRMLY SET. THOUGH
PRIDING THEMSELVES ON THE AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL, THE IROQUOIS MAINTAINED A STRICT SENSE OF
RIGHT AND WRONG. HE WHO STOLE ANOTHER’S FOOD OR ACTED IN-VALOROUSLY
IN WAR WAS “SHAMED” BY HIS PEOPLE AND OSTRACIZED FROM THEIR COMPANY
UNTIL HE HAD ATONED FOR HIS ACTIONS AND DEMONSTRATED TO THEIR SATISFACTION THAT HE
HAD MORALLY PURIFIED HIMSELF. Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes
behaved the same way. In 1635, Maryland
Indians responded to the governor’s demand that if any of them lolled an Englishman,
the guilty one should be delivered up for punishment
according to English law. The Indians said: IT IS THE MANNER AMONGST US INDIANS, THAT
IF ANY SUCH ACCIDENT HAPPEN, WEE DOE REDEEM THE
LIFE OF A MAN THAT IS SO SLAIN, WITH A 100 ARMS LENGTH OF BEADS AND SINCE THAT YOU ARE
HERE STRANGERS, AND COME INTO OUR COUNTRY, YOU
SHOULD RATHER CONFORM YOURSELVES TO THE CUSTOMS OF OUR COUNTRY, THAN IMPOSE YOURS
UPON US. So, Columbus and his successors were not coming
into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated
as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian
than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and
nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language,
but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an
oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial
drama. They paid careful attention to the
development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and
potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature. John Collier, an American scholar who lived
among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit:
“Could we make it our own, there would be an
eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.” Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in
that. But the evidence from European travellers
in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an
American specialist on Indian life, William Brandon, is overwhelmingly supportive of much
of that “myth.” Even allowing for the imperfection of myths,
it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress
in the annihilation of races, and the telling of
history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.