The TRUTH about the Americas before Columbus
The Indians and the USA Constitution!
INDIANS AND THE USA CONSTITUTION? From the book "1491" by Charles Mann The Great Law of Peace In the rest of this book, I have tried to portray the scholarly consensus-the ideas that most researchers in the field believe-while giving due recognition to dissenters. Here I am about to voice ideas that most scholars don't believe, and argue that they should be given a second chance. My remarks apply primarily to historians of North America. South of the Rio Grande, the indigenous influence on colonial and post-colonial society has been celebrated for decades, although it has not always led to teaching children there accurately about those native societies, or to treating contemporary indigenous people fairly. The native imprint is obvious in Latin American arts; the art and architecture produced by a synthesis of Indian and European styles from Mexico to Chile, the Clark University art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey argued in a 2005 monograph, is "one of humanity's greatest and most pluralistic achievements." But this synthesis is apparent in many other aspects of the culture, too, as would be expected in a place where as much as three-quarters of the population claims some Indian descent. North of the Rio Grande the picture is different: as a rule, the possibility of such influences is ignored when not denied. To some extent this is understandable. Indians were and are less numerous in the north. And most native societies in what is now the United States and Canada did not have the written languages, monumental architecture, or wide-ranging aesthetic traditions of their neighbors to the south. Yet the English, French, and Dutch who took over the hemisphere north of Florida were just as fascinated by native cultures as the Spaniards and Portuguese who emerged victorious to the south. The great European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were much concerned with new ideas of liberty and the refashioning of society. How could they not have paid heed to the novel forms of government coming into view across the Atlantic? If they wanted to know the condition of "natural man," where better to look than the "natural men" discovered in the Americas (or, rather, the people whom they believed to be "natural men")? To these thinkers, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being human-exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delage, of Laval University in Quebec, "the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe." The result, Delage explained, was to promote a new attitude of "cultural relativism" that in turn fed Enlightenment-era debates "about the republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness." It is no accident that Thomas More, writing Utopia in 1615, situated his exemplary nation in the Americas. Nor is the frequent referral to Indian examples in the writings of Montaigne, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine. Nor that Hobbes's source for his claim that the life of men outside society is "solitary, nasty, poor, brutal, and short" was "the savage people in many places of America." Nor that the young Rousseau should put some of his earliest thoughts about society and the individual in an operetta about Columbus and the Indians. (The operetta, which is not viewed favorably even by Rousseau's most ardent admirers, was never produced.) All were riveted, puzzled, inspired, and dismayed by what they heard of these strange new people across the sea. If these faraway intellectuals were much concerned with the lessons of native life, what about English and French colonists themselves, who knew intact native cultures for some three centuries? In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. `Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father's House...," he wrote nostalgically. "There was a numerous Family in this Town [Quincy, Mass., where Adams grew up], whose Wigwam was within a Mile of this House." They frequently visited Adams, "and I in my boyish Rambles used to call at their Wigwam, where I never failed to be treated with Whortle Berries, Blackberries, Strawberries or Apples, Plumbs, Peaches, etc.. .." Colonist Susanna Johnson described eighteenth-century New Hampshire as "such a mix ... of savages and settlers, without established laws to govern them, that the state of society cannot easily be described." In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life. As a diplomat, he negotiated with the confederacy of Five Nations in 1744; in those days, knowledge of Indian ways was an essential part of the statesman's toolkit. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians' unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin's printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, viewed then as critical state documents. During those centuries, Indians were greatly influenced culturally, technologically, intellectually by colonists. It seems implausible that the exchange could have been entirely one-waythat the natives have had little or no long-lasting impact on the newcomers. At the least the claim is something to be demonstrated rather than assumed. As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life - not only among the Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast - was characterized by a level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin's ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and classridden than indigenous villages. "Every man is free," the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, "has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom." As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had "such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories." (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the Mohawks.) Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. "The Savage does not know what it is to obey," complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians "think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted," the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, "believe what they please and no more" - a practice dangerous, in Hennepin's view, to a well-ordered society. "There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America," another Jesuit unhappily observed. "All these barbarians have the law of wild assesthey are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit." Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the Indians were baffled. The Huron, he reported in an account of his American years, could not understand why one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor.... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will.... [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for't, That one's as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. [Emphasis in original.] Lahontan's works, immensely popular, were translated into English almost as soon as they appeared; twenty-five editions appeared in France over the next half century, and his vision of an American paradise seem to have fed into the views of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Still, those writers would likely have been thinking of Indians without him-the essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, "noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses." I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today - a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way-scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians. My ancestor's desire to join them led to trumped-up murder charges for which he was executed-or, anyway, that's what my grandfather told me. When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life ... and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them. Influenced by their proximity to Indians - by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty - European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which "troubled the power elite of France," the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d'Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire's Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author's sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called "Oreillons" is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d'Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were "everywhere unsuccessful." In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists' allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members-surrounded by examples of free life-always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility. Scholars have long acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and military tactics-the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the rebellious colonists bedeviled British soldiers. ("In this country," Gen. John Forbes argued in 1758, "wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians.") With such adaptive changes, as the historian James Axtell has called them, Europeans employed Indian technology and tactics to achieve their goals. But they did not change how they viewed themselves or the world. According to an influential essay Axtell published to 1981, the most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as "military foes and cultural foes"-to be the "otherness" that colonists reacted against. "The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of 'Indian problems' had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America," he wrote. Collectively recoiling from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned how to become a new version of themselves. Here, though, most US historians have stopped. They have seen the Algonkian - and Iroquoian - speaking societies they encountered in the Northeast as too different from British societies to have exerted lasting changes on them. How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have had an impact on the American character is "naive," according to Alan Taylor of the University of California at Davis, because it "minimizes the cultural divide separating consensual natives from coercive colonists." Perhaps so, but then skeptics must explain why the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who did deeply influence each other, was so much smaller. (The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how "Iroquois propagandists," as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin's words about Indians, as I just did, given his oft-expressed "contempt for 'ignorant Savages' ... But people believe what they want to believe in the face of logic and evidence." The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that European-Americans were not culturally affected by African-Americans because they reviled and oppressed them.) Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions. Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the largest party of would-be colonists from Britain - some seven hundred people - to Massachusetts, where they founded the city of Boston. As the expedition was under way, the deeply religious Winthrop explained his vision of what the new colony should become: "a citty upon a hill." The city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim's God. Among these principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not intend them to play equal roles in society: GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission. Winthrop's ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity, nor a place where social distinctions were erased; the "mean" circumstances of the poor were "in all times" part of God's plan, and could not be greatly changed (if poor people got too far behind, the rich were supposed to help them). The social ideal was responsible adherence to religiously inspired authority, not democratic self-rule. The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop's vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting - a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that "displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained." To me, it seems unlikely that the surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change. Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native societies could also have exercised a malign influence (this is why the subject is not necessarily "pious" or "romantic primitivism," as the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has complained). Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, "colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe" and "the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways." There, too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian - and Iroquoian - speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer. On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography-southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists' preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who lived in these places? And if not, to what extent are contemporary American conflicts over race the playing out, at least in part, of a cultural divide that came into being hundreds of years before Columbus? To my eye, historians have been puzzlingly ready to dismiss such connections. Some of the reluctance may be a holdover from a longdormant intellectual battle in which academics and activists squared off about the purported Haudenosaunee role in the U.S. Constitution - a battle that left a bad taste in the mouth for both sides. Part of it may be a simple reluctance to credit that the culture of liberty held so essential to the identity of the United States could have so many different forebears. Think of 1. Bernard Cohen, the distinguished historian who studied the thought of the Framers of the Constitution, claiming that Enlightenment philosophers derived their ideas of freedom from Newtonian physics, when a plain reading of their writings shows that they took many of their illustrations of liberty from indigenous examples. So did the Boston colonists who held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as "Mohawks." When others took up European intellectuals' books and histories, images of Indian freedom exerted an impact far removed in time and space from the sixteenth-century Northeast. For much the same reason as their confreres in Boston, protesters in South Korea, China, and Ukraine wore "Native American" makeup in, respectively, the 1980s, 1990s, and the first years of this century. So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished - Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto - people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine - here let me now address non-Indian readers - somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors? .......... Ah what true history brings forth. It is so good to see people like Mann researching and re-writing the history books. If you have children still being educated you need to obtain such new books on history as "1491" by Charles Mann. Keith Hunt |
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