(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 soe 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 long-dormant 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 I. 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?
APPENDIX A
Loaded Words
Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants of the Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the attempt to extricate writer and reader by being logical and sensitive often ends with both parties sucked deeper into the mire. The difficulties fall into two broad categories: names for individual groups of Indians, and names for social categories used to classify those groups. Most well known among the former is “Indian,” a term so long recognized as absurd that in the 1960s and 1970s social scientists moved to change it to “Native American” or, sometimes, “Amerindian.”
The change was well meaning, but not entirely successful. On a literal level, the replacement name is as problematic as the original. “Native American” is intended to refer to the peoples who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived and their descendants today. Literally, though, it means something else: as the activist Russell Means has complained, “Anyone born in the western hemisphere is a Native American.” Worse, the term introduces an entirely new set of confusions. “Indian” does not refer to the Inuit, Aleut, and other peoples of the far north, whose cultures, languages, and even physical appearance are so different from their neighbors to the south that researchers generally argue they must have come to the Americas in a separate, much later wave of migration (though still many centuries ahead of Columbus). But all of them are Native Americans, which eliminates a distinction found useful by both scholars and indigenous peoples themselves.
In conversation, native people whom I have met (I think without exception) have used “Indian” rather than “Native American.” One day I said “Native American” when speaking to a Bolivian graduate student of indigenous descent. She shook her head dismissively at the phrase. “Aquí somos indios,” she explained. “Los ‘americanos nativos’ viven solamente en los Estados Unidos.” We are Indians here. “Native Americans” live only in the United States. “I abhor the term Native American,” Means declared in 1998. Matching his actions to his words, Means had joined and become prominent in an indigenous-rights group called the American Indian Movement. “We were enslaved as American Indians,” he wrote, “we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.” (At the same time, the common British usage of “Red Indian” to distinguish American natives from “East Indians” is unwelcome.)
Historical
ly speaking, both “Indian” and “Native American” are remote from the way America’s first peoples thought about themselves. Much as the inhabitants of the tenth-century Carolingian Empire did not describe themselves as “Europeans,” a name coined in the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in terms of “Indians,” “Native Americans,” or any other collective hemispheric entity. Instead they regarded themselves as belonging to their immediate group—the Patuxet village in the Wampanoag confederation, for instance.
To a considerable extent, the same holds true today. When Russell Thornton, the UCLA anthropologist, kindly sent me some copies of his work, he enclosed his curriculum vitae, which identified him as a “registered member of the Cherokee Nation,” not as an Indian, Native American, Amerindian, or indigenous person. When I mentioned this to Thornton, he responded that only one experience united the diverse peoples of the Americas: being flattened by European incursions. “ ‘Indians’ or ‘Native Americans’ as a category both owe their existence to Europe,” he said.
For all these reasons, this book uses “Indian” and “Native American” interchangeably, with the latter serving mainly to avoid repetition.
Note, though, that I use these terms as cultural and geographical categories, not racial ones. “Indian” is the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent to “European,” not to “white” or “Caucasian.” Racial categories are inevitably problematic, because they are ostensibly biological —that is, they are supposed to be based on heritable physical characteristics like skin color—but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the infamous “one drop” rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not be distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no matter how remote, were African. Avoiding such inconsistency and ambiguity is easier if one eschews categorizing by race, which I have tried to do, except for the occasional rhetorical flourish.
In referring to particular groups of Indians—the Wampanoag or the Maya—I use a simple rule of thumb: I try to call groups by the name preferred by their members. This approach, which seems only courteous, is sometimes attacked as condescending. After all, the argument runs, people in the United States use the English labels “French” and “German” rather than français and Deutsch. To insist on using “proper” names for Indians is thus to place them in a special category of fragility. But this objection is not well thought out. Although English-speakers do speak of “Germans” rather than Deutscher, “French people” rather than les français, they tend to avoid insulting terms like “Kraut” and “Frog.” Many common names for Indian groups are equally insulting, or descended from such insults. Unsurprisingly, they are slowly being changed.
My “simple” rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a constellation of related societies generally known as “Eskimo,” but in the 1980s this term was replaced by “Inuit” in Canada, where most of these groups live, after complaints that “Eskimo” came from a pejorative term in Algonquian language that meant “eater of raw flesh.” Why this would be bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of northerners’ diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case, linguists believe that “Eskimo” actually stems from the Algonquian terms for “snowshoe netter” or “people who speak a different language,” neither of which seems especially derogatory. Worse for contemporary purposes, “Inuit” is also the name of a specific subgroup of Arctic societies, to which such northern indigenous peoples as the Aleutiiq in the Aleutian Islands and Innu in Labrador do not belong. If that weren’t enough, the Inupiat in Alaska, who belong to the Inuit subgroup but speak a different language than their cousins in Canada, have generally resisted the term “Inuit” in favor of “Alaska Native” or, sometimes, “Eskimo.”
An additional source of confusion occurs when indigenous languages have different romanization schemes. Runa Simi (Quechua), the group of languages spoken in the former Inka empire, has several; I have tried to follow the one promulgated by the Peruvian Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in 1995, which seems to be slowly gaining popularity. The choice is more difficult for the three dozen languages grouped as “Maya.” As an example, the name of the ruler slain at the beginning of Chapter 8 has been rendered as, among other things, Toh-Chak-Ich’ak, Chak Toh Ich’ak, and Chak Tok Ich’aak; his title, “lord,” has been romanized as ahau, ahaw, ajau, ajaw, and even axaw. In 1989 the Ministry of Culture and Sports in Guatemala published a standardized orthography for Maya. Unfortunately, Mexico has a different one. Indeed, it has several. Various Mexican agencies have issued putatively official orthographies, most based on Alfredo Barrera Vásquez’s classic Diccionario Maya Cordemex, all intended to “help save these languages from extinction.” In this book, I throw up my hands and spell Maya names as they appear in the most authoritative recent source I have come across: Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by the epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube. (None of this is to say that I have not made mistakes or sometimes failed to follow my own rules. I’m sure I have done exactly that, though I tried not to.)
The second type of problem, that of categorization, is equally knotty. Take the word “civilization”—“a saltpeter of a word, often triggering explosive arguments,” Alfred Crosby has written. The arguments occur when cultures are deemed not to be civilizations; are they therefore “uncivilized”? Archaeologists and anthropologists have proposed dozens of definitions and argue about whether the existence of a written language is essential. If it is, there may have been no Indian civilizations outside Mesoamerica. Yet other parts of the Americas are filled with ruins (Tiwanaku, Marajó, Cahokia) that would be described as the product of a civilization if they were anywhere else in the world. The distinction seems to me unhelpful. Like Crosby, I use the word “not in moral comment, but simply in reference to peoples settled in cities, villages, hamlets, and to the kinds of political, economic, social, and military structures associated with such populations.”
Sometimes researchers attempt to avoid the whole debate by substituting the term “complex society.” Not much is gained thereby, because it implies that hunters and gatherers have simple lives. A century ago, anthropologist Franz Boas demonstrated the contrary as he struggled to fathom the mind-bogglingly elaborate patterns of Northwest Coast Indian life. Still, the term has some resonance. As societies grow larger, their members become more encrusted by manufactured goods, both standardized for the mass consumer and custom-made for the elite. Along with this growth comes a growth in the size and variety of the technological infrastructure. It is in this material sense that I use the words “complex” and “sophisticated.”
In this book I tend to marshal terms like “king” and “nation” rather than “chief” and “tribe.” Supposedly the latter refer mainly to kin-based societies whereas the former are for bigger societies based on a shared group identity. In practice, though, “chief” and “tribe” have historically been used to refer disparagingly to frontier cultures conquered by larger societies. In textbooks the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman civilization, are always fighting off the “barbarian chiefs” of the “Germanic tribes.” But these “tribes” had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable domains, and had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian “tribe” even conquered Rome and set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth century. (He was killed by another “tribe,” which installed its own emperor.)
Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the “Celtic kingdoms,” “Kingdom of the Lombards,” and so on, their borders marked by the solid lines we associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal or greater size and technological sophistication in the Western Hemisphere are routinely called “chiefdoms” and “tribes,” implying they are somehow different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines
mark their borders, as if to indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined. “ ‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’ are not neutral scientific terms,” archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe has declared. “They are politically loaded.” I have mostly avoided them.
In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia would use to describe social and political entities of similar size and complexity. This approach risks obliterating the real differences between, to cite one example, the court in Qosqo and the court in Madrid. But it supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in lay terms researchers’ increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a role in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the Eastern Hemisphere.
A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of B.C. and A.D. Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is a little odd to be talking about “years before Christ” in reference to people whose cultural traditions have nothing to do with Christianity. But no plausible substitutes are available. Some historians use B.C.E. to mean “before the Common era,” but because the Common Era calendar is just a renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like the Julian calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn’t get tripped up by zero—it is the first European calendar as sophisticated as the Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn’t seem useful; to discharge their informational content, readers will have to translate Julian dates back into what they know, the familiar A.D. and B.C. It seems only kind to save them the bother.