How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (39 page)

Of course, even the best of slave codes did not abolish the moral outrage that is slavery. But we would do well to remember that had it not been for the rise of Western modernity, slavery would still be everywhere. Even today, it exists in too many places.

Assessing the Consequences of Colonialism

It is time for a final assessment: was the European settlement of the Americas truly a brutal act of genocide, the destruction of a more peaceful world populated by noble savages?

Myths of the “Noble Savage”

As European colonialism spread, nearly at once Europe’s intellectuals responded on the side of the colonized, depicting the Indians as “noble savages,” as people unsullied by civilization and therefore innocent, honest, gentle, moral, peaceful, kind, and generous.

Among the influential proponents of the doctrine of the noble savage was the French
philosophe
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who glorified humans in the “state of nature.” To which his friend Voltaire responded, “Never has so much intelligence been employed to render us stupid.”
⁴⁸
Unfortunately, this stupidity reached new heights late in the
twentieth century as common sense and evidence were overwhelmed by political correctness.

Representative is the historian David E. Stannard’s claim that “social practices of certain native Americans in the pre-Columbian era—from methods of child rearing and codes of friendship and loyalty, to worshipping and caring for the natural environment—appear far more enlightened than do many dominant ideas that we ourselves live with today.”
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A huge chorus has extolled Native Americans for their “reverence for the earth, kinship with all forms of life, and harmony with nature,” as J. Donald Hughes put it.
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Wilcomb Washburn of the Smithsonian Institution proposed that “the Indians were the first ecologists.”
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According to the title of Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, the arrival of Europeans in the New World resulted in “The Conquest of Paradise.”
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To make these claims required the denial of many obvious historical facts. One of the first to be denied was the existence of New World cannibalism—indeed, it has been widely proposed that cannibalism never existed
anywhere
as “a prevalent cultural feature.”
⁵³
That is, cannibalism has no doubt occurred from time to time, but always as the isolated work of deranged or desperate persons—as when starving persons on a life raft eat the first to die. According to the anthropologist William Arens, there never has existed a society in which cannibalism took place as a legitimate activity, and all claims to the contrary are fantasies and lies. Thus, Arens said, Columbus never actually saw any cannibalism by the Caribs but was taken in by the tales of other Indians “who were eager to fill him with gossip about their enemies.”
⁵⁴

Arens’s claim was seized on eagerly by writers determined to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage in 1992 with vitriolic attacks on Columbus and the European settlement of the Americas in general. For example, Kirkpatrick Sale flatly denounced the claim that the Caribs were even hostile, let alone cannibals, as “a bogey, born of Colón’s own paranoia or stubborn ferocity and spread to his comrades, to the chroniclers of Europe, and to history.”
⁵⁵
Similarly, numerous scholars denied that the Aztecs ate their sacrificial victims; a few even argued that the Aztecs didn’t engage in human sacrifice.
⁵⁶

In fact, many societies, including many in the Western Hemisphere, have practiced cannibalism. Even if we were to agree with Arens, Sale, and others that all the many eyewitness accounts are mere bigotry or errors of interpretation, there is overwhelming
physical evidence
to sustain
the claims of cultures of cannibalism. In many different places, involving many different tribes, archaeologists have found solid evidence of human bones that have been cooked and scraped clean precisely like the bones of animals that have been cooked and eaten.
⁵⁷

In any case, the eyewitness accounts are so numerous and detailed that they cannot all be dismissed. Writing in 1519, Bernal Díaz del Castillo reported on the Aztecs’ practices: “Every day we saw sacrificed before us three, four or five Indians whose hearts were offered to the idols and their blood plastered on the walls, and the feet, arms and legs of the victims were cut off and eaten, just as in our country we eat beef brought from butchers.”
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Later, Díaz recounted seeing the sacrifice of some of his fellow conquistadors, in which the Aztecs “kicked their bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet.”
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Finally, the Caribs ate Verrazzano while his companions watched from on board their ship.

It is certainly true that Europeans did dreadful things to Indians. But not even the wildest critics of Columbus and of the Western colonization of the New World claim that the Europeans engaged in cannibalism.

It has been proclaimed far and wide that Europeans taught the Indians to scalp.
⁶⁰
Vine Deloria explained, “Scalping … was introduced prior to the French and Indian War by the English.”
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That claim was even confided to millions of viewers of a TV Western shown on NBC in 1972.
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But here, too, archaeological evidence prevails, having unearthed the pre-Columbian remains of North American Indians who were scalped.
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“Probably the most dramatic skeletal example of prehistoric violence in North America comes from the Crow Creek site in central South Dakota,” the historians Michael Haines and Richard Steckel wrote. “Archaeological excavations revealed about 486 skeletons within a fortification ditch on the periphery of the habitation area. The site … dates to about 1325 A.D.… Analysis revealed that 90% of the individuals had cut marks characteristic of scalping.”
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Many of the same writers who deny cannibalism have been equally adamant that before the arrival of Columbus, North American Indians were very peaceful—that they learned war from the white man. D’Arcy McNickle proposed that at least 70 percent of North American tribes were pacifists.
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Kirkpatrick Sale affirmed this claim, saying that at least that many tribes had no battle legends or war myths. Of those war myths that have been passed down, he added, “virtually every one of them
involves horses,” meaning that they date from after Europeans brought horses to the New World.
⁶⁶

But the pre-Columbian Indians unearthed in South Dakota did not scalp themselves. Nor had they dug a fortification ditch for exercise. Warfare was chronic everywhere in the New World.
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Even the Viking sagas report attacks by natives in Vinland, and Champlain found himself involved in a long-standing war between the Iroquois and the Hurons. Extensive pre-Columbian fortifications exist in the southeastern United States, and battlefields complete with skeletons have been found. Even in the American Southwest, among the allegedly peaceful Hopi and Zunis, warfare was constant and bloody.
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And, of course, the Aztecs and the Incas were warrior nations who imposed a brutal colonial rule on other tribes in their regions and also engaged in frequent civil wars.

It also has become a virtual article of faith that, unlike the white man, Native Americans lived in close harmony with nature and had a reverence for the earth that prevented them from doing damage to the ecology. Some writers even have claimed that this is why they “chose” not to develop technology as the Europeans had done.
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In truth, the inhabitants of the New World had no notions about ecology, and to the extent that any were easy on the environment, it was the unintended consequence of their lacking the capacity to do more. Moreover, there is ample evidence of Indian activities inconsistent with reverence for the earth—including deforestation and worn-out fields. As the distinguished environmental archaeologist Karl Butzer put it: “The empirical evidence … contradicts the romantic notion that the Native Americans had some auspicious recipe to use the land without leaving a manifest and sometimes ugly imprint upon it.”
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This is nowhere more fully demonstrated than in the remains of the Mayan Empire.

The Mayan Empire was to the south of the Aztecs’, located on the Yucatan Peninsula, and it flourished from about the third through the tenth centuries. Judging from their massive ruined cities, the Mayans probably were more advanced than either the Incas or the Aztecs. Although they had no metal tools, they grasped the concept of zero and had a fully developed written language that scholars did not decipher until the 1960s and ’70s. For many years one of the great historical mysteries was what caused the precipitous fall of the Mayan civilization. For in the tenth century, suddenly the Mayans abandoned their great cities, and those who survived lived at a far lower level of intellectual
and material sophistication. Today, after a great deal of excavation and study, it is believed that the Mayan Empire succumbed to a combination of ecological disaster and endemic warfare. The Mayans appear to have cleared too much of the rain forest for cropland, slowly wearing out the soil to such an extent that they were helpless when faced with a minor decline in rainfall.
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As the ecology went sour, Mayan cities were raided by unknown outsiders who committed a number of massacres, as archaeological evidence including skeletons and evidence of vandalism has indicated.
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The point being that the Mayans were neither ecologists nor pacifists.

Most of those who celebrate the superior virtues of pre-Columbian American Indian societies remain silent about their practice of slavery, despite the fact that the enslavement of Indians by Indians was widespread. Of the few writers who have acknowledged this fact, most have brushed it off as not being
real
slavery. Thus Morton Fried argued that those said to be slaves ought to be called “captives,” since so-called slavery among the Northwest Indians “bears little resemblance” to real slavery.
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Ronald and Evelyn Rohner agreed. In their monograph on the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest, they admitted that the Kwakiutl “had slaves who were usually war captives from other tribes. Slaves contributed little to the traditional social system except to give prestige to their owners; we give them no further attention.” Perhaps it was on these grounds that for decades no mention of slavery was included in undergraduate textbooks on North American Indians or in the “definitive”
Smithsonian Book of North American Indians
published in 1986.

The truth is that slavery was widespread in pre-Columbian North America—at least thirty-nine societies had slavery, according to the Standard Cross-Cultural Files. And slavery among the Northwest Indians was as brutal as anywhere else.
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Bondage was not only lifelong but also hereditary: as the anthropologist Leland Donald showed, masters held “complete physical control over their slaves, and could even kill them if they chose.” And they often did choose to kill the old, sick, or rebellious.
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Hence, by 1990 even the Smithsonian was willing to acknowledge that the Northwest Indians had real slavery and to condemn “the standard view … that slaves were mere prestige goods” and “lived as well as their masters.”
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It should also be noted that in the nineteenth century American Indians began to acquire black slaves. In 1838, when the Cherokee
Indians were forced to leave Georgia for resettlement in the Oklahoma Territory—the famous “Trail of Tears”—they took along a number of their black slaves.
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Finally there is the charge of genocide. Everyone agrees that, lacking any immunity to communicable European diseases such as smallpox, measles, and typhus, the indigenous populations of the Americas suffered a catastrophic death rate—millions died within a few years after contact. In recent decades, however, many have characterized this calamity as genocide and identified Columbus as the chief villain. Native American activist Russell Means charged: “Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.”
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The title of David E. Stannard’s 1997 book said it all—
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
.

Consider the unknown captain of the galley that rowed into the port of Messina in October 1347, aboard which were rats infested with fleas carrying the Black Plague. Should we identify him as the perpetrator of genocide and worse than Hitler? Why not? The galley captain
unintentionally
and
unknowingly
transmitted an epidemic disease to a population lacking immunity. So did Columbus. What happened in the New World was an unpreventable catastrophe; grumblings about the intentional spread of disease are unwarranted.
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As the historian Stafford Poole put it, “The term [genocide] applies to a calculated, deliberate extermination of an identifiable people for racial or other reasons.… There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them.”
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Why Were the Americas Behind?

These days, whenever anyone asks why the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere were so far behind Europe, at least in terms of science and technology, the usual response is insulting: Indians were far too wise to pursue such a foolish and wicked path. Kirkpatrick Sale assured his readers that Indians “certainly could have developed [advanced technologies] if they felt any need to do so.… If they did not anywhere use the plow, for instance, that may have been because their methods of breaking the soil with a planting stick worked just as well with a tenth the effort, or because they had learned that opening up and turning over whole fields would only decrease nutrients and increase erosion, or because their thought-world would not have allowed such disregardful violence.” In the same paragraph Sale touted the bow and arrow as “far easier, faster,
and safer than the musket.”
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Sale’s knowledge of farming equals his knowledge of weaponry. The Indians did not plow because it is impossible to do so with wooden implements.