Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (15 page)

Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got guns first, guns that could be trained on interior peoples who had not yet acquired any. Suddenly some nations had a great military advantage over others. The result was an escalation of Indian warfare. Native nations had engaged in conflict before Europeans came, of course. Tribes rarely fought to the finish, however. Some tribes did not want to take over the lands belonging to other nations, partly because each had its own sacred sites. For a nation to exterminate its neighbors was difficult anyway, since all enjoyed the same level of military technology. Now all this changed. European powers deliberately increased Indian warfare by playing one nation off against another. The Spanish, for example, used a divide-and-conquer strategy to defeat the Aztecs in Mexico. In Scotland and Ireland, the English had played tr;'.,es against one another to extend British rule. Now they did the same in North America.

For many tribes the motive for the increased combat was the enslavement of other Indians to sell to the Europeans for more guns and kettles. As northern Ran away from his Master Nathanael Holbrook of Sherburn, on W ednesday the 19th of Sept last, an Indian Lad of about 18 Years of Age, named John Pittarnc; He is pretty well sett and of a guilty Countenance and has short Hair; He had on a grey Coat with Pewter Buttons. Leather Breeches, an old tow Shirt. grey Stockings, good Shoes, and a Felt Hat.

Whoever shall take up the said Servant, and convey him to his Master in Sherburn. shall have Forty Shillings Reward and all necessary Charges paid. We hear the said Servant intended to change his Name and his Clothes.

Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when they could. This notice comes from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4,1739.

tribes specialized in fur, certain southern tribes specialized in people. Some Native Americans had enslaved each other long before Europeans arrived. Now Europeans vastly expanded Indian slavery. Colonists in South Carolina paid nearby Indian nations in guns, ammunition, and other goods, which enabled them to enslave interior nations as far west as Arkansas,

I had expected to find in our textbooks the cliche that Native Americans did not make good slaves, but only two books, Triumph of the American Nation and The American Tradition, say even that. The American Pageant contains a paragraph that at least states the basics“Indian slaves were among the colony's earliest exports”even if it gives no hint of the trade's extent. American History buries a sentence, “A few Indians were enslaved,” in its discussion of the African slave trade. Otherwise, the twelve textbooks are silent on the subject of the Native American slave trade.

The Europeans' enslavement of Native Americans has a long history. Textbooks used in elementary schools tell that Ponce de Leon went to Florida to seek the mythical fountain of youth; they do not say that his main business was to capture slaves for Hispaniola." In New England, Indian slavery led directly to African slavery; the first blacks imported there, in 1638, were brought from the West Indies to be exchanged for Native Americans from Connecticut.28 On the eve of the New York City slave rebellion of 1712, in which Native and African slaves united, about one resident in four was enslaved and one slave in four was Indian. A 1730 census of South Kingston, Rhode Island, showed 935 whites, 333 African slaves, and 223 Native American slaves.

The center of Native American slavery, like African American slavery, was South Carolina. Its population in 1708 included 3,960 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured servants, presumably white. These numbers do not reflect the magnitude of Native slavery, however, because they omit the export trade. From Carolina, as from New England, colonists sent Indian slaves (who might escape) to the West Indies (where they could never escape), in exchange for black slaves. Charleston shipped more than 10,000 Natives in chains to the West Indies in one year!30 Further west, so many Pawnee Indians were sold to whites that Pawnee became the name applied in the plains to all slaves, whether they were of Indian or African origin.31 On the West Coast, Pierson Reading, a manager of John Sutler's huge grant of Indian land in central California, extolled the easy life he led in 1844: “The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the south.” In the Southwest, whites enslaved Navajos and Apaches right up to the middle of the Civil War.

Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered stable settlements no longer safe, helping to deagriculturize Native Americans. To avoid being targets for capture, Indians abandoned their cornfields and their villages and began to live in smaller settlements from which they could more easily escape to the woods. Ultimately, they had to trade with Europeans even for food.53 As Europeans learned from Natives what to grow and how to grow it, they became less dependent upon Indians and Indian technology, while Indians became more dependent upon Europeans and European technology.“ Thus what worked for the Native Americans in the short run worked against them in the long. In the long run, it was Indians who were enslaved, Indians who died, Indian technology that was lost, Indian cultures that fell apart. By the time the pitiful remnant of the Massachuset tribe converted to Christianity and joined the Puritans' ”praying Indian towns,“ they did so in response to an invading culture that told them their religion was wrong and Christianity was right. This process exemplifies what anthropologists call cultural imperialism. Even the proud Plains Indians, whose syncretic culture combined horses and guns from the Spanish with Native an, religion, and hunting styles, showed the effects of cultural imperialism: the Sioux word for white man, wasichu, meant ”one who has everything good.

Figure It Out Study the two drawings below Both were made after the year 1500, but one shows how Indians lived before 1500 and one shows Indian life after 1500. Which shows Indian life before Europeans arrived and which shows Indian lite after? What evidence tells you the date The textbook Life and Liberty is distinguished by its graphic presentation of change in Native societies. It confronts students with this provocative pair of illustrations and asks, “Which shows Indian life before Europeans arrived and which shows Indian life after? What evidence tells you the date?” Thus Life and Liberty helps students understand that Europeans did not “civilize” or “settle” “roaming” Indians, but had the opposite impact.

To be anthropologically literate about culture contact, students should be familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural imperialism, or at least the concepts they denote. None of the twelve textbooks mentions either term, and most of them explain nothing of the process of cultural change, again except for the Plains Indian horse culture, whjpSi, as a consequence, comes across as unique. Not one textbook tells of the process of incorporation into the global economy, none tells how contact worked to deskill Native Americans, most don't tell of increased Indian warfare, and only The American Pageant even hints at the extent of the Native American slave trade.

Just as American societies changed when they encountered whites, so European societies changed when they encountered Natives. Textbooks completely miss this side of the mutual accommodation and acculturation process. Instead, their view of white-Indian relations is dominated by the archetype of the frontier line. Textbooks present the process as a moving line of white (and black) settlementIndians on one side, whites (and blacks) on the other. Pocahontas and Squanto aside, the Natives and Europeans don't meet much in textbook history, except as whites remove Indians further west. In reality, whites and Native Americans worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled with each other for scores and even hundreds of years. For 325 years, after all, from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890, independent Native and European nations coexisted in what is now the United States.

The term frontier hardly does justice to this process, for it implies a line or boundary. Contact, not separation, was the rule. Frontier also locates the observer somewhere in the urban East, from which the frontier is “out there.” Textbook authors seem not to have encountered the trick question, “Which came first, civilization or the wilderness?” The answer is civilization, for only the “civilized” mind could define the world of Native farmers, fishers, and gatherers and hunters, coexisting with forests, crops, and animals, as a “wilderness,” Calling the area beyond secure European control “frontier” or “wilderness” makes it subtly alien. Such a viewpoint is intrinsically Eurocentric and marginalizes the actions of nonurban people, both Native and non-Native.is The band of interaction was amazingly multicultural. In 1635 “sixteen different languages could be heard among the settlers in New Amsterdam,” languages from North America, Africa, and Europe.57 In 1794, when the zone of contact had reached the eastern Midwest, a single northern Ohio town, “the Glaize,” was made up of hundreds of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians, British and French traders and artisans, several Nanticokes, Cherokees, and Iroquois, a few African American and white American captives, and whites who had married into or been adopted by Indian families. The Glaize was truly multicultural in its holidays, observing Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, the birthday of the British queen, and Indian celebrations.36 In 1835, when the contact area was near the West Coast, John Sutler, with permission of the Mexican authorities, recruited Native Americans to raise his wheat crop, operate a distillery, a hat factory, and a blanket company, and build a fort (now Sacramento). Procuring uniforms from Russian traders and officers from Europe, Sutler organized a 200-man Indian army, clothed in tsarist uniforms and commanded in German!

Our history textbooks still obliterate the interracial, multicultural nature of frontier life. American History devotes almost a page to Suiter's Fort without ever hinting that Native Americans were anything other than enemies: "Gradually he built a fortified town, which he called Sutler's Fort. The entire place was surrounded by a thick wall 18 feet high (about 6 meters) topped with cannon for protection against unfriendly Indians,

The historian Gary Nash tells us that interculturation took place from the start in Virginia, “facilitated by the fact that some Indians lived among the English as day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to Indian villages rather than endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English.”40 Indeed, many white and black newcomers chose to live an Indian lifestyle. In his Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur wrote, “There must be in the Indians' social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.”41 Crevecoeur overstated his case: as we know from Squanto's example, some Natives chose to live among whites from the beginning. The migration was mostly the other way, however. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. “People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty,” if caught by whites.3 Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Indian nationhood in 1890, whites con tinued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.

Communist Eastern Europe erected an Iron Curtain to stop its outflow but could never explain why, if Communist societies were the most progressive on earth, they had to prevent people from defecting, American colonial embarrassment similarly went straight to the heart of their ideology, also an ideology of progress. Textbooks in Eastern Europe and the United States have handled the problem in the same wÈ. by omitting the facts. Not one American history textbook mentions the attraction of Native societies to European Americans and African Americans,

African Americans frequently fled to Indian societies to escape bondage. What did whites find so alluring? According to Benjamin Franklin, “All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” Probably foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admiration of European observers.44 Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Although leadership was substantially hereditary in some nations, most Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “There is not a Man in the Ministry of the Five Nations, who has gain'd his Office, otherwise than by Merit,” waxed Lt. Gov, Cadwallader Colden of New York in 1727. “Their Authority is only the Esteem of the People, and ceases the Moment that Esteem is lost.” Colden applied to che Iroquois terms redolent of “the natural rights of mankind”: “Here we see the natural Origin of all Power and Authority among a free People.”

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, tie demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be 'bound hand and foot“ and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile the Native prisoners ”went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy,“ in tine words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner {in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes ”infamous and embarrassing.