Lies My Teacher Told Me (16 page)

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.

Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions.
We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to
Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne,
Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European thinkers then influenced Americans such as
Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.46 In recent years historians have debated whether Indian ideas may also have influenced our
democracy more directly. Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquols League stood
before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically.
The terms used by Lt. Gov. Golden find an echo in our Declaration of Independence fifty
years later.

In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering English colonies
and suggested that the colonies form a union similar to the league. In 1754 Benjamin
Franklin, who had spent much time among the Iroquois observing their deliberations,
pleaded with colonial leaders to consider the Albany Plan of Union: “It would be a strange
thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a
union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears
insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English
colonies.”

The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a forerunner of the Articles of Confederation
and the Constitution. Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention
referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery. In 1775 Congress formulated a speech to the
Iroquois, signed by John Hancock, that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The Six Nations
are a wise people,” Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council and teach our children
to follow it.”4S John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for
the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and “all those things which got
attached to the Bill of Rights.” Without the Native example, “do you really believe that
all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium
butchering other people because of intolerance of questions of religion?”40 Mohawk may have overstated the case for Native democracy, since heredity played a major
role in office-holding in many Indian societies. His case is strengthened, however, by the
fact that wherever Europeans went in the Americas, they projected monarchs (“King
Philip”) or other undemocratic leaders onto Native societies. To some degree, this pro
jecting was done out of European self-interest, so they could claim to have purchased
tribal land as a result of dealing with one person or faction. The practice As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of
arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League.
Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once.

also betrayed habitual European thought: Europeans could not believe (hat nations did not have such rulers, since that was the only form of government they knew.

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source
of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of Indians
to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia's patriot rifle companies wore
Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took action to
oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party or the anti-rent protests against
Dutch plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840s, they chose to dress as
Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol
identified with liberty.

Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as well as New York. So did British common
law and the Magna Carta. American democracy seems to be another example of syncretism,
combining ideas from Europe and Native America, The degree of Native influence is hard to
specify, since that influence came through several sources. Textbooks might, present it as
a soft hypothesis rather than hard fact. But they should not leave it out. In the twelve
textbooks I surveyed, discussion of any intellectual influence of Native Americans on
European Americans was limited to Discovering American History, which pictures a wampum belt paired with Benjamin Franklin's famous cartoon of a divided,
hence dying snake. “Franklin's Albany Plan might have been inspired by the Iroquois
League,” captions Discovering. “The wampum belt expresses the unity of tribes achieved through the League, Compare it
with Franklin's cartoon.” The other eleven books are silent.

But, then, the books leave out most contributions ofNative Americans to the modern world.
I had expected to find at least such noncontroversial items as food, words, and place
names. After all, our regional cuisinesthe dishes that make American food distinctiveoften
combine Indian with European and African elements. Examples range from New England pork
and beans to New Orleans gumbo to Texas chili.51 Mutual acculturation between Native and African Americans-due to shared experience in
slavery as well as escapes by blacks to Native communitiesaccounts for soul food being
part Indian, from cornbread and grits to greens and hush puppies.“ Historians have known
for centuries that Indians of the Americas domesticated more than half of the food crops
now grown around the world. Native place names dot our landscape, from Okefenokee to
Alaska. Even nineteenth-century racists relished names like Mississippi, meaning ”Great River." From hurricane to skunk to (probably) OK, Indian words have been incorporated into English.53 Notwithstanding all this, only Land of Promise and Triumph of the Amtricdn Nation discuss Indian foods, only Triumph mentions Indian names, and none of the twelve books deals with Indian words.

Transmitting food and names, mundane though it may seem, involves ideas. Native farming
methods were not “primitive.” Indian farmers in some tribes drew rwo or three times as
much nourishment from the soil as we do.54 Place names, too, show intellectual interchange. Whites had to be asking Indians, “Where
am I?” “What is this place called?” “What is that animal?” “What is the name of that
mountain?” Although textbooks “appreciate” Native cultures, the possibility of real
interculturation, especially in matters of the intellect, is foreign to them. This is a
shame, for authors thereby ignore much of what has made America distinctive from Europe.
In a travel narrative, Peter Kalm wrote in 1750, “The French, English, Germans, Dutch, and
other Europeans, who have lived for several years in distant provinces, near and among
the Indians, grow so like them in their behavior and thought that they can only be
distinguished by the difference of their color.”55 In the famous essay, “The Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner told
how the frontier masters the European, “strips off the garments of civilization,” and
requires him to be an Indian in thought as well as dress. “Before long he has gone to
planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick.” Gradually he builds something new,
“but the outcome is not the old Europe.” It is syncretic; it is American.

Acknowledging how aboriginal we are culturally-how the United States and Europe, too, have
been influenced by Native American as well as European ideas-would require significant
textbook rewriting. If we recognized American In the nineteenth century Americans knew of Native American contributions to medicine.
Sixty percent of all medicines patented in the century were distributed bearing Indian
images, including Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, and Kickapoo Indian
Oil. In this century America has repressed the image of Indian as healer.

Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure, we would have to
acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might have to reassess
the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimates the entire conquest.“ In 1970
the Indian Historian Press produced a critique of our histories, Textbooks and the American Indian. One of the press's yardsticks for evaluating books was the question, ”Does the textbook
describe the religions, philosophies, and contributions to thought of the American Indian?"58 A quarter-century later the answer must still be no.

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. The American Way describes Native American religion in these words:

These Native Americans [in the Southeast] believed that nature was filled with spirits.
Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives
with the spirits of nature.

Way is trying to show respect for Native American religion, but it doesn't work. Stated flatly
like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher
civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians
today.

These Americans believed that one great male god ruled ihe world. Sometimes they divided
him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and
wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his
blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died.

Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that
such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction
ofcommunion.

Textbooks could present American Indian religions from a perspective that takes them
seriously as attractive and persuasive belief systems. The anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that when whites remark upon the fact
that Indians perceive a spirit in every animal or rock, they are simultaneously
admitting their own loss of a deep spiritual relationship with the earth. Native Americans
are “part of the total living universe,” wrote Turner; “spiritual health is to be had only
by accepting this condition and by attempting to live in accordance with it.” Turner
contends that this life-view is healthier than European alternatives: “Ours is a
shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to
which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.”6" Thus Turner shows that taking Native American religions seriously might require
re-examination of the Judeo-Christtan tradition. No textbook would suggest such a
controversial idea.

Similarly, textbooks give readers no clue as to what the zone of contact was like from the
Native side. They emphasize Native Americans such as Squanto and Pocahontas, who sided
with the invaders. And they invert the terms, picturing white aggressors as “settlers” and often showing Native settlers as
aggressors. “The United States Department of Interior had tried to give each tribe both
land and money,” says The American Way, describing the U.S. policy of forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to
reservations. Whites were baffled by Native ingratitude at being “offered” this land, Way claims: “White Americans could not understand the Indians, To them, owning land was a
dream come true.” In reality, whites of the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen. Philip
Sheridanwho is notorious for having said, “The only good Indian is a dead
Indian”understood. “We took away their country and their means of support, and it was for
this and against this they made war,” he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?” The textbooks have turned history upside down.

Let us try a right-side-up view. “After King Philip's War, there was continuous conflict at
the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers worried about savages scalping them.”
This description is accurate, provided the reader understands that the settlers were
Native American, the scalpers white. Even the best of our American history books fail to
show the climate of white actions within which Native Americans on the border of white
control had to live. It was so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas
in North Carolina “fled in every direction” in 1786 when a solitary white man rode into
their village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe!

From the opposite coast, here is a story that might help make such dispersal
understandable: “An old white settler told his son who was writing about life on the
Oregon frontier about an incident he recalled from the cowboys and Indians days. Some
cowboys came upon Indian families without their men present. The cowboys gave pursuit,
planning to rape the squaws, as was the custom. One woman, however, pushed sand into her
vagina to thwart her pursuers.”65 The act of resistance is what made the incident memorable. Otherwise, it was entirely
ordinary. Such ordinariness is what our textbooks leave out. They do not challenge our
archetypal Laura Ingalls Wilder picture of peaceful white settlers suffering occasional
attacks by brutal Indians, If they did, the fact thai so many tribes resorted to war, even
after 1815 when resistance was clearly doomed, would become understandable.

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. But not our history textbooks.
“For almost two hundred years,” notes David Horowitz, “almost continuous warfare raged on
the American continent, its conflict more threatening than any the nation was to face
again.” Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George
Washington's administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and
expense. Yet most ofour “Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre” shows a motif common m nineteenth-century lithographs:
Indians invading the sanctity of the white settlers' homes. Actually whites were invading
Indian lands and often Indian homes, but pictures such as this, not the reality, remain
the archetype.