There's a lot more
to the story of colonists and Native Americans than the tale of
the first Thanksgiving taught in school, says history professor
Colin Calloway.
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1491
by Charles C Mann |
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The Columbian Exchange
by Alfred W Crosby Jr
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Custer Died for Your Sins
by Vine Deloria Jr |
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The Invasion of America
by Francis Jennings |
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The Middle Ground
by Richard White |
I want to start out on solid footing by establishing how I should
refer to the subjects of our discussion this Thanksgiving.
There are a variety of terms some people prefer indigenous,
some people prefer Native American, and some people prefer American
Indian. They are all collective terms and they are all imperfect
terms some people would say theyre all a little offensive
but Ive always used them interchangeably. I work in
a Native American Studies programme, most of my colleagues are natives
and they use these terms interchangeably. So Im not sure if
there is one right answer.
Even in an age of scepticism and multiculturalism, four-year-olds,
like my son, already can recount the hallowed story of how Pilgrims
from the Mayflower were able to thrive in America by learning the
ways of the land from friendly indigenous people. My aim is to demythologise
that simple picture by discussing your five books, but before we
dive into them, please demythologise the roots of Thanksgiving itself
for us.
The account of Thanksgiving that we have is Edward Winslows
account [written in 1622]. It is quite brief but around it has sprung
up stories and traditions and, if you like, myths. But the notion
of early European colonists depending on Native Americans for food,
shelter and even survival is not a myth. It happened quite frequently
and is an important part of the story for our society. For a long
time European colonists were dependent on Indian people as Indian
people become increasingly dependent on Europeans and their imports.
There was a long era of European colonists and native people living
alongside one another while exchanging technology, exchanging information
and exchanging ideas.
Lets begin before the Niña, the Pinta, and the
Santa María, let alone the Mayflower, arrived in the Americas.
What would we learn about human civilisation in the Americas prior
to Columbuss landing by reading Charles Manns 1491.
Charles Manns 1491 is subtitled New Revelations
of the Americas Before Columbus. He pulls together a lot of
the new research over the last generation in one place and provides
the reader with a helicopter overview of the American hemisphere
on the eve of contact. He goes into a great deal of detail and from
that a reader gets a very different picture, not just of the Americas
in 1491, but also the whole world in 1491. Mann shows that the Americas
were not just an empty world waiting for Europeans to arrive and
create a greater American nation but a place where civilisation
had risen and fallen, where there were great cities that contained
probably as much population as Europe at the time, if not more,
where corn agriculture had transformed large areas of the continent,
and where Indian people had created changes in the land that left
their imprint on the environment. The book provides a huge hemispheric
overview.
Manns revisionism is not simply based on the same centuries-old
evidence from a different theoretical perspective. He draws from
researchers who are using new scientific techniques to uncover evidence,
which is forcing historians to reconsider long-settled assumptions
about pre-Columbian American life. Correct?
People are working in Native American history in all kinds of areas.
There are new discoveries, it seems, every year in archaeology.
Increasingly, native scholars are making their voices heard and
scholars who are not native are much more receptive to that. Anthropologists,
in the last generation or so, more often work with historical sources
and historians are drawing on the work of these anthropologists
so theres a whole new range of inquiry triggering new understandings
of the role of native people in how America develops.
One area where that is particularly true is the whole issue of
population. One of the larger changes in understanding has to do
with the size of the population before contact and the extent of
the population collapse after contact. Back in the old days, people
would throw about estimates of pre-Columbian population north of
Mexico as maybe a million. Now, as a result of the work of experts
in demography and epidemiology, we have a much greater understanding
of population dynamics. When Europeans were in an area doing head
counts, more often than not they were recording the number of survivors
of epidemics like smallpox, influenza, measles, and other crowd-killing
diseases that came to America with Europeans but were not present
in America beforehand. The cumulative effect of these epidemics
on the native population throughout the hemisphere was absolute
devastation. As one scholar described it, it was one of the greatest
biological disasters in human history.
Some people argue about the numbers; some people question the calculations.
But I think the important point is the revisions of population estimates,
wherever they land, leave us with a different impression of pre-contact
America. It was not an empty or sparsely inhabited continent but
a world full of Indians. It was a place where much of the worlds
population lived and the impact of contact played out through epidemic
disease shifted that dramatically. You cant understand the
subsequent history of America without understanding that population
collapse.
This seems an apt time to consider the consequences of European
arrival on the existing population of the Americas. Tell us about
the core argument of Alfred Crosbys Columbian Exchange.
Alfred Crosbys Columbian Exchange was published in
1972. If we read it today, especially in the wake of reading something
like 1491, it might seem quite sparse, because since then scholars
have done a huge amount of work in fleshing out this idea.
I think titles are important and I think this title, Columbian
Exchange, is hugely important because it puts early colonial
history into a broader context, so that the European invasion of
America is not seen as a one-way street with humans simply crossing
the Atlantic and landing in America. Its two continents coming
into contact and so opening up transoceanic exchange of people and
plants and animals and disease. Crosby was the first scholar to
point to the impact of epidemic diseases. Much more intensive and
sophisticated work has been done since, but Crosbys work was
crucial, and theres nothing more important to understanding
that early history of America.
Is the communication of communicable diseases what led to European
dominance over the hemisphere?
Its not the only factor. As Jared Diamonds book title
says: Guns, Germs and Steel. There are a number of issues
to consider but I think disease is important to understanding the
invasion and colonisation of the Americas and even the subsequent
expansion of the United States nation westward. Whenever we consider
how native peoples are coping with, responding to, and adjusting
to the presence of Europeans and the expanding power of the United
States, we should recall the impact of disease on the population.
Disease undermines Native Americans capacity for resistance
at the very time when they need the utmost capacity. It upsets the
balances of power and relations between native peoples so I think
it certainly has to be high on the list, if not at the top of the
list, in understanding how things play out in this continent.
Lets take a detour from straight history to discuss Custer
Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto from 1969 by Vine Deloria
Jr. What is this book about and why is it so important to demythologising
the story of Indians in America?
Custer Died for Your Sins is not primarily about early American
history its a groundbreaking collection of essays in
which Vine Deloria, a Lakota writer, scholar and activist, takes
a series of pot shots at federal Indian policies and Anglo academics
who made their careers as so-called Indian experts.
Vine Deloria, who died in 2005, was in many ways the most influential
Native American intellectual for the 20th century.
What this collection did was alter the way we think about and discuss
Native American history. His writings in Custer Died for Your
Sins put non-Indians on the defensive. He made us think twice
about the kind of work that we do and how we should do it. Theres
also a powerful articulation of tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
He puts Indian concerns, Indian rights, the continuing injustices
that native people suffer and the continuing hypocrisies in American
society about Indians, in plain view at a time when American society,
by and large, still misunderstands Native American experiences,
frustrations and aspirations. Its a reminder that even though
were working on the 17th or 18th century, what we do has an
impact on contemporary native communities. Native people have clear
views on their history and wed better consider those views
if we want our work to be relevant.
The word manifesto sounds awfully serious but this book seems
quite funny.
There are certain passages that are quite funny. He makes fun of
anthropologists who arrive in Indian country and take notes and
have an assistant with them and leave to write up their findings
and become recognised as experts on the subject, when the people
in the community that theyve visited, if they ever read those
things, would often think: That doesnt sound like us,
this is ludicrous. A scenario like that continues to be a
caution in the back of the minds of people who are trying to work
responsibly in Native American history. So its not only funny,
we can recognise that what hes talking about is partially
true. Non-native people working on Native American history dont
want to be like those people Vine Deloria made fun of. So I think,
even though theres humour in all of Vine Delorias writing,
some of it quite rapier-like, there are also important points behind
it. Thats why I wanted to include Custer Died for Your
Sins on this list.
The author of your next book recasts the arrival of Europeans
in the hemisphere as an incursion. Please tell us about The Invasion
of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest.
Again I think titles are important. I actually teach a course here
at Dartmouth called The Invasion of America. Its
one of those titles that makes people stop and think: Invasion
of America, when did that happen?
Francis Jennings was hard hitting. Some people would say this book
is polemical. He exposes the mythologies of early contact. He focuses
on New England because it is the locus of myths about American Indians
and early contacts. Instead of dwelling on Thanksgiving and all
the good feelings associated with that, Jennings accuses Puritans
of dispossessing native people through manipulation of deeds, assaulting
native culture and committing genocide like in the Pequot War. He
also accuses them of distorting the historical record to justify
their actions.
Its a bit much for many people and many of his assertions
have since been challenged and modified by subsequent generations
of scholars, who took up his challenge to pore over records that
had previously gone unexamined. But I think The Invasion of America
triggered a new level of debate among historians and anthropologists
about the early history of America and helped prompt a new generation
of scholarship about American Indian history.
Were Puritans imperialist, as Jennings argues?
If you look at history, you can find evidence of everything. You
can find evidence of people who were vicious, manipulative and genocidal,
and you can find people who dealt equitably and even-handedly with
natives. There are examples where Puritans and Indian people got
along they had to get along because they both needed each
other. So you get cautious coexistence across gulfs of culture.
But that shifts as the power dynamics shift. As the English presence
in New England became more established, they were less reliant on
Native American people and less respectful of them. Puritans can
be seen as part of colonialism in North America. Looking at their
actions in the Pequot War and King Philips War, theres
a lot of evidence to support the perspective that Francis Jennings
puts forward.
How friendly were the Native Americans who met the Puritans?
That sounds like an awful question, but I just want your help in
demythologising the story of Squanto shaking hands with Puritans.
The word friendly is a little sketchy. We have to understand those
first contacts in context. If we use the term friendly
it gives this impression of a naive or simple people welcoming the
English with open arms. When Squanto meets the Puritans, Squanto
has already been to Europe, hes been kidnapped, taken to Spain,
and made his way back home where he found his people, the Patuxet
people, essentially decimated by disease. So when the Puritans arrive,
that area of New England is not a virgin wilderness its
a place that has already been ravaged by disease carried over on
boats from England that came up the coast between 1616 and 1619.
The impact of those diseases on that coast affected intertribal
balances of power. If the Wampanoag people in Massachusetts suffered
heavily from disease, other native powers further to the west suffered
less so and so theres a shifting going on in the balance of
powers which makes the arrival of a new power, from across the Atlantic,
something to be taken seriously. So it behoves the Wampanoag to
embrace these people as allies.
Native societies on the east coast of North America have been dealing
with other peoples for hundreds of years. Different Indian nations
had their own foreign policies, their own sets of relationships,
their own rituals for conducting trade, and their own protocols
for establishing alliances. Its important not to see these
first contacts as Indian people reacting to English overtures alone.
What you have is a multitribal, multinational world in which different
Indian nations have their own agendas, their own experiences and
their own sets of relations with other native people. Inject into
that the presence of these new people. Different nations respond
differently. Some incorporate the English into their diplomatic
networks. This wasnt a case of primitive Indians making naive
gestures of friendliness.
Thank you for meeting such a poorly phrased question with such
an illuminating answer. In your next selection, Richard White moves
beyond the story of cultural conquest to discuss how Native Americans
and Europeans came to coexist. Please tell us about the complex
picture that White paints in The Middle Ground.
Richard Whites The Middle Ground shifts the focus
away from the East Coast to the upper Great Lakes. The first part
of the book, and I think the most important part, focuses not on
the relationship between the English and Indians but on the relationship
between the French and Indians. Its very important to remember
that the English were only one of a number of European nations that
tried to establish colonial footholds and, in so doing, had to establish
relationships with native people.
The French were early actors, particularly in Canada. They worked
their way up the Saint Lawrence River and across the Great Lakes
and down the Mississippi Valley toward New Orleans. But the Great
Lakes area was the primary thrust of French colonialism they
were driven by the desire to harvest Indian furs and the missionary
impulse to save Indian souls.
Richard White complicates understandings of Indian and white relations
by looking at how Indians and Europeans in a world already
thrown upside down because of the impacts of disease, escalating
warfare involving the fur trade and an arms race, as Indian people
scrambled to get the guns they needed to survive constructed
a complex world that was new to all the participants.
The middle ground was an area where Indian power was real, where
Europeans who were ambitious about building empires, establishing
trade or saving souls had to compromise and conciliate not
command. They had to adjust to doing business in Indian country
in a world where kinship and fluctuating tribal alliances and multiple
tribal agendas dictated life. It was an area of cautious coexistence,
cultural convergence and alliances built on mutual need.
What do we learn about American culture through Richard Whites
story of accommodation between the Algonquin and the French?
The Middle Ground is important because it helps destroy
the notion that American history began in the east with the arrival
of the English and spread westward. Its far more accurate
to look at North America as a mosaic or even kaleidoscope of different
Indian peoples. So, for 20 years now, the Middle Ground has
been part of the lexicon of Native American history, and a whole
generation of younger scholars coming through looked at different
areas of the country, tested Whites hypothesis and considered
how European colonists conciliated with Indian power.
And finally, you wanted to slip in a footnote: That there is
no better reading for Thanksgiving than Everything
You Know about Indians Is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith. What is
the most important thing that we should realise is wrong about our
perceptions of indigenous Americans?
From my perspective, as a historian of early America, the most
important thing to realise is that the English did not arrive on
the edge of a continent that was essentially empty. We cannot fully
understand what happens after that first Thanksgiving without better
understanding what had happened in the thousands of years leading
up to that moment. That first Thanksgiving shouldnt be seen
just as something that occurred on the western edge of European
history but rather as something that happened at the northeastern
edge of an American Indian world, which stretched throughout the
continent.
Colin Calloway is Professor of Native American
Studies at Dartmouth. He has written 15 books, and edited a further
two, about early Native American history. His work has earned a
Pulitzer Prize nomination and the best book award from the Organisation
of American Historians. In 2011 Calloway won the American Indian
History Lifetime Achievement Award
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