DR: What have we learned, and what can be done in the future to keep this kind of fraudulent claim from gaining so much steam?
MB: I think the best thing we can do is to ask Congress, the courts, a presidential commission, or perhaps all three to look at the areas of American democracy, over the last four years and especially in the period between the 2020 election and the 2021 inauguration, where the system was in danger of failing, and to pass legislation or do other things that will make sure that nothing like that can ever happen again.
That happened in 1975, as you remember, after Watergate, but it was helped by the fact that there was a large Democratic majority and that most Republicans agreed that Richard Nixon had committed crimes that would have sent him to prison had he not been pardoned. That isn’t the case now.
DR: Is our democracy, our system of governing, weaker or stronger now because of what occurred?
MB: I think our system of democracy is stronger because of what we went through. But I hope that no one will see what happened and say, “This shows that we have a perfect system, because these attacks on democracy were defeated.” If 2020 had been a different kind of year, without the tragic calamity of the pandemic and the widespread economic suffering that happened largely as a result of that, there’s a very good chance that Donald Trump, despite his obvious threat to democracy, would have been reelected.
So in many ways this was a close call, and rather than saying, “The system worked and isn’t everything perfect?” what we should be saying is, “We almost did not make it. We almost did not get untied from the railroad tracks. Let us see what we can do in terms of new laws, new traditions, new regulations that can make sure that if a reckless, selfish, corrupt demagogue like Donald Trump is ever elected president again, God help us, our system will be better equipped to protect itself against that.”
2
Suffering and Sorrow
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
PHILIP J. DELORIA on Native American History
Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
“There has not been a treaty made between the United States and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States.”
From the time the early European settlers landed in North America, they acted as if the land they occupied was theirs—in part because a European royal leader had deeded it to them. These settlers saw the Natives they encountered as temporary—if not bothersome—occupants of this deeded land.
That the Natives’ ancestors had lived on this land for centuries, if not millennia, was ignored. Indeed, the original sin of slavery to which African Americans were subjected was matched by the original sin of expropriation, deceit, violence, and murder to which American Indians were subjected by the early settlers (and their descendants).
The difference to some extent was that African Americans were unwillingly imported into the colonies and then the United States, while American Indians were peacefully occupying the lands first settled by their ancestors. Indeed, when Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Western Hemisphere, there were already perhaps tens of millions of these Indigenous people on the continent, living in civilized, healthy, and prosperous ways, in several hundred different tribes.
How did these people lose their land, their lifestyles, their culture, and the bulk of their population over the ensuing several hundred years?
That is a complicated question, but the European settlers at first, and in time their American descendants, felt entitled to the land and its resources. They believed their civilization had a superior culture, religion, language, and life purpose. That entitlement gave the colonialists the belief that they were doing God’s work in creating a country where whites of European descent controlled the Indians’ fate.
Indians were given essentially no rights in the country created by the Constitution. They were not citizens, and they could not integrate into the society being built on the lands that their ancestors had long occupied. And agreements entered into between Indians and the U.S. government were repeatedly and violently broken by the government over a two-century period.
The result is that the Indian population today is modest compared to what it might otherwise have been. Fewer than five million Americans are considered Native. About half of that population lives on reservations, which are areas set aside by the U.S. government for Native Americans to occupy (but not own). Sadly, reservations have not been paradises; rather, they are well known for their intense challenges, including high alcohol, drug, poverty, and suicide rates.
This may be a difficult story for many Americans to believe. But the story is true. In recent decades, scholars have done heroic work in assembling the facts about the lives of Indians in the United States, long ago and now, and they have written eloquently about these facts.
One of the leading scholars of the Indian experience in the United States has long been Philip J. Deloria of Harvard University. I interviewed him virtually on September 4, 2020, in connection with a series at the New-York Historical Society.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You are a professor of Native American history at Harvard, a university that has been around for almost four hundred years. In four hundred years, there had never been a tenured professor of American Indian history at Harvard. Was that a surprise to you?
PHILIP J. DELORIA (PD): I’m not really surprised. We measure Harvard in centuries; we measure American Indian history, as an academic pursuit, in decades. It’s part of the efforts of many institutions of higher education to take seriously Native American histories—not simply as something that sits within American history per se but as valid, separate, and distinct histories of their own, which intersect with American history but are also autonomous.
Native American history has been growing for the last fifty or sixty years. In the last two or three decades it has attracted much more interest, particularly as we’ve made arguments for the distinctiveness of the Native American experience and its centrality to the United States.
DR: When I was in school, we were told that Christopher Columbus didn’t actually get to North America. He saw a few Caribbean Natives and called them Indians because he thought he was in India.
PD: That is why we call Native people Indians, yes. He ended up in the Caribbean. He did a number of voyages. We think about his first voyage and we think about discovery. But what’s really interesting is to go back and consider his relationships with the Indigenous people of the Caribbean.
One of the first things he did on his first voyage was to capture several Native people and take them back to Spain. His second voyage was quite explicitly a slaving voyage. He planned to capture as many Native people as he could—which he did—and bring them back to Spain to be sold in the slave markets.
When we think about slavery in America, we tend to think about it as a story of chattel slavery, of African slavery. But slavery actually begins in the New World with Columbus and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.
DR: How many Native Americans were on the continent of North America around the time Columbus came over?
PD: These numbers have been debated. As we know, one of the things that Europeans brought was epidemic disease, which killed off many Native people—from 70 to 90 percent of the populations in some areas. It’s an interesting history for us to think about when we’re contemplating our own contemporary world, so vulnerable to pandemic.
Those population numbers have ranged from as high as 100 million people for the hemisphere to something on the order of 7.5 million people in North America. Scholars derive those numbers from many different methods, thinking about the carrying
capacity of land, and social organization, and these kinds of things. A reasonable consensus for the population of the Americas in 1492 is around 50–60 million people.
One of the things we can say for certain is that the number of Native people here was dramatically reduced, to the point where environmental change actually ensued—the growing of massive forests, the proliferation of certain animal species. Many people have taken this as a marker of a moment when, literally, the planet changed because of human-caused effects.
DR: As you say, some people have said there were as many as 100 million Native Americans around the time Columbus came over. That went down to maybe 10 million. Was it the diseases brought from Europe that Native Americans were not able to withstand, or the Europeans killing them?
PD: It’s pretty clear that epidemic disease is the major cause. But it’s been very easy for people to say, “Oh, disease! What could anyone have done about that?” There’s a way in which the language of disease, and the way we teach and talk about disease, is letting some other important factors off the hook.
One of the more interesting books of the last decade has been Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery, in which he points out that when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, it took almost twenty-five years for smallpox to arrive. And yet the amount of indigenous death in the Caribbean was extraordinary.
One of the things Reséndez has argued—quite correctly, in my view—is that slavery and violence and genocidal killing destroyed people before disease even arrived. And when disease does arrive, what do the Spanish do? They double down on the captivity, and the killing, and the violence against Native people. Jeff Ostler has extended this argument to other times and places: colonialism is the critical context for understanding Native population declines.
DR: Native Americans were thought to have come over when there was a land bridge between Russia and what’s now Alaska. Is that correct? How long ago was it that they came?
PD: This has been one of the most interesting things that’s been happening in our field. For a very long time we understood that, around 13,000 years ago, people crossed over the Bering land bridge, made their way through these ice-free corridors, through the glaciers, down into North America, and then spread across both the North and South American continents. That story has now been completely confounded by various forms of new archaeological and DNA evidence.
At the Monte Verde site in Chile, Tom Dillehay has discovered evidence of inhabitation 14,500 years back. That’s a whole millennium of difference! Other archaeological and DNA evidence has pointed back to 20,000 years, and perhaps even longer, as time frames for the inhabitance of North and South America.
What we’ll be thinking about, in the years to come, is how much further back, how much longer were Native people here? How many more people were here? What were the various routes of immigration to the continent? These things are going to get much more complicated and more interesting.
DR: The people that came over the land bridge, some went to Latin America and developed very sophisticated cultures in the 1500s and 1600s—the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas. Were cultures as sophisticated developed in North America at the same time?
PD: We tend to love old cultures that build big stuff made of stone that lasts a long time and is quite monumental. Archaeologists have argued that there are six independent vectors of civilization. Two of them are in the New World, in Mexico and Peru.
But we should not ignore other societies—those who build (as my colleague Gustavo Verdesio characterizes it) in earth and clay. When we think about North America, we should always consider Cahokia [near present-day St. Louis] and the other mound-building Mississippian cultures. We should be thinking about the Chaco culture in the Southwest. All were capable of amazing kinds of technological achievements—the building of long straight roads, of monumental architecture, enabled by hierarchical social organizations.
It’s been easy to think “history” and “prehistory” and to fail to do justice to the North American continent in terms of its own long and continuous past. One of the things that’s really exciting in the field right now is the ways in which we’re trying to bridge those kinds of divides. Juliana Barr, for instance, has reminded us of the ways that Chacoan culture or Cahokia culture, robust and active in the centuries before Columbus arrived, continued to have consequences after Europeans showed up. That history ought to be continuous rather than discontinuous.
DR: In the latter part of the 1500s and the early part of the 1600s, when settlers from England were coming to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, how many different tribes were there of Native Americans in North America?
PD: There were hundreds of tribes and tribelets, and multiple forms of social and political organization. We think about nation states, and we think about tribes, and we are tempted to consider early Native social organization as being analogous to the nation. But if we imagine instead very dense and detailed kin relations that spread across geographies, and that took the form of political entities—confederacies, chieftainships, theocracies, alliances—we can imagine a village world that is also elevated in political form into larger kinds of structures.
Today, the media commonly uses “tribal” in a pejorative way that is actually offensive to a lot of Native people, to reflect a kind of crude, instinctual political clannishness. Tribe may not be the most useful word for thinking about the ways in which Native people had organized themselves prior to Columbus. But today, the tribal nation is in fact an important and legitimate form.
DR: When European settlers are coming to North America, at that time Native Americans are not one nation. They’re different tribes or different groups. Did they have a common language? Did they fight with each other, or were they basically peaceful?
PD: Like any other place in the world, there was certainly conflict among different Native people. We mentioned slavery earlier. There are many different forms of unfreedom and enslavement across the diversity of North America.
There are interesting common languages. The Plains Indians’ sign language functioned as a kind of lingua franca. Native people developed those kinds of language systems in many places. They also had diplomats who were quite capable of speaking five, six, seven, eight languages. So the network of Native people, even across language barriers in North America and in the Americas, was quite strong.
DR: In the United States, the tradition is that the settlers in Plymouth had a Thanksgiving with the Indians, who brought some turkeys and other gifts. Is there any truth to that myth?
PD: There was apparently food-sharing back and forth. But we can stop there. First of all, we should recognize that it’s not that the Pilgrims land and they’re the first white people that Indians have ever seen. The Indian people on the Atlantic coast had been dealing with European raiders and slavers and traders for a very long time, so they knew what was happening. The Wampanoags watched them for quite a while before reaching out, and they made an alliance with the Pilgrims in order to advance their own geopolitical interests. When the Pilgrims fired off their guns for a Thanksgiving celebration, ninety Wampanoags showed up. They thought the Pilgrims were under attack and came to hold up their alliance, not to share in a feast.
In most of these Atlantic places, when Europeans come and settle, there are a few years of adjustment, and then things really do start to fall apart. We can celebrate Thanksgiving as this dream of multicultural unity, but what we have to remember is these relationships often devolved into warfare. Throughout the 1600s, basically, there’s a series of wars up and down the Atlantic coast, as Native people recognize what colonizers are coming to do, which is to take their land.
DR: Did the Native Americans say, “We’ve been on this land for thirteen thousand years or so. What are you doing here?” Or they did start trading and say, “You can stay here if you give us something”?
PD: There’s a whole range of things that happened in those encounters. Many of the land contracts, the treaties, the agreement
s are situations in which Native people think they’re just agreeing to share the use of the land, not actually making a legal transfer of ownership in a European sense. Most of those early agreements break down on the failure to share understandings about what exactly is being negotiated. And then those things tend to turn violent.
DR: Did the effort to get Native Americans to convert to Christianity get very far?
PD: There are many places where the Christian tradition is a useful thing for Native people. My own family is a Native Christian family of clergy.
When we think about conversion, we tend to think that people have left one system of belief and moved into another system of belief, and that’s really not how it played for most Native people. Most were—and are—happy to keep multiple systems of belief going at the same time.
For Native people, efficacy really was the bottom line in terms of spiritual practice. There’s plenty of evidence to think that Native people looked at Christians, and looked at the process of colonization, and imagined that there was some form of efficacy around Christianity. So you tend to get syncretic kinds of religious experiences.
DR: In the 1760s the French and Indian War—often called the Seven Years’ War—occurred. What was that all about?
PD: It is another instance when two European empires clash and the Native people who are allies of those two empires become central to the whole experience.
The British have a model of colonial settlement, where they bring their own colonists, and they take over land, and they expand. The French have a quite different model, which relies almost entirely upon their Native allies. When you think about the map of New France, you should imagine small groups of Frenchmen trading up and down the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi area, accompanied by Indian allies.
So you’ve got two different systems of alliance that take shape around a European struggle. When the British end up winning the global Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War here in North America, they have to then deal with their Native allies and with the allies of the French who remain their enemies.
The American Experiment Page 10