The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way—scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians. My ancestor’s desire to join them led to trumped-up murder charges for which he was executed—or, anyway, that’s what my grandfather told me.
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life…and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.
Influenced by their proximity to Indians—by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty—European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members—surrounded by examples of free life—always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide. Think of I. Bernard Cohen claiming that Enlightenment philosophers derived their ideas of freedom from Newtonian physics, when a plain reading of their texts shows that Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine took many of their illustrations of liberty from native examples. So did the Boston colonists who held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as “Mohawks.” When others took up European intellectuals’ books and histories, images of Indian freedom exerted an impact far removed in time and space from the sixteenth-century Northeast. For much the same reason as their confreres in Boston, protesters in South Korea, China, and Ukraine wore “Native American” makeup in, respectively, the 1980s, 1990s, and the first years of this century.
So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished—Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto—people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine—here let me now address non-Indian readers—somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?
AFTERWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION
When I set out to write 1491, my hope was that it would introduce readers to a subject that I found fascinating. For this reason I wanted to have a fuller bibliography than is usual in popular works—I wished to point people to the original sources, so that readers who were interested could find out more.
Most of the researchers whose work I covered have been very kind about 1491, but I knew from the beginning that few would be completely satisfied. Any book so broad in scope risks getting the details wrong; besides, it was written by a journalist, and journalists and scholars notoriously have different interests and styles.
As it turned out, the section that drew the greatest criticism was the coda. If I could write the book over again, I would go in more detail there, both to explain my point better and because the section exemplifies, to my mind, why the book’s subtitle is justified, even though (as some archaeologically sophisticated readers have complained) some of the “new revelations” chronicled in 1491 occurred fifty years ago. More than fifty, in fact—some of the demographic estimates I describe in the first section date to the 1940s.
The reason for the subtitle is that for the most part these revelations—the great antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the public. The question, implicit in the previous, is the cause of the gap. Why don’t intelligent non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about stem cells and read contemporary literature, already know something about how researchers think of the Americas before Columbus? Another way of putting the question would be to ask: Why isn’t this material already in high-school textbooks?
In the past one could have simply pointed to institutional racism. Today, though, when textbooks are routinely criticized for overemphasizing the stories of minorities and women, it seems hard to imagine that ethnocentrism accounts for the relative lack of attention paid to the indigenous world. To my mind, the culprit nowadays is more likely to be disciplinary boundaries. Except possibly for China and Japan, non-Western societies have generally been regarded as the province of anthropology and archaeology. As a result, the historians who write school textbooks have all too often waved their hands at the first fifteen or twenty thousand years of American history in an obligatory first chapter and then moved quickly into fields they find more congenial. Even today, a surprising number of historians remain unaware of the discoveries and methodologies of their colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, geography, and cultural studies. Similarly, many anthropologists know little of what has been called “ethnohistory.” While I was giving a presentation about this book at a large U.S. university, a man in the audience, identifying himself as an American historian, asked me how he could learn more about this material. I am not mocking him for asking—I was delighted that he wanted to know the answer. But at the same time I was amazed: He was in an audience full of professors and graduate students who could have answered his every question. Repeated incidents of this sort have convinced me that his lack of knowledge was not exc
eptional.
Change is occurring, but there is still no account, to cite but one example, of the conquest of Mexico that masters the evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl to portray the two sides in equal depth. The lack is amazing, given that the conquest is one of the most pivotal moments in recent history—it delivered the vast wealth of the Americas to Europe, and that newly acquired wealth played a principal role in Europe’s rise to dominance.
To be sure, a number of historians have worked to portray the indigenous side in post-contact history. (One U.S. example is Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade, a remarkable history of the pre-Revolutionary Southeast that appeared in 2003; another is Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground, a study of British-Haudenosaunee relations in the Revolutionary era, from 2006.) But even many of these writers have shied away from awarding Indians the status of full participants—by asking, for example, how native societies influenced the colonial societies that mingled with them.
This criticism applies primarily to historians of North America. South of the Rio Grande, the indigenous influence on colonial and post-colonial society has been celebrated for decades. (This celebration, which has been convenient for nationalistic reasons, has not always led to teaching Latin American children accurately about those native societies, or to treating contemporary indigenous people fairly.) The native imprint is obvious in the arts; the art and architecture produced by the synthesis of Indian and European styles in colonial Mesoamerica, the Clark University art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey argued in a 2005 monograph, is “one of humanity’s greatest and most pluralistic achievements.” But this synthesis is apparent in many other aspects of the culture, too, as would be expected in a place where three-quarters of the population claims some Indian descent.
North of the Rio Grande the possibility of such influences are often ignored when not denied. To some extent this is understandable. After all, Indians were and are less numerous in the North. And most native societies in what is now the United States and Canada did not have written languages, monumental public architecture, or the wide-ranging aesthetic traditions of their neighbors to the south. Yet European colonists mingled with intact native cultures for some three centuries. Colonist Susanna Johnson described eighteenth-century New Hampshire, for example, as “such a mix…of savages and settlers, without established laws to govern them, that the state of society cannot easily be described.” During those centuries, Indians were greatly influenced—culturally, technologically, intellectually—by colonists. It seems implausible that the exchange could have been entirely one-way—that the natives have had little or no long-lasting impact on the newcomers. At the least the claim is something to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
Scholars have acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and military tactics, such as the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the rebellious colonists bedeviled British soldiers. (“In this country,” Gen. John Forbes argued in 1758, “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians.”) With such adaptive changes, as the historian James Axtell has called them, Europeans employed Indian technology and tactics to achieve their goals. But they did not change how they viewed themselves or the world. According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as “military foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists reacted against. “The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote. Collectively recoiling from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned how to become a new version of themselves.
Here, though, most historians have stopped. They have seen the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking societies they encountered in the Northeast as too different from British societies to have exerted lasting changes on them. How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? My suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have had an impact on the American character is “naïve,” according to Alan Taylor, because it “minimizes the cultural divide separating consensual natives from coercive colonists.” Perhaps so, but then skeptics must explain how the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who did deeply influence each other, could have been so much smaller.
(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how “Iroquois propagandists,” as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin’s words about Indians, as I did, given his oft-expressed “contempt for ‘ignorant Savages.’…But people believe what they want to believe in the face of logic and evidence.” The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because the latter was racist and systematically oppressed the former.)
To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being human—exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delâge, of Laval University, in Québec, “the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe.” Montaigne, Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine were among the writers who mulled over the differences between native and European ways of life; some pondered Indian criticism of European societies. The result, Delâge explained, was to promote a new attitude of “cultural relativism” that in turn fed Enlightenment era debates “about the republican form of government, the rearing of children, and the ideals of freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the right to happiness.”
Cultural influence is difficult to pin down in documents and concrete actions. Nevertheless it exists. In 1630 John Winthrop led what was then the largest party of would-be colonists from Britain—some seven hundred people—to Massachusetts, where they founded the city of Boston. As the expedition was under way, the deeply religious Winthrop explained his vision of what the new colony should become: “a citty upon a hill.” The city would be ruled by the principles of the Pilgrim’s God. Among these principles: the Supreme Deity loves each person equally, but He did not intend them to play equal roles in society:
GOD ALMIGHTY in his most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission.
Winthrop’s ideal community, that is, was not a place of equal opportunity, nor a place where social distinctions were erased; the “mean” circumstances of the poor were “in all times” part of God’s plan, and could not be greatly changed (if poor people got too far behind, the rich were supposed to help them). The social ideal was responsible adherence to religiously inspired authority, not democratic self-rule.
The reality turned out to be different. Instead of creating Winthrop’s vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting—a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that “displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained.” To me, it seems unlikely that the surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.
Accepting that indigenous societies influenced American culture opens up fascinating new questions. To begin with, it is possible that native societies could also have exercised a malign influence (this is why the subject is not necessarily “pious” or “romantic primitivism,” as the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has complained). Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, “colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe” and “the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaways.” There,
too, the native groups, descended from Mississippian societies, were far more hierarchical and autocratically ruled than the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking groups in the Northeast. As Gallay has documented, indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.
On the map, the division line between slave and non-slave societies occurs in Virginia, broadly anticipating the Mason-Dixon line that later split slave states from free. The repeated pattern doubtless has to do with geography—southeastern climate and soil favor plantation crops like tobacco and cotton. And southern colonists’ preference for slavery presumably reflected their different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds. But can one readily dismiss the different Indian societies who lived in these places? And if not, to what extent are contemporary American conflicts over race the playing out, at least in part, of a cultural divide that came into being hundreds of years before Columbus?
A few personal remarks: After the first publication of this book, a number of readers and researchers contacted me with observations and criticisms, many of which made their way into this updated and corrected edition. Some book reviewers, too, drew my attention to errors, which I have tried to fix. For this help, I thank T. Chad Amos, David B. Bieler, Alfred W. Crosby, Todd Follansbee, Daniel W. Gade, Berl Golomb, Bob Hart, Bruce Johansen, Jeff Kellem, Elias Levy, Barbara Mann, William H. McNeill, Daniel N. Paul, Victor Sanchez, Jeffrey Shallit, Ted Slusarczyk, Michael M. Smith, Rev. Steve Thom, Rick Uyesugi, and Ronald Wright. I am sure I have left out some names—not until relatively late in the process did I begin keeping records. A couple of people read all or part of the published book a second time after having read it a first time in manuscript. One of these gluttons for punishment, Frances Karttunen, gave my Nahuatl orthography a second critique (it is still imperfect, but I hope improved); I also profited from her other insights. William Denevan, too, went through everything again with blue pencil in hand. I am indebted to both. A number of bloggers weighed in, for which my especial thanks to James Hannam (Venerable Bede), Chris Price (Layman) and Laura Gjovaag (Tegan).
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