TERMINAL NARRATIVES
According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to European invasion, warfare, and material acquisitiveness than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory, and he writes that “epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”13 Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principal reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.
Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged questions.
US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors … which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”14 Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa, and Asia. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.15 Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.16 These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.
Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought depopulation in the Pacific Islands, Australia, western Central America, and West Africa.17 Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts Nations—in late-eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish, while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.18
Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.
Anthropologist Michael V. Wilcox asks, “What if archaeologists were asked to explain the continued presence of descendant communities five hundred years after Columbus instead of their disappearance or marginality?” Cox calls for the active dismantling of what he terms “terminal narratives”—“accounts of Indian histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of Indigenous peoples.”19
GOLD FEVER
Searching for gold, Columbus reached many of the islands of the Caribbean and mapped them. Soon, a dozen other soldier-merchants mapped the Atlantic coast from the northern Maritimes to the tip of South America. From the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals, and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous populations and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the “New World” between Spain and Portugal with a line drawn from Greenland south through what is now Brazil. Called the Doctrine of Discovery, it claimed that possession of the entire world west of that line would be open to Spanish conquest and all east of it to Portuguese conquest.
The story is well known. In 1492, Columbus sailed with three ships on his first voyage at the behest of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castille. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 had led to the merger of their kingdoms into what would become the core of the Spanish state. Columbus planted a colony of forty of his men on “Española” (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and returned to Spain with Indigenous slaves and gold. In 1493, Columbus returned to the Caribbean with seventeen ships, more than a thousand men, and supplies. He found that the men he had left on the first trip had subsequently been killed by the Indigenous inhabitants. After planting another settlement, Columbus returned to Spain with four hundred Arawak slaves. With seven ships, Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1498, reaching what is now Venezuela, and he made a fourth and final voyage in 1502, this time touching the Caribbean coast of Central America. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and charted the Pacific coast of the Americas. Juan Ponce de León claimed the Florida peninsula for Spain in 1513. In 1521, following a three-year bloodbath and overthrow of the Aztec state, Hernando Cortés proclaimed Mexico as New Spain. Parallel with the crushing of Mexican resistance were Ferdinand Magellan’s explorations and charting of the Atlantic coast of the South American continent, followed by Spanish wars against the Inca Nation of the An
des. In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors confiscated elaborate artwork and statuary made of gold and silver to be melted down for use as money. During the same period, the Portuguese laid waste to what is today Brazil and began a thriving slave trade that would funnel millions of enslaved Africans to South America, beginning the lucrative Atlantic slave trade.
The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.
THREE
CULT OF THE COVENANT
For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it and to thy seed forever.
—Genesis 13:15
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.
—Genesis 17:7
MYTH OF THE PRISTINE WILDERNESS
With the onset of colonialism in North America, control of the land was wrenched away from the Indigenous peoples, and the forests grew dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the former cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape. Abandoned fields of corn turned to weeds and bushes. Settlers chopped down trees in New England until the landscape was nearly bare.1 One geographer notes, “Paradoxical as it may seem, there was undoubtedly much more ‘forest primeval’ in 1850 than in 1650.”2 Anglo-Americans who did observe Native habitat management in action misunderstood what they saw. Captain John Palliser, traveling through the prairies in the 1850s, complained about the Indians’ “disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons.” In 1937, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup claimed that the “open, park-like woods” written about in earlier times had been, “from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America” and could not have been the result of human management.3
In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them. By the early seventeenth century, when British colonists from Europe began to settle in North America, a large Indigenous population had long before created “a humanized landscape almost everywhere,” as William Denevan puts it.4 Native peoples had created town sites, farms, monumental earthworks, and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosophies of government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international relations. They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways of the American continents. Before the arrival of Europeans, North America was indeed a “continent of villages,” but also a continent of nations and federations of nations.5
Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs. Historian Francis Jennings was emphatic in addressing what he called the myth that “America was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages”:
European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.
This is so simple a fact that it seems self-evident.6
THE CALVINIST ORIGIN STORY
All modern nation-states claim a kind of rationalized origin story upon which they fashion patriotism or loyalty to the state. When citizens of modern states and their anthropologists and historians look at what they consider “primitive” societies, they identify their “origin myths,” quaint and endearing stories, but fantastic ones, not grounded in “reality.” Yet many US scholars seem unable (or unwilling) to subject their own nation-state’s founding story to the same objective examination. The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world. It is one of the few states founded on the covenant of the Hebrew Torah, or the Christian borrowing of it in the Old Testament of the Bible. Other covenant states are Israel and the now-defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both of which were founded in 1948.7 Although the origin stories of these three covenant states were based on Judeo-Christian scripture, they were not founded as theocracies. According to the myths, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.
The influence of the scriptures was pervasive among many of the Western social and political thinkers whose ideas the founders of the first British colonies in North America drew upon. Historian Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that “certain societies, in certain eras of their development,” have looked to the scriptures for guidance, and likens it to the way “the human genetic code operates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, directly determined what people would believe and when they would think and what they would do.”8 Dan Jacobson, a citizen of Boer-ruled South Africa, whose parents were immigrants, observes that,
like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England, [the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the heathen, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf. . . . A sense of their having been summoned by divine decree to perform an ineluctable historical duty has never left the Boers, and has contributed to both their strength and their weakness.9
Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the United States had a similar sense of a prov
idential opportunity to make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, “it is from [the] scriptures that western society learned how to think historically.” The key moment in history according to covenant ideology “involves the winning of ‘the Land’ from alien, and indeed evil, forces.”10
The principal conduit of the Hebrew scriptures and covenant ideology to European Christians was John Calvin, the French religious reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the European invasion and colonization of the Americas. The Puritans drew upon Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as did the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding their South African colony during the same period. Calvinism was a Protestant Christian movement with a strong separatist political component. In accord with the doctrine of predestination, Calvin taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are “called” by God and are among the “elect.” Salvation therefore has nothing to do with one’s actions; one is born as part of the elect or not, according to God’s will. Although individuals could not know for certain if they were among the elect, outward good fortune, especially material wealth, was taken to be a manifestation of election; conversely, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin, were taken as evidence of damnation. “The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists … is obvious,” Akenson observes, “for one could easily define the natives as immutably profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue.”11
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