American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Just what the population of California was at this time is unknown. The most commonly cited estimate is something in excess of 300,000—while other calculations have put it at 700,000 and more.15 Although the larger figure is regarded by many scholars as excessive, both it and the lower number represent estimates for California’s Indian population only in 1769, the time of the founding of the Franciscan mission—that is, more than two centuries after initial Spanish incursions into the region. Even at the time of Cabrillo’s voyage in 1542, however, the Indians reported to him the presence of other Spaniards in the area who, he wrote, “were killing many natives.” And there is clear evidence that European diseases had a serious impact on California’s native peoples throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 Since, as we shall see in a later chapter, during those same two centuries the native population of Florida was reduced by more than 95 percent, primarily by Spanish-introduced diseases but also by Spanish violence, it is likely that the indigenous population of California also was vastly larger in the early sixteenth century than it was in 1769. A population of 300,000 for all of California, after all, works out to a population density somewhere between that of the Western Sahara and Mongolia today—hardly suggestive of Cabrillo’s “thickly settled” and “densely populated” environs. Indeed, 700,000—rather than being excessive—will in time likely turn out to have been an excessively conservative estimate.

  To the east of California lay the vast, dry spaces of the southwest, what is now southern Utah and Colorado, parts of northwestern Mexico, southern Nevada, west Texas, and all of Arizona and New Mexico. The Papago, the Pima, the Yuma, the Mojave, the Yavapai, the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Zuni, the Tewa, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Towa, the Cocopa, the Tiwa, the Keres, the Piro, the Suma, the Coahuiltec, and various Apache peoples (the Aravaipa, the Coyotera, the Chiricahua, the Mimbreno, the Jicarella, the Mescalero, the Lipan) are just some of the major extant cultures of the southwest. And all these large cultural designations contain within them numerous smaller, but distinctive, indigenous communities. Thus, for example, the Coahuiltecs of the Texas-Mexico borderlands actually are more than 100 different independent peoples who are grouped together only because they speak the Coahuiltec language.17

  The major ancient cultural traditions of this region were those of the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. Together, these cultures influenced the lives of peoples living, from east to west, across the virtual entirety of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico, and from middle Utah and Colorado in the north to Mexico’s Sonora and Chihuahua deserts in the south. This area has supported human populations for millennia, populations that were growing maize and squash more than 3000 years ago.18 Indeed, agriculture in the pre-Columbian era attained a higher level of development among the people of the southwest than among any other group north of Mesoamerica. Beginning 1700 years ago, the Hohokam, for example, built a huge and elaborate network of canals to irrigate their crops; just one of these canals alone was 8 feet deep, 30 feet wide, 8 miles long, and was able to bring precious life to 8000 acres of arid desert land. Other canals carried water over distances of more than 20 miles.19 The general lingering fame of these societies, however, rests predominantly on their extraordinary artistry, craftsmanship, and architectural engineering—from fine and delicate jewelry and pottery to massive housing complexes.

  Among the numerous outstanding examples of southwest architectural achievement are the Chacoan communities of the San Juan Basin in Colorado and New Mexico, within the Anasazi culture area. Chaco Canyon is near the middle of the San Juan Basin, and here, more than a thousand years ago, there existed the metropolitan hub of hundreds of villages and at least nine large towns constructed around enormous multi-storied building complexes. Pueblo Bonito is an example of one of these: a single, four-story building with large high-ceilinged rooms and balconies, it contained 800 rooms, including private residences for more than 1200 people and dozens of circular common rooms up to 60 feet in diameter. No single structure in what later became the United States housed this many people until the largest apartment buildings of New York City were constructed in the nineteenth century. But in its time Pueblo Bonito was far from unique. Poseuinge, near present-day Ojo Caliente, is another example among many: a complex of several adjoining three-story residential buildings, Poseuinge (or Posi) contained more than 2000 rooms.20

  In the dry surrounding countryside the people of this region—not only the ancient Hohokam—constructed intricate canals and ditches, with diversion dams, floodgates, and other runoff control systems, alongside which they planted gardens.21 So successful were these water management systems that, as Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton have observed, “virtually all of the water that fell in the immediate vicinity was channeled down spillways and troughs to feed their gardens and replenish their reservoirs.”22 And in recent decades aerial photography has revealed the presence of great ancient roadways up to 30 feet wide that linked the hundreds of Chaco Canyon communities with at least fifty so-called outlier population centers up to 100 miles away, each of which contained its own complex of large, masonry pueblos. In all, it appears that these roads connected together communities spread out over more than 26,000 square miles of land, an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined—although recent studies have begun to suggest that the Chaco region was even larger than the largest previous estimates have surmised. Indeed, as an indication of how much remains to be learned about these ancient peoples and societies, in the Grand Canyon alone more than 2000 indigenous habitation sites have thus far been identified, of which only three have been excavated and studied intensively—while almost half of the canyon’s 1,200,000 acres of land area has never even been seen at close range by an archaeologist or a historian.23

  Despite the enormous amount of organized labor that was necessary to construct their carefully planned communities, the native people of the southwest have always been known for their political egalitarianism and their respect for personal autonomy. The earliest Spanish visitors to the southwest—including Franciso Vásquez de Coronado in 1540 and Diego Pérez de Luxán in 1582—frequently commented on the widespread equality and codes of reciprocity they observed among such Pueblo peoples as the Hopi and the Zuni; the only significant class distinctions that could be discerned were those that granted power and prestige (but not excessive wealth) to the most elderly women and men.24 Observing the descendants of these same peoples 400 years later, twentieth-century anthropologists continue to reach similar conclusions: it is “fundamentally indecent,” anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn once wrote of the Navajo, “for a single individual to make decisions for the group.”25 That was far from the case, however, for the Indians of the southeast who were encountered by Hernando de Soto in the early sixteenth century during his trek north through Florida in search of gold. Here, much more hierarchical political and personal arrangements prevailed.

  At one location during his travels in the southeast de Soto was met by the female leader of the Cofitachequi nation who was carried in a sedan chair, was wrapped in long pearl necklaces, and rode in a cushion-filled and awning-covered boat. She commanded a large area of agriculturally productive land, once settled with dense clusters of towns and filled with impressively constructed ceremonial and burial sites. In plundering those sites de Soto’s men found elegantly carved chests and art objects, pearl inlaid and copper-tipped weapons, and other valuables (including as many as 50,000 bows and quivers) that at least one of the conquistadors compared favorably with anything he had seen in fabulously prosperous Mexico or Peru. It was an apt comparison, not only because the jewelry and pottery from this area is distinctly similar in many respects to that of Mesoamerica and the Andes, but because large and dense city-like settlements, built in stockade fashion and surrounded by intensely cultivated agricultural plantations were common here, as were state and quasi-state organizations in the political realm. Major cultural centers here include those of the Caddo peoples, the H
asinai, the Bidai, the Atakapa, the Tunica, the Chickasaw, the Tuskegee, the Natchez, the Houma, the Chocktaw, the Creek, the Tohome, the Pensacola, the Apalachee, the Seminole, the Yamasee, the Cusabo, the Waccamaw, the Catawba, the Woccon—and again, as in other regions, many more. No other part of North America outside of Mesoamerica had such complex and differentiated societies, and no other area outside of the northwest coast and California was so linguistically diverse—much more diverse, in fact, than Western Europe is today.26

  Pottery developed in this region at least 4000 years ago and true agriculture followed about 1000 years later. Although the people of the southeast did hunt and fish, they lived primarily in sedentary communities distinguished by clusters of towering temple mounds, large public buildings that each held scores and sometimes hundreds of assigned seats for political and religious gatherings, and assemblages of individual family houses that spread out over as many as fifteen to twenty miles. The people living in these state-like communities largely were nourished by enormous fields of corn, beans, and other produce that they harvested in two or even three crops each year and stored in corn cribs and granaries. They were superb basket-makers, carpenters, potters, weavers, tanners, and fishermen. Some, like the Calusa, fished from large canoes in the open ocean, while they and others also gathered clams and oysters from the coasts and used weirs and basket traps and spears and stupefying herbs to catch fish in rivers and in streams.27

  The Calusa, in fact, are especially intriguing in that they defy conventional rules of political anthropology by having been a complex of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies that also were sedentary and highly stratified, with politically powerful and centralized governments. Paramount chiefs, who commanded standing armies of warriors who had no other work obligations, ruled directly over dozens of towns in their districts, while controlling dozens more through systems of tribute. Class rankings included nobles, commoners, and servants (who were military captives), while there were specialized roles for wood carvers, painters, engravers, navigators, healers, and the scores of dancers and singers who performed on ceremonial occasions. And such festivities were both frequent and major affairs: one European account from the sixteenth century describes a paramount chief’s house as large enough to accommodate 2000 people “without being very crowded.” Moreover, such buildings were not especially large by southeastern coast standards. As J. Leitch Wright, Jr., notes: “similar structures in Apalachee, Timucua, and Guale (coastal Georgia) held considerably more.”28

  Elaborate social and cultural characteristics of this nature are not supposed to exist among non-agricultural or non-industrial peoples, but like many of the hunting and gathering societies of the northwest, the Calusa lived in an environment so rich in easily accessible natural resources that agriculture was not needed to maintain large, stable, politically complex settlements. One measure of the great size of these communities can be seen in the middens—the refuse collections studied by archaeologists—that the Calusa left behind. Throughout the world, among the largest shellfish middens known to exist are those at Ertebølle in Denmark, where they range up to 30 acres in size and almost 10 feet in height. In comparison, shell middens from Calusa areas throughout southwest Florida have been found covering up to 80 acres of land and reaching to heights of 20 feet—that is, many times the cubic volume of the largest Ertebølle middens. And yet, enormous as these deposits are—testifying to extraordinary concentrations of population—ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence indicates that shellfish were not a major component of the Calusa diet.29

  Far to the north of the Calusa and the hundreds of other cultural centers in what today are Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, resided the Tuscarora, the Pamlico, the Secotan, the Nottaway, the Weapemeoc, the Meherrin, the Powhatan, the Susquehannock, and the Delaware—to just begin a list that could be multiplied many times over. Beyond them, of course, were the great Northern Iroquoian nations—the Seneca, the Oneida, the Mohawk, the Onandaga, the Cayuga, the Wenro, the Erie, the Petun, the Neutral, the Huron, and the St. Lawrence Iroquois. And the New England Indian nations—the Pennacook, the Nipmuk, the Massachusett, the Wampanoag, the Niantic, the Nauset, the Pequot, the Mahican, the Narraganset, the Wappinger, the Mohegan, and more. Traditionally these native peoples were thought to have lived in very thinly populated settlements, but recent re-analyses of their population histories suggest that such separate nations as the Mohawk, the Munsee, the Massachusett, the Mohegan-Pequot, and others filled their territorial areas with as many or more residents per square mile as inhabit most western regions in the present-day United States. Overall, according to one estimate, the Atlantic coastal plain from Florida to Massachusetts supported more than 2,000,000 people before the arrival of the first Europeans.30

  Probably the most common association that is made with the congregations of northeastern cultures concerns their sophisticated domestic political systems and their formal networks of international alliances, such as the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois League, founded in the middle of the fifteenth century and composed of the independent Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. Many writers, both historians and anthropologists, have argued that the League was a model for the United States Constitution, although much controversy continues to surround that assertion. The debate focuses largely on the extent of Iroquois influence on Euro-American political thought, however, since no one denies there was some influence.31 Indeed, as numerous historians have shown, overall American Indian political and social organization had a powerful impact on European social thought, particularly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.32 In any case, however the controversy over Iroquois influence on the U.S. Constitution eventually is decided, it will not minimize the Iroquois achievement, since—as one of the originators of the notion of a connection between the League and the Constitution, J.N.B. Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution, admitted when he first propounded the hypothesis more than fifty years ago:

  Some of the ideas incorporated in the League of the Five Nations were far too radical even for the most advanced of the framers of the American Constitution. Nearly a century and a half was to elapse before the white men could reconcile themselves to woman suffrage, which was fundamental in the Indian government. They have not yet arrived at the point of abolishing capital punishment, which the Iroquois had accomplished by a very simple legal device. And child welfare legislation, prominent in the Iroquois scheme of things, had to wait for a century or more before the white men were ready to adopt it.33

  To limit a description of female power among the Iroquois to the achievement of “woman suffrage,” however, is to not even begin to convey the reality of women’s role in Iroquois society. As the Constitution of the Five Nations firmly declared: “The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother.”34 In her survey and analysis of the origins of sexual inequality among the major cultures of the world, this is how anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday describes the exception of the Iroquois:

  In the symbolic, economic, and familial spheres the Iroquois were matriarchal, that is, female dominated. Iroquoian women headed the family long-house, and much of the economic and ceremonial life centered on the agricultural activities of women. Men were responsible for hunting, war, and intertribal affairs. Although women appointed men to League positions and could veto their decisions, men dominated League deliberations. This tension between male and female spheres, in which females dominated village life and left intertribal life to men, suggests that the sexes were separate but equal, at least during the confederacy. Before the confederacy, when the individual nations stood alone and consisted of a set of loosely organized villages subsisting on the horticultural produce of women, females may have overshadowed the importance
of males.35

  Perhaps this is why, as Sanday later remarks: “Archaeological excavations of pre-Iroquoian village sites show that they were unfortified, suggesting that if there was an emphasis on warfare, it lacked major economic motivation, and conquest was an unknown objective.”36 And perhaps this also helps account for the unusually strong egalitarianism even among later Iroquois people—as among other native peoples of the northeast—on which early European visitors invariably remarked. The Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix, for instance, traveled throughout what today is New York, Michigan, and eastern Canada and marveled at the early age at which Indian children were encouraged, with success, in seemingly contradictory directions—toward both prideful independence and cooperative, communal socialization. Moreover, he noted, the parents accomplished this goal by using the gentlest and subtlest of techniques. While “fathers and mothers neglect nothing, in order to inspire their children with certain principles of honour which they preserve their whole lives,” he wrote, “they take care always to communicate their instructions on this head, in an indirect manner.” An emphasis on pride and honor—and thus on the avoidance of shame—was the primary means of adult guidance. For example, notes Charlevoix: “A mother on seeing her daughter behave ill bursts into tears; and upon the other’s asking her the cause of it, all the answer she makes is, Thou dishonourest me. It seldom happens that this sort of reproof fails of being efficacious.” Some of the Indians, he adds, do “begin to chastise their children, but this happens only among those that are Christians, or such as are settled in the colony.”37 The most violent act of disapprobation that a parent might use on a misbehaving child, Charlevoix and other visitors observed, was the tossing of a little water in the child’s face, a gesture obviously intended more to embarrass than to harm.