American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Children, not surprisingly, learned to turn the tables on their parents. Thus, Charlevoix found children threatening to do damage to themselves, or even kill themselves, for what he regarded as the slightest parental correction: “You shall not have a daughter long to use so,” he cites as a typical tearful reaction from a chastised young girl. If this has a familiar ring to some late twentieth-century readers, so too might the Jesuit’s concern about the Indians’ permissive methods of child rearing: “It would seem,” he says, “that a childhood so ill instructed should be followed by a very dissolute and turbulent state of youth.” But that, in fact, is not what happened, he notes, because “on the one hand the Indians are naturally quiet and betimes masters of themselves, and are likewise more under the guidance of reason than other men; and on the other hand, their natural disposition, especially in the northern nations, does not incline them to debauchery.”38

  The Indians’ fairness and dignity and self-control that are commented on by so many early European visitors manifested themselves in adult life in various ways, but none more visibly than in the natives’ governing councils. This is evident, for example, in a report on the Huron’s councils by Jean de Brebeuf during the summer of 1636. One of the most “remarkable things” about the Indian leaders’ behavior at these meetings, he wrote, “is their great prudence and moderation of speech; I would not dare to say they always use this self-restraint, for I know that sometimes they sting each other,—but yet you always remark a singular gentleness and discretion. . . . [E]very time I have been invited [to their councils] I have come out from them astonished at this feature.”39 Added Charlevoix on this same matter:

  It must be acknowledged, that proceedings are carried on in these assemblies with a wisdom and a coolness, and a knowledge of affairs, and I may add generally with a probity, which would have done honour to the areopagus of Athens, or to the Senate of Rome, in the most glorious days of those republics: the reason of this is, that nothing is resolved upon with precipitation; and that those violent passions, which have so much disgraced the politics even of Christians, have never prevailed amongst the Indians over the public good.40

  Similar observations were made of other Indian societies up and down the eastern seaboard.41 In addition, most natives of this region, stretching from the densely settled southern shores of the Great Lakes (with a pre-Columbian population that has been estimated at close to 4,000,000) across to northern Maine on down to the Tidewater area of Virginia and over to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, displayed to their neighbors, and to strangers as well, a remarkable ethic of generosity. As the Jesuit Joseph Francois Lafitau, who lived among the Indians for six years, observed: “If a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help at their own expense so humanely and with such greatness of soul. In Europe we should find few [people] disposed, in like cases, to a liberality so noble and magnificent.”42

  As with our earlier enumerations and comments on native peoples across the length and breadth of the continent, these examples of eastern indigenous cultures are only superficial and suggestive—touching here on aspects of the political realm, there on intimate life, and elsewhere on material achievement, in an effort to point a few small spotlights into corners that conventionally are ignored by historians of America’s past. Untold hundreds of other culturally and politically independent Indian nations and tribes that we have not even tried to survey filled the valleys and plains and woodlands and deserts and coastlines of what are now Canada and the United States. So many more, in fact, that to name the relative few that we have, this tiny percentage of the whole, risks minimizing rather than illustrating their numbers. Perhaps the best way to convey some sense of these multitudes and varieties of culture is simply to note that a recent listing of the extant Indian peoples of North America produced a compilation of nearly 800 separate nations—about half of which are formally recognized by the United States as semi-sovereign political entities—but then cautioned that the list “is not exhaustive with regard to their subdivisions or alternate names. There are thousands more of both.”43

  In the same way that in the villages and towns and nations of other continents—of Asia and Africa and Europe—the social structures and political networks and resource production systems of different communities varied greatly from place to place and from time to time, so too was there astounding diversity and multiformity among North America’s aboriginal peoples. As on those other continents, both in the past and in the present, some communities were small, isolated, provincial, and poor, barely scraping subsistence from the soil. Others were huge urban and commercial centers where large numbers of people, entirely freed from the necessity of subsistence work, carried out other tasks of artistry, engineering, construction, religion, and trade. And, between these extremes, there was a rich variety of cultural organization, a great diversity of social design. But in all these communities, regardless of size or organizational complexity, human beings lived out the joys and sorrows, the mischief, the humor, the high seriousness and tragedy, the loves, fears, hatreds, jealousies, kindnesses, and possessed all the other passions and concerns, weaknesses and strengths, that human flesh throughout the world is heir to.

  Over time (again as in the histories of the other continents), cultures and empires in North America rose and fell, only to be replaced by other peoples whose material and political successes also waxed and waned while the long centuries and millennia inexorably unfolded. Not all the cultures surveyed in the preceding pages were contemporaneous with one another; certain of them ascended or declined centuries apart. Some of the societies that we have mentioned here, and some that went unmentioned, have long since disappeared almost without a trace. Others continue on. Some have had their remains so badly plundered that virtually nothing of them any longer exists—such as the once-massive Spiro Mound, a monument of an eastern Oklahoma people, that was looted of its treasures in the 1930s by the farmer who owned the land on which it stood. Literally tons of shell, pearl, and other precious objects were hauled out in wheelbarrows and sold by the side of the road. And then, for good measure, once the mound was emptied, the farmer had it dynamited into rubble.44

  In contrast, other large communities have left immense and permanent reminders of their past glories—such as the huge earthen mound at Cahokia, Illinois. At the center of a large community that sprawled down the banks of the Illinois River for a distance as great as that from one end of San Francisco to the other today, with houses spread out over more than 2000 acres of land, stood a gigantic man-made structure extending ten stories into the air and containing 22,000,000 cubic feet of earth. At its base this monument, which was larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, covered 16 acres of land. About 120 other temple and burial mounds rose up in and around Cahokia which acted as the urban core for more than fifty surrounding towns and villages in the Mississippi Valley, and which by itself probably had a population of well over 40,000 people. In size and social complexity Cahokia has been compared favorably with some of the more advanced Maya city-states of ancient Mesoamerica.45 And it was fully flourishing almost 2000 years ago.

  These, then, are just some examples of the great multitudes of permanently settled societies that constituted what commonly and incorrectly are thought of today as the small and wandering bands of nomads who inhabited North America’s “virgin land” before it was discovered by Europeans. In fact, quite to the contrary of that popular image, as the eminent geographer Carl O. Sauer once pointed out:

  For the most part, the geographic limits of agriculture have not been greatly advanced by the coming of the white man. In many places we have not passed the limits of Indian farming at all. . . . In general, it may be said that the plant domesticates of the New World far exceeded in range and efficiency the crops that were
available to Europeans at the time of the discovery of the New World. . . . The ancient Indian plant breeders had done their work well. In the genial climates, there was an excellent, high yielding plant for every need of food, drink, seasoning, or fiber. On the climatic extremes of cold and drought, there still were a remarkable number of plant inventions that stretched the limits of agriculture about as far as plant growth permitted. One needs only to dip into the accounts of the early explorers and colonists, especially Spanish, to know the amazement with which the Europeans learned the quality and variety of crop plants of Indian husbandry.46

  Still, wildly inaccurate though the popular historical perception of Indian America as an underpopulated virgin land clearly is, on one level—a comparative level—the myth does contain at least a shred of truth. For despite the large, prolific, sophisticated, permanently settled, and culturally varied populations of people who inhabited the Americas north of Mexico prior to the coming of Columbus, their numbers probably did not constitute more than 10 to 15 percent of the entire population of the Western Hemisphere at that time.

  II

  The number of people living north of Mexico in 1492 is now generally estimated to have been somewhere between what one scholar describes as “a conservative total” of more than 7,000,000 and another’s calculation of about 18,000,000.47 These figures are ten to twenty times higher than the estimates of scholars half a century ago, but even the largest of them is dwarfed by the population of central Mexico alone on the eve of European contact. As noted earlier, probably about 25,000,000 people, or about seven times the number living in all of England, were residing in and around the great Valley of Mexico at the time of Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

  But the Aztec empire, with its astonishing white city of Tenochtitlán, was at the end of the fifteenth century only the most recent in a long line of magnificent and highly complex cultures that had evolved in Mesoamerica—where more than 200 separate languages once were spoken—over the course of nearly three thousand years.

  Some time around 2500 B.C. villages were being established in the Valley of Oaxaca, each of them containing probably no more than a dozen or so houses surrounding a plaza that served as the community’s ceremonial center. After about 1000 years of increasing sophistication in the techniques of growing and storing foodstuffs, by 1500 B.C., around the time of Amenhotep I in Egypt and a thousand years before the birth of Pericles in Athens, these people had begun to merge into the Olmec Empire that was then forming in the lowlands off the southernmost point of the Gulf coast in Mexico. Very little detail is known about Olmec culture or social structure, nor about everyday life in the other complex societies that had begun to emerge in northwest Central America at an even earlier time. But there is no doubt that in both regions, between 1500 B.C. and 2000 B.C., there existed civilizations that provided rich cultural lives for their inhabitants and that produced exquisite works of art.48

  The core of the Olmec population was situated in a river-laced crescent of land that stretched out across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec on Mexico’s southern Gulf coast. At first glance this appears to be an inhospitable area for the founding of a major population center and civilization, but periodic flooding of the region’s rivers created a marshy environment and the richest agricultural lands in Mexico—land that often has been compared to the Nile delta in Egypt. From about 1200 B.C. to 900 B.C. the center of Olmec culture was located in what is now known as San Lorenzo, after which it was moved to La Venta. Here, in the symbolic shadow of their Great Pyramid—about 3,500,000 cubic feet in volume, a construction project that is estimated to have taken the equivalent of more than 2000 worker-years to complete—the Olmecs farmed extensively, worshiped their gods, enjoyed athletic contests involving ball games and other sports, and produced art works ranging from tiny, meticulously carved, jade figurines to enormous basalt sculpted heads more than ten feet tall.

  Neither the jade nor the basalt used for these carvings was indigenous to the areas immediately surrounding either of the Olmec capitals. The jade apparently was brought in, along with other items, through a complicated trade network that spread out across the region at least as far as Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The basalt, on the other hand, was available from quarries in the Tuxtla Mountains, a little more than fifty miles away. From here in the mountains, writes archaeologist Michael Coe, in all probability the stones designated to become the huge carvings “were dragged down to navigable streams and loaded on great balsa rafts, then floated first down to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Coatzacoalcos River, from whence they would have to be dragged, probably with rollers, up the San Lorenzo plateau.” Coe observes that “the amount of labor which must have been involved staggers the imagination,” as indeed it does, considering that the finished sculptures formed from these enormous boulders themselves often weighed in excess of twenty tons.49

  Before the dawn of the West’s Christian era another great city was forming well north of the Olmec region and to the east of the Lake of the Moon—Teotihuacan. Built atop an enormous underground lava tube that the people of the area had expanded into a giant cave with stairways and large multi-chambered rooms of worship, this metropolis reached its pinnacle by the end of the second century A.D., about the time that, half a world away in each direction, the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty in China were teetering on the brink of ultimate collapse. Teotihuacan was divided into quarters, bisected from north to south and east to west by two wide, four-mile long boulevards. Constructed around a nine-square-mile urban core of almost wall-to-wall buildings made from white stucco that was brightly painted with religious and mythological motifs, the overall alignment of the city—with everything consistently oriented to 15 degrees 25 minutes east of true north—evidently had religio-astronomical meaning that has yet to be deciphered.50 At its peak, the city and its surroundings probably contained a population of about a quarter of a million people, making it at the time one of the largest cities in the world. The density of population in the city itself far exceeded that of all but the very largest American metropolises today.

  Teotihuacan too had its great pyramids—the huge, twenty-story-high Pyramid of the Sun and slightly smaller Pyramid of the Moon. In addition, the city contained numerous magnificent palace compounds. Typical of these was the Palace of Xolalpan, with 45 large rooms and seven forecourts arranged around a sunken central courtyard that was open to the sky. Smaller sunken courts existed in many of the surrounding rooms as well, with light and air admitted through openings in the high column-supported ceilings, a design reminiscent of Roman atria.51 Those not fortunate enough to live in one of Teotihuacan’s palaces apparently lived in large apartment complexes, such as one that has been unearthed in the ruins on the eastern side of the city, containing at least 175 rooms, five courtyards, and more than twenty atria-like forecourts. So splendid and influential was the architecture and artwork of this immense urban center that a smaller, contemporary reproduction of it, a town that Michael Coe says is “in all respects a miniature copy of Teotihuacan,” has been found in the highlands of Guatemala—650 miles away.52

  Many other cultures were flourishing in Mesoamerica while Teotihuacan was in its ascendancy, some in areas of lush farming potential, others in regions where complex irrigation techniques were devised to coax life from agriculturally marginal land. The Zapotec civilization in a previously almost uninhabited part of the Valley of Oaxaca is a prime example of this latter situation. And in the heart of Zapotec country another major city emerged—Monte Albán—an urban center that may have been unique in all the world as a politically neutral capital (a so-called disembedded capital) for a confederation of semi-independent and historically adversarial political states.53 Politically neutral or not, however, Monte Albán clearly was an important ceremonial community, spread out over fifteen square miles of land, and containing public plazas, temple platforms, and public buildings, including the Palace of Los Danzantes, constructed around thre
e towering central pyramids.

  The city’s many residents, for the most part, lived in homes built on more than 2000 terraces that they had carved into the hillsides from which Monte Albán later took its European name. Monte Albán’s population usually is estimated to have been somewhat in excess of 30,000 (about what New York City’s population was at the beginning of the nineteenth century), but a recent analysis of the agricultural potential of adjacent farmland has raised some questions about that number that have yet to be addressed: it shows the 30,000 figure to be less than 10 percent of the population that could have been supported by available foodstuffs.54

  All of this, and much more, predates by centuries the rise of classic Maya civilization during the time of what traditionally has been known in Europe as the Dark Ages. Indeed, with every passing year new discoveries are made suggesting that we have hardly even begun to recognize or understand the rich cultural intricacies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican life. A recent example was the discovery in 1987 of a huge, four-ton basalt monument in a riverbed near the tiny Mexican village of La Mojarra. What made this find so confounding was that the monument is covered with a finely carved inscription of more than 500 hieroglyphic characters, surrounding an elaborate etching of a king—hieroglyphics of a type no modern scholar had ever seen, and dating back almost two centuries before the earliest previously known script in the Americas, that of the Maya. It has long been recognized that several less complex writing traditions existed in Mesoamerica as early as 700 B.C. (and simpler Olmec symbolic motifs date back to 1000 B.C. and earlier), but the monument found in La Mojarra is a complete writing system as sophisticated as that of the Maya, yet so different that epigraphers, who study and analyze hieroglyphics, don’t know where to begin in trying to decipher it.