American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Arawak is the general, post-Columbian name given to various peoples who made a long, slow series of migrations from the coast of Venezuela to Trinidad, then across open ocean perhaps first to Tobago, then Grenada, and on up the chain of islands that constitute the Antilles—St. Vincent, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Anguilla, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba—then finally off to the Bahamas, leaving behind at each stop populations that grew and flourished and evolved culturally in their own distinctive ways. To use a comparison once made by Irving Rouse, the people of these islands who came to be known as Arawaks are analogous to those, in another part of the world, who came to be known as English: “The present inhabitants of southern Great Britain call themselves ‘English,’ and recognize that their ethnic group, the English people, is the product of a series of migrations from the continent of Europe into the British Isles, beginning with various prehistoric peoples and continuing with the Celts, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans of protohistoric time.”90

  Similarly, Arawak (sometimes “Taino,” but that is a misnomer, as it properly applies only to a particular social and cultural group) is the name now given to the melange of peoples who, over the course of many centuries, carried out those migrations across the Caribbean, probably terminating with the Saladoid people sometime around two thousand years ago. By the time of their encounter with Columbus and his crews, the islands had come to be governed by chiefs or caciques (there were at least five paramount chiefdoms on Hispaniola alone, and others throughout the region) and the people lived in numerous densely populated villages both inland and along all the coasts. The houses in most of these villages were similar to those described by the Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas:

  The inhabitants of this island . . . and elsewhere built their houses of wood and thatch in the form of a bell. These were very high and roomy so that in each there might be ten or more households. . . . On the inside designs and symbols and patterns like paintings were fashioned by using wood and bark that had been dyed black along with other wood peeled so as to stay white, thus appearing as though made of some other attractive painted stuff. Others they adorned with very white stripped reeds that are a kind of thin and delicate cane. Of these they made graceful figures and designs that gave the interior of the houses the appearance of having been painted. On the outside the houses were covered with a fine and sweet-smelling grass.91

  These large buildings conventionally were arranged to face the great house that was inhabited by the local cacique, and all of them in turn faced an open field or court where dances and ball games and other festivities and ceremonies were held. In larger communities, several such fields were placed at strategic locations among the residential compounds.

  The people of these climate-blessed islands supported themselves with a highly developed level of agriculture—especially on Cuba and Hispaniola, which are among the largest islands on earth; Cuba, after all, is larger than South Korea (which today contains more than 42,000,000 people) and Hispaniola is nearly twice the size of Switzerland. In the infrequent areas where agricultural engineering was necessary, the people of the Indies created irrigation systems that were equal in sophistication to those existing in sixteenth-century Spain.92 Their staple food was cassava bread, made from the manioc plant yuca, which they cultivated in great abundance. But also, through so many long generations in the same benign tropical environment, the Arawaks had devised an array of unique methods for more than satisfying their subsistence needs—such as the following technique which they used to catch green sea turtles weighing hundreds of pounds, large fish, and other marine life, including manatees:

  Noting that the remora or suckerfish, Echeneis naucrates, attached itself to the body of a shark or other larger fish by means of a suction disc in its head, the Arawaks caught, fed, and tamed the remora, training it to tolerate a light cord fastened to its tail and gill frame. When a turtle was sighted the remora was released. Immediately it swam to the turtle, attaching its suction disc to the under side of the carapace. The canoe followed the turtle, the Arawak angler holding a firm line on the remora which, in turn, held tightly to its quarry until the turtle could be gaffed or tied to the cauoe.93

  In addition to this technique, smaller fish were harvested by the use of plant derivatives that stupefied them, allowing the natives simply to scoop up large numbers as though gathering plants in a field. Water birds were taken by floating on the water’s surface large calabashes which concealed swimmers who would seize individual birds, one at a time, without disturbing the larger flock. And large aquaculture ponds were created and walled in to maintain and actually cultivate enormous stocks of fish and turtles for human consumption. A single one of these numerous reed marine corrals held as many as 1000 large sea turtles. This yielded a quantity of meat equal to that of 100 head of cattle, and a supply that was rapidly replenished: a fertile female turtle would lay about 500 eggs each season. Still, the Arawaks were careful not to disturb the natural balance of these and other creatures; the evidence for this is that for millennia they sustained in perpetuity their long-term supply of such natural foodstuffs. It was only after the coming of the Spanish—and, in particular, their release of dogs and pigs that turned feral and ran wild—that the wildlife ecology of the islands found itself in serious trouble.94

  In sum, as Caribbean expert Carl Sauer once put it, “the tropical idyll of the accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true” regarding the Arawak. “The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dextrous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances, and music. They lived in peace and amity.”95

  III

  Much the same thing that Sauer says about the Arawak can be said for many of the other peoples we have surveyed here, and for countless others we had neither the time nor the space to mention. Certainly not all of them, however. And again, this is what would be expected on any large body of land containing such remarkable geographic and cultural diversity. Some of the native peoples of the Americas did indeed suffer from want, at least from time to time, and some lived hard and difficult lives. Some had little time or talent for great art or architecture, or for elaborate games or music or dance. Others lived in societies that, far from being characterized by peace and amity, frequently were at odds with their neighbors.

  There is no benefit to be gained from efforts to counter the anti-Indian propaganda that dominates our textbooks with pro-Indian propaganda of equally dubious veracity. For the very plain fact is that the many tens of millions of people who lived in the Americas prior to 1492 were human—neither subhuman, nor superhuman—just human. Some of the social practices of selected groups of them we would find abhorrent to our cultural tastes and attitudes at present, in the same way that we would find loathsome certain social practices of earlier European and Asian cultures. Thus, for example, few of us today would countenance the practice of human sacrifice as a way of propitiating an angry god, as was done by a few of the highest urban cultures in Mesoamerica during the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century. However, neither would many of us support the grisly torture and killing of thousands of heretics or the burning of tens of thousands of men and women as witches, in a similar effort to mollify a jealous deity, as was being done in Europe, with theocratic approval, at precisely the same time that the Aztecs were sacrificing enemy warriors.

  Conversely, other social practices of certain native Americans in the pre-Columbian era—from methods of child rearing and codes of friendship and loyalty, to worshiping and caring for the natural environment—appear far more enlightened than do many of the dominant ideas that we ourselves live with today. (Even in the sixteenth century the conquering Spanish wrote “with undisguised admiration” of Aztec childrearing customs, notes his
torian J.H. Elliott. “Nothing has impressed me more,” commented the Jesuit Jose de Acosta, “or seemed to me more worthy of praise and remembrance, than the care and order shown by the Mexicans in the upbringing of their children.”)96 If these attitudes and behaviors varied in emphasis from one native group to another, one characteristic of America’s indigenous peoples that does seem almost universal, transcending the great diversity of other cultural traits, was an extraordinary capacity for hospitality. We have noted this in our discussion of the Iroquois and the Indians of California, but in fact, the native peoples’ affectionate and fearless cordiality in greeting strangers was mentioned by almost all the earliest European explorers, from Vespucci in South America in 1502, where the Indians “swam out to receive us . . . with as much confidence as if we had been friends for years,” to Carrier in Canada in 1535, where the Indians “as freely and familiarly came to our boats without any fear, as if we had ever been brought up together.”97

  And these were more than ceremonial, more than passing generosities. Indeed, without the assistance of the Indians in everything from donated food supplies to instruction in the ways of hunting and fishing and farming, the earliest European settlements, particularly in North America, could not have taken root. As Edmund S. Morgan has shown, with regard to Roanoke in the 1580s:

  Wingina [the local chief] welcomed the visitors, and the Indians gave freely of their supplies to the English, who had lost most of their own when the Tyger [their ship] grounded. By the time the colonists were settled, it was too late to plant corn, and they seem to have been helpless when it came to living off the land. They did not know the herbs and roots and berries of the country. They could not or would not catch fish in any quantity, because they did not know how to make weirs. And when the Indians showed them, they were slow learners: they were unable even to repair those that the Indians made for them. Nor did they show any disposition for agriculture. Hariot admired the yields that the Indians got in growing maize; but the English, for lack of seed, lack of skill, or lack of will, grew nothing for themselves, even when the new planting season came round again. Superior English technology appeared, for the moment at least, to be no technology at all, as far as food production was concerned. 98

  Indeed, Morgan later notes, “the Indians . . . could have done the English in simply by deserting them.”99 They did not desert them, however, and in that act they sealed their fate. The same was true throughout the Americas: the cultural traits and the material achievements of the native people were turned against them once the European invasion began. Indian openness and generosity were met with European stealth and greed. Ritualized Indian warfare, in which few people died in battle, was met with the European belief in devastating holy war. Vast stores of grain and other food supplies that Indian peoples had lain aside became the fuel that drove the Europeans forward. And in that drive they traveled quickly, as they could not otherwise have done, on native trails and roadways from the northeast and northwest coasts to the dizzying heights of the Andes in Peru.

  Some who have written on these matters—such as one historian who recently has shown how the Spanish conquest of Mexico was literally fed by the agricultural abundance that the Aztecs had created—have commented on the irony of native achievement being turned against itself.100 Perhaps the greatest and most tragic irony of all, however, was that the extraordinary good health of the native people throughout the Americas prior to the coming of the Europeans would become a key ingredient in their disastrous undoing. For in their tens of thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the earth’s human populations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of disease that had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to the Middle East, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medieval Paris.

  This is not to say that there were no diseases in the pre-Columbian Americas. There were, and people died from them. But the great plagues that arose in the Old World and that brought entire Asian, African, and European societies to their knees—smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and more—never emerged on their own among the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples and did not spread to them across the oceans’ barriers until 1492. Thus, when smallpox was introduced among Cree Indians in Canada as late as the eighteenth century, one native witnessing the horrifying epidemic that was destroying his people exclaimed that “we had no belief that one man could give it to another, any more than a wounded man could give his wound to another.”101 Such devastating contagion was simply unknown in the histories of the Cree or other indigenous peoples of the Americas.

  Debate continues as to the existence or extent of tuberculosis and syphilis among native peoples in the pre-Columbian era, with most recent research suggesting that at least some sort of “tuberculosis-like pathology” was present in some parts of the New World prior to 1492, though of a type not associated with pulmonary disease, as well as a relatively benign nonvenereal (that is, not sexually transmitted) treponemal infection that was related to syphilis.102 However, there is no evidence that either disease (whatever it may have been) was at all widespread in either North or South America. And the most detailed recent studies of large-scale sedentary societies in the Americas—where such diseases would have taken hold if they were to do so anywhere—have found no evidence of either tuberculosis or syphilis (or anything like them) as causing significant damage prior to European contact.103 Similarly, ancient small-scale migratory societies, even in such harsh environments as those of the frigid northwestern plains, produced people who, in the words of the most recent and extensive study of the subject, “appear to have lived very long lives without significant infectious conditions, or even much serious injury.”104 Moreover, the limited range of potentially serious diseases that did exist among the Americas’ indigenous peoples (primarily gastrointestinal disease and various minor infections) had long since been mitigated by millennia of exposure to them, as well as by generally beneficent living environments and more than adequate nutrition.105

  All that was to change, however, with shocking and deadly suddenness, once those first three Spanish ships bobbed into view on the rim of the Caribbean horizon. For it was then only a matter of months before there would begin the worst series of human disease disasters, combined with the most extensive and most violent programs of human eradication, that this world has ever seen.

  NATIVE PEOPLES

  For 40,000 years, hundreds of millions of the Americas’ native peoples have built their homes and their societies on a land mass equal to one-fourth of the earth’s ground surface. Consistent with the great diversity of their natural environments, some of these original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere lived in relatively small communities that touched only lightly on the land, while others resided in cities that were among the largest and most sophisticated to be found anywhere in the world. So numerous, varied, ancient, and far-flung were these peoples that at one time they spoke as many as two thousand distinct and mutually unintelligible languages.

  Only a few of the societies that once existed in the New World are illustrated on the following pages. Thousands of others filled North and South and Central America’s 16,000,000 square miles of land, most of them as distinctive and different from one another as were the peoples represented here. By the end of the nineteenth century, photographers had become interested in preserving images of what they erroneously thought were the soon-to-be-extinct native peoples of North America. The photographs reproduced at the end of this section are from that era.

  The drawings of Maya cities were done by Tatiana Proskouriakoff in collaboration with archaeologists who excavated the sites. They are reprinted here with the permission of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Theodor de Bry’s engravings of Florida’s and Virginia’s native peoples, based on first-hand paintings by Jacques Le Moyne and John White, appeared in de Bry’s multi-volume Great an
d Small Voyages (1590–1634), from which the illustrations and quoted portions of captions printed here are taken. The photographs following the de Bry illustrations are all from the Smithsonian Institution, with the exception of the last one, which is from the Library of Congress.

  The Acropolis at Copán, Honduras. Constructed at a bend of the Copán River, the city’s enormous rectangular plazas were surrounded by pyramids with steps on which the populace sat in review of ceremonies and to witness athletic events. Although the countryside outside Copán was thick with other towns and villages, the city contained no military fortifications and its elaborate art and architecture carried no hint of martial imagery.

  Chichén Itzá, Yucatán: View from the North. A paved boulevard led from the sacred well of the city in the north (lower left of the drawing) to the four-sided, eight-story-high Temple of Kukulcan in the center. To the east, the Group of the Thousand Columns, made up of plazas and temples and colonnades, once was a busy marketplace. To the west lay a huge ballcourt and athletic compound.

  Temple Group at Uaxactún, Guatemala. The temple clusters of this city were built on eight hilltops, which were leveled in some places and fortified in others to support large monuments and plazas. Paved roadways, raised to the heights of the hilltops, connected the temple groups, while residential areas and minor courts and plazas were placed on adjacent hillsides and low ground.

  The Patio of the Mercado, Chichén Itzá. The Mercado was the marketplace of the city, and this small patio, surrounding a recessed interior court, was at the rear of one of the Mercado’s main buildings. Masonry walls and plaster-covered columns, set into a plaster-and-flagstone floor, supported wooden rafters and a steeply pitched roof, designed to resist the high winds and heavy rains of the region.