by Paul Schrag
Despite the death and devastation, Tuscaloosa escaped. Riding deep into unknown lands, De Soto and his men marched to capture him. The giant chief disappeared, and the pursuing Spaniards found only abandoned cities with massive mounds. These staggering mounds remain standing throughout the South, especially in the Mississippi Valley.
Professor Robert Silverberg, who has written extensively about Native American history, says:
The Mississippi mound builders seemed to already have been declining when the Spaniards came around. The Native Americans of the Southeast slid into a less ambitious way of life. Huge mounds were no longer built, around the old mounds the familiar festivals and rituals continued, but hollowly, until their meaning was forgotten and the villagers no longer knew that it was their own great-great-grandfathers who had built the mounds. All of the Native Americans of the Temple Mound regions had only faint and foggy notions of their own history.2
Silverberg suggested that the mounds stretched so far back into antiquity that they were not built by Native Americans.
From Oklahoma to northern Georgia, explorations of these mounds have unearthed a variety of items, ranging from simple shells, ceramics, and pipestones to extravagant ceremonial copper axes. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of mounds were built in the Mississippi Delta. Radiocarbon dating has shown that the decline in the Mound Builders population began more than a century before Europeans arrived in the region. The decline and desertion of these people is still a mystery.
During the time of the conquistadors, there was only one group of southeastern Native Americans who appeared to be able to trace their heritage back far enough to include the Mound Builders. These people were the Natchez, who, along with the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, were the primary travelers of the natural trail—which they shared with migrating bison, deer, and other animals—that later became the route that Lewis and Clark made famous. Their empire stretched from the delta to the swamps of Louisiana. It’s a stretch of land that Meriwether Lewis would become all too familiar with. We know from the writings of French Jesuit Pierre Charlevoix that the Natchez rebelled unsuccessfully against the French in 1729.
The few survivors became scattered among other southeastern tribes and were looked upon as wise and gifted with mystic power. As did the ancient sages of the other tribes, the Natchez had legendary tales of invaders from a region on the other side of the world. The Natchez described the mounds as the work of earlier people.
As the early exploration of America continued, there seemed to emerge mounting evidence of a civilization in the Americas that preceded the natives encountered by early explorers. The explanation for oddities such as a race of giants would require a reversal of a long-established intellectual and religious dogma. It seemed less of a task to continue to accept the belief that the Native Americans discovered by Christopher Columbus were the original mound builders. In 1881 the Smithsonian began to actively promote this idea, which today has found its way into the federal government’s Department of Education as part of the elementary school curriculum. As a result the Smithsonian has been charged with effectively withholding information that supports the theoretical framework known as cultural diffusionism, which, as we have seen in chapter 1, is the simple and logical belief that throughout history people interacted via worldwide travels and trade.
While the Smithsonian may have spent the better part of a century manipulating research and selectively sequestering native artifacts to support the theory that the Mississippi Mound Builders were an otherwise unremarkable tribe, growing evidence points to the contrary.
During the 1800s the contents of many mounds were revealed to include the remains of huge men with estimated heights of seven or eight feet, buried in full copper armor with swords and axes. As settlers moved west, they came across and reported countless mounds. At the time it was not unusual to find stories or articles in local newspapers about discoveries of the remains of perfectly proportioned giants. As land was cleared for settlement and agriculture, some suggested that these mounds and their amazing contents were the products of ancient cultures that predated known native tribes. Tribes that greeted early pioneers told of a long-extinct race of giants.
Ohio historian Ross Hamilton explains:
The first hint we had about the possible existence of an actual race of tall, strong, and intellectually sophisticated people, was in researching Old Township and county records. Many of these were quoting from old diaries and letters that were combined, for posterity, in the 1800s from diaries going back to the 1700s. Some of these old county and regional history books contain real gems, because the people were not subjected to a rigid indoctrination about evolution and were astonished about what they found and honestly reported it.3
How did these bits of knowledge alluding to the existence of prehistoric races in the Americas get excluded from public education? Consider that prior to the establishment of the federal Department of Education, the Smithsonian Institution was looked upon as the guardian of the physical facts that have shaped our culture—the culture of a New World. At the time, the Smithsonian and its political and scientific endeavors were an outgrowth of the federal politics of the early 1800s, most notably struggles to deal with the so-called Indian problem, and struggles to justify the social costs of westward expansion. (The politics of the early 1800s, and the deadly consequences for Meriwether Lewis, are explained more fully in chapters 9 and 10.)
Government officials at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 considered the native occupation of the American continent to be the chief impediment to the creation of the New World. And while Thomas Jefferson is well known for being fascinated by and supportive of the so-called Indians, he also recognized that they represented a threat to westward expansion.
While Lewis and Clark were gathering information about native peoples and exploring potential trade routes west, Jefferson was developing a plan to get the natives out of the way—in what would later become a government policy known as Indian Removal.
The first component of his plan involved encouraging natives to adopt agricultural practices, which would reduce their territorial hunting areas. He hoped then that government agents would be able to convince natives to sell their surplus land.
The second component was an amplification of the first and involved encouraging natives to adopt a European-style agricultural economy in hopes that they would become dependent on trade with European settlers. That dependence, in turn, could be used as leverage against natives who resisted selling their land.
The third component of his plan involved establishing government trading posts near native settlements. His hope, in this case, was that natives could be fooled into spending themselves into debt. That debt, in turn, would be forgiven in exchange for tribal lands, which would be appropriated by the federal government.
Many tribes, including members of the Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee tribes, willfully adopted European culture. They assimilated thoroughly, building schools and churches and creating government structures that resembled those of the United States of America. But Jefferson and agents of the American government met with increasing resistance from other tribes.
In 1803—the same year that the Louisiana Purchase was announced, and the same year that Lewis was chosen as the leader of the westward expedition—Jefferson sent a letter to the then governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, outlining his plan for removing the remaining resistant natives.
To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or
remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.4
Thomas Jefferson envisioned Louisiana Territory as a core component of his plans to remove natives from their lands.
This letter outlines that last part of Jefferson’s grand design, which included a notion that would become known as land exchange; this involved trading tribal land in the eastern portion of the continent for land west of the Mississippi—what was then known as the Louisiana Territory (soon to become the Louisiana Purchase). Later, this practice would become the conceptual foundation for the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Jefferson declared his intentions to use the Louisiana Territory as a dumping ground for displaced natives clearly in a letter to John C. Breckinridge during the summer of 1803.
The best use we can make of the country for some time, will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Missipi, in exchange for their present country, and open land offices in the last, & thus make this acquisition the means of filling up the Eastern side, instead of drawing off its population.5
Although Jefferson also had been a vocal proponent of natives’ nobility, intelligence, and equality for decades, his philosophical perspectives were seemingly trumped by his political ambitions and pervasive Eurocentric myopia. It was those same political ambitions that encouraged Jefferson to send Lewis west, both as an emissary and as a scout. It also follows that Lewis’s appointment as governor of the Louisiana Territory was, at least in part, granted because Lewis had spent years studying and negotiating with native tribes. He was well suited for overseeing the task of relocating tribes to their new “homes” in Louisiana. As a seasoned naturalist, he also was well suited for overseeing the various tribes’ training in European-style agricultural practices.
Jefferson’s move to “civilize” the natives out of their land, and some of the scientific theories that he ascribed to, would later evolve into a doctrine known as Progressive Social Evolutionary Theory, taken up by one John Wesley Powell, who would come to exert great influence over United States public policy as head of several government agencies.
Powell began to exert real influence beginning in 1879, when he was named director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, which he helped create.
Like Jefferson and other “enlightened” predecessors, Powell held seemingly contradictory beliefs about the native peoples of America. Powell had been an ardent defender of native peoples, lived and worked among them, and worked tirelessly to preserve their culture and lands. It was this pursuit that led Powell to lobby Congress to change the way federal agencies dealt with land acquisition. In the process, he laid the groundwork for the creation of the United States Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. This monumental task consolidated a number of government agencies that were previously under control of the United States Department of the Interior. It also created a phenomenal political power base for Powell and his associates in the scientific community.
By 1879 work begun by Jefferson and Lewis, including the study of native cultures and efforts to assimilate seemingly beloved natives into Euro-American culture, had become an official government mandate. Powell was now at the helm of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and also strongly allied with the National Academy of Sciences. He had grown from being a man in the field to being a member of the establishment, and given his new status, he went along with the mandate.
Like Jefferson, Powell made countless moral concessions in order to be able to continue his work. Those concessions included modifying, or perhaps ultimately coming clean about, his philosophical and scientific prejudices. Put simply, Powell was, at heart, and at the end of the day, a racist; he believed that natives, while fascinating in their own right, were inherently inferior to Europeans. This belief, championed by the emerging science dubbed ethnology, and later anthropology, became a pseudoscientific and philosophical justification for the decimation of native tribes, the plundering of natural resources, and the ever-growing list of horrific consequences of westward expansion begun by Jefferson and Lewis.
Lee Baker, professor of cultural anthropology and African American studies at Duke University, summarizes:
Industrializing America . . . needed to explain the calamities created by unbridled westward, overseas, and industrial expansion. Although expansion created wealth and prosperity for some, it contributed to conditions that fostered rampant child labor, infectious disease, and desperate poverty. As well, this period saw a sharp increase in lynchings and the decimation of Native American lives and land. The daily experience of squalid conditions and sheer terror made many Americans realize the contradictions between industrial capitalism and the democratic ideals of equality, freedom, and justice for all. Legislators, university boards, and magazine moguls found it useful to explain this ideological crisis in terms of a natural hierarchy of class and race caused by a struggle for existence wherein the fittest individuals or races advanced while the inferior became eclipsed.
Professional anthropology emerged in the midst of this crisis, and the people who used anthropology to justify racism, in turn, provided the institutional foundations for the field. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, college departments, professional organizations, and specialized journals were established for anthropology. The study of “primitive races of mankind” became comparable to geology and physics. These institutional apparatuses, along with powerful representatives in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), prestigious universities, and the Smithsonian Institution, gave anthropology its academic credentials as a discipline in the United States. The budding discipline gained power and prestige because ethnologists articulated theory and research that resonated with the dominant discourse on race.6
In an article written for American Anthropologist in 1888, titled “From Barbarism to Civilization,” Powell made his views about natives and the so-called Indian Problem very clear: “In setting forth the evolution of barbarism to civilization, it becomes necessary to confine the exposition . . . to one great stock of people—the Aryan Race.”7
This view—that native and African American races were inherently inferior to Europeans—became institutionalized thanks to Powell and powerful allies of his, including Powell’s mentor, ethnologist, lawyer, senator, and railroad baron Lewis Henry Morgan; finance lord and museum magnate George Foster Peabody; publisher, AAAS president, and key developer of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History Frederic Ward Putnam; and influential educator Nathaniel Shaler, who worked tirelessly to produce scientific rationale for segregation and mistreatment of African Americans.
The views created by these so-called vanguards of cultural study persist, and only now have begun to unravel in the face of modern inquiry. In fact, during the past several decades, archaeological and ethnic studies have eroded, and in some cases obliterated, the notion that natives of the American continents were simple folk who lived in perfect harmony with the land around them. Authors such as Jared Diamond and Charles Mann, for example, have collected and presented evidence that natives molded and shaped the land, created technologies and systems of government, institutions, advanced agricultural practices, public sanitation, plumbing and other artifacts previously believed to be the sole province of non-natives.
In his book 1491: New Revelations
of the Americas Before Columbus, Mann notes that there is a
cohort of scholars that in recent years has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation that continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views . . . would be to say that . . . this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind . . . some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness.8
Mann quotes the Smithsonian Institution’s Betty J. Meggers in relating a conversation about the Beni, a remote province in Bolivia that is host to a unique matrix of forest islands and mounds linked by causeways built by what many scholars believe to have been a vast, technologically advanced culture that inhabited the region.
“I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in Beni,” Meggers once told Mann. “Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.”9
From this reasoning stems a view that Mann dubs “Holmberg’s Mistake,” after Allan R. Holmberg, a young doctoral student who studied the best-known of the Beni-region natives, the Siriono, during the early 1940s.
The Siriono, Holmberg wrote in an account of his studies titled Nomads of the Longbow, were “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.” They were poor and impoverished, lived without clothes, had no domestic animals, no musical instruments, no art or design, and no discernable religion. They were, from Holmberg’s perspective, living evidence of the failure of aboriginal culture to thrive and a justification of so-called civilized European influence. They were, he wrote, the “quintessence” of “man in the raw state of nature.”10 Holmberg also believed that this was the state the Siriono lived in for thousands of years. That is, until they encountered Spanish explorers and stepped into the river of modern history.