The reasons why western Canada’s frontier history is so different from that of Hispanic northern Mexico and the American West are seldom addressed by historians. Extensive trade for furs preceded actual settlement on both frontiers, including trade in those inflammatory commodities, alcohol and guns.25 Even if the Hudson’s Bay Company’s methods, calculated to create dependency, were less provocative than those of fly-by-night entrepreneurs in the south, it lost its trade monopoly before the agricultural settlement and railroad building began. In any case, the Canadian Plains tribes preferred to trade with cut-rate Métis and American independents. In the earlier fur trade in both countries, the Indians monopolized production of the furs, whereas whites and Métis played the role of traders. Later, whites and Métis eliminated this informal Indian monopoly when they began trapping and hunting directly, first in the 1820s in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, and then on the Plains in the 1860s (when the focus of trade shifted to buffalo hides). In fact, the trade situation in western Canada was similar to that south of the border during the critical period between 1860 and 1890.
One crucial Canadian-U.S. difference was the role played by the central government in colonization.26 In Canada, agricultural settlement occurred only after treaties had “extinguished aboriginal title,” whereas in the United States, settlement usually preceded treaties. The Canadian government and its agents kept these agreements by regularly delivering the commodities and cash annuities promised and by preventing white encroachment. In the United States, such treaties were often not ratified by the Senate, nor were the necessary funds allocated by the House. If funds were available, they were often skimmed by corrupt officials and traders. The Spanish and Mexican governments, when they played any role at all, granted large land grants to settlers without paying any attention to native title. In the United States and Mexico, grazing or squatting on Indian land was ignored or even encouraged.
The reserves granted to Canadian tribes in arable regions were small and scattered but allowed each tribe or band to remain within its traditional territory, if only on tiny fragments of it. The Canadian government thus divided its potential enemies as it dispossessed them, but took pains to minimize other potential grievances. In the United States, reservations were much larger; but in these several tribes or bands (sometimes mutually hostile ones) were concentrated, often far from their homelands. Homesickness, intertribal rivalries, and the terrible living conditions made American reservations a constant fount of hostile excursions. Many army officers and settlers regarded these turbulent reserves as little more than temporary sanctuaries where the unpacified bands could receive food and be rearmed each winter after spending the warm season hunting and raiding. Although this view grossly overestimated the winter comforts of these places, in a few instances it bore a kernel of truth. The most outrageous case involved the Kiowas of Fort Sill (Oklahoma) who raided each summer into Texas but then received supplies and ammunition each winter on the reservation.27 (The Kiowas believed that Texans were not Americans and were puzzled by the outrage expressed by U.S. officials concerning their raids.) In general, the U.S. Indian policy and its implementation united and concentrated potential enemies, multiplied their grievances, and even supplied them with arms and ammunition. It is hard to imagine a better recipe for frontier war.
By and large, Canadian justice was evenhanded; both white and Indian malefactors were caught and punished. The Indians of western Canada seemed to get along as well with the Mounties as any people would with those who policed them. These reasonable relations applied even to refugee warriors from south of the border—for example, the bitterly antiwhite Chief Sitting Bull. The Mounties were and behaved as policemen, not soldiers, in their dealings with Indians and with others. As historian Robert Utley puts it, the paramilitary Mounted Police “could deal with individuals as well as tribes. It did not have to go to war with a whole people to enforce order.”28 Since Mountie officers also served as magistrates, the legal system on the Canadian frontier resembled a mild form of martial law. Typically, the Canadian government ensured the benefits of peace and raised the costs of all crime—especially homicide—for both newcomers and natives. As well, the restraint exercised by the Indians of western Canada as they were subjugated and dispossessed is evidence of how much injustice people will tolerate for the sake of peace if they are assured of receiving the means to survive, certain punishment for breaking the peace, and impartial protection of their persons and property if they keep it. Peace, like war, has its price, and some parties pay more for it than others.
In the U.S. and Mexican realms, crimes committed against Indians went unpunished or were punished less severely than similar offenses against whites. Similarly, the tribes were averse to punishing fellow tribesmen for crimes committed against settlers. White law officers lacked legal jurisdiction over independent Indians, who in any case refused to surrender tribesmen to a foreign and obviously unfair legal system. Because of these legal deficiencies, a state of primitive war often arose between the Indians and the settlers, as these groups’ war parties and “militias” exchanged murders, raids, and massacres in cycles of retaliation. When the U.S. and Mexican governments did intervene in these feuds, it was invariably on the side of the colonists. Even on those occasions when the U.S. government or its representatives tried to secure more equitable legal treatment for the Indians, their efforts were usually sabotaged by local legislatures, politicians, and juries.29 The frequent resort to vigilantism by American settlers indicates that their own legal systems often failed to provide them with adequate redress for crimes committed among themselves. It is, then, hardly surprising that these weak and highly localized frontier legal systems were incapable of redressing crimes committed by Indians or those committed against them. In the nineteenth century, the American West was hardly lawless—on the contrary, it suffered from a plethora of insular, mutually uncooperative systems of law and legal enforcement: customary tribal (various); Spanish and Mexican colonial; American federal, state/territorial, and local (or vigilante).
The primary difference between the Canadian and the American western frontiers has been succinctly summarized by a Canadian historian: “the Canadian government got to the West first”—that is, before the settlers. In the American West, effective federal control of land allotments, treaty negotiations, and law enforcement lagged far behind the expansion of settlement. The primary role played by the U.S. government on the western frontier involved supplying a regular army to extinguish the numerous brushfire wars ignited between the equally independent, aggressive, and weakly policed settlers and tribes. Even decades after the first Euro-American colonization, the American West remained in a virtually stateless (or tribal) condition.
Comparing the examples of the Xingu and of nineteenth-century western Canada, it is difficult to isolate common features that might represent generalizable preconditions for peace. Like Xingu society, early-nineteenth-century Canadian society was founded by three abjectly defeated groups: resident French-Canadians and refugee American Loyalists and Highland Scots. But the term “defeated refugees” hardly applies to Canada’s later immigrants or to the native tribes of the Canadian West. The trade in specialities linking Indians and Europeans in Canada was hardly arbitrary in the fashion of the Xingu exchanges. The Canadian peace was predominantly the product of the mediation and police powers of the central state and the use made of them, but the Xinguanos lacked such Hobbesian institutions entirely. Geographic isolation may have played a role in limiting external wars in the Xingu, but this situation did not apply to Canada in relation to its western Indians. Looking at these peaces from the point of view of Xinguanos accused of witchcraft (who had to fear for their lives) or Canadian Indians living in diminished (and sometimes destitute) circumstances on reserves in the late nineteenth century, one could hardly call them attractive. Nevertheless, these peaces do share one enticing feature: they worked.
The only thing both cases clearly demonstrate is that interet
hnic harmony and intercultural appreciation are not preconditions for peace. Victorian Canada and the Xingu provide evidence that a workable peace can be forged and maintained between highly ethnocentric, mutually suspicious, and factious groups. What interethnic peace appears to require is a minimal and practical tolerance by the different parties for the harmless differences between them: one’s own group lives the right way and lets others live their own irrational, erroneous way. By and large, the attitude of the allied Xingu tribes was to let their fellow Xinguanos speak a brutish language, wear shocking or ridiculous fashions, eat disgusting foods, worship in the wrong way, and call noise “music”—as long as they honored debts and commitments, did not break the general peace, and refrained from unduly interfering with one’s own “proper” mode of life. These allied tribes treated one another with what Gregor describes a “false good manners.” Although various forms of covert and overt intolerance among its various ethnic groups have engendered many of Canada’s major political quarrels, the only organized violence these have generated since 1820 has been a handful of interethnic killings and two minimally bloody, comic-opera uprisings. That peace may flourish in the face of mildly biased attitudes is heartening, since a condescending tolerance seems less difficult to inculcate than eliminating the universal feeling that one’s own ways are best or training people to cherish uncritically precisely those behaviors and beliefs most different from their own. Peace may require minding one’s own business and sustaining coolly correct manners, but not wholesale brainwashing.
The Xingu, Canadian, and other cases previously mentioned suggest a few factors that seem to help peace endure. As noted, geographic isolation limits the number of provocations that can lead to war. The bitter aftertaste of a catastrophic defeat and dispossession can foster an aversion to war among the losers that can last for generations. The existence of a powerful third party that effectively and impartially punishes violence and theft can prevent war. A degree of mutual sufferance for the customs and beliefs of others is obviously helpful, but it is not necessary to banish all ethnocentrism or eliminate all economic and social injustice. Allowing allies to specialize in the production of items that a society could produce itself also seems to help maintain peace. On the other hand, neidier trade nor intermarriage encourages peace, but often helps to rupture it. The cases discussed here are evidence that peace is as demanding a state as war, requiring for its maintenance effort, economic sacrifice, and even occasional violence. Peace is not an effortless inertial or “natural” state to which people and societies revert in the absence of perturbation.
THE IRRELEVANCE OF BIOLOGY
One persistent claim made regarding the scarcity of peace is that humans (especially men) are driven by their “biology” or “nature” to war on one another. Obviously, nothing in humans’ nature inhibits them from making war, but this lack hardly creates an automatic compulsion to fight. Almost all higher animals are capable of violence against their own kind. Humans seem no more predisposed to aggressive behavior than any other species that commonly fights and occasionally kills its own kind over territory, sexual access, or social dominance. Even some species of plants may be considered as “homicidal,” since they kill other individuals of their own species in slow motion by shading or other forms of crowding. Humans are such social animals that almost any activity, however basic to individual existence or reproductive success, involves the cooperation of a group. It is hardly surprising that violence, whether against other species or against other humans, often involves group cooperation. Other highly social creatures, from ants to rhesus monkeys, also display forms of group violence that have been called warfare. Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.
One difficulty for a sociobiological explanation is precisely humans’ inborn aptitude for social cooperation, the most obvious and unique expression of which is language. Our capacity for and use of violence is neither remarkable nor excessive compared with that of many other animal species, whereas our sociability and cooperativeness are unique. The Hobbesian “war of all against all” might be used to describe some solitary species of nonhuman animals, but it cannot be applied to any known human society. All societies, however bellicose or violent, use social and cultural devices to preserve havens of peace and cooperation within a group—even if only within a small band or village. If humans can occasionally construct huge societies involving hundreds of millions of individuals within which homicide is nearly eliminated, there is no biological reason why such social units could not include all of humanity. Regarding humans’ inborn capacities, it is far easier to explain peace than war.
But the greatest problem for a biological explanation of warfare—or of almost any aspect of our behavior—is the incredible plasticity of human conduct. Human behavior is shaped by learning and decision making to an extraordinary and overwhelming degree. Several examples have already been given of people regarded as especially peaceable or warlike changing within a few generations and even within a single lifetime to the opposite extreme. In many societies, members are extremely unaggressive and nonviolent toward one another and yet are very aggressive and violent toward outsiders.30 Most groups treat certain outsiders with friendship and kindness, others with cool suspicion and reserve, and yet others with hostility and cruelty. Human history is replete with examples in which such relationships change from familiar friendship to bitter enmity and back again with remarkable rapidity. To anthropologists, who have spent over a century exploring the huge variety of human behavior and its mutability, human biology looks less like destiny and more like its absence.
To use a modern analogy, if we look at the identical microchips in two computers, there is nothing intrinsic to explain why one is playing a war game while the other is doing accounts, or why the same computer can at one moment be targeting a missile and in the next designing a toy factory. Modern computers of exactly the same architecture are capable of directing aerial battles, conning ships, performing music, formulating genealogies, and simulating thousands of other warlike and peaceable activities, but in no sense does their hardware (that is, their “nature”) require them to perform these activities. They can and will perform such tasks only if they have “learned” how to do them by being programmed and then receive the proper “social and environmental stimuli” in the form of commands and other inputs. Like computers, their far simpler and entirely passive reflections, human individuals and societies possess the “hardware” to conduct wars and create peace but will not unless they have the proper programs and stimulating circumstances.
WHY WAR AND WHY NOT PEACE?
One social reason for the existence of war is that peace is sometimes too costly. When the effects of peace are the same as those of war—loss of members to homicide and kidnapping, impoverishment by theft and vandalism, and diminished access to critical resources—people have little to lose by going to war and potentially much to gain. Like those referred to in the famous signs of the Paris zoo, humans are dangerous animals because when attacked they will defend themselves. There are situations when it is better to send men to the on their feet than have everyone live on their knees.
Many people (and some anthropologists) deny that any gains are attainable through warfare, although they do concede that, in a Hobbesian world of war, declaring unilateral peace amounts to committing social suicide. The positive benefits of war as a rule come only with success. The loot and captives commonly obtained by a victor or successful raider may amply compensate for the risks and penalties of combat. Warfare offers one way to increase supplies of food and essential materials, expand territory, and enlarge the pool of labor and sexual partners. With its hazards and hardships, warfare may be (in the Western phrase) “a hard dollar,” but it yields gains nonetheless. To encourage warfare, these benefits need not be the goal, motivation, or cause of warfare; nevertheless, they often enough reward those who decide for whatever reas
ons to make war.
One explanation for why young men (especially young bachelors) are usually the most aggressive in initiating and conducting warfare is that they have the least to lose and the most to gain from successful combat.31 They are (often) unmarried, possess little or no property, and have far less status or influence than do older men. If they are killed, their deaths leave behind no widows or orphans who might become a burden to fellow tribesmen or suffer the degradations of captivity in defeat. If only wounded, they recover from their injuries more readily than do older men. If they succeed, war can gain them wealth, renown, and even a wife. No wonder, then, that young bachelors must be restrained by older men and women who have more to lose from defeat and less to gain from victory.
The circumstances under which regional pacification developed is another arena in which relative costs and benefits played a role in determining the incidence of war and peace. As we have seen, in many tribal areas, peace was imposed by an external power that punished fighting with superior force. Some areas pacified themselves when repeating rifles became readily available and trade with the wider world increased—like in many areas of Melanesia and among the Kalinga of the Philippines.32 In all these cases, changes made either warfare significantly more costly or peace substantially more profitable (or both).
War Before Civilization Page 22