Towards the end of the conference, the Irish revolted. Several of the participants and audience members got up on the stage of the tent that had been set up for the largest events and read a manifesto—a very polite manifesto, I heard, though I could never find anyone with a copy. One Irish participant told me they’d thought the conference was held in Ireland because of an interest in their country’s issues and culture and were annoyed to find that like most conferences it was taking place in the limbo of whatever slides were shown and subjects were discussed. The New Age wore out its welcome in Ireland then and there, he said. The locals took over the end of the conference, though, with a fife, drum, and fiddle and a long line dance that picked up everyone in the pavilion and led them out as a long chain snaking into the sunlight, where an old woman vigorously step-danced next to the musicians. When I left, a middle-aged man sitting on a tree stump—another professional Irishman—buttonholed me and read me Gaelic poetry, which had the fine bristly sound unknown languages often have and whose letters lay round and inscrutable on the page of his old book. It was as good an answer as any.
10
And a Pound of Lead
There was an implicit analogy throughout the ITA conference between the two exotics brought in to flesh out or ground the transpersonal psychology, the Irish and the Native Americans, an analogy that was never articulated. It’s one with an ancient lineage, dating back to the Tudor era, when the English were colonizing Ireland and, soon afterwards, the eastern edges of North America, and it’s survived into the present. When the plantation of Ulster—that is, Ulster’s violent colonization and conversion to a market economy—began, one of its executors, Fynes Moryson, wrote that the program should be carried out with “no less cautions . . . than if these new colonies were to be led to inhabit among the barbarous Indians.” The historian Nicholas Canny comments, “It was ominous for both the Irish and the American Indians that authors frequently made cross-cultural references, thereby implying that the two were descended from the same primitive ancestors or that they were at the same retarded state of cultural development.” In 1600, a mediocre poet wrote of the Irish kerns, or mercenaries:
Fraught with all vice, replete with villainy
They still rebel and that most treacherously.
Like brutish Indians these wild Irish live;
Their quiet neighbors they delight to grieve.
Some contemporaries compared the Irish instead to other exotic peoples, to Russians and Tartars, for example. The poet and colonial administrator Edmund Spenser went to great lengths to demonstrate the Irish were really barbaric Scythians; and an anonymous tract by a Munster landowner from the 1620s or 1630s sets out to demonstrate that Irish serfs were descended from demons, not humans. Many explorers of North America compared the peoples they encountered to the Irish for their material culture, for weapons, trousers; George Percy, walking near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, even compared a pathway he came across to an Irish bog or forest road.
Such comparisons were still being made two centuries later when Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont toured Ireland after Tocqueville’s more celebrated investigation of democracy in America. “I defy you, my dear cousin,” he wrote in a letter, “whatever efforts of the imagination you may make, to picture the misery of the population of this country. Every day we enter mud houses, covered with thatch, which do not contain a single piece of furniture, except a pot to cook the potatoes. I should have believed myself returned to the huts of my friends, the Iroquois, if I saw a hole made to allow the smoke to escape. Here the smoke goes out by the door, which gives, according to my weak lights, a decided advantage to the architecture of the Iroquois.” By the middle of the nineteenth century and the height of the Famine, The Times of London could rejoice, “In a few more years, a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan”; the Irish were not only like Native Americans but would be displaced with the same disregard.
But by the end of that century, the values accorded the analogies had begun to shift. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the great ethnographer James Mooney documented the Ghost Dance religion among the Lakota, northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and several other indigenous nations who embraced this apocalyptic cult; Mooney’s own Irish nationalism is sometimes said to be what made him sympathetic to the struggles of these indigenous Americans. A few decades later, Roger Casement came back from the Putumayo rainforests of Peru to Connemara where, as one of his biographers puts it, “starvation and squalor caused an outbreak of typhus.” Then the lot of the Indian and the Irish peasant seemed to him to be much the same. He christened the locality the “Irish Putumayo” and wrote that “The ‘white Indians’ of Ireland are heavier on my heart than all the Indians of the rest of the earth.” California historian Mike Davis tells me that when he first arrived in Belfast in the 1970s, he was sitting in a pub in a nationalist area when a drunken republican came over, slammed his fist on the table so that the glasses jumped, and demanded, “Can ye tell me why ye killed Geronimo?” The IRA has long identified with the guerrilla struggles of Native Americans trying to protect their homeland against colonialism; and the American Indian Movement activist and writer Ward Churchill reiterated the Irish-Indian analogy in 1994. I had first heard it a few years earlier from the Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds, who’d spent several months in the Republic of Ireland. He came back and declared that as far as he was concerned Ireland was a formerly colonized nation of indigenous land-based people, the same terms in which Native Americans are often framed.
Though the analogy has been drawn for nearly four centuries, it isn’t stable in its meanings. For the English colonizers, it was a way of pairing peoples whose lack of civilization justified their conquest; for Tocqueville and Casement it was a means to link two cases of material deprivation; for the IRA, Churchill, and perhaps Mooney it brings together resistance movements seeking self-determination and cultural survival. But the more I thought about the analogy, the more it seemed to suggest differences rather than similarities. On the face of it, there are hundreds of distinct Native American cultures with radically different beliefs and means of sustenance, from nomadic hunters to sedentary agriculturalists, at least as different as Sicilians and Laplanders, so there’s nothing generic to analogize to the Celtic Irish. All analogies have limits; two things are alike up to the point of their differences; and what the analogy of these two cultures locates is difference from the idea of Europe. A vague idea of what it means to be attached to a land that has been invaded emerges from the analogy, but a very specific fracturing of the idea of what it means to be European also emerges. Politically, Ireland resembled what were labeled the new and third worlds, and culturally its traditional tribal society had more in common with colonized people in many places than with the mercantile urbanized nation-states of the colonizers. It’s an analogy that suggests how contingent both definitions are, or all definitions are. One can say European or Native only conditionally, aware of all the disparate qualities they group together, all the similarities they divide.
The Irish themselves, like practically every Christian group that ever felt exiled or marginalized, had a long history of comparing themselves to the Jews in exile from Israel, which didn’t necessarily make them sympathetic to actual Jews, but in Northern Ireland the Irish Catholics are now often compared to the Palestinians as disenfranchised locals (and the IRA and the PLO have supported each other, and for that matter the American Indian Movement has identified with both). Across the Atlantic, the term white too shifts around when one tries to locate the Irish in relationship to it. A whole different set of analogies arose around the Irish in the United States in the nineteenth century: they were compared to African-Americans with terms derogatory to both. “Low-browed and savage, grovelling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian and sensual—such were the adjectives used by many native-born Americans to describe the Catholic Irish ‘race�
� in the years before the Civil War,” writes the historian David Roediger. “The striking similarity of this litany of insults to the list of traits ascribed to antebellum Blacks hardly requires comment. Sometimes Black/Irish connections were made explicitly . . . In short, it was by no means clear that the Irish were white.” Ireland can be a divining rod with which to locate the points of seepage in the cut-and-dried terms of identity.
The Irish the Tudors wrote about were unlike modern Europeans, in both sympathetic and unsympathetic versions. The Elizabethan Edmund Campion described them thus: “The people are thus inclined: religious, frank, amorous, ireful, sufferable of pain infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with wars, great alms-givers, passing in hospitality.” Ireland was, in the early seventeenth century, a heavily forested island made up of petty kingdoms—one of Henry VIII’s correspondents identifies more than sixty countries—without an overarching administrative hierarchy, a high king. Both the presence of forests and bogs and the absence of centralization of either government or population made the island’s people particularly hard to subdue, and the war to subjugate them was a prolonged, brutal, fragmentary affair that never wholly succeeded. The Irish of Elizabethan times, like the Irish of such pre-Christian sagas as The Tain, were largely pastoralists, rather than agriculturalists, and both cattleraiding and cattleherding kept much of the population mobile. The Tain is, in a nut-shell, about Queen Maeve’s cattleraid and its fatal consequences, with a great deal of topographical detail about various parties’ wanderings across Ulster and Connaught. The poet Seamus Heaney writes,
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail
Reading the historical and mythological material about cattle-raids and border skirmishes, meals of milk and cow’s blood, one is reminded more of the Masai of East Africa or pastoralist desert nomads than Native Americans, who were often nomads but rarely herders.
Nomads are an affront to centralized administration and the idea of borders, and the Irish were no exception. The aristocrats and professionals had their own varieties of mobility, and even the peasant class took to the forests and hills with their cattle during the warmer half of the year. “I believe that seasonal nomadism,” writes the folk historian E. Estyn Evans, “is an important and neglected aspect of Irish social history.” Spenser, a colonial administrator in Ireland from 1580 to 1598, complained that the natives tended “. . . to keep their cattle and to live themselves the most part of the year in bollies [from the Gaelic buaile, which originally meant a temporary enclosure and came to mean a mobile gathering], pasturing upon the mountain and waste, wild places, and removing still to fresh land as they have depastured the former; the which appeareth plain to be the manner of the Scythians . . . driving their cattle continually with them and feeding only on their milk and white meats . . . But by this custom of bollying there grow in the meantime many great enormities, unto that commonwealth. For, first, if there be any outlaws or loose people (as they are never without some) which live on stealths and spoil, they are evermore succored and find relief only in those bollies being upon the waste places; whereas else they should be driven shortly to starve or to come down to the towns to steal relief . . . Moreover, the people that live thus in these bollies grow thereby the more barbarous and live more licentiously . . . for there they think themselves half exempted from law and obedience, and having once tasted freedom do, like a steer that hath been long out of his yoke, grudge and repine ever after to come under rule again.”
Besides the pastoralist agricultural peasantry, there were other professions entailing other kinds of mobility. Poets and lawgivers formed privileged classes who wandered freely across boundaries, as did physicians. Craftspeople too were often nomadic, because in a largely townless society they had to seek out their dispersed customers. In his fine portrait of Irish society in the Elizabethan era, David Beers Quinn writes, “The hereditary status of the learned class and the mobile character of some of its members and of certain ancillary craftsmen and specialist groups, appeared disruptive of the influence of the state and of the policy of stabilizing the population. The creation of small, stable, landowning units was difficult to resolve with extensive grazing rights and summer transhumance, which involved a certain undesirable diffusion of property rights.” The picture that emerges seems a vestige of a heroic era vanished from the rest of Europe, with its nomadism, its powerful poets whose elaborate curses were greatly feared, its far more liberal customs regarding nudity, sexuality, marriage, and divorce (Engels, in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, reports of this society: “The reasons that entitled a woman to a divorce without detriment to her rights at the settlement were of a very diverse nature: the man’s foul breath was a sufficient reason”), and its very easygoing version of Christianity.
A new and permanent schism had opened up between the English and the Irish with the secession of Henry VIII and his subjects from the Catholic church; religious differences would make Ireland’s invading and indigenous populations separate and irreconcilable in a way they never had been before. The English occupation of Ireland thereafter would take on the qualities of a true colonization, distinct from the invasive migrations culminating in near-assimilations that preceded it. It opened up a wound that is still bleeding. Campaigns of vast brutality were launched to subdue the population, again and again. Lord Grey, who succeeded Sir Henry Sidney (father of the poet), went on a two-year campaign beginning in 1580, whose tally was “1485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law and killing of churls, which were innumerable.” Spenser himself, who had come over as Grey’s secretary, penned the lengthy treatise A View on the Present State of Ireland, which makes it clear not even such brutal wartime tactics worked and recommends instead ravaging the countryside and subduing the populace by starvation. He described the results of such a campaign in the southern quadrant of Munster, and his account has become famous for its brutal clarity: “Although there should none of them fall by the sword, nor be slain by the soldier . . . notwith standing that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that ye would have thought they could have been able to stand long, yet ere one-year-and-a-half they were brought to so wonderful wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death. They spake like ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves. And if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewith al, that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly void of man and beast.”
Conquest of the populace by sword and starvation combined as strategies to conquer Ireland in the century after 1550, along with ancillary programs like outlawing the poets. The oaks were cut down to build ships and barrels and used as charcoal in metal smelting, and vast expanses of forest were cleared away. It was a fringe benefit that deforestation eliminated refuges for outlaws and rebels, though some Irish nationalists like to assert that this was the main reason—a Killarney forester told me that’s what he was taught in school. The new landowners, with the recklessness of people who didn’t see the place as their home or their future, denuded vast forests without replanting, permanently altering the Irish landscape. As the Dublin Natural History Museum mentions, by the end of the seventeenth century, when the clearcutting was so comprehensive that Ireland became a timber-importing nation, squirrels became extinct; they were reintroduced from England in the early nineteenth century. Afterward, both landowners and historians would bla
me the peasantry for Ireland’s deforestation: it is a change Young addresses, and lays at the landlords’ feet.
The forests around Killarney give a faint taste of what the island must have been like when such stately old trees covered much of the landscape and the vistas of contemporary Ireland and some of its starkness must have been unknown. By 1901 Ireland had been reduced to 1 percent forest; it is still the most deforested country in the European Community, though replanting has officially brought its forests up to 6 percent of the landscape. Unfortunately, much of what are now counted as forests are dense tree plantations, often of Douglas fir and other fastgrowing nonnative conifers, which do nothing to restore the original ecology or any kind of wilderness. They are literally impenetrable, so close together are the treetrunks with their dead lower limbs forming barriers, dead because the sun is completely screened out by a flat canopy of trees of identical age and species. Without birds, without animals, without an understory of grasses and smaller plants, without any of the other elements that make up a forest, they may be at last trees without a forest.
In Ulysses Joyce parodies the links between forests and nationalism through the person of the brutal Citizen: “Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland . . .” From this sentimental tirade, the text slips into a parody of tree mythology with a society wedding between a forester and “Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley,” attended by a veritable grove of trees—Mrs. Rowan Green, Miss Virginia Creeper, and so forth, with the honeymoon of course planned for the Black Forest. Trees, or groves, were known to have played a role in Celtic religion, and much celebration and mystification of trees took place in Joyce’s time as part of the Celtic revival. But for all Joyce’s sarcasm, the deforestation of Ireland was a serious matter. Its beginnings in Tudor and Stuart England signify the onset of transnational export economies that enrich nonnative stakeholders at the expense of the indigenous population and environment; the iron smelting and timber and barrel export foreshadow resource extraction economies throughout the undeveloped world, from oil pumping in Ecuador to timber cutting in northern British Columbia. The trees gave way not only to Englishmen but to capitalism and the modern age, and with their clearance the Irish were being forced into the worldview meant by the term European.
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