Columbus: On and Off the Reservation by Wilcomb Washburn National Review October 5, 1992. Did Columbus destroy the idyllic world of primitive virtue by introducing the corruptions of Western civilizations? Were the naked people Columbus saw in 1492, as N. Scott Momaday puts it in the first chapter of America in 1492, "members of a society altogether worthy and well made, a people of the everlasting earth, possessed of honor and dignity and generosity of spirit unsurpassed," or where they members of Sick Societies, as Robert B. Edgerton puts it in his book? Edgerton's book focuses on warfare, witchcraft, divination, torture, human sacrifice,s child abuse, female genital mutilation, male dominance, diseases, poor health practiced, bad nutrition, taboos, foot binding, suttee, blood feuds, and other traits of s,mall traditional societies. Such practices, in the spirit of culture; relativism, are rarely criticized by anthropologists and are often interpreted as adaptive responses to the environment. The essays in America in 1492 are sparing in their consideration of these subjects, if they are mentioned at all. For example, in Miquel Leon-Portillas thirty-page chapter on the cultures of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbeans, only two sentences are given to Aztec Human sacrifice. Leon- Portilla writes that "the ritual communion of small pieces of the victims flesh, offered to deserve the gods existence-a sacrament vividly anticipating one that would soon be preached by Christian Missionaries-inseparable ingredient of a culture which, with all its contrasts, was a summing up of Mesoamerica's grandeur." Edgerton, on the other hand, writes less poetically of the practice of "Aztec cannibalism," in the course of which "sacrificed bodies was rolled down the temple stairs )probably made as steep as they were to facilitate the process) to waiting men who carved them up as adroitly and dispassionately as any butcher might deal with side of beef before the various parts were carried away to be seasoned, cooked, eaten, and hugely enjoyed." America in 1492 contains chapters on the different geographical regions of the Americas in 1492 and a series of topical chapters on Indian languages, religion, social organization, intertribal trade and relations, science and technology, and the arts. There is not a hint of violence or warfare in some of the chapters, and a few references to war in the other descriptions of Indian life before Columbus. Edgerton takes a less politically convenient view. An iconoclast among anthropologist, he insists that many native practice were maladaptive rather than adaptive, and caustically chides the "adaptives" in his profession who interpret virtually any bizarre practice in terms of its presumed positive social uses. He attacks frontally the belief that primitive societies were far more harmonious than societies caught up in the modern world. He concludes reasonably that it is likely that the ethnographic record substantially underreports that amount and kind of human suffering and discontent that has actually existed in the world's small societies, just as it underrepresents the various things that people believe and practice that do not contribute to their well being. Edgerton's book draws most it examples from Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Arctic. It is possible that Edgerton's strictures on the nasty, brutish lifestyles of those non-Americans societies are inapplicable to the American Indians cited by those who created the myth of the noble savage? Present day defenders of the myth have yet to offer a reason to believe tat as primitive societies go, those native to the Americas were less primitive than the rest. It may seem strange that after five hundred years we are still debating that nature of native cultures and whether the European cultures that were superimposed upon them were a force for good or evil. The difficulty in assessing the consequences of the discovery of America is that we have to examine the entire five hundred years between 1492 and 1992. That this is true is illustrated by the aftermath of another historical event; the expulsion of the Jews and Arabs from Spain and the imposition of the Inquisition in the years following. The intellectual life of both Portugal and Spain in the medieval period owed much to Jewish and muslim scholars. The loss of these elements was a self inflicted wound upon Spain, from which the country is only now recovering. And yet it has taken five hundred year for the Spanish government formally to acknowledge it mistake. How much more momentous must be the discovery of America, which the Spanish historian Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in the General History of the Indies called the greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of him whom created it)? Acknowledging the importance of the discovery, was it a blessing or a curse? Did good supplant evil, or evil good? And does our current preference for a democratic society and ideals render us incapable of judging the merits of autocratic and societies such as those of the Aztec and the Inca? Perhaps the most controversial subject in discussions of the "encounter" is the role of Christianity. In the nineteenth century there was even a move to canonize Columbus. Today it seems that, measured y the sincerity and commitment of its followers, Christianity has emerged as a stronger force for good or evil in the New World continues to be the subject of vigorous and often bitter debate. The pope has seen the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus arrival in the New World as giving a new thrust to evangelization. On the other hand many of the mainline Protestant churches have declared Columbus arrival a tragedy and called on the west to repent than celebrate the event. This is a strange response from people who at least in theory believe that Christianity constitutes the ultimate revelation of God's will before the people of the world. Anyone who committed to the idea that Christianity offers a universal doctrine of salvation cannot coherently maintain the arrival in the Americas was anything but an event for the good-to put it mildly. The Christian vision of the world also shaped the debate over the nature of the American Indian. Reports from many of the early explorers, from Columbus on, shocked Europe with news of the existence of men living naked, in a state of nature, or, to put it in Christian terms, in a state of innocence, like that preceding the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. Reports of the first explorers that the natives acted with unfeigned generosity, lack of shame, and lack of greed caused some intellectuals to speculate the corrupt Europe has found a society morally superior to its own. The writings of some sober first hand observers reporting actual experience with individual Indians, should caution us against rejecting the myth of its entirety. It contained some truth. Equally, however, some individual Indians acted deceptively, treacherously, or cruelly and were the subject i=of bitter invectives questioning their humanity and comparing them, not to Greeks and Romans, but to savage animals. Given that we have learned about the warlike nature of life in pre-Columbian Central and South America, no one ought to wish to defend the proposition that the Indians were universally pacific. Indeed, recent archaeologists discoveries in Guatemala suggest that massive warfare among Mayan city-states was the cause of the decline and collapse of the Mayan empire between the seventh and tenth centuries. Rightly,the abstraction of the noble savage is disparaged in both the Edgerton book and the Josephy book. In part,the noble savage myth has lost its earlier attractiveness to disinterested scholars because, through the tendency of left-wing scholarship to simplify and vulgarize complex phenomena, it has been carried to absurd extremes. In the radical perspective, all Native Americans had been living peacefully until there hands were seized and they were brutalized by Europeans. This pose has been embraced a it has only because western society is so self critical and guilt ridden that it makes no objection to being pummeled from the outside as well from the inside. Blacks demand reparations from descendants of whites who bought them but not from descendants of those Indians the earlier dispossessed them but do not propose to pay reparations to those Indians they earlier dispossessed. While professing to exalt Indian values, these critics failed to realize that they are appealing to Western values. Ultimately, the test of the significance of Columbus voyage must lie in the direction the world has taken since then. And it has, as seems clear to all, taken the direction of Western ideas and values. Few even anthropologists would like to see the Americas returned to the rule of the political and social institutions that prevailed in 1492. To be sure, the Spanish culture that initially supplanted the "Native American" differed in important from what we mean today by "Western ideas and values." Although the Bill of Rights exhibition in the U.S. Pavillion in Seville makes every effort to credit Spain and other European countries with the emergence of such guarantees of individual rights, the achievement of democracy in the New World is more heavily dependant upon and english tradition that emerged after the establishment of Spain's hegemony in much of the New World and in many respects in opposition to it. Only now, five hundred years after Columbus, has that democratic philosophy achieved almost universal acceptance in Latin America, long dominated by the more centralized, hierarchial political structure left by an imperial Spain. Economically, Latin America inherited the mercantilist and protectionist traditions of its liberal founders as politically it inherited hierarchial and autocratic traditions. The influence of Adam Smith, who helped the English-speaking nations throw off their mercantilist shackles, is only now being strongly felt in Latin America countries. And yet it may be argued that the triumph of Western democratic values in 1992 is itself a validation od Spain's sponsorship of Columbus in 1492. It was, one might say, the arrival of Spain that introduced the European tradition in the Americas, thus allowing the later implantation of English politics and economics. Today we can find interpreters such as Hernando de Soto and Roberto Campos arguing for the ideas of Adam Smith in Peru and Brazil, if not always with success. In asserting that the direction of history vindicates the globalization of European values, one faces the peculiar opposition of a powerful force of Western intellectuals who see Western civilization as the principal source of evil in the World and Columbus as the agent of the propagation of that evil. This view is reflected in books such as America in 1492 and Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise:Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (1990). With the collapse of Communism, anti=Western idealogy rest increasingly on ecological ("green") values, feminism (with its emphasis on the important role of clan mothers in Iroquois society, for example), and animal rights. Sale even goes so far as to say that 'It is not fanciful to see warring against species as Europe's preoccupation as a culture." These critics of Europe normally choose to overlook the anti- ecological anti-feminist, anti-animal rights, anti-human-rights (in fact,cannibal) character of most of the societies they hold up as models to be emulated. A word need to be said about an indirect result of Columbus's voyage, one related to what Columbus intended but did not himself achieve: the meeting of East and West. To reach Japan and China was the aim of Columbus "great enterprise." While it is true that he continued to assert that he had reached Asia, he well knew that he had not arrived at the fabled kingdoms of Japan or China. Rather, the lands he reached seemed more like the thousands of islands that Marco Polo had described as lying off Asia, and that the Catalan Atlas of 1375 had depicted as filled with naked men and even cannibals. But, in fact, although he was not to be the personal agent of the meeting of the East and West, his discovery of the new world lying between Europe and Asia gave added incentive to Spain, as well as to portugal and other European nations, to reach the desired goal. That object was achieved by the Portuguese-in the case of China, in 1517 (reopening a link that had essentially ended with the departure of Marco Polo) and, in the case of Japan (which had never been visited by Europeans), in 1542 or 1543. The actual "discovery" of these great nations by the Europeans was more influential in charging the culture of Europe than discovery of America. While America was yielding its treasure and labor to the Europeans, Asia was altering Europe's mind. Not only were the natural sciences revolutionized, but the science of man (anthropology) developed as a way of attempting to explain the differences encountered by the Europeans in both America and Asia. Because the incitive for discovery came from the West and not from the East, the differences between Europe, America, and Asia were more sharply etched on the European mind than on the Asian and led to a rich intellectual harvest if theories such evolution, cultural relativism, and even Marxism and economic determination. Both America and Asia were relatively stagnant, being more wedded to their traditions than was the West, which found the novelty of other climes and other cultures stimulating. While the Western mind did not always move in directions that we would now applaud, it moved-indeed, darted here and there-as the Asian mind too often did not. The Left's current affair with "multiculturalism" derives its ultimate authority precisely from the expansion of Europe and the scholarly if not always respectful study of non-Western civilizations by Europeans. Were then, the American societies uncovered by European explorers "sick societies," to use Edgerton's term, or were they "worthy societies," as Momaday suggests in America in 1492? Momaday and his colleagues ignore the dark side of the cultures they celebrate; Edgerton ignore the bright side, with the exception of the Yahi tribe of his native California. Edgerton is right to assert that the folkways of many small traditional societies are neither as adaptive nor as harmonious as many of his anthropological colleagues would like to believe. Scholars must be willing to evaluated-which is to say, Judge-the societies they study. We are still to much enmeshed in the debate precipitated by Columbus's voyage to be able to reach a consensus on the values of our own society or in the values of the "the other." America in 1492, all too predictably. seeks to indict rather than to understand "Western European ethnocentricity," which Columbus is accused of introducing into the New World. As Alvin Josephy puts it in his introduction: "Asserting the superiority of the white aggrandizers' religious, political, and social universe over those people of each of the many different indigenous peoples from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South america, this ethnocentricity was an arrogant vice, backed by superior firepower and boundless gall, that never faltered or weakened." "It continues," Josephy goes on to say, even more forcefully stated by Vine Deloria Jr. Deloria, a spokesman for American Indians, reflects in his Afterward on the collapse of Communism and the apparent triumph of American values. His interpretation is, simply, bizarre. He asserts that "Nazism can be regarded as the true response od Europe to its declining role in the world: the Lebensraum of the National Socialists was simply russian and american imperialism written in the small space of central Europe." Deloria sees signs, as in the emergence of the animal rights movements, that we may be facing a future in which the basic tenets of the indian View of life becomes the central themes of our society." What these animadversions have to do with the state of Indian society in 1492-the subject of the book in which they appear-may be questioned. The reason they are there is that,as with other ethnic groups, some American Indians have redefined their relationship with American Society in terms of a continuing war, a war which, despite initial defeats, they believe they are in the process of winning. What might be the outcome of such a successful struggle? If the universities were controlled by the Indians we would have an entirely different explanation of the peopling of the New World, and it would be just respectable for the establishment to support it. Deloria's remark occurs in a passage rejecting what he calls the scholarly Bering Strait fiction. This is the theory, accepted by almost all scholars, that the ancestors of the American Indians migrated to the New World across the Bering Straits during one of the periods when it formed a land bridge to Asia. But Deloria's underlying assumption-that truth is entirely a reflection of one ethnic loyalties-cannot be accepted by anyone who values disinterested scholarship. One shudders to think what other hypothesis would have to be revised if Indians controlled the universities. So although we should welcome the renewed attention to or native past stimulated by the quincentennial, we should not ignore the native societies while belaboring that of European societies. Nor should we ignore the dark side of Indian Societies while throwing a searchlight on the dark side of our European ancestors. Americans, whatever their origin, need not apologize for inheriting the past.