Axtell
Part 4 of 5
The encounters between America's natives and newcomers
took many forms and produced many kinds and degrees of change
on both sides. No encounters would have occurred when and how
they did had not Western European nations and peoples initiated
a series of powerful "outthrusts" from the continent
after 1400. Cecil H.Clough and P.E.H. Hair have edited a volume of essays in honor
of David Beers Quinn on his eighty-fifth birthday entitled The
European Outthrust and Encounter.- The First Phase c. 1400-c.1700,
which limns the broad features of those related movements
into northern Africa, Siberia, and the Far East as well as the
Americas before presenting six case studies. Hair sees three
stages of outthrust: (1) internal colonization of unpopulated
lands close to home, (2) external
colonization of populated lands farther away, and (3) latter-day
reflection on the history of colonialism, often with ethical agony
and "moralizing rhetoric." According to Hair, the first
two stages produced four major varieties of encounter: (1)
encounters with the natural environment, (2) conquest, resulting
in assimilation much more often than genocide, (3) rejection of
the invaders or their culture by the native population, and (4)
"opportunist co-existence" involving "a significant
degree of tolerance of 'the Other' imposed by the prospect of
gain"--economic, technical, cultural, or ideological.(77)
The large-scale movements of European peoples into
foreign parts are traced in cogent detail by eleven authors in
Nicholas Canny's collection, Europeans on the Move: Studies
on European Migration, 1500-1800. The ten essays, eight of
which are based on new research, treat the medieval expansion
of Europe and the later outmigrations from Spain, England, Ireland,
Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France largely but not
exclusively to the Americas. Ida Altman and James Horn's collection
of seven essays, "To Make America"- European Emigration
in the Early Modern Period, covers similar but smaller ground.
Two essays look at patterns of outmigration from Spanish localities,
rural and urban, two at the recruitment of French emigrants for
Canada and the Antilles, one at the free English bound for the
Chesapeake, and one at German immigration to British North America.
Both books underscore the tremendous variety of migratory peoples,
motives, and methods that must complicate our future explanations
of the American encounters on the European side and prevent us
from attributing to the colonists only the cliched motives "gold,
glory, and the gospel."(78)
Equally salutary demands will be made by Settlements
in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited
by Ralph Bennett. Twelve scholars plot the urban and rural settlement
plans and patterns of Hispanic, English, and French colonizers
in such diverse locales as Nassau, Providence island, Puebla (Mexico),
Santa Fe, Savannah, Philadelphia, and Quebec. Graziano Gasparini
reminds us that many Latin American cities, thought to be built
on the imported Roman-Renaissance grid pattern, had numerous native
urban precedents in Mexico and the Andes.(79)
Once the European migrations were launched, the
native polities of the New World began to crumble, and native
cultures inexorably, though not always predictably, altered.
On the surface, Americas Lost, 1492-1713: The First
Encounter, edited by Daniel Levine as a companion volume to
an exhibition at the Musee de I'Homme in Paris, seems to be just
another Quincentenary coffee table book, but it is an especially
good one. Nine international experts have written eleven accessible
but learned essays to complement a plethora of well-chosen, often
unfamiliar illustrations ranging from the Reconquista to
all the Americas in the eighteenth century, with a glance at dramatic
"encounter" rituals in Mesoamerica today. The essays
are divided into two parts, "The Encounter" and 'The
Coexistence." In the first section, Anne Vitart's brief chapter
on "American Curiosities" traces Indians and Indian
artifacts in Europe; in the second, Christian Duverger's essay
on native conversions and Georges Baudot's on cultural syncretism
(with its castas paintings of finely tuned categories of
mixed-race offspring in Spanish America) stand out.(80)
Although the history of the American encounters
usually depends on European written sources, scientific travel
writer Ronald Wright uses surprisingly abundant native testimony
to tell stories of the invasion, resistance, and rebirth of the
Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois peoples from Columbus
to the present. Inspired by reading the Inca Guaman Poma's 1200-page
protest chronicle to King Philip III of Spain, Wright's Stolen
Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 is
a consciously one-sided attempt to redress the historiographical
imbalance. Unfortunately, it oversimplifies native realities
and succumbs to facile moralizing; the invaders are all of a piece
and the natives are all preternaturally wise and noble.(81)
In Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North
America, a collection of eleven essays, I seek not only to
highlight native perspectives on the early encounters and on the
Quincentenary but also to ensure that the voices of all parties-past
and present, European and Indian-are heard and that the handling
of moral issues is fair and complex. Particularly in "Native
Reactions to the Invasion of America" and "Moral Reflections
on the Columbian Legacy," I try to complicate the normative
past in order to secure justice for its native victims without
doing new injustices to innocent immigrants. The trick is to
restore proper agency to both natives and newcomers without minimizing
or ignoring the constraints of power, culture, and biology within
which both groups operated.(82)
Another approach to America's contact history that
largely eschews moral considerations is archaeology. J. Daniel
Rogers and Samuel M. Wilson have edited twelve essays on the interface
between Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to
Postcontact Change in the Americas. The contributors, all
Americanist anthropologists or archaeologists by training, use
written documents and archaeological findings in tandem to probe
local and universal processes of acculturation, despite the "mixed
epistemologies" involved in such an operation. Many of the
authors explore how native perceptions, sociopolitical strategies,
and aesthetic preferences helped determine the nature and impact
of trade and of contact in general. Gregory Waselkov, for example,
traces the emergence and changing face of factionalism among the
Creeks after 1685. Personal possessions buried with Creek dead
between 1700 and 1770 (and excavated before 1945) fall into distinct
patterns of pro-English, pre-French, and mixed assemblages that
exactly mirror the documented fortunes of South Carolina and Louisiana
traders in Creek affairs. These diverse case studies of the Caribbean,
North America, and Mesoamerica suggest that the natives' differential
success in dealing with Europeans corresponded strongly to three
factors: "the degree of sociopolitical integration of the
indigenous peoples, precontact population density, and the timing
and intensity of European contact." They also contradict
the conventional interpretation of Indian-white trade as "a
supply-driven system."(83)
Less theoretically productive is Ivor Noel Hume's
robust updating and retelling of The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke
to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical odyssey.
With his customary literary flair (and occasional license)
and keen nose for historical drama, Noel Hume works familiar ground
for more than 450 pages, enticing the reader with helpful maps,
flavorful quotations, and 141 illustrations. Results from his
own excavations at Wolstenholme Towne and at Roanoke-the latter
uncovered some of Thomas Harriot's scientific equipment, perhaps
intended to turn base metal- into gold-as well as at Jamestown
and Flowerdew Hundred and off the Bermuda coast add interesting
and often important facets to America's foundational story. Although
Indian characters appear much more frequently than in Noel Hume's
previous books, they invariably play supporting roles to English
gallants such as Walter Ralegh and John Smith. The underdeveloped
state of historical and protohistorical Indian archaeology in
the region is only partly to blame.(84)
Where one scholar lacks omnicompetence, an interdisciplinary
team approach to early contact studies often succeeds. A 1988
conference in Portland, Maine, led to a handsome collaborative
volume on American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture,
and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, the vaguely defined
region around Penobscot Bay where French, English, and Indians
contended for economic and political dominance from early in 'the
sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. Thirteen
chapters probe the real and imagined limits of the region, native
worldviews and relations with Europeans, the fishing industry'
and nascent colonization. Their authors use archaeology, maps,
folklore, and ethnohistory as well as documents to reveal the
rapidly changing world of the Abenakis. The late J. B. Harley's
essay "New England Cartography and the Native Americans"
caps the collection with a brilliant deconstructive reading of
the imperial presences and native absences on contemporary maps.
Maps became not only European tools of "boundary making,
of charter framing, of settlement planning, and of strategic value
in the war of attrition against the Indians" but 11 the best
testimony for the exclusion of the Indians from the territories
of New England" and "a mirror to God's providence."(85)
After one of the English voyages to Maine in 1605,
crewman James Rosier published an account with an Indian word
list for 'those that shal goe in the next Voyage." Presumably,
his nautical successors made good use of Abenaki words such as
powwow, sagamore, moose, and tomahawk. In 0 Brave New
Words! Charles L. Cutler briefly describes the etymologies
and dates the first usages of Native American Loanwords in
Current English for a popular audience. Two glossaries of
loanwords-a long one from Indian languages north of Mexico and
a shorter one from Eskimo and Aleut languages-alphabetize the
words whose histories Cutler sketches in 150 pages of undemanding
text; an appendix provides another list of borrowings from Latin
American Indian languages. Cutler also includes 'Indianisms,"
English words or phrases that translate Indian expressions or are specifically
related to Indians, such as 'long knives," "Indian corn,"
and " happy hunting ground." All the words remind us
that America's encounters were two-way streets, and a graph points
out, ironically, that the invaders borrowed most heavily when
they were winning most decisively, between 1875 and 1900.(86)
Before the Indians and immigrants could fashion
a common tongue' they had to rely on interpreters and cultural
brokers who could maneuver in the tight but fluid spaces between
cultures. Both Indians and non-Indians (including Africans and
metis) negotiated the changes and accommodations on both
sides that the post-Columbian encounters entailed. Linguist Frances
Karttunen's Between Worlds is a fascinating, often moving
series of portraits of native Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors,
male and female, who mediated cultural exchanges from sixteenth-century
Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru to twentieth-century Mexico, Australia,
and Rhode Island. A final chapter charts the social and economic
costs to these intermediaries and to their children. Of most
interest to colonialists are the stories of Cortez's interpreter
and mistress Dona Marina (La Malinche), the Inca protestor Guaman
Poma de Ayala, and Gaspar Antonio Chi, a noble Maya whose literacy
in Spanish helped convert his people to Christianity but also
subverted the worst cruelties of a deranged bishop and contributed
importantly to our ethnographic understanding of ancient Mayan
culture.(87)
Margaret Connell Szasz has edited a similar (and
similarly titled) essay collection, Between Indian and White
Worlds.- The Cultural Broker. Fourteen contributors describe
the mediating activities of native and Euro-American men and women
from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries not
only as interpreters but as traders, healers, artists, and educators.
Most of the figures in these two books were marginalized in their
own cultures. In working with the Other on their particular cultural
frontiers, they showed unusual degrees of curiosity, receptiveness,
and determination, for which they received "rescue, protection,
sustenance, recognition, companionship."(88)
In most societies, women are more susceptible to
marginalization than are men, which often makes them skillful
brokers and willing Negotiators of Change, the title
of Nancy Shoemaker's ten-chapter edition of Historical
Perspectives on Native American Women. Taking a cue from
Kathleen Brown's stimulating chapter on 'The Anglo-Algonquian
Gender Frontier," Shoemaker argues that 'cultural constructions
of gender had as much influence on the contact experience as economic,
political, and social interactions. Cultural ideas about gender
difference provided a lens through which people looked at the
Other and interpreted, or misinterpreted, the meaning of the Other's
actions and words." Shoemaker's own chapter on 'Kateri Tekakwitha's
Tortuous Path to Sainthood" in the French Catholic reserve
of Kahnawake shows that, while the Jesuits sought to implement
patriarchy at their missions, they also brought "the symbols,
imagery, and rituals women needed to subvert
patriarchy."(89)
Lest we forget, despite the valiant efforts of interpreters
and cultural brokers on both sides, that many American encounters
devolved into armed confrontations for hegemony or survival, Ian
K. Steele has written Warpaths: Invasions of North America.
He successfully brings together "the fashionable, if
sometimes shrill and sanctimonious, field of ethnohistory"
(which he has not practiced hitherto) and "the less fashionable,
sometimes case-hardened and myopic, study of 'the colonial wars'"
(which he has). Steele's first six chapters describe the establishment
between 1513 and 1684 of the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch
"Bases for Invasion." The next two analyze new and recurring
patterns of warfare before 1748, when American wars were fought
"primarily by and for colonists and Amerindians." How
warfare changed when substantial numbers of European regulars
arrived is the focus of the final four chapters. If ethnohistory
is more evident in the first half of the book, the reason is due
to the state of the field as well as to Steele's predilection
for the military history of the Great War for Empire.(90)
Throughout the colonial period, another kind of
battle was waged on North American frontiers. Peter C. Mancall's
compact history of Deadly Medicine.- Indians and Alcohol
in Early America describes the efforts of competing European
traders to entice native customers to swap their valuable pelts
for low-cost, high-profit "firewater," of Indian leaders
and Christian missionaries to keep the evil spirits out of native
communities, and of natives and colonists alike to explain and
cope with the social, economic, and spiritual damage wrought by
Indian drinking. Mancall argues convincingly that "liquor
was not a minor component of the so-called Columbian exchange."
The alcohol trade became "crucial to the way colonists and
Indians understood each other," and "neither Indians
nor colonists could sever the ... trade from the workings of the
empire." (91)
Alcohol also contributed to the "providential"
demise (as many colonists saw it) of Indian populations in early
America by weakening the natives before the onslaught of
epidemic diseases, which were also brought from Europe, inadvertently,
as part of the now-familiar Columbian exchange. Since 1972, when
Alfred W. Crosby popularized that phrase in his book of the same
title, our understanding of the floral, faunal, and pathogenic
exchanges between the Old and New Worlds has grown exponentially,
thanks in part to the continued work of Crosby.(92) Because the
original book is somewhat dated, teachers will be grateful that
Crosby has published twelve of his occasional essays on
Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History.
Appearing originally between 1976 and 1993, they treat, in Crosby's
inimitably pungent style, topics such as the impact of the Columbian voyages,
"The British Empire as a Product of Continental Drift," native mortality in
North America and Hawaii, and the demographic impact of American crops in
Europe. The introduction on "Nerds [Scientists] Versus Twits [Historians]"
alone is worth the purchase price, especially when Crosby ues that, because
"we humans are, before all else, organisms," the 'history f bowels" is as
important and as knowable as the history of international lations.(93)
As a special issue of the Annals of the Association ofamerican
Geographers akes clear, historical geographers also have much to teach us
about the olumbian exchange. "The Americas before and after I492: Current
eographical Research," edited by Karl W. Butzer, contains ten essays on e
"pristine myth"-that the Indians had not altered the American landcape
significantly before I492-agricultural practices in tatin America efore and
after Columbus, the impact of disease on native populations and roperty, and
the exploration and colonization of North America. William . Denevan explodes
the pristine myth by demonstrating that, "by 1492, Indian activity had modified
vegetation and wildlife, caused erosion, and reated earthworks, roads, and
settlements throughout the Americas." By 650, Daniel W. Gade shows, Andean
highland farmers had selectively opted from the Spanish a dozen plants (mostly
wheat and barley), several nimals (especially sheep and mules), the scratch
plow and sickle, and adobe Ilings with thatched roofs in efforts to cope with
conquest and depopulaion. Carville Earle's "Pioneers of Providence: The
Anglo-American erience ) 1492-1792 " is a model of how the true syncretism of
history and geography can re-energize a familiar subject.(94)
The ecological consequences of introducing Spanish grazing animals to a egion
of central Mexico between 1530 and1600 is the subject of Elinor G. K.
Melville's monograph, A Plague of Sheep. Melville shows in tragic detail how the
natives' "intensive irrigation agriculture shifted to extensive pastoralism; the
region was transformed from a complex and densely populated agricultural osaic
into a sparsely populated mesquite desert; and the indigenous populaons were
economically marginalized while land and regional production assed into the
hands of large landowners who were socially (if not always ethically)
Spanish."(95) As Crosby, William Cronon, Timothy Silver, and Carolyn erchant
have done for several other areas of the colonial world, Melville rts the
symbiotic roles of environmental degradation and the conquest of ative peoples
in Spanish America in ways that should breed imitators.(96)
The severe decline of native American populations, often as high as 90
percent in the first century after contact, prompted two scholarly responses
during the Quincentenary: condemnation and explanation. David E. Stannard's
American Holocaust. Columbus and the Conquest of the New World is firmly in
the former camp, and his conscientious research and impassioned writing make
him its leader. Like his ideological predecessor, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stannard
paints an idyllic picture of pre-Columbian America (conveniently ignoring,
among many other things, the possibly genocidal blood sacrifices of the
Aztecs) and then blames (the operative word) European racism, sexism,
ethnocentrism, greed, and Christianity for spoiling the Indians' Eden and
committing "genocide" against "tens of millions" of hapless natives in
senseless "orgies of human destructiveness." In laying out his moral
indictment of virtually all Euro-American, particularly Christian, colonists
and their modern United States successors, Stannard inflates native population
estimates as high as possible and constantly elides the crucial distinction
between deaths caused by human agency and volition and mortality from
uncontrollable pathogens. The natives who died "from forced labor, from
introduced disease, from malnutrition, from death marches, from exposure, and
from despair," he argues, "were as much victims of the EuroAmerican genocidal
race war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or
devoured by hungry dogs." While Stannard's heart may be in the right spot, his
mind was clearly made up long before launching his research, and his
historical explanations are too facile and unrefined to convince anyone but
the already convinced.(97)
While not ignoring human cruelty, witlessness, and atrocities, the
authors represented in three collections of essays on disease and death in
post-Columbian America provide more nuanced, more time- and space-specific, and
ultimately more convincing explanations than do the moral castigators. Noble
David Cook and W. George Lovell, the editors of nine essays comprising "Secret
judgments of God".- Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, emphasize
that, while smallpox and measles were the biggest killers of Indians, the web
of endemic and epidemic disease was "a complex gestalt, one in which the whole
was decidedly more ruinous than the sum of its lethal parts," which they
select for close analysis. Their concluding chapter, "Unraveling the Web of
Disease," is a clear introduction to the modern science of epidemiology that
informs so many documentary studies of past outbreaks. (98)
Disease and Demography in the Americas, containing twenty-seven essays
edited by John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker from a Smithsonian symposium
in November 1989, focuses on native population loss and its effects primarily
in North America. Wielding the technical tools of paleopathology, the authors
of the first fourteen chapters put to rest the myth of a disease-free
precontact America. Indians all over the Americas suffered from chronic
infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and treponematosis (varieties of yaws
or syphilis), rheumatoid arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, intestinal
parasites, and dental caries. But they were free from--and therefore not immune
to--the deadly crowd infections of the Old World, which ran riot through the
virgin soil populations of the New World. The final thirteen chapters offer
differing assessments of the human costs of these losses, according to "the
size of the aboriginal population, fluctuation in population size prior to
European contact, the extent to. which disease impact preceded actual
population contact, the magnitude and severity of the epidemics, and regional
or local variability in the timing and rate of population decline."(99)
A similar, though less conclusive, book resulted from a meeting of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists in April 1992. In the Wake of
Contact.- Biological Responses to Conquest, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen and
George R. Milner, contains fifteen papers on native illness, diet, habitual
activities, and workload as revealed by archaeological remains of human bones
and teeth. The authors find "no simple dichotomies between precontact and
postcontact populations," partly because they acknowledge the presence of
debilitating and life-threatening diseases and trauma in preColumbian America.
Their evidence does register significant, often serious, changes after
contact. Pueblo and Florida villagers suffered more head wounds (from Spanish
swords); Omahas and Poncas in Nebraska ate better after acquiring horses and
firearms, although Omaha women wore down their front teeth chewing buffalo
hides for an expanded trade, and everyone suffered serious (though seldom
lethal) lead poisoning from imported red pigment and metallic lead used to
make ornaments and musket balls; Guale Indians on the Georgia coast grew
slightly more robust, even as quality and variety of their diet decreased, but
suffered more physical stress and injuries from doing manual labor for Spanish
missionaries. (100)
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