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| Foreword | xiii | ||||
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| Prologue: A History Written in Bone | xvii | ||||
| Part I NAMES AND IMAGES | |||||
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3 | (8) | |||
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11 | (18) | |||
| Part II NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENTISTS | |||||
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29 | (7) | |||
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36 | (8) | |||
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44 | (8) | |||
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52 | (12) | |||
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64 | (7) | |||
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71 | (6) | |||
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77 | (14) | |||
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91 | (11) | |||
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102 | (21) | |||
| Part III DEEP AMERICAN HISTORY | |||||
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123 | (10) | |||
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133 | (6) | |||
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139 | (6) | |||
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145 | (12) | |||
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157 | (10) | |||
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167 | (10) | |||
| Part IV THE INDIANS REFUSE TO VANISH | |||||
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177 | (9) | |||
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186 | (12) | |||
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198 | (11) | |||
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209 | (16) | |||
| Part V BRIDGING THE CHASM | |||||
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225 | (14) | |||
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239 | (15) | |||
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254 | (14) | |||
| Epilogue | 268 | (9) | |||
| Acknowledgements | 277 | (2) | |||
| Endnotes | 279 | (18) | |||
| Literature Cited | 297 | (21) | |||
| Index | 318 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
A significant portion of the proceeds from this book are being donated to the Arthur Parker/Native American Scholarship Fund of the Society for American Archaeology. I believe strongly in this program, which is specifically designed to assist Indian people wishing to pursue advanced studies in archaeology. I respectfully request that other archaeologists writing books-for-profit about American Indians give some serious thought to donating (at least part of) their royalties to the Parker Fund.
I believe it's a wise investment.
DHT
Chapter One
COLUMBUS, ARAWAKS, AND CARIBS: THE POWER TO NAME
[The natives] have often asked me, why we call them Indians. --Roger Williams (Plimouth Colony, 1643)
On the morning of October 12, 1492, Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) guided his small landing party onto dry land. Unfurling the banner of the Spanish monarchy--a green crowned cross emblazoned on a field of white--the Admiral of the Ocean Sea led his little group in a prayerful thanksgiving. He set up a wooden cross and christened the island San Salvador --after the Holy Savior who had protected them during their perilous voyage.
Columbus commanded those present--the brothers Pinzón (Mart¡n Alonso and Vincente Yáñez), fleet secretary Rodrigo de Escobedo, and comptroller Rodrigo Sánchez--"to bear witness that I was taking possession of this island for the King and Queen." This new land and its riches now belonged to Spain. Its inhabitants were henceforth Spanish subjects.
The same scene was repeated five years later when John Cabot stepped onto the northern peninsula of Newfoundland in 1497 and made a short speech claiming possession for Mother England. Two Frenchmen, Cartier and Champlain, did the same in the St. Lawrence Valley, as did Henry Hudson in New York Harbor and Captain Cook in Polynesia. Even the moon is graced with an American flag and a plaque signed by Richard Nixon.
LOS INDIOS
For the three months following his first landfall, Columbus piloted his three ships through a maze of islands, "discovering" and naming each one. After San Salvador came Santa María de la Concepción and then, on October 16, Fernandina , named after King Ferdinand. As he proceeded southward, still seeking the Asian mainland, Columbus soon encountered the island he named Isabela . A Haitian harbor became San Nicholás (because he entered it on December 6, the feast day of that saint). The nearby headland was Cabo del Estrella , named for the Southern Cross in the sky immediately above. "Thus I named them all," Columbus wrote in his diary.
The names established an agenda under which the rest of the encounter would be played out. After discovering a patch of "unclaimed" land, the conqueror would wade ashore and plant his royal banner. He proclaimed that these newly discovered lands were now his patron's domain and laid claim to the new-found riches, the natural resources, and the things living and inanimate--all of which was simply wilderness before being "discovered" and defined by Europeans. During the Golden Age of Discovery, European colonial powers competed in a high stakes game of finders keepers. The power to name reflected an underlying power to control the land, its indigenous people, and its history.
Discovering and naming were not limited to islands. In the letter announcing his feats to the world, Columbus called the people he found los Indios , broadening the geographical India to denote all of Asia east of the Indus River. Even after Columbus' navigational error (a pair of intervening continents) was recognized, his term Indios was retained and eventually translated into the other languages of conquest--the French Indien and the English Indian . Thus the invented word "Indian," which began as a navigational misnomer, would carry enduring colonial connotations. It would mask the enormous complexities and variability of Native American people by grouping them together into a vastly oversimplified pan-tribal construct.
The Arawak-speaking people who lived on "San Salvador" did not ask Columbus to rename their island. They had called their home Guanahani since first arriving there centuries before. As they watched the three ships make their way toward the shore, they must have wondered about the voyagers' origins. They must have applied their own names to these curious bearded strangers. But these names and musings are forever lost because within a decade after the encounter, the Arawak-speakers on Guanahani had all died. Hardly more than a decade after Columbus arrived, European-borne disease and harsh treatment had decimated the native population of Hispañola. They were slaughtered wholesale by fire and torture, the sword, and ferocious war dogs, worked to death as slaves, and mowed down by smallpox, measles, and diphtheria. The Spanish had to venture ever further south in search of slaves to support their fledgling New World colonies.
The names Indian and San Salvador persist today because they were made up and retained by the conquerors of this "New World." As usual, the winners got to write the history books.
NOBLE ARAWAKS AND BLOODTHIRSTY CARIBS
The Admiral was touched by the poor but generous Arawaks living on the island he called San Salvador. Columbus wrote in his diary a glowing testimonial to the gracious and amiable people he found there. They brought him food and water and asked if he came from the heavens. Although not exactly sure where he had landed, Columbus saw about him a terrestrial paradise, perhaps even the threshold of the Garden of Eden itself.
After some island hopping, the Spanish explorers were befriended by a local chief named Guacanagari. Not long after they met, on December 25, 1492, the flagship Santa María ran aground on a shallow coral reef off what today is Haiti. Guacanagari wept at the plight of the stranded foreigners, and he immediately dispatched his people in long canoes to help offload supplies from the stricken ship. The Admiral and his crew were invited to take refuge in Guacanagari's village. His Arawak hosts, Columbus wrote, were among the world's most generous people, living in peace in their island universe. They were loving parents. They venerated their elders and cared for them in old age. Their language lacked even a word for "war." These sentiments were embellished a few years later by Bartholomé de las Casas: "God created these simple people without evil and without guile. They are most obedient and faithful to their natural lords and to the Christians whom they serve. Nor are they quarrelsome, rancorous, querulous, or vengeful. Moreover they are more delicate than princes and die easily from work or illness. They neither possess nor desire to possess worldly wealth. Surely these people would be the most blessed in the world if they only worshiped the true God."
Thus was invented the Noble Redman.
The image of America as earthly paradise was short-lived. The Noble Redman was soon joined by vicious warriors lurking deep within the tropical forest. The Indians of Hispañola told Columbus of a fierce people they called the "Carib," known for their savage ways--particularly their appetite for human flesh. The gentle Arawak recounted a calamitous migration of warriors coming from the deepest jungles to the south. All-male Carib war parties were said to be advancing island by island, seizing food and weapons, hunting down and eating the Arawak men. They castrated young boys and fattened them up like capons to be consumed later at feasts. Female captives were taken as unwilling brides, to bear the next generation of warriors.
Columbus took careful note of the cannibal menace, which he welcomed as strangely good news. Recalling the cannibals so vividly described by Marco Polo two centuries earlier, Columbus took the Arawaks' stories as a sign that Cathay was not far to the west.
During the very first months of his New World adventure, then, Columbus had invented two classic stereotypes that would condition Euroamerican perceptions of Indians for the next five centuries. The peaceful Arawak continued their idyllic Garden of Eden existence even as they were menaced by the brutal Carib monsters, vivid personifications of the Devil himself. The same Good Indian/Bad Indian imagery is peddled in many bookstores today.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea , published in 1942, and the subsequent European Discovery of America (1971-1974), the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison uncritically employed Bad Indians to lionize Columbus, his lifelong hero. An experienced sailor, Morison retraced under sail every mile of the Admiral's epic first voyage to America. He portrayed Columbus, in typically stirring language, as "an intrepid mariner and practical dreamer" who met the hardships of land and sea "with stoic endurance." Among those hardships were the "dreaded man-eating Caribs," said to live on the island of Dominica, killing and eating all who ventured ashore. One day, Morison relates, the Caribs became so violently ill after eating a Spanish friar that they swore off clerics for good. From that time forth, whenever Spaniards were forced to call at Dominica for water, "they either sent a friar ashore or rigged up the boat's crew with sacking and the like to fool the natives."
The occasional brutality shown by Columbus and his men toward the Caribs was more than justified, Morison argued, because it was directed at club-wielding children of nature who existed halfway between humanity and animality. In Morison's view, Columbus was sent to the New World because the Caribs were the antithesis of civilized Europeans. They deserved what they got and Columbus was just the man to set things straight.
Similar portraits turn up in James Michener's Caribbean , a historical novel sold in tourist traps from Miami to Trinidad. Michener is not, to be sure, a card-carrying professional historian, but that hardly mattered to generations of Americans looking to soak up a little history on their Caribbean vacations through the rich prose of a best-selling novelist. Though he fictionalized his Carib and Arawak characters, Michener assures the reader, "there is historical evidence for the life of the two tribes as portrayed."
To Michener "the heritage of the Caribs was brutality, warfare and little else." This evil tribe supplied the world with words "originating in force and terror: cannibal, hurricane , the war canoe , the manly cigar , the barbecue , in which they roasted their captives." Even the food habits of Michener's Caribs "were totally primitive and graced with none of the refinements that the Arawaks and other tribes had developed; the Caribs ate by grabbing with dirty fingers scraps of meat from the common platter, the men invariably snatching theirs before the women, who were allowed the leftovers." The macho Carib men mistreated their women, "and even their personal adornment was invariably of a warlike nature, and it was the men, never the women, who decorated themselves with the whitened bones of their victims." But Michener's blissfully civilized Arawaks were no match for marauding Carib war parties. "The impending struggles between these two contrasting groups were bound to be unequal, for in the short run brutality always wins; it takes longer for amity to prevail."
Michener's gripping drama about the Carib and Arawak has helped keep the pathos of the pre-Columbian past alive. His books are known for their meticulous research and grounding in historical scholarship. The back cover of Caribbean even suggests that "Michener should be assigned by the nation's educators to pep up those dull, dull history books that students yawn through."
The problem is that the Columbus-Morison-Michener renderings of Caribs and Arawaks are totally and utterly false. There were no man-eating Carib marauders. There were no peaceful Arawak villagers. There was no northward invasion by man-eaters.
Recent historical and archaeological research has shown that the Carib and Arawak imagery is pure myth, a product of overactive fifteenth-century European imaginations. Historian Alvin Josephy has called the Caribs "the most maligned humans on earth." Yet these stereotypes of native Caribbean life have persisted for five centuries, handed down from Columbus to Morison, from Michener to the poolside reader on cruise ships.
What Columbus really saw were differing ways of coping with European invaders. During the earliest encounters, native people often tried simple accommodation and compromise. But as the European strangers became more aggressive, the "peaceful Arawaks" fell victim to the Spanish sword and to the accidental germ warfare that wiped out thousands of native people lacking immunity to European diseases. Their strategies of accommodation made the Arawak villagers prime candidates for conversion to Christianity, but their numbers plunged during the first Columbian years, and their traditional culture soon died out.
As Columbus and subsequent explorers pushed their way southward through the Lesser Antilles, native people took up more aggressive tactics of resistance: From a native perspective, the "Carib" warriors were the first American freedom fighters, defending their families, their land, and their tribal sovereignty from foreign conquest. By the seventeenth century, Caribs were forging temporary alliances with the British, French, and Dutch. If the French outstayed their welcome on a particular island, the local Caribs would ally with the British to eject them. Then, after a few years of British rule, the Caribs might go back to join with the French to depose the British. This strategy fended off the tribes' complete disintegration until treaties had been worked out to divide up the Lesser Antilles. Such forms of resistance lasted well into the eighteenth century, and pockets of Carib people survive today. But to the European mind, they were heathens and savages.
Were the Caribs really cannibals? The best modern evidence suggests that they may indeed have engaged in ritual consumption of enemy body parts. The practice is well documented elsewhere in Native America--a ritual perhaps analogous to the rite of Roman Catholic communion. In the hands of the priest, the holy Eucharist actually becomes the blood and body of Jesus Christ. The Caribs were obviously not using other humans as merely a source of protein. But there is no credible evidence or first-hand testimony to establish that Caribs consumed human flesh at all. The only direct "evidence," from Columbus and his contemporaries, is lurid hearsay passed along again and again as fact.
Yet this cannibal image rationalized the Spanish imperative for a New World slave trade. Even the ardently sympathetic Morison recognized that "there never crossed the mind of Columbus, or his fellow discoverers and conquistadors, any other notion of relations between Spaniard and American Indian save that of master and slave." As his letters and log make clear, Columbus was scouting the islands for potential slaves from the very start. Invading America and enslaving her native people were justified, Columbus believed, because the Indians were so clearly inferior to Europeans; they maintained unconscionable institutions and lived in mortal sin. Given such bestiality, he wondered whether conversion to Christianity was even possible.
Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand, conflicted over the issue of New World slavery, were particularly upset by Columbus' proposed trafficking in humanity. Taken by the image of the peaceful Arawaks, the Queen and King saw American Indians as potential vassals and Christians-to-be, fully deserving of royal protection. After all, if they have souls, are you not obligated to love them as you love yourself?
By early 1500, Columbus was no longer a player in the Caribbean, having been hauled back to Europe in chains and in disgrace; but his invention of the Carib presence continued to fuel the dialogue on slavery. Although Isabela forbade slave taking among Indians friendly to the Crown in 1503, she specifically excluded "barbaric people--enemies of the Christian, those who refuse conversion, and those who eat human flesh." If those bloodthirsty Caribs were really decimating and devouring the Queen's gentle Arawaks, then the Spanish had the necessary justification for taking Indian captives. Thus the Caribs--whom the archaeologist William Keegan calls the "great villains of West Indian prehistory"--became fair game. As cannibals, they were beyond Christian redemption, and by long-standing European practice, anybody captured in a "just war" could be enslaved. This is why Spanish explorers welcomed news of mayhem and rebellion in the Indies. Conquistadors from this point forward carefully distinguished the fierce, cannibalistic Caribs from the peaceful Arawak villagers. The notary public became a key member of every exploring party, ready to record whether or not the Indians encountered in the tropical Caribbean were indeed eaters of human flesh. If so, they were subject to merciless attack and enslavement.
This was all a matter of Euroamerican necessity. Columbus and his successors needed the Noble Arawak/Bloodthirsty Carib fictions to rationalize slave taking to the Spanish Crown. Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand needed to maintain the same fiction to ensure that their missionaries could proceed in good faith, even in the face of hostile pagans. The Carib-Arawak dichotomy served the self-interest of an expanding Spanish empire--making up, to some degree, for Columbus' disappointingly meager discoveries of gold and other precious metals. For Morison, the premier Columbus biographer, detestable Carib cannibals justified the inhuman treatment of native people by his heroic Admiral of the Ocean Sea. For Michener, the division into Good Indians and Bad Indians pitted contaminated against uncontaminated, the pristine against the corrupt, the high-minded against the debased, and thus, provided his novel's dramatic tension. The twin imagery of Noble and Bloodthirsty Savage became a tool by which generations of Euroamericans would define and control Indian people. From the time of Columbus onward, the stereotypes created by newcomers led to a near-universal failure to appreciate the intricacies and textures of actual Native American life.
Copyright © 2000 David Hurst Thomas. All rights reserved.
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