An astonishing new book! The main myth that the book refutes is that in colonial American the Indians were just a sideshow. Author Hämäläinen shows thAn astonishing new book! The main myth that the book refutes is that in colonial American the Indians were just a sideshow. Author Hämäläinen shows that, in fact, it was the indigenous populations who were in charge most of the time. Therefore the book fills in many gaps left in the standard American histories and expunges many false claims.
This is not a review — the book's four-century scope won't allow that— rather it's a gathering of a few quotes that support the main themes of the book.
"The dual threat of Indigenous power and English expansion from the east terrified the French inhabitants in Louisiana to their core. The Natchez war had shown, with graphic immediacy, what disregard for Indigenous sovereignty, traditions, and needs could bring. Cataclysmic violence, massive loss of life and property, the utter collapse of colonial institutions. The violence discouraged French investments in the colony and impeded France's empire-building in the lower Mississipi Valley. It also taught the colonists how little they could do without Native approval. In Louisiana, Indigenous customs prevailed, turning a colonial space into a hybrid one. Choctaw, Illini, Quapaw, and Apalachee societies were all intact, and they expected the French to comply with their traditions. The consequences for Louisiana were far-reaching. Métissage — cultural mixing — became the norm, shaping the most intimate aspects of the colonists' lives: sexual practices, gender roles, and child-rearing. The French in Louisiana came to realize that to survive in North America, newcomers needed to embrace its Indigenous inhabitants and convince them to become allies. The French had been doing so elsewhere, and by the early eighteenth century, all the European empires had grasped, if not necessarily accepted, that reality. They had also learned that the most effective way of building alliances was generosity and trade, which could turn enemies into kin." (p 226-7)
This is a dense text, but a well written one. For me, a general reader, the key to conquering it was to sound out the sometimes complex Indian personal and place names early on: Thayendanegea, Michilimackinac, Meshekinnoqquah, etc. Happily, all Indian names are not this complex, but some are, and unless you are a scholar the book is probably not skimmable.
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"ALL ACROSS THE CONTINENT, from the Southeast to the Southwest, from the deep interior to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, colonial ambitions had crashed into Indigenous geographies of power. . . . Fundamentally, it was a matter of distance and geography. North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior, where Native territories extended deep into what, to Europeans, was a great unknown. The two Americas were almost complete opposites. In the interior, the Columbian Exchange often worked to the Indians' advantage. Deadly germs were brought inland by European traders, but their impact remained limited, whereas new military technology guns, powder, metal, and horses became available through colonial border markets and extensive Indigenous trade networks. In a transitional belt where the Indians were neither too close to European colonies to fall under their epidemiological shadow nor too far away to reap the benefits of their commerce, several geographically privileged Indigenous regimes rose to challenge colonial expansion on their own terms. This emerging belt was where great fortunes could be amassed, and where empires were won and lost." (p. 258)
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"The Lenapes fought back. The sachem Shingas thought that if they stopped the English, 'we may do afterwards what we please with the French, for we have [them] as it were in a sheep den, and may cut them [off] at any time.' Ohio Country Indians kept attacking English settlements, forcing Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to focus on protecting their borders at a time when they should have been fighting the French. Highly mobile Native squadrons killed or captured hundreds of settlers, sending them into a chaotic retreat to the east. Soon the frontier was only a hundred miles from Philadelphia. The sudden contraction of British America became an opening for the French." (p. 278)
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"THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR, Pontiac's War, Lord Dunmore's Was, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The 1783 Treaty of Paris extinguished that long-standing ambition. The thirteen colonies were severed from the British Empire and recognized as the United States of America. Native Americans had not been invited to the treaty talks, and they knew to expect an undesirable outcome. Still, when the news arrived, they were shocked and appalled. The treaty gave the United States an enormous territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, including the southern Great Lakes. The United States was an instant empire, claiming lands far beyond its effective borders. . . .
"Contemporary Europeans saw the 1783 treaty as a decisive turning point in the North American continent's history that spelled doom for Native Americans, who could no longer play rival colonial powers against one another. That view of the situation was wishful thinking. The fledgling United States may have claimed an enormous swath of Indigenous territory, but it controlled very little of it. Native Americans . . . had retained their territorial supremacy in North America throughout the long war. The Great Lakes region and nearly all of the Trans-Mississippi West remained under Indigenous rule, with catastrophic consequences for the British Empire. . . ." (p. 318-9)
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There can be no doubt about the genocide British, Spanish, French, and American colonists gradually brought against the Indians. President Andrew Jackson and Congress in the mid 1830s moved indigenous nations off of prime agricultural land in the south and onto far less arable tracts in the west. (The Third Reich was inspired by the accomplishment; during WW2 they wanted to move the "untermenschen" to less productive land in Asia, but they didn't have the luck of working in a news vacuum as early American colonial powers did.) The United States compelled marches in winter which killed off a good number of Indians either by extreme cold or germs. Although this book is about the triumph of the indigenous nations over the colonial powers — and that power over the colonizers was immense — it is in the end about the killing of the American Indians and the massive expropriation of their lands. (See Claudio Saunt's powerful Unworthy Republic).
"GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON BECAME president in 1829 and announced "Indian removal" — a euphemistic term if there ever was one — as his main ambition. He did not acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty, having once argued that Congress had 'the right to take it and dispose of it.' Events accelerated dangerously for the Cherokees. The Georgia General Assembly strove to extend its jurisdiction over the Indians' territory, and a year later gold was found in the Dahlonega region in northern Georgia, triggering the first gold rush in American history. The land belonged to the Cherokee Nation. Jackson argued that 'though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits.' The Cherokees sent envoys to Washington, D.C., in March 1830. They stayed in Brown's Hotel, equidistant from the White House and Congress. The House of Representatives debated the expulsion of Indians from the South for two weeks before passing the Indian Removal Act by a paper-thin margin of 102-97. The Senate vote was 28-19 in favor of the act. Jackson declared that the new Indigenous domain in the West would be called the 'Indian Territory'" (p. 394)
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The biggest surprise for this reader was the description of Indian-on-Indian slavery. It's made me think differently of the African slave experience, which I had previously thought without parallel in North America. But Indigenous peoples had been trading captives with each other long before Europeans arrived in North America. So extensive was such slavery that I have been unable to find a summarizing quote that might give you a sense of its scope, which was vast. Indian enslavement was eventually helped along by confederations Indians formed with the colonizers, once, that is, they grew powerful enough to participate.
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"In October 1867, the Cheyennes, led by Black Kettle, signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty with U.S. representatives. Only a month later, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, burning with ambition, attacked Black Kettle's village on the Washita River, killing dozens of solders and women and children. U.S. Indian policy was misguided, vicious, and incompetent all at once, entangling the nation in unnecessary wars that only weakened its authority in the critical midsection of the continent. All in all, it was a massive miscalculation that would quickly come to haunt the U.S. Army. [W2 emphasis]. The central plains became dangerous to Americans, and soon a U.S. official complained that the Kiowas and Comanches 'have been doing much of this wrong. I shall however, continue to exert myself to prevent these acts of violence.' The Americans were making far too many enemies." (p. 440)...more
A fascinating book about the "fierce people." The Yanomamö—a "demographically pristine" stone age population occupying a remote expanse of the OrinocoA fascinating book about the "fierce people." The Yanomamö—a "demographically pristine" stone age population occupying a remote expanse of the Orinoco straddling Brazil and Venezuela. The author spent 30 years with them and came back with robust comparative data that will never be equaled, since, the Yamamanö are now acculturated. That is, their violent but pristine way of life has by now been diluted or admixed irrevocably by our culture.
Three quarters of the book is about the tribes themselves. Chagnon had to spend years in the field. He started by learning the Yamamanö language from scratch. Eventually, he would discover that it was without precedent. That is, without marked similarities to nearby languages. This suggests the Yamamanö are an exceedingly ancient people, having lived in considerable isolation, perhaps for millennia. Along with the New Guinea Highlanders, they were perhaps the last such pre-contact stone age people to survive into the twentieth century. And Chagnon worked with groups that had never before seen a white man.
There exists among the Yanomamö—a name taboo. Not only is it considered offensive to use the name of someone who has recently died, but even to call a living person by their name out loud is unseemly. Now try to imagine how this affected Chagnon, one of whose tasks was to gather genealogies and censuses. It makes for quite a story, especially when the tribe, the Bisassi-teri, which loved a good scatological joke, deceived him for months on end about the names he was collecting. Naturally, he was furious, but what could he do?
• "On one trip, again with Rerebawä as my guide, we were followed all the way from our canoe to the edge of the village by a jaguar, a walking distance of four hours"; • "The Yanomam�� express distance by the number of 'sleeps' it takes to get somewhere"; • The Yanomamö technique of asphyxiating armadillo in their burrows and digging precisely where their quarry has fallen is an astonishing thing to read about; • "The most vile and vulgar insult you can utter in Yamamanö is 'Wa bei kä he shami!' ('Your forehead is filthy!') Any allusion to blemishes, warts, pimples, etc., on someone's skin, especially on or near the forehead, is potentially insulting."
Then there's the time when a monk from the Salesian Mission asks Chagnon—an atheist—to murder one of the mission's fellows, who, it has been discovered, has sired several children with a Yanomamö woman. Now get this, the proposed murder was seen by the monk, Padre Cocco, as a means of saving the Church from further embarrassment. The Salesians were evil, but Chagnon had to remain on good terms with them if he was to get his work done. The monks would take Yanomamö children downstream to mission encampments "...where they were put into dormitories, taught Spanish, and discouraged from using their own language. They were away from their parents and their villages for months at a time." Moreover, in the ongoing struggle to out perform the Protestant missionaries, the Salesians began giving the Yanomamö—a war-making people previously limited to bows and arrows—shotguns.
Noble Savages is also a book of searing, irrefutable truths, of reputations regained. A book by an author who underwent decades of smears. Here is the bottom line: Chagnon determined empirically that of the men in the many tribes he studied over decades, those who killed one or more enemies on raids, had almost three times greater reproductive success (more wives, more offspring) than those who did not kill. See the fascinating tables on pages 275 and 276.
This, Chagnon's biggest finding, connecting Yanomomö war-making with reproductive success started an academic war. For empirical proof that the Yanomamö went to war over women completely upset the anthropological orthodoxy of the day. That orthodoxy said that the "...theory of human behavior had no room for ideas from biology, reproductive competition, and evolutionary theory." That's right, the cultural anthropologists were anti-science! War in primitive societies, they decreed, had to be due to competition over scarce material resources or a reaction to the repression of the western colonial powers. To say otherwise was "contrary to the prevailing anthropological wisdom derived from Marxism."
Now imagine poor Prof. Chagnon. He was 28 at the time the first of his findings were published, and he faced a backlash from the "purists" who smeared him baselessly and who argued without evidence that he was wrong. But he was not wrong. He was correct. The Yanomomö did indeed go to war over women. Thus, the vast sphere of Cultural Anthropology as it was then defined went to war with itself.
There weren't many colleges in America in those days, mostly tutors. But by the time Lewis finished his two years as personal secretary of JeffeNotes:
There weren't many colleges in America in those days, mostly tutors. But by the time Lewis finished his two years as personal secretary of Jefferson — reading voraciously from the president's library and dining with the man almost nightly — he was broadly competent in a number of disciplines. Beyond that he was sent to a number of experts in Philadelphia — a botanist, physician, navigator, etc. — to polish his skills.
"Jefferson gave his reasons for picking Lewis to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia: 'Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, & familiar with Indian manners & character. He is not regularly educated, but he possesses a great mass of accurate observation on all the subjects of nature which present themseles here, & will therefore readily select those only in his new route which shall be new. He has qualified himself for those observations of longitude & latitude necessary to fix the points of the line he will go over.'" (p. 79)
The cool dispositions shown by both Lewis and Clark, especially when it came to disobedience among the rank-and-file — theirs was a military operation — evince a patience worthy of Job.
Ambrose keeps the non-standard spelling used by both men, but reading it all these years later makes them at times seem deranged. Which was not the case, of course.
"Groops of Shrubs covered with the most delicious froot is to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flours Delicately and highly flavered raised above the Grass, which Strikes and profumes the Sensation, and amuses the mind." (p. 149)
Then again it should be remembered our writings may one day be considered non-standard.
In Meriwether Lewis's first contact with an Indian tribe, the Otos, he delivers a long speech, which is so condescending it had me cringing more than two centuries later. He repeatedly called them "children" and then commenced to tell them how they should behave with white men.
"Lewis did all this with the utmost seriousness. It never occurred to him that his actions might be characterized as patronizing, dictatorial, ridiculous, and highly dangerous. . . . His idea of how to make them [the Indians] into allies was to give them worthless medals and wardrobe trappings rather than the guns and powder they needed. . . . In general, it would be impossible to say which side was more ignorant of the other." (p. 163)
Slips at times into hagiographic praise:
"His health was excellent. His ambition was boundless. His determination was complete. He could not, would not, contemplate failure."
"He turned his face west. He would not turn it around until he reached the Pacific Ocean. He stepped forward, into paradise." (p. 216)...more
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