American Indian Reflections: July 2006 Archives

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2002 Charles Mann asks how did the people on the Mayflower survive the first winter, he gives this answer:

"In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"-the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.

To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. "The good hand of God favored our beginnings," Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."

By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges-British despite his name-tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened."

There are other sources that raise some questions about Mann's account. While the Pawtucket were decimated by disease, a good part of the Plymouth Colony was planted in Wampanoag and Narraganset land.  These communities had populations larger than the English settlement for at least the first two decades.  The active support of those native populations was necessary for the Plymouth Colony survival.

Was in viral hepatitis?  Perhaps, but other accounts blame small pox, which had come to these shores with the Spanish was spreading up the East Coast. What is important is how much Bradford and others in that generation shared with Pat Robinson in their self righteous assumption that God was on their side and was bringing death to natives to clear the land.  This quote indicates how early "white narcissism," began to form within the dominant culture  (the incapacity to empathize with others who are outside of one's narrow socially constructed "culture" of reference.)  The founders of the Massachusetts Colony also rejoiced to God for the ravages that disease had inflicted on the native populations.

I wanted to be a Unitarian Universalist minister when I was in high school.  I studied philosophy and humanities in college, and then I went of Crane Theological School at Tufts University.  I arrived in Medford, Massachusetts having experienced Liberal Religious Youth and San Francisco State and the emerging peace and civil rights movements.  The United States was escalating the war against the Vietnamese and I became more and more involved in creating a peace movement, and I made the decision to take a leave from my theological education so I could help end the war.  Looking back now I realize that had taken the ideals of my Unitarian sunday school  and home very seriously, and I was full of illusions about the United States.  I didn't return to theological school for several decades.  During the prolonged interim I was anti war organizer, a labor organizer, a college teacher, a community organizer, a political campaigner, and an organizer of a community school to teach activists some wisdom and some skills.

I taught history and my academic interests centered around social history, which means to do historical research by doing social analysis to understand the past.  Most political and intellectual historians have documents, and while social historians have documents the documents are things like census reports, ship manifests, classified ads in the newspaper,  bills of sales for slaves, or deeds to land.  Social historians might look at folk art, and popular music, and others might read the diaries of ordinary people.  The point of view of the social historian is do history from the bottom up rather than from the top down.  A social historian will get excited about research  revealing how poor Whites in Western New York responded to the Declaration of Independence, and less about another biography of Thomas Jefferson.  During the 1970s social historians were finding ways to reconstruct histories of the family life of slave families, so we began to see books on Thomas Jefferson's other family.

The impact of the work of social historians working with political and intellectual historians is now reflected in our understanding of the American Revolution. The British had gone into debt fighting the French in the Seven Years War (1754 to 1763), and one of the lessons the British government learned from that conflict was that must maintain peace with the American native peoples or war would go on and on.  That was not the kind of war the British wanted to fight, and they saw no advantage in conquering the wilderness west of the Appalachians.  So they made a law forbidding settlement beyond the continental divide and they made treaties with the native people promising peace to all peoples west of the Eastern Mountains.

The American colonists were upset with a number of restrictions on their economic life imposed by the Empire, not the least of which was the restriction on land speculation west of the continental divide.  How could young hustlers like George Washington make their fortune if they couldn't survey land out in some valley in Western Virginia and sell it to land hungry immigrants?  Who cared if there were agreements with the native people, their fathers had broken agreements with the natives east of the Mountains.  That is how the land was cleared, you make an agreement to keep "those savages" at bay, and then build up your forces and kill them at the first opportunity.  The colonial gentry reasoned they didn't need the British Army to fight the Indians, they could arm the settlers, and let them form militias. (I ask you to think about the Second Amendment to the Constitution and its meaning in 1789.)  There was a fortune to be made in selling off the West.  If you made the laws it would be legal.  Jefferson even invented a way to survey land that no surveyor had ever seen (ever wonder about the West's arbitrary grid system that assigns house numbers to mountain tops and ravines without regard to topography.)

There were other restrictions imposed on the colonies, and other enterprising men who found these restrictions a violation of their liberty.  We should not forget that there  were iron makers who wanted to build huge forges,  silver smiths who could be making plate for ships,* and would be bankers who wanted to found banks.*  There were the Yankee slave smugglers who longed to trade in human beings legally (at the time the British had a monopoly on this trade.)  The coalition that gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 included idealists, ideologues, hustlers and entrepreneurs.  The document they approved with all its rhetoric about human rights has inspired revolutions against colonization and movements for self determination of peoples as well as a continuing struggle for human rights around the world

I commemorate Independence Day, commemorate for me is a better word that celebrate given my understanding what the birth of the United States meant for human kind.  I reflect on its lessons and its meaning.  I dedicate myself to telling the truth about power and to helping to realize the ideals that articulated for by common people everywhere, even if the were not seriously intended by the author of that document.

*Paul Revere was the founder of American Biltrite, freed from mercantile restrictions he became a manufacturer of metal plate.  He got his reward in the form of a contract to put the plate on "Old Ironsides" the U.S.S. Constitution.  He did a good job.  Thomas Paine was one of the founders of the First National Bank of Boston, one of the banks that consolidated to form the Fleet Financial Group.  With his profits from getting that charter, he was able to go to France to help make another Revolution.

On June 30, I posted details about Thomas Jefferson who authored the long standing U.S.policy toward Native people known as "Move or Die."  I included this quote: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

I was asked which Indians was Jefferson referring to when he made that quote.

My instinct is to say "all Indians" and leave it like that,  the Europeans ravished this continent by dividing and conquering.  But the truth is it was all Indians that were left, some had already been exterminated. 

The Shawnee were the major nation resisting Virginia's murderous invasion in 1780 just as the Cherokee were resisting North Carolina's and Georgia's invaders.  But it would have been "first they came for the Shawnee, and then they came for the rest."  By 1780 Virginia had already wiped out several nations.  Jefferson was a national leader,  the author of the Declaration of Independence, the former ambassador to France, when he spoke as Governor of Virginia he was not referring to a local  state problem.  The Illinois River was a long way from Williamsburg.

I have been able to compile a short list of known victims of this policy which was continued until the indigenous people were no longer in possession of any ancestral land, continued even after Wounded Knee, continued even after the people had been humiliated and reduced to dependency.  Jefferson's policy affected these Indians.

Abenakis,  Accochannock,  Alabama Coushatta,  Abanki, Alaska Natives, Apache,*  Arapaho,  Arikara,  Assiniboine Sioux,  Blackfeet,* Caddo,  Carrier, Catawba, Cayuga ,  Cheyenne,  Chickasaw,  Chicora,  Chilcotin, Chippewa,  Chippewa Cree,  Chitimacha,
Chocataw,  Cherokee*,  Chumash,  Coharie, Comanche,* Costanoan,  Cowlitz, Cree,  Creek,  Crow, Dakota, Delaware,  Dene,  Edisto, Essellen, Goshute , Gros Ventree, Gwitch'In , Haida, Haliwa-Sponi, Hidatsa, Ho Chunk , Hohokam, Hopi,Houma, Hupa, Huron,  Illinois, Innu, Inuit, Inupiaq, Iowa, Iroquois, Kalispel, Kaw, Kiowa,  Klallam, Klamath, Kootenai, Lakota, Lumbee, Maidu, Makah, Mandan, Mattaponi, Meherrin, Menominee, Metis, Miami, Mingo, Miwok, Mohawk, Mohegan, Monacan, Montaucketts, Munsee Delaware, Nansemond, Navaho *, Nez Perce, Nisga'a, Nootka,  Ohlone, Ojibwe, Omaha, Oneida, Onondaga, Osage, Ottawa,  Paiute, Pamunkey,  Pawnee, Peoria, Pequot, Pima,  Potawatomi, Powhatan, Pueblo, Quapaw,  Quinault,  Ramapough, Sac and Fox , Salish, Saponi, Secwepemc, Seminole,
Seneca,  Shawnee, Shinnecock, Shoshone, Shuswap, Siletz, Sioux, Spokane, Steilacoom, Suquamish, Susquehanna  Tlingit, Tonkawa, Tsilhqot'In, Tuscarora,  Umatilla,  Umpqua,  Ute,* Wabanaki, Waccamaw-Sioun, Wampanoag, Warm Springs Indians, Washoe, Wea,
Wendat, Wichita, Wiyot, Wyandot.

I am sure there are some I couldn't find.  Some of the peoples on the above list have been reduced to populations smaller than one of our average sized congregations, they were hundreds of thousands in 1491.

Was the removal policy an alternative to Genocide?  In other words if the Indians choose to move, rather than die, isn't it true that there was only the threat of genocide, not the reality of genocide?

If individuals are moved from a land where they ancestors lived, if their children are forcefully removed and sent to English Christian schools, if the land they are resettled on is incapable of sustaining them agriculturally and they are put on the dole they have been destroyed as a people.  When armed men keep them in their "reserve," they are in concentration camps.    Genocide is when a people's culture and way of life has been destroyed.  The native people were destroyed as an indigenous people and turned into the underclass known as Indians.  The survivors are victims of genocide just as much as those who ended up in a mass grave.

Ask the Armenians.  Ask the Jews.  One doesn't have to get every last individual for a genocide to have taken place.  Genocide is the destruction of a particular community of people, survivors of transported Indians were able to recreate some community, but Oklahoma isn't the Great Smocky Mountains.

Native people are resurgent,  more and more individuals are learning their language and working with others to overcome shame and become autonomous and self determining.  But native people live with the awareness of holocaust.  To heal this nation the children of the conquerors must share that awareness.

The old ones say that an individual Cherokee would have different names during their lifetime.  I will render the names in English, but Cherokee never use an English equivalent.  Do not call any Cherokee "Red Dear"  their name is the Cherokee language.  But for purposes of illustration I use English to show the naming culture.

When one was born the parents would give a name, almost always a "nickname" for some endearing feature that they experienced in the baby.  For example, "always smiling" will be a child's name, or "joy of my life" might express affection.  The parent might also make a statement about the circumstances under which the child was conceived, there were a number of "light of the moon" and "stars shined" among the youngsters.

The older child at about the age of eleven would take on a name for themselves, and many of these names were a little grandiose.  The child becoming a pre adolescent might choose to be "good swimmer,"  or "lovely shinning hair."  Some had the foresight to choose a name they c0uld grow into like night owl, or smart fox.

From what I have been told the celebration of becoming a young adult (about 16) was usually marked by choosing an adult name, more often of religious significance.  A totem animal with a significant modifier (Red Wolf) would be a common choice, or a religiously significant natural phenomenon (Great  Noise of Rushing Water, or Firecloud.)  The community would recognize this name in some public way, not as formal as wedding, but not as informal as "oh, cute smile, I heard you want us to call you Silver Fox from now on."  It was sort like a new member recognition.

The naming conventions of boys and girls in our society are either private or sectarian,  it would be good to have a public recognition of coming of age.  It would be good to have a chance to choose and re choose one's identity.  If as an adult, one ceased to feel like a Running Elk, one might decide that Thunder Mountain was more one's style.  The mid life crisis could be channelled into a retreat into the wilderness and emerging with a new name.  Not as expensive as a red sports car.

One way present day Cherokee keep their names as their own is use an English language name when relating to the dominant culture.  A name like Martha or Clyde.  The Cherokee name is not used outside of the community that recognizes the sacred naming and the promise that it takes a community to fulfill.

Choosing one's name is good, but Sometimes we grow toward the names we have been given.  I know I have.