In this 8th lecture, I want to shift the focus from Eurasia – we’ve talked about the
Mongols and Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.
I want to shift to the Western Hemisphere and talk about the indigenous people of the
West.
The Indians, or the Native Americans, I think I had mentioned earlier that I don’t think
there’s a dime’s worth of difference between Indians and Native Americans.
They’re both quite wrong.
We don’t take the time to learn the various tribal names or use them correctly, so I will
interchangeably say – Indians, Native Americans, indigenous people – it all means the same
thing.
This lecture is going to deal with a shifting paradigm in the study of Native American history.
We talked about paradigms earlier; a paradigm is a model or a way of understanding the world.
And then when we find a shifting paradigm we move from the old model to a new model,
and that’s what’s happening here in scholarship or within the academy, the way scholars use
to approach Indian history has changed over the past few generations.
So what I want to do is take you through the old paradigm and give you an idea of how Indian
history was understood for many, many years.
And then I want to take you through the new paradigm so you can see the changes that have
taken place among scholars in our understanding of Native American history.
So – and bear with me – I’m going to consult my notes during this lecture more
than usual because I have just reworked this lecture.
So I want to keep up and not leave anything out.
T
The old paradigm said that the New World was essentially empty, just waiting for the Europeans
to arrive, waiting for Christianity to arrive.
The old paradigm said that the Indians apparently arrive here in the Western Hemisphere about
13,000 years ago, and they arrived over the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age.
The old paradigm said that Indians lived in small, isolated groups.
It maintained that Indians did not make good use of the land, therefore it was okay for
the Europeans to push them off the land to make the land productive.
The old paradigm said that the Indians were essentially a people without history, that
they did not acquire a history until the Europeans arrived, that Indians were outside the scope
or the cosmology of Christianity, and therefore were not part of God’s plan.
The old paradigm essentially ignored the Indian presence in the use of maps.
Europeans would map the New World and distinguish Indian Territory as unknown land, or as land
to be occupied, mentally, at any rate, pushing the Indians off the land.
Of course, Indian land was partitioned by the Europeans without consulting the Indians,
and you can imagine how disconcerting this might be.
One of the early Spanish explorers who came over with the Spanish in the early days of
exploration was Las Casas, and Las Casas, of course, has left us histories of the Indies.
He’s a Spanish priest, a Dominican I believe, and he was or he became very sympathetic the
Indians’ plight and wrote a defense of the Native Americans, and their brutal treatment
by the Spanish.
Las Casas said, or he portrayed the Indians as sort of natural creatures, like other creatures,
like cows or other livestock, living sort of naturally on the land.
He called the New World a terrestrial paradise.
He said that the Indians have a sort of pre-lapsarian innocence about them.
Lapsarian meaning the fall of man, Adam and Eve, and the sin in the Garden of Eden, that
the Indians were somehow removed from this, and that the Indians had lived here in the
New World for millennia waiting for Christianity to arrive.
Now in the 19th century, the foremost historian, George Bancroft, wrote a series of histories
of the United States.
In these histories, Bancroft argued that North America was quote/unquote, an unproductive
waste, before the arrival of the Europeans.
He says it’s only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute
of commerce and of political connection.
This, of course, is quite wrong in every aspect.
You can see here the Eurocentric point of view prevailing, as well as a demonstratively
racist point of view.
Bancroft, much like Las Casas, maintained that the Indians had existed for millennia
in societies without change.
Bancroft, unlike Las Casas though, did not attribute this to the innocence of the Indians.
He attributed it to sloth or laziness.
So we have a very negative image here of the indigenous people.
In the 20th century, Samuel Eliot Morison, who wrote a series of books on European exploration
that are still well worth readying, his portrayal of the Indians is very similar.
He said they were imprisoned in a changeless wilderness; they were pagans expecting short
and brutish lives void of any hope for the future.
A rather sweeping and damning generalization about millions upon millions of people.
Morison goes on to say the native people’s chief function in history – Oh, I’m sorry,
this is from a British historian who said the native people’s chief function in history
is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.
So you can see, there are remarkably negative portrayals of the Indians in this old paradigm.
One aspect of the old paradigm was that sometimes called the Pristine Myth, that is, North America
was pristine.
The land had not been changed by the Indians; they’d had no impact on the environment.
In fact, all the way up to 1964, during the Great Society when Lyndon Johnson pushed for
legislation to re-do and improve the national parks system, the Wilderness Act of 1964 said
quote/unquote – America was untrammeled by man prior to the arrivals of the Europeans.
Almost as if millions upon millions of indigenous people had never existed, that essentially
North America was an empty Garden of Eden waiting, waiting patiently, for European Christians
to arrive.
Also in the 19th century, a figure from American literature that you should know, Henry David
Thoreau, he admired the Indians because he said they were quite unlike Europeans.
They had not experienced the Enlightenment and they did not, therefore, create these
categories of good and bad.
They lacked the capacity for evil, unlike the Europeans.
Now this assertion by Thoreau tends to make the Indians innocent, but it also has them
living without history in an unchanging environment just waiting for the Europeans to arrive.
And since history, of course, is a record of change, an unchanging civilization or an
unchanging environment would indicate a people without history.
And finally, since the Indians were obviously not Christian, they’re not part of God’s
plan and they lie outside the scope of Christian history.
Now – the new paradigm.
A lot of evidence has been uncovered by scholarship across the board – archeologists, geologists,
historians, critical readers in literary theory, on and on – have gone back into these sources
and discovered new sources, and have created a new model for understanding Indian history.
First of all, immigrants from Asia arrived here in the New World much earlier than previously
believed.
We have found artifacts dating back over 30,000 years.
That far predates the old notion of 13,000 years or the immigration of Indians across
the Bering land bridge.
So they’ve been here far longer than we previously believed, and they may have arrived
here – the immigrants coming to the New World – may have arrived here in more ways
than simply the Bering land bridge.
There’s evidence that Polynesians may have crossed the Southern Pacific, sort of island
hopping their way to South America.
The population of the New World would rival that of Eurasia at the time of the Columbian
Exchange according to more recent demographic investigations.
This new paradigm says that the Indians had a significant impact on the environment, just
as the Europeans had.
Indian agriculture had a subtle, but significant impact on the environment.
Large empires created in the New World, the Incas, the Olmecs, later the Aztecs, a variety
of Indian societies in North America, both sedentary, farming and agricultural people,
and nomadic people, mound societies that we see in the Mississippi and in the American
southeast.
So there’s a huge variety of Indian civilizations.
The new paradigm suggests that the Indians experienced a Neolithic revolution at about
the same time as the Eurasians.
Neo – new, lithic – stone, the new Stone Age.
Remember that the New Stone Age is characterized by farming, agriculture, settling down, having
larger families, greater populations, villages, towns, and finally cities stored food so we
don’t have to wander about in search of sustenance constantly.
We have stored food.
And of course, once you do these things, you can domesticate plants and animals and create
a society of specializations.
The Indians had their Neolithic revolution very much as Eurasians did in what today we
would think of as Mesopotamia, Turkey, modern-day Iraq.
The Indians developed sophisticated farming techniques just as the Eurasians did.
The Indians developed sophisticated trading networks, just as the Eurasians did.
We find a variety of artifacts, hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their point
of origin, as the Indian trading circuit moved throughout North America into Central and
then South America.
The Indians had developed sophisticated mythological systems, just as Eurasians had, and religious
systems.
The Indians did not adopt monotheism as was adopted by the Jews, the Christians, and the
Muslims in the Middle East of Eurasia.
Indian religion probably resembled the polytheistic nature of perhaps Hinduism than it would any
of our well-known monotheistic faiths.
The new paradigm says that history, Indian history, existed parallel to that of the Eurasians.
It’s just that Eurasians were ignorant of it.
They were separated by the Atlantic on one hand, and the Pacific on the other.
So this new view, this new paradigm, of Indian history gives us a much more complex and frankly
a much more interesting past with which to investigate.
We will return again to the Indians as we go forward in this class.
And in our next lectures, I want to look at 2 of the consequences of the Columbian Exchange,
Atlantic slavery and imperialism.
Thank you.