Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 462

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America," by Kathleen DuVal.

Native nations existed in North America long before Europeans, Africans, and Asians arrived and continue to the present day. Indigenous civilizations did not come to a halt when a few wandering explorers or hungry settlers arrived in their homelands, even when the strangers came well armed. Native Americans made up the majority of the North American population through the mid-1700s and controlled most of the land and resources of the continent for another century after that.

The myth that Native Americans were primitive people too uncivilized to have developed cities was a convenient way for Europeans and European Americans to assert territorial claims and cultural superiority. In reality, Native America had a long and complex urban history that had been changing and growing for centuries before Europeans arrived. It was true that, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of Native North America looked nothing like the cities that Europeans came from, but that was not because they were primitive or never had cities. Instead, by the time Europeans arrived, most Native Americans had rejected cities’ centralized power. As we shall see in the next chapter, the cities’ fall would create a new world in North America, long before Europeans claimed to have discovered one, and would prompt the development of some of the most egalitarian societies in the early modern world.

Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality. The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political and economic centralization to build new ways of living, more similar in scale to how their distant ancestors had lived and how some peoples had continued to live even during the height of the large civilizations. Smaller-scale communities allowed for both more sustainable economies and more widespread political participation. Peoples instituted a variety of political checks and balances to prevent dictatorial leaders from taking power and to ensure that citizens had a say. These changes did not all happen at once or in the same way everywhere. Many places had never established the hierarchical structures of Cahokia or the Huhugam, and some of the leveling trend continued in later years as societies adjusted to population declines resulting from European diseases or dispersed to get away from European settlements.

Western Europe took a different path in the Little Ice Age. For Europeans, the city became the marker of civilization—indeed, they share the same root, “civis.” They doubled down on hierarchy and centralization as means of dealing with the difficult times. Europeans’ resulting beliefs have shaped subsequent notions of what civilization is. Their assumptions informed later anthropological models, still taught in schools today, of how societies develop along an imagined progression, from the hunter-gatherer “Paleolithic era” to the agricultural and urbanizing “Neolithic era,” before they can truly be part of “history” once they invent writing, then passing through an age of absolute monarchs to eventually arrive at democracy. Europeans interpreted these steps as universal rules. Centuries later, in the Age of Revolutions, Europeans would call for the rights of man and curb (or guillotine) their monarchs. In some ways, Native Americans took a shortcut to democracy, developing participatory politics rapidly after rejecting the hierarchies of the twelfth century.

Urbanization is not a necessary condition for civilization, or for a good life. Smaller-scale societies that include hunting and gathering in their economies can provide their people with a better diet and more leisure time. Judging civilizations by their elaborate structures surely is less useful than asking what kinds of structures and ways of life made sense for people in a given place and time. In fact, people have had mixed opinions about cities for as long as they have existed. Those who live in and benefit from them often believe that urban life is the only life worth living. In the first large cities—ancient Rome and the cities of Han Dynasty China—urban thinkers and writers saw themselves as more rational, sophisticated, and advanced than rural dwellers.

But there has always been an opposing view, held by those on farms and in small towns and even shared by some urban dwellers: that cities are corrupt places, whose residents are willing to trade autonomy for material comforts under autocratic rulers. 

By the mid-1700s the Quapaws were receiving annual payments, plus additional gifts whenever a new French official arrived or needed a particular service, such as a guide, interpreter, or military escort. The practice had developed in the Iroquoian and Algonquian relationships with the Dutch and English in the late 1600s and had been adopted by France’s Native allies in Canada and the Great Lakes. By 1716 the governor of Canada was writing to his superiors that he needed gifts of six hundred guns, forty thousand pounds of gunpowder, and sixty thousand pounds of musket balls yearly “to maintain peace with the Indians and to prevent them trading with the English.” A South Carolina merchant represented many a frustrated European official when he wrote that “the Indians have been so used of late years to receive presents that they now expect it as a right belonging to them, and the English, French and Spaniards are in some measure become tributary to them.” Europeans wanted to believe that North America belonged to them, but in reality they were paying tribute or rent to have access to particular Native land and resources.

One spring day in 1789, Shawnees discovered men surveying and laying out markers for streets that would one day be Cincinnati, at a site north of the Ohio River between the Great Miami and Little Miami rivers, smack in the center of Shawnee country. When the Shawnees asked what they were doing there, the leader replied that he represented the United States. He showed them the commission that proved it: a signed, written document marked with the seal of the United States, a bald eagle holding in its right talon an olive branch and in its left a bundle of thirteen arrows. When the man explained the commission and the symbolism of the seal—that the United States desired peace (the olive branch) but would fight if necessary (the arrows)—one of the Shawnees countered that he “could not perceive any intimations of peace from the attitude the Eagle was in; having her wings spread as in flight.” As anyone familiar with birds and symbolism would know, he said, folded wings would show “rest and peace.” To him, the eagle was “bearing a large whip in one claw, and such a number of arrows in the other, and in full career of flight,” that it must be “wholly bent on war and mischief.”

It was too late, U.S. reformers feared, to assimilate adult Indians, so they targeted the children. They took them away from the supposedly terrible reservations and placed them in boarding schools, often purposefully far from home. Richard Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, declared that his school’s purpose was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Reformers separated children as young as five from their parents and grandparents and made them take new names and wear strange clothes. They forbade them from speaking their own languages or practicing their own religions.

As boarding school survivors remembered and later investigations and hearings exposed, many children were taken by force and, once in schools, faced horrific mental and physical abuse at the hands of people with far too much unregulated power. Former students recalled being starved and beaten. Countless children died at school, never to return home. Most Native families were affected—in 1926, for example, more than 80 percent of school-age Native American children were in boarding schools, and the schools lasted for many decades, over two full generations of children. The goal of boarding schools was to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture, yet because this era was the height of white supremacy, the place within white American society designated for Indians, like other nonwhite Americans, was not an equal one. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 advised that “in the schools the education should be elementary and largely industrial. The need of higher education among the Indians is very, very limited.”

Mohawk scholar Tom Sakokweniónkwas Porter calls Carlisle and the other boarding schools “almost a knockout blow to our Native religion, language, community based lifestyle and our Indian pride.” Reservations could be places of preserving language, culture, identity, and community; boarding schools were designed to take those things away, leaving generations separated from the knowledge and ways of their peoples and repeatedly told that those ways—and their family members—were backward and doomed.

Allotment and boarding schools brought tremendous loss and trauma, yet they did not destroy Native people or their nations. Ojibwe historian Brenda J. Child noted that her grandmother returned home from boarding school to “re-embrace her culture, language, and community.” Reading letters and other accounts by children who attended the schools, Child concluded that they were not broken or assimilated but instead that the “deep and abiding commitment to children, demonstrated time and time again by parents and others at home…outlasted and outmaneuvered a failed educational idea.” Boarding schools tried to make non-Indian children, but their families and communities “refused to allow government boarding schools to supplant their essential roles in child rearing.”