Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (16 page)

Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European thinkers then influenced Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.46 In recent years historians have debated whether Indian ideas may also have influenced our democracy more directly. Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquols League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically. The terms used by Lt. Gov. Golden find an echo in our Declaration of Independence fifty years later.

In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering English colonies and suggested that the colonies form a union similar to the league. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin, who had spent much time among the Iroquois observing their deliberations, pleaded with colonial leaders to consider the Albany Plan of Union: “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.”

The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a forerunner of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery. In 1775 Congress formulated a speech to the Iroquois, signed by John Hancock, that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The Six Nations are a wise people,” Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council and teach our children to follow it.”4S John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and “all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights.” Without the Native example, “do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance of questions of religion?”40 Mohawk may have overstated the case for Native democracy, since heredity played a major role in office-holding in many Indian societies. His case is strengthened, however, by the fact that wherever Europeans went in the Americas, they projected monarchs (“King Philip”) or other undemocratic leaders onto Native societies. To some degree, this pro jecting was done out of European self-interest, so they could claim to have purchased tribal land as a result of dealing with one person or faction. The practice As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once.

also betrayed habitual European thought: Europeans could not believe (hat nations did not have such rulers, since that was the only form of government they knew.

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia's patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took action to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party or the anti-rent protests against Dutch plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840s, they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.

Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as well as New York. So did British common law and the Magna Carta. American democracy seems to be another example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native America, The degree of Native influence is hard to specify, since that influence came through several sources. Textbooks might, present it as a soft hypothesis rather than hard fact. But they should not leave it out. In the twelve textbooks I surveyed, discussion of any intellectual influence of Native Americans on European Americans was limited to Discovering American History, which pictures a wampum belt paired with Benjamin Franklin's famous cartoon of a divided, hence dying snake. “Franklin's Albany Plan might have been inspired by the Iroquois League,” captions Discovering. “The wampum belt expresses the unity of tribes achieved through the League, Compare it with Franklin's cartoon.” The other eleven books are silent.

But, then, the books leave out most contributions ofNative Americans to the modern world. I had expected to find at least such noncontroversial items as food, words, and place names. After all, our regional cuisinesthe dishes that make American food distinctiveoften combine Indian with European and African elements. Examples range from New England pork and beans to New Orleans gumbo to Texas chili.51 Mutual acculturation between Native and African Americans-due to shared experience in slavery as well as escapes by blacks to Native communitiesaccounts for soul food being part Indian, from cornbread and grits to greens and hush puppies.“ Historians have known for centuries that Indians of the Americas domesticated more than half of the food crops now grown around the world. Native place names dot our landscape, from Okefenokee to Alaska. Even nineteenth-century racists relished names like Mississippi, meaning ”Great River." From hurricane to skunk to (probably) OK, Indian words have been incorporated into English.53 Notwithstanding all this, only Land of Promise and Triumph of the Amtricdn Nation discuss Indian foods, only Triumph mentions Indian names, and none of the twelve books deals with Indian words.

Transmitting food and names, mundane though it may seem, involves ideas. Native farming methods were not “primitive.” Indian farmers in some tribes drew rwo or three times as much nourishment from the soil as we do.54 Place names, too, show intellectual interchange. Whites had to be asking Indians, “Where am I?” “What is this place called?” “What is that animal?” “What is the name of that mountain?” Although textbooks “appreciate” Native cultures, the possibility of real interculturation, especially in matters of the intellect, is foreign to them. This is a shame, for authors thereby ignore much of what has made America distinctive from Europe. In a travel narrative, Peter Kalm wrote in 1750, “The French, English, Germans, Dutch, and other Europeans, who have lived for several years in distant provinces, near and among the Indians, grow so like them in their behavior and thought that they can only be distinguished by the difference of their color.”55 In the famous essay, “The Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner told how the frontier masters the European, “strips off the garments of civilization,” and requires him to be an Indian in thought as well as dress. “Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick.” Gradually he builds something new, “but the outcome is not the old Europe.” It is syncretic; it is American.

Acknowledging how aboriginal we are culturally-how the United States and Europe, too, have been influenced by Native American as well as European ideas-would require significant textbook rewriting. If we recognized American In the nineteenth century Americans knew of Native American contributions to medicine. Sixty percent of all medicines patented in the century were distributed bearing Indian images, including Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, and Kickapoo Indian Oil. In this century America has repressed the image of Indian as healer.

Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure, we would have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimates the entire conquest.“ In 1970 the Indian Historian Press produced a critique of our histories, Textbooks and the American Indian. One of the press's yardsticks for evaluating books was the question, ”Does the textbook describe the religions, philosophies, and contributions to thought of the American Indian?"58 A quarter-century later the answer must still be no.

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. The American Way describes Native American religion in these words:

These Native Americans [in the Southeast] believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature.

Way is trying to show respect for Native American religion, but it doesn't work. Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today.

These Americans believed that one great male god ruled ihe world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died.

Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction ofcommunion.

Textbooks could present American Indian religions from a perspective that takes them seriously as attractive and persuasive belief systems. The anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that when whites remark upon the fact that Indians perceive a spirit in every animal or rock, they are simultaneously admitting their own loss of a deep spiritual relationship with the earth. Native Americans are “part of the total living universe,” wrote Turner; “spiritual health is to be had only by accepting this condition and by attempting to live in accordance with it.” Turner contends that this life-view is healthier than European alternatives: “Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.”6" Thus Turner shows that taking Native American religions seriously might require re-examination of the Judeo-Christtan tradition. No textbook would suggest such a controversial idea.

Similarly, textbooks give readers no clue as to what the zone of contact was like from the Native side. They emphasize Native Americans such as Squanto and Pocahontas, who sided with the invaders. And they invert the terms, picturing white aggressors as “settlers” and often showing Native settlers as aggressors. “The United States Department of Interior had tried to give each tribe both land and money,” says The American Way, describing the U.S. policy of forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to reservations. Whites were baffled by Native ingratitude at being “offered” this land, Way claims: “White Americans could not understand the Indians, To them, owning land was a dream come true.” In reality, whites of the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen. Philip Sheridanwho is notorious for having said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”understood. “We took away their country and their means of support, and it was for this and against this they made war,” he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?” The textbooks have turned history upside down.

Let us try a right-side-up view. “After King Philip's War, there was continuous conflict at the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers worried about savages scalping them.” This description is accurate, provided the reader understands that the settlers were Native American, the scalpers white. Even the best of our American history books fail to show the climate of white actions within which Native Americans on the border of white control had to live. It was so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas in North Carolina “fled in every direction” in 1786 when a solitary white man rode into their village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe!

From the opposite coast, here is a story that might help make such dispersal understandable: “An old white settler told his son who was writing about life on the Oregon frontier about an incident he recalled from the cowboys and Indians days. Some cowboys came upon Indian families without their men present. The cowboys gave pursuit, planning to rape the squaws, as was the custom. One woman, however, pushed sand into her vagina to thwart her pursuers.”65 The act of resistance is what made the incident memorable. Otherwise, it was entirely ordinary. Such ordinariness is what our textbooks leave out. They do not challenge our archetypal Laura Ingalls Wilder picture of peaceful white settlers suffering occasional attacks by brutal Indians, If they did, the fact thai so many tribes resorted to war, even after 1815 when resistance was clearly doomed, would become understandable.

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. But not our history textbooks. “For almost two hundred years,” notes David Horowitz, “almost continuous warfare raged on the American continent, its conflict more threatening than any the nation was to face again.” Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington's administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense. Yet most ofour “Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre” shows a motif common m nineteenth-century lithographs: Indians invading the sanctity of the white settlers' homes. Actually whites were invading Indian lands and often Indian homes, but pictures such as this, not the reality, remain the archetype.

textbooks barely mention the topic. The American Pageant offers a table of “Total Costs and Number of Battle Deaths of Major U.S. Wars” that completely omits Indian wars! Pageant includes the Spanish-American War, according it a toll of 385 battle deaths, but leaves out the Ohio War of 1790-95, which cost 630 dead and missing U.S. troops in a single battle, the Battle of Wabash River.