The effect of contact between Indigenous People in the Americas and European invaders was astonishing. The invaders were barbarians. There really is no other word adequate to describe them. I know I never learned any of this history when I went to school as a young lad. Europeans came to bring civilization. That is what I was taught.  It took me decades to learn differently.

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., a respected historian, was  described by the New York in 1982 as the “leading non-Indian writer about Native Americans.”

Josephy Jr. described the initial contact between New World and the Old World this way:

“Among the whites there was scarcely the blinking of an eye over the devastating impact of Europeans on an Indian world that had been millennia in the making.  During the first Centuries of contact, pandemics of small pox, measles, and other sicknesses against which the Indians had no immunity, plus the European’s acquisitive, crusading zeal and their use of superior military power were disastrous for the indigenous populations and cultures. Native populations were massacred; Indian cities and towns destroyed and abandoned to the elements; religious structures defiled and looted; political and spiritual leaders slain; confederacies, chiefdoms, and other societies ripped apart; and disoriented leaderless survivors enslaved or forced to flee and move in with other groups–or revert, as many of them did, to more primitive levels of existence, hunting or foraging again for wild foods in the wake of the collapse of their world.

It has been estimated by some demographers that by the seventeenth century, more than fifty million natives of North and South America had perished as a result of war, disease, enslavement, and the careless or deliberate brutality of Europeans–history’s greatest holocaust by far.”

Some have estimated that more than 50 million died! In any event, the Europeans made the Nazis looked like small beer.

The inspiration for this long series of post on my blog about Indigenous people was some comments I received about a year ago from two friends. If I recall correctly, they suggested that we could help them by showing up for a weekend or so and build some homes for them. In other words they suggested we white guys knew what was good for the Indigenous people  and could solve their problems. That is a terrible mistake, because it assumes that we know best and all they need to do is do what we suggest they do. This is mistake is what I call Eurocentrism–i.e. the assumption that we are superior and know what’s good for them. We are as subject to his prejudice as early Europeans were when they first encountered Indigenous people. This is exactly the attitude that we need to expunge.

The Initial misunderstandings between Europeans and Indigenous People that occurred from their first meetings in 1492 proved to be fundamental and ensured that the relationship between them would never be stable.  Historian Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. put it this way:

“To a large extent, the fundamental problem stemmed from (and continues to stem from the non-Indians’ Eurocentrism, an ingrained conviction on the part of those who came first to the Americas from Europe, as well as by their American descendants, that their cultures, values, religions, lifeways, abilities and achievements were more advanced or of a higher order than those of the Indians. It followed therefore, that they deemed the Indians to be inferior peoples–uncivilized Stone Age savages, perhaps even subhuman–and their cultures irrelevant or barbaric and dangerous to civilized mankind.

More importantly, through the centuries, the belief in their own superiority justified, to the white invaders, the enslavement of Indians, the seizure of their lands and resources, the destruction of their societies, the cultivation of anti-Indian prejudice, and the patronization that still treats Indians as inferiors and denies them self-determination, sovereignty, and respect for their spiritual life.”

This was unfortunate for both of these worlds. Had this Eurocentrism not been there both sides could have learned immense things of value from the other. Both could have benefitted immeasurably. The history of the world could have been radically different and we are all the losers as a result.

A couple of years ago, when I visited the Casa Grande Ruins, the ancient home of the O’odham Nation, nearby where we are living in Arizona, I remember hearing a local person say how mean and nasty Apaches were. That is a typical opinion of whites in North America. They were considered ‘treacherous savages” as were many other indigenous peoples. Often that opinion was based on prejudice or misunderstanding.

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. gives an interesting example of this in the book Native Americans: An Illustrated History.  It happened in 1849 on the California Trail that was used to transport what he called “hordes of fortune hunters” rushing from Eastern North America to California in search of gold. The vast desert of what is now Nevada was considered the most dangerous stretch of that trail. The travellers, who had not been invited by the local indigenous people we must always remember, believed those local inhabitants were treacherous savages. What would we think if Canada or the United States was filled with uninvited hordes from Russia, or Iran, or Mexico?  The answer is obvious. We would not be gracious. Likely the invaders would consider us savages for resisting the invasion.

Many of the travelers relied on published journals of earlier European migrants who had described the local indigenous people as “wretched, degraded, and despicable.” They went on to call them “the meanest Indians in existence.” The travelers noticed that these “Indians” hid from sight during the day and came sneaking out at night into their camps to steal food and livestock. How nasty can you get?

The weary travelling whites had to post guards all night long keeping a careful eye and ear out for suspicious sights and sounds. Alvin M. Josephy described what resulted as follows:

“When they heard a suspicious noise, they shot in the direction of the source, and at dawn they often found a dead Indian lying nearby. Sometimes it was the body of a young child or woman, or a gnarled elder, and the traveler’s stories circulated the information as proof that all “Diggers” (as they called the local Indigenous people) were skulking thieves, no matter their age or sex.

The Indians side of what was going on was quite different. It never got into the history books…What the whites had believed were “skulking” thieves and murderers in the darkness were in fact hungry and terrified Indian families trying to get safely across a road that white men had unwittingly cut directly through territory where for centuries the Indians had lived, gathered food, and held their ceremonies. The bisecting road had crippled the Indian’s freedom of movement across their lands, for they lived in mortal dread of the stream trigger-happy white travelers who shot at them as if they were rabbits.”

Indians, as the Americans call them,  often desperate for food on the verge of starvation had to take risks to get food for their families. So they hid with their families during the day until darkness gave them cover to try to get some food. Often they would tell their young to scamper across the trail until they managed to join them. The Indians of course tended to blame the whites for over-running and destroying their food gathering grounds, polluting their water wells, and things like that. So they thought it was only fair to steal some of the whites livestock or food. Wouldn’t you?

As Alvin M. Josephy said, “These, in short were what the travelers cursed as “the meanest Indians in existence”–men, women and children trying to survive, but whom the whites occasionally heard in the night and killed.”

Josephy came to the following conclusion about these misunderstandings:

“In the history of Native American nations, the California Trail story is not unique. Ever since Europeans first arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 their relations with Indians have been marked –even until today–by the stain of countless similar episodes in which groundless fears, prejudices, and misunderstandings have led to tragedy.

These misunderstandings date back to 1492 when Columbus thought he had reached India. He thought, as did the Europeans that followed him, that they had “discovered” a New World that was “a barbaric, virgin wilderness.”  They did not realize that there was nothing new about it at all. As Josephy  said,  “To the Indians, of course, this ‘New World’ was a very ancient one of many millions of persons and a myriad sophisticated and thriving cultures and civilizations.”

It is unfortunate that the relationship between these worlds was based on such fundamental misunderstandings.  That has colored everything that followed. And that is a real pity. It could have been so much better.

The invaders of North America represented (sort of) the Holy Roman Empire. Europe at the time of 1492 and for a couple of centuries after that was filled with tribal territories often with boundaries that were not fixed or agreed upon. At the time there were few countries. Nationalism really came later. At the time there were mainly city-states and small nations. Napoleon was really right when he said, “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”

When two imperialists from worlds apart met, the Castilian of Spain and the Aztecs of Mexico, they represented two expanding empires that both had a tribal origin. Both had gained control of other people. Mexico of course was much larger. The Aztec capital on the site of what is now Mexico City contained one quarter of a million people. That was 4 times as many as Tudor London.  About 20 million people were under their control. At the time the British islands had about 5 million people and Spain about 8 million.

Europe was not really as civilized as Europeans might want us to think. Ronald Wright in his book Stolen Continents described Europe this way,

“European secular government was a tangle of decayed feudal loyalties and personal ambition.  The last proper roads had been built by the Romans more than a thousand years before.  The rapidly growing cities were unplanned, ramshackle, without sanitation, seething with poverty and disease. If famine struck a region, the state was quite unable to provide relief. Life expectancy oscillated between the high teens and low thirties, lower than in the most deprived nations of today. The achievements of Europe were technological, not social. It had the best ships, the best steel, the best guns; it also had conditions desperate enough to make its people want to leave and use these things to plunder others. Spain, in particular, was scarcely touched by the Renaissance; 700 years of war against the Moors had produced a warrior culture filled with loathing and contempt for other ways of life, not a new spirit of inquiry.”

The invaders of North America  were dirty, hairy, uncouth, and, let us be clear about this, savage. I am not saying the Indigenous people were angels, but the Europeans were certainly not.

Mark Twain got it wrong. It is not true that there are ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics,” as he claimed.  There are lies, damn lies, and history. I said that.

The facts of the invasion of the western hemisphere by Europeans are to a large extent unknown by people who make no effort to find them. Which of course means they are largely unknown except to scholars. The rest of us have a learned a very one-sided history—the history of those who saw themselves as victors.

Yellow Wolf, of the Nez Percé, an indigenous nation of the western United States, put this accurately in 1877: “The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true.  Only his own best deeds,, only the worst deeds of the Indians, as the white man told.”

I want to look at both sides, but the fact is that the side of the whites has been well told for centuries.  I learned their stories in school. For example, I learned how mean and cruel the Iroquois were to those nice kind priests from France. I never learned the other side the story at at all. It took me many  years to learn otherwise. So I want to redress that. I want to look at all sides.

As Ronald Wright said in his wonderful book Stolen Continents,  “Few things are so dangerous as believing one’s own lies”. The first lie, a vital part of what I have called the Original Sin, was that the Europeans were civilized and the people of the Western Hemisphere were savages. That is a lie we should stop believing. It was a convenient lie. It allowed the Europeans to ravage the western continents with a clean conscience.

For example, and this is just a beginning, it is not true that most of the people living in the western hemisphere were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Many of them were exactly that. But many of them lived settled lives in towns and cities.  There were some amazing cities in North and south America.  One of those cities was Cahokia. I will talk about that later. According to Wright, “Hollywood may have convinced us that the ‘typical’ Indian was a nomadic hunter, but in fact the majority had been living in villages, towns, and cities since long before Columbus.”

In fact there is a lot of evidence now that the real barbarians, the real savages, came sailing in on big ships!

The Europeans that followed Christopher Columbus to the western hemisphere referred the western hemisphere as “the New World.”  Of course it was no more a new world than it was India. The people of Europe were wrong—again.

The history we learned in school taught us that this “discovery” was one of the  greatest achievements of mankind.  The people that were “discovered” had very different views.  The people in the western hemisphere, as it has come to be called, with a little more justification, believed that their world was the only world. They were also mistaken. They believed that they lived on a great island floating on an ancient sea.  Some of them referred to this world as “Turtle Island.”

These people on the western hemisphere were amazing people. They had occupied all habitable areas of this hemisphere  (and some like Manitoba are arguably not really habitable at all) from the Arctic tundra, to the plains, mountains, forests and deserts of North America. They occupied the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central America and the incredible rainforests, deserts, plains and mountains of South America. They developed many different kinds of society. They included nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities and cities as large as any in the rest of the world. Numbers vary, but by 1492 there may have been 100 million Native Americans in the South and North combined. This was about 1/5 of the entire human race.

To the people of the Americas, their encounter with people from Europe was not a discovery, it was an invasion! It was an invasion with profound effects for both sides.  As Ronald Wright said, “Within decades of Columbus’s landfall, most of these people were dead and their world barbarously sacked by Europeans. The plunderers settled in America, and it was they, not the original people, who became to be known as Americans.” “Unlike Asia and Africa, America never saw its colonizers leave.”

The original people did not however disappear.  As Wright put it, “Many survive, captive within white settler states that built on their lands and on their backs.”