Colin Woodard (49 page)

In both Canada and Greenland the Inuit have been at the forefront of the climate change battle, as warmer temperatures are already disrupting their way of life. In Ilulissat and other northern Greenland settlements, hunters are reluctantly giving up their sled dog teams because sea ice no longer forms in winter. (You can't travel by “land” in Greenland because rugged mountains and mile-tall glacial fronts block every route.) Alaskan villages have already had to be moved to escape the advancing sea and melting permafrost. Polar bears and other game are vanishing. Meanwhile drug abuse, alcoholism, and teen suicide have become endemic. “In one lifetime, our way of life has been transformed,” says Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Nunavut, whose climate change work as chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council earned her a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nomination. “We've been seeing the breakdown of our society.”
⁴

 

Greenlanders, for one, have decided the best way to move forward is to be masters of their own destiny. In 2009 they achieved a state of nearindependence from Denmark following a self-rule referendum supported by 76 percent of voters. Greenlanders now control the criminal justice, social welfare, and health care systems, land-use planning, fisheries management, and environmental regulations, education, transportation, and even the issuance of offshore oil exploration contracts. “It's a natural thing for a population to run their own country,” says the island's foreign minister, Aleqa Hammond. “We don't think like Europeans, we don't look like Europeans, and we're not in Europe. It's not that we have bad feelings about Denmark, but it's a natural thing for a population with its own race and identity to want to cut its strings to foreign rule.” Securing independence won't be easy, she admits, given that the country is still dependent on Danish government subsidies to maintain its government, hospitals, and generous social welfare system. But she believes Greenlanders have a secret weapon: women like herself. “You'll notice here in Greenland that the women are very strong, not only physically strong, but in all respects: in politics, business, education level and everything,” she says, adding that roughly half the island's parliament is female. “Our bishop is a woman, most mayors are women and so forth. There's never been a fight for gender equality in Greenland. Women have always been powerful in our society. Our God was female, and when the Christians came to Greenland [in the eighteenth century] and said ‘our God is mighty and great and he looks like us,' our first reaction was: a
He
? Because not only are our women smarter and more pretty than men, they also give birth, they give life, and when there are problems in society, the women are the ones who are fighting to be sure the society survives. The Inuit language has no difference between he or she, or between mankind and animal,” she adds. “They're all equal.”
⁵

Communalistic, environmentally minded, and female-dominated, the people of First Nation will have a very different approach to the global challenges of the twenty-first century from that of the other nations of the continent and the world. And starting in Greenland, First Nation is building a series of nation-states of its own, giving North America's indigenous peoples a chance to show the rest of the world how they would blend postmodern life with premodern folkways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SUGGESTED READING

American Nations
is largely a work of synthesis and, as such, has many intellectual forebears, informants, and godparents. A few works were especially helpful to me in thinking about North America's regional cultures, and I recommend them heartily for those wishing to further explore their development, expansion, and characteristics.

Joel Garreau first advanced the notion that North America was defined by international rivalries in
The Nine Nations of North America
, which appeared in 1981 and came into my hands as a junior high school student shortly thereafter. As I mentioned at the outset, Garreau's argument was ahistorical, and so, to my thinking, couldn't quite hit the nail on the head. However, his overall point—that the continent's real, meaningful fissures did not correspond to official political boundaries—was spot-on and helped inspire my own inquiry nearly three decades later.

Some of my favorite works on regionalism are also among the most accessible to the general reader. David Hackett Fischer's
Albion's Seed
(1989) posits that four “British folkways” were transposed to British North America in the colonial period that roughly correspond to Yankeedom, the Midlands, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia. Fischer's focus is on demonstrating continuities between specific regional cultures in the British Isles and their North American splinters, a thesis that's taken some knocks from other academics. I think his most important contribution is to have substantiated the presence, origins, and salient characteristics of distinct regional cultures on this side of the pond. One of Fischer's more recent works,
Champlain's Dream
(2008), did much the same for New France. Russell Shorto's excellent
Island at the Center of the World
(2004) brought the Dutch period of New York's history alive and argued for its lasting impact on the culture of the Big Apple—a thesis I heartily endorse. Kevin Phillips's prophetic 1969 study
The Emerging Republican Majority
identified many of the key fault lines between regional cultures and used them to predict four decades of American political developments; two of his later works—
The Cousins' Wars
(1999) and
American Theocracy
(2006)—draw on regional differences in exploring Anglo-American relations and the decline of American power respectively. In
Made in Texas
(2004), a scathing attack on the Dixification of American politics, Michael Lind identifies regional tensions between what I would call the Appalachian and Deep Southern sections of his home state, and some of their salient policy differences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Among the more technical scholarly works, a few stand out. Wilbur Zelinsky's
The Cultural Geography of the United States
(1973) developed useful concepts for mapping and analyzing regional cultures. Raymond Gastil's
Cultural Regions of the United States
(1975) fleshed out regional variations in a variety of subjects and social indicators.
Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography
(1969) by Donald W. Meinig used similar approaches to examine the oft-discussed cultural fissures in Texas. Frederick Merk's
History of the Westward Movement
(1978) and Henry Glassie's
Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States
(1968) are invaluable in tracing settlement flows.

Another set of works shed light on important aspects of particular nations. E. Digby Baltzell—scholar of the American elite—compared and contrasted the cultures of the leading families of the intellectual capitals of Yankeedom and the Midlands in his exhaustive 1979 study,
Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia
. For understanding El Norte's Spanish heritage, David J. Weber's
Spanish Frontier in North America
(1992) and
The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico
(1982) provide essential background. Rhys Issac's
The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790
(1982) describes the Tidewater gentry's world at its apogee in wonderful detail. For New Netherland in the Dutch era, I recommend Oliver A. Rink's 1986 study
Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York
. On the Deep South and the Barbadian system on which it was first modeled, turn to Richard S. Dunn's 1972 study
Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713
and his April 1971 paper “English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina” in the
South Carolina Historical Magazine
. The classic—and very chilling—academic examination of Deep Southern culture in the early twentieth century is
Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Case and Class
, published by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago in 1941. On the spread of the nations into the Midwest and the implications thereof see especially Richard Power,
Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of The Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest
(1953); Paul Kleppner,
The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900
(1970); and Nicole Etcheson,
The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861
(1996). For the Far West and Left Coast, start with Marc Reisner's
Cadillac Desert
(1986), David Alan Johnson's
Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890
(1992), and Kevin Starr's,
Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915
(1973). My thanks to all of these authors—and to many others whose works appear in the endnotes—for creating so many fine ingredients.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Sarah Skillin Woodard, who shared in this project's many stresses while in graduate school and, much of the time, pregnant. As fate would have it,
American Nations
and our first child wound up being due at the same time, and Sarah continued editing the manuscript and offering me active support and assistance at a time when these roles should have been reversed. Thank you, my love; you know this would never have been finished without your many contributions and sacrifices. Our son, Henry, who ultimately beat this book into the world, has been a joy and inspiration, even if his editorial advice is sometimes difficult to interpret.

My friend and journalistic colleague Samuel Loewenberg—who splits his time between Berlin, Geneva, and the relief camps of Africa—took the time to read sections of
American Nations
and offered invaluable advice at a time when it was needed; thanks much, Sam, I owe you yet another one. My agent, Jill Grinberg, not only continued to provide me with stellar representation, but at a critical juncture, provided assistance that went far beyond the call of duty; no author could ask for a better person in his corner. At Viking, I am grateful to my editor, Rick Kot, for his support and sound advice on both this book and
The Lobster Coast
. Thanks also to designers Paul Buckley at Viking and Oliver Munday in Washington, D.C. (for the cover); to Viking's Francesca Belanger (for designing the book itself); to Sean Wilkinson of Portland, Maine (for creating the maps and patiently revising them); and to copy editor Cathy Dexter (wherever you are).

And thanks to you, the reader, for taking this journey with me. If you enjoyed the trip, do tell your friends.

April 2011
Portland, Maine

NOTES

1
Miriam Horn, “How the West Was Really Won,”
U.S. News & World Report
, 21 May 1990, p. 56; Samuel L. Huntington,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, pp. 67–70; James Allen Smith,
The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite
, New York: Free Press, 1991, pp. 179–181; Barack Obama, “Remarks on Iowa Caucus Night,” Des Moines, IA, 3 January 2008.

2
Jim Webb,
Born Fighting
, New York: Broadway Books, 2004, pp. 13, 255; Angela Brittingham and C. Patricia de la Cruz,
Ancestry: 2000
, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004, p. 8.

3
Michael Adams,
Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values
, Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2003, pp. 81–83.

4
Oscar J. Martinez,
Troublesome Border
, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988, pp. 107–108.

5
Haya El Nasser, “U. S. Hispanic Population to Triple by 2050,”
USA Today
, 12 February 2008; Sebastian Rotella, “Eyewitness: Carlos Fuentes,”
Los Angeles Times
, 28 September 1994.

6
Hans Kurath,
A Word Geography of the Eastern United States
, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1949, p. 91; Henry Glassie,
Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States
, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968, p. 39; Raymond D. Gastil,
Cultural Regions of the United States
, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975, pp. 11, 49, 83, 107, 139; Wilbur Zelinsky, “An Approach to the Religious Geography of the United States,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
, Vol. 51, No. 2, 1961, p. 193; Kevin Phillips,
The Emerging Republican Majority
, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969, pp. 47, 209, 299; Frederick Jackson Turner,
The United States: 1830–1850
, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1935 (appended map); Frank Newport, “State of the States: Importance of Religion” (press release), Gallup Inc., 28 January 2009, available at
http://www.gallup.com/poll/114022/State-States-Importance-Religion.aspx
; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 228: Educational Attainment by State: 1990 to 2007” in
Statistical Abstract of the United States 2010
, available online via
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0228.pdf
.

7
U.S. Census Bureau,
Profile of General Demographic Characteristics: 2000, Geographic Area: New York, N.Y.
, Table DP-1, p. 2, online at
http://censtats.census.gov/data/NY/1603651000.pdf
.

8
Wilbur Zelinsky,
The Cultural Geography of the United States
, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.

9
Bill Bishop,
The Big Sort
, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, pp. 9–10, 45.

10
Donald W. Meinig,
Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography
, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969, pp. 110–124; Zelinsky (1973), pp. 114–115.