Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (14 page)

Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual, with all the characteristics that Mircea Eliade assigns to the ritual observances of origin myths:

1. It constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernatural. 2. It is considered to be true. 3. It tells how an institution came into existence. 4. In performing the ritual associated with the myth, one '"experiences'

knowledge of the origin“ and claims one's patriarchy. 5. Thus one ”lives" the myth, as a religion.

My Random House dictionary lists as its main heading for the Plymouth colonists not Pilgrims but Pilgrim Fathers. The Library of Congress similarly catalogs its holdings for Plymouth under Pilgrim Fathm, and of course fathers is capitalized, meaning “fathers of our country,” not of Pilgrim children. Thanksgiving has thus moved from history into the field of religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah has called it. To Bellah, civil religions hold society together. Plymouth Rock achieved iconographic status around 1880, when some enterprising residents of the town rejoined its two pieces on the waterfront and built a Greek templet around it. The templet became a shrine, the Mayflower Compact became a sacred text, and our textbooks began to play the same function as the Anglican Book ofCommon Prayer, teaching us the meaning behind the civil rite of Thanksgiving.

The religious character of Pilgrim history shines forth in an introduction by Valerian Paget to William Bradford's famous chronicle OfPlimoth Plantation: “The eyes of Europe were upon this little English handful of unconscious heroes and saints, taking courage from them step by step. For their children's children the same ideals of Freedom burned so clear and strong that ... the little episode we have just been contemplating, resulted in the birth of the United States of America, and, above all, of the establishment of the humanitarian ideals it typifies, and for which the Pilgrims offered their sacrifice upon the altar of the Sonship of Man.” In this invocation, the Pilgrims supply not only the origin of the United States, but also the inspiration for democracy in Europe and perhaps for all goodness in the world today! I suspect that the original colonists, Separatists and Anglicans alike, would have been amused.

The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Indians. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, “I is for the Indians we invited to share our food.” The silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the handouts that schoolchildren have carried home for decades, complete with captions such as, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!” When the Native American novelist Michael Dorris's son brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school, Dorris pointed out that “the Pilgrims had literally never seen 'such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

This notion that “we” advanced peoples provided for the Indians, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations. For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor. Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, j overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs coward the United States.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric After all, if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously? This ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimate the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-a-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics.7 Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures.

On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James “was selected, but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.”77 James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you . . . but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. . , . The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans, . . . Massasoit, the grear leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yei he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers , . , , little knowing that. . . before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags . . . and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. . . . Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts.. .. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wbeai. Our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. For at least a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of the meaning of the plague from New England pulpits. Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but of deliberate forgetting. Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto's helpfulness, his name, the fish in the cornhills, sometimes even the menu and the number of Indians who attended the prototypical first Thanksgiving,

I have focused here on untoward detail only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of them died. It was not immoral of the Pilgrims to have taken over Patuxet. They did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Massasoit was happy that the Pilgrims were using the bay, for the Patuxet, being dead, had no more need for the site. Pilgrim-Indian relations started reasonably positively. Ply mouth, unlike many other colonies, usually paid the Indians fot the land it took. In some instances Europeans settled in Indian towns because Indians had invited them, as protection against another tribe or a nearby competing European power.79 In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundibut neither is it exceptionally less violent.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give moral instruction, the way origin myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by' allowing students to learn both the “good” and the “bad” sides of the Pilgrim tale. Conflict would then become part of the story, and students might discover that the knowledge they gain has implications for their lives today. Correct!

taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial omissions and the invented details with which our textbooks retail the Pilgrim archetype are close cousins of the overt censorship practiced by the Massachusetts Department of Commerce in denying Frank James the right to speak. Surely, in history, “truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.”

To understand the making of Anglo-America is impossible without close and sustained attention to its indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses.

James Axtell The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . . quantities of propaganda to overpower their own countrymen's scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics. We live with it still.

Francis Jennings1 Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually,

memory yields.

Friedrich Nietzsche There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.

Rupert Costo

Lies My Teacher Told Me

4. Red Eyes

Historically, American Indians have been the most lied-about subset of our population. That's why Michael Dorris said that, in learning about Native Americans, “One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten.”5 High school students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically present Native Americans through white eyes. Today's textbooks should do better, especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is interracial) has flowered in the last twenty years, and the information on which new textbooks might be based currently rests on library shelves.

There has been some improvement in textbooks' treatment of Native peoples in recent years. In 1961 the best-selling Rise of ih( American Nation contained ten illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations); most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage warfare. Twenty-five years later, the retitled Triumph ofthe American Nation contained fifteen illustrations of Indians; more importantly, no longer were Native Ameri cans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were people who participated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land. Included were Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the Revolution, who was also part black in ancestry), Sequoyah (who invented the Cherokee alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World War II.

Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks “need a crash course in cultural relativism and ethnic sensitivity,” according to James Axtell, who criticized textbooks in 1987 for still using such terms as half-breed, mdisacre, and war-whooping6 Reserving milder terms such as frontier initiative and settlers for whites is equally biased. Even worse are the authors' overall interpretations, which continue to be shackled by the “conventional assumptions and semantics” that have “explained” Indian-white relations for centuries. Textbook authors still write history to comfort descendants of the “settlers.”

Our journey into the history of Indian peoples and their relations with European and African invaders cannot be a happy excursion. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin,”7 Ifwe look Indian history squarely in the eye, we are going to get red eyes. This is our past, however, and we must acknowledge it. It is time for textbooks to send white children home, if not with red eyes, at least with thought-provoking questions.

Today's textbooks at least try to be accurate about Indian culture. All but two of the twelve textbooks I surveyed begin by devoting more than five pages to pre-contact Native societies,8 And to their credit most of the textbooks recognize diversity among Native societies. They tell about the League of Five Nations among the Iroquois in the Northeast, potlatches among the Northwestern coastal Indians, cliff dwellings in the Southwest, and caste divisions among the Natchez in the Southeast. In the process of presenting ten or twenty different cultures in six or eight pages, however, the textbooks can hardly reach a high level of sophistication. So they seize upon the unusual. No matter that the Choctaws were more numerous and played a much larger role in American j history than the Natchezthey were also more ordinary. Students will not find among the Native Americans portrayed in their history textbooks many “regular folks” with whom they might identify.

American Indian societies pose a special problem for textbooks.9 The authors of history textbooks are consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology, ethnobotany, linguistics, physical anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthro pology, ethnohistory, and other related disciplines. Scholars in these fields can j tell us much, albeit tentatively, about what happened in the Americas before Europeans and Africans arrived. Unfortunately, the authors of history textbooks j treat archaeology et al. as dead disciplines to be mined for answers. These fields study dead people, to be sure, but they are alive with controversy. Only The j American Adventure admits uncertainty: “This page may be out of date by the time it is read,” Adventure goes on to present claims that humans have been in the Americas for 12,000, 21,000, and 40,000 years. As a result, although Adventure \ is one of the oldest of the twelve textbooks, its pre-Columbian pages have not j gone out of date.ia Most other textbooks retain their usual authoritative tone. On the matter ofthefirsthumansettlementoftheAmericas,estimatesvaryfrom12,000years I before the present to more than 70,000 B.P.11 Some scientists believe that the I original settlers came in successive waves over thousands of years; genetic sitni! larities convince others that most Natives descended from a single small band,lz The majority of the textbooks choose one position or the other and present it as undisputed fact. Every textbook says something like this, from American History: “The water level of the oceans dropped sharply, exposing a land bridge between Asia and North America.” Actually, while most scholars accept a “Beringia” crossing, actual evidence is siim, so we cannot rule out boat crossings, accidental or purposeful. Even if the first Americans arrived on foot, they were just as surely explorers as Columbus. Nonetheless, textbooks picture them as primitives, vaguely Neanderthalian.

This archetype of the primitive savage, not very bright, enmeshed in wars with nature and other humans, drives some of the certainties that textbooks impose on the ancient past. American History tells of “the wanderers” who “moved slowly southward and to the east. . . . Many thousand years passed before they had spread over all of North and South America” Actually, a significant number of archaeologists believe that people reached most parts of the Americas within a thousand years, too rapidly to allow easy archaeological determination of the direction and timing of their migration. “They did not know that they were exploring a new continent,” American History goes on, offering no evidence upon which to infer these early Americans' alleged igno rance. The depiction of mental torpor persists as American History continues: “None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power.” In Europe and Asia, most pre-1492 machines depended on horses, oxen, water buffalo, mules, or cattlebeasts that were unknown in the Americas, after all.

American History then generalizes: “Those who planted seeds and cultivated the land instead of merely hunting and gathering food were more secure and comfortable.” Apparently the author has not encountered the “affluent primitive” theory, which persuaded anthropology some twenty-five years ago that gatherer-hunters lived quite comfortably, American History completes the evolutionary stereotype: “These agricultural people were mostly peaceful, though they could fight fiercely to protect their fields. The hunters and wanderers, on the other hand, were quite warlike because their need to move about brought them frequently into conflict with other groups.” Here the author betrays the influence of the old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized school dating back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx in the last century. The authors of history textbooks may well have encountered such thinking in anthropology courses when they were undergraduates; it is no longer taught today, however. Decades ago, most anthropologists challenged the outmoded continuum, determining that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful, compared to agriculturalists,

and that modern societies were more warlike still. Thus violence increases with civilization.

Today's textbooks do confer civilization on some Natives. Like the Spanish conquistadors themselves, The American Adventure equates wealth and civilization: “Unlike the noncivilized peoples of the Caribbean, the Aztec were rich and prosperous.” Textbooks invariably put the civilization far away, in Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru. By comparison, “Indian life in North America was less advanced,” says The American Pageant. It seems thai, despite good intentions, textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive” Americans with modern Europeans, Part of the problem is that the books are really comparing rural America to urban Europe Massachusetts to London. Comparing Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) to rural Scotland might produce a very different impression, for when Cortez arrived, Tenochtitlan was a city of 100,000 to 300,000 whose central market was so busy and noisy “that it could be heard more than four miles away,” according to Bernal Diaz, who accompanied him.14 Moreover, from the perspective of the average inhabitant, life may have been equally as “advanced” and pleasant in Massachusetts or Scotland as in Aztec Mexico or London.

For a long time Native Americans have been rebuking textbook authors for reserving the adjective civilized for European cultures. In 1927 an organization of Native leaders called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians criticized textbooks as “unjust to the life of our people.” They went on to ask, “What is civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts, stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we were not savages, but a civilized race.”15 Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures reinforces ethnocentrism so long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-civilized continuum. This continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday conversation“refined or enlightened”with “having a complex division of labor,” the only definition that anthropologists defend. When we consider the continuum carefully, it immediately becomes problematic. Was the Third Reich civilized, for instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes. In what ways do we prefer the civilized Third Reich to the more primitive Arawak nation that Columbus encountered? If we refuse to label the Third Reich civilized, are we not using the tetm to imply a certain comity? If so, we must consider the Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his I Spaniards primitive if not savage. Ironically, societies characterized by a complex division oflabor are often marked by inequality and capable ofsupporting large specialized armies. Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to resort 10 savage violence in their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.

Thoughtless use of the “etherizing” terms civilized and trvilizttifm blocks any real inquiry into the world-view or social structure of the “uncivilized” person or society. In 1990 President Bush condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with the words, “The entire civilized world is against Iraq”an irony, in that Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates valleys are the earliest known seat of civilization.

After contact with Europeans and Africans, Indian societies changed rapidly. Native Americans took into their cultures noi only guns, blankets, and kettles, but also new foods, ways of building houses, and ideas from Christianity. Most American history textbooks tell about the changes in only one group, the Plains Indians. Eight of the twelve textbooks I surveyed mention the rapid efflorescence of this colorful culture after the Spaniards introduced the horse to the American West. It is an exhilarating example of syncretismblending elements oftwo different cultures to create something new.

The transformation in the Plains cultures, however, was only the tip of the cultural-change iceberg. An even more profound metamorphosis occurred as Europeans linked Native peoples to the developing world economy. Yet textbooks make no mention of this process, despite the fact that it continues to affect formerly independent cultures in the last half of our century. In the early 1970s, for example, Lapps in Norway replaced their sled dogs with snowmobiles, only to find themselves vulnerable to Arab oil embargoes.'" The process seems inevitable, hence perhaps is neither to be praised nor decriedbut it should not be ignored, because it is crucial to understanding how Europeans took over America,

In Atlantic North America, members of Indian nations possessed a variety of sophisticated skills, from the ability to weave watertight baskets to an understanding of how certain plants can be used to reduce pain. At first, Native Americans traded corn, beaver, fish, sassafras, and other goods with the French, Dutch, and British, in return for axes, blankets, cloth, beads, and kettles. Soon, however, Europeans persuaded Natives to specialize in the fur and slave trades. Native Americans were better hunters and trappers than Europeans, and with the guns the Europeans sold them, they became better still. Other Native skills began to atrophy. Why spend hours making a watertight basket when in one-tenth the time you could trap enough beavers to trade for a kettle? Even agriculture, which the Native Americans had shown to the Europeans, declined, because it became easier to trade for food than to grow it. Everyone acted in rational self-interest in joining such a systemthat is, Native Americans were not mere victims because everyone's standard ofliving improved, at least in theory.

Some of the rapid changes in eastern Indian societies exemplify syncretism. When the Iroquois combined European guns and Native American tacRED EVES

tics to smash the Hurons, they controlled their own culture and chose which elements of European culture to incorporate, which to modify, which to ignore. Native Americans learned how to repair guns, cast bullets, build stronger forts, and fight to annihilate.19 Native Americans also became well known as linguists, often speaking two European languages (French, English, Dutch, or Spanish) and at least two Indian languages, British colonists sometimes used Natives as interpreters when dealing with the Spanish or French, not just with other Native American nations.

These developments were not all matters of happy economics and voluntary syncretic cultural transformation, however. Natives were operating under a military and cultural threat, and they knew it. They quickly deduced that European guns were more efficient than their bows and arrows. Europeans soon realized that trade goods could be used to win and maintain political alliances with Indian nations. To deal with the new threat and because whites “demanded institutions reflective of their own with which to relate,” many Native groups strengthened their tribal governments." Chiefs acquired power they had never had before. These governments often ruled unprecedentedly broad areas, because the heightened warfare and the plagues had wiped out smaller tribes or caused them to merge with larger ones for protection. Large nations became ethnic melting pots, taking in whites and blacks as well as other Indians. New confederations and nations developed, such as the Creeks, Seminoles, and Lumbees. The tribes also became more male-dominated, in imitation of Europeans or because of the expanded importance of war skills in their cultures.