Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (17 page)

At least today's textbooks no longer blame the Natives for all the violence, as did most textbooks written before the civil rights movement. Historians used to say, “Civilized war is the kind we fight against them, whereas savage war is the atrocious kind that they fight against us.”" Not one of the twelve history books I examined portrays Natives as savages. The authors are careful to admit brutality on both sides. Some of the books mention the massacres of defenseless Native Americans at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.

Like the legacy of slavery, the legacy of conquest persists, however. Indeed, conquest ended more recently than slavery, outlasting that unfortunate institution by a quatier-century. Slavery is now taken seriously in our histories;

conquest still is not.66 In this sense, the American Indian Movement, unlike the civil rights movement, has failed. Our textbooks do not teach against the archetype of the savage Indian that pervades popular culture. On the contrary, textbooks give very little attention of any kind to Indian wars.

As a result, my college students still come up with savagewhen I ask them for five adjectives that apply to Indians. Like much of our “knowledge” about Native Americans, the “savage” stereotype comes particularly from Western movies and novels, such as the popular “Wagons West” series by Dana Fullet Ross. These paperbacks, which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, claim boldly, “The general outlines of history have been faithfully followed.” Titled with state names/i&/>0.', Utah!, etc.the novels' covers warn that “marauding Indian bands are spreading murder and mayhem among terror-stricken settlers.”7 In the Hollywood Old West, wagon trains are invariably encircled by savage Indian hordes. In the real West, among 250,000 whites and blacks who journeyed across the Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 pioneers (and 426 Native Americans) died in all the recorded battles between rhe two groups, Much more commonly, Indians gave the new settlers directions, showed them water holes, sold them food and horses, bought cloth and guns, and served as guides and interpreters.68 These activities are rarely depicted in movies, novels, or our textbooks. Inhaling the misinformation of the popular culture, students have no idea lhat Natives considered European warfare far more savage than their own.

New England's first Indian war, the Pequot War of 1636-37, provides a case study of the intensified warfare Europeans brought to America. Allied with the Narragansetts, traditional enemies of the Pequots, the colonists attacked at dawn. Surrounding the Pequot village, whose inhabitants were mostly women, children, and old men, the British set it on fire and shot those who tried to escape the flames. William Bradford described the scene: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.” The slaughter shocked the Narragansetts, who had wanted merely to subjugate the Pequots, not exterminate them. The Narragansetts reproached the English for their style of warfare, crying, “It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” In turn, Capt. John Underbill scoffed, saying that the Narragansett style of fighting was “more for pastime, than 10 conquer and subdue enemies.” Underbill's analysis of the role of warfare in Narragansett society was correct, and might accurately be applied to other tribes as well. Through the centuries, whites frequently accused their Native allies of not fighting hard enough. The Puritans tried to erase the Pequots even from memory, passing a law making it a crime to say the word Pequot. Bradford concluded proudly, “The rest are scattered, and the Indians in all quarters are so terrified that they are afraid to give them sanctuary.”70 None of these quotations enters our textbooks, which devote an average of A sentences to this war.

Perhaps the most violent Indian war began in 1676, when white New Englanders executed three Wampanoag Indians and the Wampanoags attackedKing Philip's War. One reason for the end of peace was that the fur trade, which had linked Natives and Europeans economically, was winding down in Massachusetts.11 Textbooks could present students with the Native side of this conflict by quoting the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, whom the English called King Philip:

The English who first came to this country were but a handful of people, forlorn, poor, and distressed. My father was then sachem; he relieved their distresses in the most kind and hospitable manner. He gave them land to plant and build upon. They flourished and increased. By various means they got possessed of a great part of his territory. But he still remained their friend until he died. My elder brother became sachemhe was seized and confined and thereby thrown into illness and died. Soon after I became sachem they disarmed all my people. Their land was taken; but a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains, I am determined not to live until T have no country.

This was no minor war. “Of some 90 Puritan towns, 52 had been attacked and 12 destroyed. . . . At the end of the war several thousand English and perhaps twice as many Indians lay dead.”7i King Philip's War cost more American lives in combat, Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the SpanishAmerican War. In proportion to population, casualties were greater than in any other American war.' Nonetheless, five of the twelve books T surveyed leave it out entirely. Most others give it halfa paragraph.

War with the Indians started in Acoma, now New Mexico, in 1599, when a Spanish leader avenged the death of his brother by “enslaving most of the villagers and chopping off one foot of all males over 25 years of age.”15 It spread to the Southeast where, “because of fierce and implacable Indian resistance, the Spanish were unable to colonize Florida for over a hundred years.”76 Except foe Most textbook maps, like that above, show “French territory,” “British territory,” 'Spanish Territory,“ and sometimes ”Disputed Territory." with no mention of Indians at all. In maps that include Indian nations, such as the map opposite from D, W. Meinig, The Shaping of America [(New Haven: Yale University Press. 19861, 1: 209], the function of Indians as buffers between the colonial powers is graphically evident.

a few minor skirmishes, it ceased in 1890 with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Our histories can hardly describe each war, because there were so many. But precisely because there were so many, the way our textbooks minimize the Indian wars misrepresents our history.

The textbooks also reduce the Indianness of some of our other wars, From 1600 to 1754 Europe was often at war, including three world warsthe War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97), known in the United States as King William's War; the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), known here as Queen Anne's War; and the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48), known here as King George's War. In North America the major European powers, England, France, and Spain, buffered from each other by Indian land, fought mainly through their Indian allies. Native Americans inadvertently provided a gift of relative peace to the colonies by absorbing the shock of combat themselves.

Another world war, the Seven Years War (1754-63), in the United States called the French and Indian War, was also fought in North America mostly by Native Americans on both sides. Native Americans not only fought in the American Revolution but were its first cause, for the Proclamation of 1763, which placated Native American nations by forbidding the colonies from making land grants beyond the Appalachian continental divide, enraged many colonists. They saw themselves as paying to support a British army that only obstructed them from seizing Indian lands on the western frontier. After hostilities with Britain broke out, however, the fledgling United Colonies in 1775 were initially more concerned about relations with Indian nations than with Europe, so they sent Benjamin Franklin first to the Iroquois, then to France. Native Americans also played a large role in the War of 1812 and participated as well in the Mexican War and the Civil War.TM In each war Natives fought mostly against other Natives. In each, the larger number aligned against the colonies, later the United States, correctly perceiving that, for geopolitical reasons, opponents of the United States offered them better chances of being accorded human rights and retaining their land.

Even in describing the French and Indian War, textbooks leave out the Indians! One of the worst defeats Indians ever inflicted on white forces was Ihe rout of General Eraddock in 1755 in Pennsylvania. Braddock had 1,460 men, including eight Indian scouts and a detachment of Virginia militia under George Washington. Six hundred to one thousand Native Americans and 290 French soldiers opposed them, but you would never guess any Indians were there from The American Tradition:

On July 9, as they were approaching the fort, the French launched an ambush. Braddock's force was surrounded and defeated. The red-coated British soldiers, unaccustomed to fighting in the wilderness [s'c], suffered over 900 casualties. Braddock, mortally wounded, murmured as he died, “We shall know better how to deal with them another time.”

Tradition thus renders Braddock's last words meaningless, for “them” refers not to the French but to Native Americans.

This is one of many old lithographs that show Indians attacking BraddocK, evidence that colonials were aware who defeated Braddock, Today's textbooks make the Native Americans invisible.

In our Revolution, most of the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the British and attacked white Americans in New York and northern Pennsylvania. In 1778 the United States suffered a major defeat when several hundred Tories and Senecas routed 400 militia and regulars at Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, killing 340. After the Revolution, although Britain surrendered, its Native American allies did not. Our insistence on treating the Indians as ifwe had defeated them led to the Ohio War of 1790-95, and later to the War of 1812.

The never-ending source of dispute was land. To explain this constant conflict, half of the textbooks I examined rely on the cliche that Native Americans held some premodern understanding of land ownership. When students are informed that the Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of trade goods, presumably they are meant to smile indulgently. What a bargain! What foolish Indians, not to recognize the potential of the island! Not one book points out that the Dutch paid the wrung tribe for Manhattan, Doubtless the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal. The Weckquaesgeeks, who lived on Manhattan and really owned the land, weren't so happy. For years afterward they warred sporadically with the Dutch.TM Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction within a much larger nation. Often they didn't really care; they merely sought justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another. The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it was not France's land to s e llit was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners befote selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. France merely sold its claim to the territory. The United States was still paying Native American tribes for Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. We were also fighting them for it: the Army A/rnanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in the Louisiana Purchase from 1819 to 1890. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks do, is Eurocentric. Equally Eurocentric are the maps textbooks use to show the Lewis and Clark expedition. They make Native Americans invisible, implying that the United States bought vacant land from the French, A lthough the M andans hosted the expedition during the winter of 1804-05 and the Clatsops did so the next winter, even these ttibes drop out. Apparently Lewis and Clark did it all on their own.

Some textbooks chide Natives for not understanding that when they sold their land, they transferred not only the agricultural rights, but also the rights to the property's game, fish, and sheer enjoyment. “Indians regarded the land in the same way we regard the sea,” to quote Ldnd ofPromise. Textbook authors seem unaware that most land sales before the twentieth century, including sales among whites, transferred primarily the rights to farm, mine, and otherwise develop the land. Undeveloped private land was considered public and accessible to all, within limits of good conduct. Moreover, tribal negotiators typically made sure that deeds and treaties specifically reserved hunting, fishing, gathering, and traveling rights to Native Americans.

Six of the twelve histories I studied avoid this cliche of Indian naivete about land ownership. Showing the influence of the new scholarship in Indian history, several of them even point out that the problem lay in whites' not abiding by accepted concepts of land ownership. But the textbook authors never develop this isolated admission into a general understanding of Indian wars. The most important cause of the War of 1812, for example, was land Spanish land (Florida), British land (Canada), but most of all Indian land. All along the boundary, from Vermont to the Georgia Piedmont, white Americans wanted to “push the boundaries of white settlement ever farther into the Indian country.” The British, on the other hand, wanted to “keep a sort of Indian buffer state between the United States and Canada.”81 Only three textbooks inquire reasonably into the causes of this war.sz The others simply repeat the pretext offered by the Madison administrationBritain's refusal to show proper respect to American ships and seameneven though it makes no sense. After all, Britain's maritime laws had been in place since 1807 and caused no war until the frontier states sent War Hawks-senators and representatives who promised military action to expand the boundaries of the United Statesto Congress in 1810. After going on for two pages about the alleged maritime reasons for the war, The American Tradition admits its puzzlement: “The West and the South, oddly enough, were the most anti-British regions of the nation even though they were the least affected by Britain's policies toward American shipping,” Land ofPromise is similarly perplexed: “Where, you must wonder, were the War Hawks of New England? After all, it was New England ships and sailors who bore the brunt of [Britain's] attacks.”