Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (18 page)

Like its predecessors, the War of 1812 cannot be understood so long as its Indian origin is obscured. Whites along the frontier wanted the war, and along the frontier most of the war was fought, beginning in November 1811 with William Henry Harrison's attack on the Shawnecs and allied tribes in Indiana, called the Battle of Tippecanoe. The United States fought five of the seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against Native Americans,

Nonetheless, unlike Canadian histories, none of our textbooks recognizes the involvement of Native Americans.

All but two textbooks miss the key result of the war. Some authors actually cite the “Star Spangled Banner” as the main outcome! Others claim that the war left “a feeling of pride as a nation” or “helped Americans to win European respect.” The American Adventure excels, pointing out, “The American Indians were the only real losers in the war.” Triumph ofthe American Nation expresses the same sentiments, but euphemistically: “After 1815 the American people began the exciting task of occupying the western lands.” The other ten books simply ignore the key outcome: in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain gave up its alliances with Indian nations in what would become the United States.

Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic moppingup operations. This result was central to the course of Indian-US, relations for the remainder of the century. Thus Indian wars after 1815, while they cost thousands of lives on both sides, would never again amount to a serious threat to the United States,84 Although Native Americans won many battles in subsequent wars, there was never the slightest doubt over who would win in the end.

Another result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. “A century of learning [from Native Americans] was corning to a close. A century and more of forgettingof calling history into service to rationalize conquestwas beginning.” After 1815 Indians could no longer play what sociologists call the role of conflict partneran important other who must be taken into accountso Americans forgot that Indians had ever been significant in our history. Even terminology changed: until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans.

Ironically, several textbooks that omit King Philip's War and the Native American role in the War of 1812 focus instead on such minor Plains wars as Cetonimo's Apache War of 188586, which involved maybe forty Apache fighters.87 The Plains wars fit the post-1815 story line of the textbooks, since they pitted white settlers against serni-nomadic Indians. The Plains Indians are the Native Americans textbooks love to mourn: authors can lament their passing while considering it inevitable, hence untroubling.

The textbooks also fail to mention how the continuous Indian wars have reverberated through our culture. Carleton Seals has written that “our acquiescence in Indian dispossession has molded the American character.”89 As soon as Natives were no longer conflict partners, their image deteriorated in the minds of many whites. Karen Kupperman has shown how this process unfolded in Virginia after the Indian defeat in the 1640s: “It was the ultimate powerlessness of the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which made it possible to see them as people without rights.”85 Natives who had been “ingenious,” “industrious,” and “quick of apprehension” in 1610 now became “sloathfull and idle, vitious, melancholy, [and] slovenly.” This is another example of the process of cognitive dissonance. Like Christopher Columbus, George Washington changed his attitudes toward Indians. Washington held positive views of Native Americans early in his life, but after unleashing the Ohio War in 1790 he would come to denounce the Ohio Indians as “having nothing human except the shape.”

This process of rationalization became unofficial national policy after the War of 1812. In 1845 William Gilmore Simms wrote, “Our blinding prejudices . . . have been fostered as necessary to justiiy the reckless and unsparing hand with which we have smitten [the Indians] in their habitations and expelled them from their country,” In 1871 Francis A. Walker, Commissioner ofIndian Affairs, considered Indians beneath morality: “When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasrs, no question of national honor can arise.” Whatever action the United States cared to take “is solely a question of expediency.”91 Thus cognitive dissonance destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much ofthe Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations. Although European nations professed to be shocked by our actions on the western frontier, before long they were emulating us. Britain exterminated the Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total war against the Herrero of Namibia. Most western nations have to face this history. We also have to admit that Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west “and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's exterminationby starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies.

Were there alternatives to this history of war? Of course, there were. Indeed, France, Russia, and Spain all pursued different alternatives in the Americas. Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States, however, they are tricky topics for historians. As Edward Carr noted, “History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not of what they failed to do.”9i On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent upon the actions of people. “The duty of the historian,” Gordon Craig has reminded us, “is to restore to the past the options it once had.” Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memorable.94 White Americans chose among real alternatives and were often divided among themselves. At various points in our history, our anti-Indian policies might have gone another way. For example, one reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England was that New Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by slaveowners to appropriate Indian land. Peaceful coexistence of whites and Native Americans presents itself as perhaps the most obvious alternative to war, but was it really possible? In thinking about this question, we must take care not to compare a static Indian culture to changing modern culture. We have seen the rapid changes in independent Native culturesadaptation to an economy based on hunting and trapping, the flowering of multilingualism, development of more formal hierarchies. Such changes would no doubt have continued. Thus we are not talking about bow-and-arrow hunters living side by side with computerized urbanites.

We should keep in mind that the thousands of white and black Americans who joined Indian societies must have believed that coexistence was possible. Fromthe stari, however, white conduct hindered peaceful coexistence. A thousand little encroachments eventually made it impossible for Indians to farm near whiles. Around Plymouth, the Indians leased their grazing land but retained iheir planting grounds. Too late they found that this did not keep colonists from leiting theit livestock roam free to ruin the crops. When Native Americans protested, they usually found that colonial courts excluded their testimony. On the other hand, “the Indian who dared to kill an Englishman's marauding animals was promptly hauled into a hostile court.”" The precedent established on the Atlantic coastthat Indians were not citizens of the Europeans' state and lacked legal rightsprevented peaceful white-Indian coexistence throughout the colonies and later the United States. Even in Indian Territory, supposedly under Native control, whether Indians were charged with offenses on white land or whites on Indian land, [rial had to be held in a white court in Missouri,

miles away.96 Since many whites had a material interest in dispossessing Indians of their land, and since European and African populations grew ever larger while plagues continued to reduce the Indian population, plainly the United States was going to rule. In this sense war only prolonged the inevitable. Another alternative to war would have been an express commitment to racial harmony: a predominantly European but nonracist United States that did not differentiate between Indians and non-Indians. U.S. history provides several examples ofrelatively nonracist enclaves. Sociologists call them triracial isolates because their heritage is white, black, and red, as it were. For centuries, these communities occupied swamps and other undesirable lands, wanting mostly to be left alone. The Revolutionary War hero Crispus Attucks was a member of such an enclave: an escaped slave of Wampanoag, European, and African ancestry. The Lumbee Indians in North Carolina comprise the largest such group. Other triracial isolates include the Wampanoags in Massachusetts, the Seminoles in Florida, and smaller bands from Louisiana to Maine.

The first British settlement in North America, Roanoke Island in 1585, probably did not die out but was absorbed into the nearby Croatoan Indians, “thereby achieving a harmonious biracial society that always eluded colonial planters.” Eventually the English and Croatoans may have become pan of the Lumbees. The British never learned/die outcome of the “Lost Colony,” however. Frederick Turner has suggested that they did not want to think about the possibility that British settlers had survived by merging with Native Americans. Instead, in the words of). F. Fausz, “tales of the 'Lost Colony' came to epitomize the treacherous nature of hostile Indians and served as the mythopoeic 'bloody shirt' for justifying aggressions against the Powhatan years later.” Triracial isolates have generally won only contempt from their whke neighbors, which is I why they have chosen rural isolation. Our textbooks isolate them, too: none I mentions the term or the peoples.

A related possibility for Natives, Europeans, and Africans was intermarriage. Alliance through marriage is a common way for two societies to deal! with each other, and Indians in the United States repeatedly suggested such a I policy.“ Spanish men married Native women in California and New Mexico I and converted them to Spanish ways. French fur traders married Native women I in Canada and Illinois and converted to Native ways. Not the British. Text books might usefully pass on to students the old clichethe French penetrated I Indian societies, the Spanish acculturatcd them, and the British expelledÈ them-for it offers a largely accurate summary of European-Indian relation ships. In New England and Virginia, English colonists quickly moved to] forbid interracial marriage.1 Pocahontas stands as the first and almost the last! Native to be accepted into British-American society, which we may therefore! call ”white society,“ through marriage. After her, most interracial couples found! greater acceptance in Native society. There their children often became chiefsj because their bicultural background was an asset in the complex world th tribes now had to navigate. In Anglo society “half-breeds” were not valued but stigmatized. Another alternative to war was the creation of an Indian state within the United States. In 1778, when the Delaware Indians proposed that Native Americans be admitted to the union as a separate state, Congress refused even to consider the idea,11” In the 1840s Indian Territory sought the right enjoyed by other territories to send representatives to Congress, but white Southerners stopped them. The Confederacy won the backing of most Native Americans in Indian Territory, however, by promising to admit the territory as a state if the South won the Civil War. After the war Native Americans proposed the same arrangement to the United States. Again the United States said no, but eventually admitted Indian Territory as the white-dominated state oF Oklahomaironically, the name means “[land for] red people” in Choctaw.

Our textbooks pay no attention to any of these possibilities. Instead, they dwell on another road not taken: total one-way acculturation to white society. The overall story line in contemporary American history textbooks about American Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn't or couldn't do it; so we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda used by policymakers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal-that Native Americans stood in the way of progress. The only real difference is the tone. Back when white Americans were doing the dispossessing, justifications were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as primitive, savage, and nomadic. Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of God, said to favor those who “did more” with the land. Now that the dispossessing is done, our histories can see mure virtue in the conquered cultures. But they still picture Indians as tragically different, unable or unwilling to acculturate.

American ffistory tells of misguided liberals who tried to get Indians to settle down on farms and become “good Americans.” They wanted Indians to give up their customs and religions and copy the culture of the whites. They did not care that this would destroy the Indians as a distinct group of people. They believed that the change would be the best thing that could happen both to the Indians and to their white neighbors on the frontier.

American History appears to offer a sympathetic treatment of a tragic clash of two irreconcilable lifestyles in the Ohio Valley around 1800. This treatment mimics Pres. Thomas Jefferson, who told a delegation of Cherokees in 1808, “Let me entreat you therefore, on the lands now given [sic] you to begin every man a farm, let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies let it belong to his wife and children after him.”106 Other textbooks share Jefferson's view and lament that if only the Indians had become farmers like us, everything would have turned out better. Triumph ofth? American Nation commiserates, “Two such different ways of life could not long exist peaceably side by side. Conflict was inevitable.”