1
COLUMBUS, THE INDIANS, AND . HUMAN PROGRESS
\iawak men und women, naked, uwny, and full of wonder, emerged fr.mi ifidrsillagesonto the island's beaches and swam out to get .1 closer Itiok at the strange big boat. Ulien CJilumbus and his sailors e-ame ashore, carrying svti>rds, spiriting oddly, the Aravaks ran to greet them. Wrought them food, water, gift a. I Ir later wrote of rhis i ji his log:
"l"hey . . . bttwgtit us parmcs JJkd lulls of unnron and xpears and many other things, which they Mch*n|ccd for thr plus liesds and hawks' bells, They willingly traded everything th*y owned,... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features, . . .Thr, .In imi Ix-ar mm, and dr> not know them, for I showed them a sword, they look it hy die edge and cut ri:ii> ekes ii-r. .>l' urnnMiKi. I Iii». !:..•.< no 11.in ITleir jpeai". are made of cane. ..,. They would make fine servants. . .. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them d<> whatever wc want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians nn the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing, These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the reliipon of popes, the government of longs, the fatty for money 1l1.1t marked U'^iiTn cuili/jcion :ind its Inst messLiijrer to the Americas, tihristopher Columbus.
*
s -
t <
ŕ. f
f-
-
-7
n
Ě
E
■T
t
—
-
7:
-
-■
■ E
= -
j
J
&> i
S E
Íl
Íl
íl
I* if &
" 1
t l
■d -š Š *
"í 1
j" -
•
r
-
-t
f
'n U
Ü
111
ii -s s
J! J -2
Z    - -Ě
« -S .H
í 3 K
— - u
—
■z
Ü -S
.s J
11}
m    c d
1*8 j
-
í síl
■ g <
1!-s!
A KOUK's HISTORY OF THE l'hitkd states
asking for a litde help from their Majesties, and in return he would briny ihcin from his nm voyage "as much gold 35 they need .,. and as many slacks a* ihey ask" [ [e was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives vkmry to those who follow His Mram apparent impossibilities."
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition wis given seventeen ships and more than twelve humored men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island 10 island in the ( jnbbean, talinp Indians as captives. Bui as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more ami more empty villages, On Haiti, the)' found that the sailors left behind at Kort Nandad had been killed in a batde with the Indians, After they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as sJaves for sei and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They round no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up hheen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, pui tln'm in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then pkied the five hundred besi specimens to load unto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died cn route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slave* were "naked as the day they were born,"* they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Lcc us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can he sold."
But ton many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cieao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hurt 1 eil down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, sword*, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants
COLUMBUS, THE INDIANS, AND HUMAN PROGRESS J
■.mi  ki'.'.cil 111 -I1..-11 imrn the Spaniards. In tv.ii year-, rlvnigh
murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 2S0.00O Indians on Haiii were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as enivmintdat. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year Í51Í, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year Inšfi shows none of the original Arav, aks or their descendants, left on the island.
The chief source—and, on many matters the only sourc*r-of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Hariiiliume de la* Chv*s, who, js :i young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he im ned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, hut he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbuss journal and, in his fifties, began a muliivolume Hiti//ry vftbe ttidics. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women, They are not completely peaceful, because they do batde from
lime In lime v, i I hi oilier trilies, bill their casualties sei in sinali, ami liny Iil;It when thct   .1/c indiiidunlk  mined to tin mi because ill sii:::l
grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Clasas descrihes sen relations:
Marriage laws are non-en'swnt: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, withnur ofifenw, jcalowy nr angfr. ITiey multiply in iiTcal alnui<Lii»i:e; fwegnant wnnwn work to the La.it minute and give
birth almost painlessly; up the next day. ihey bathe in the fiver and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth, If they are of their men, they give themselves nhortioTw with h*rh< rhsr řnnne srillhirths, covering their shume-iul p»rb with Uano 01 oollinil cloth; altlluu|th tm the whole, Indian men and women lock upon total nakedness with a* much casuaJness as we look upon a man't. hi'.i'l nr .,r   !■■ h.m.k
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in
'»rj(t L'umniund ik.-11-shnped buildings, hoieann up In MA) people at nne time ., . made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves. ... They prir-e bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adnrn iheiT eirs and lipv hur Th<ry put nn value
a people's history of the lnited statp.s
■ I'll KULIS, the indians, and human fhogri5s
7
on gold and Other precious things. They lack ill manner of cnmmerce, neither lnuying nor selling, and rely exclusively Oil their natural environment fur nuintenance. They arc rvrremely generous with ihcir poMcssiuns and by [he Kline tuken covet the posxemidiis of their friends and CjpcX't the same
degree of libera liry....
In Book Two of his Hutoty of the fitiiiex, I -as Casas (who at first urped replacing Indians by black slaves, dunking they were stronger and would survive, lint later relented when he saw the cffccLS on blacks) lulls about the treatment at the Indians hy the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:
Rndlext tesrimnfiirs . . prove the mil*! and pacific temperament of the natives. ... But our work was tn exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy) small wonder, then, if (hey tried tu lull line ni us now and then. . Ih* admiral, it is true, was blind as those whu eiltie after him, and he was u> anx> u>ih tn please die King that he committed irreparable- cniue> a^auiM the Indians.. ..
I -a* Casts tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited n..r;, day" and alter a white tLhihi.il in walk any distance, They "rude the backs of Indians if they were in a hum" or were carried <m hainuioi k^ hy Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians cam1 large leaves to I shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."
Total control Jed to total cruelty. The Spaniards "'thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to teat ilie sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how *rwo of these so- J called (^hrisiijrii tnei i«d Indian hoys one day. each carrying a parrcrt; they cook the parrots and lot fun beheaded the b"\\."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into (he hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, "they suffered and died in (he mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help." He describes their work in the mines:
.. . mountains are stripped from tnp tn bottom and bottom to top l thousand times; they dig, split roeb. more stones, mil carry dirt on their backi
tt> wash it in the rivers, while those who wash fluid stay in the water all the
unie with their hacks lient so ennstandy it breaks thcrni and when water invades the mines, the most arduous tail of all is m dry the mines by scoop* ing tippansful of water and throwing it up outside—
Mni e.nh sis or eight months' work in the mines, which was the rri|vninl of each crew to dig enough cold for melting, up to a third i '......milled.
\\ loir ihe men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives
tn........I !■■ ■.'ink ihe snil, forced into the excruciating job of digging
■Mil 1*1 jl in ft thousands ol hills for cassava plants.
Tin* hwhonds and wives were together only once every eight or ten
........h* n-il when ihi i w.' -i-', ,u.-[ v, exhausted and ilcpr'.-ssi-d on both
I hey ceased tci procreate. rLS for the neuLy born, they died early i 111,1 ihell mothers, m-eiworked a.nd famished, had no milk to nurse dwttt. «wl itw this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7\%X> children died in three
llvMilln Scune mothers even drowned their babies from sheer ■l> i- i hi In ll:is-.>i'.. :r.ishamU ili:-d in rhe 111 lies. wt\esd«:d ..I work, and 11 nil Iren died from lack uf milk ... and in a thort time this Land which Má* «i rtcii. so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated.. . . My eyes have ' Mm these acts so foreign ro human nature, and now I tremble « I write-.. . .
H hen he arrived on HLspanioLa in 1508, La.* C»sas says, "there were Mi iMiii people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from i l'i i in I (OK, over three mil In hi people hail perished from war, slavery, tod i hi no.-. VVIm m fiiTu:c general i ims w if lulicvi. 'his- 1 imsclf ig it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it, -, ,'"
I bus began the history, five hundred years ago, of die Kuropean
■ ii mi of the Indian settlements in the Americas, That beginning, »ii' ii fini nad I js Casas—even if his figures are exaggerations (were ttttre l million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as ■0111« historians have c-alculaicd, or K miMnm .i^ others now believe-)—is
......in. si, ■d.nery, death. When v.c read the history books given tochil-
ihm in die Lnited States, it all scares with heroic adventure—there is no hi.....Idled—a:H Columbus Day is a celebrabon.
I'an ihe elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of ininrihing else, Sirojel Lhot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the Rum distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a iiinlrivolume luiiMiitphyv and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus's route m n.*v the Atlantic. In his popular book Chrirtvphrr Cufww^wr, Mariner. * i nu ii in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: "The mul pi»|k-y iniitaied by Columbus and pursued by his successors r«<ki ill i'i| m complete genocide.11
111.11 is on one page, buned halrv. av into the telling of a grand romance. In ihe I mole's last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:
f A people's history of the i'nited states
I la had hii faults and his defecti, hut they were largely the defects uf dtc «|i.il.m s t)iji iii.nli hmi grc At  his illimitable will, hi-s superb faith Ln God
ami in hn own missjnn as the Cihnst-liearier tn lands tii-viind ihi1 .i .1'., his MuMkhm persistence iluv|Htc neglect, puierty uul discouragement. But then wii no flaw. 1» dark side to the nvost outstanding and es^e-mia] ut" all
his <piahties   hi* seamanship.
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions, \Unison does neither, lie
refuse* to lit ahoUl < lolulllhits. I 1l <1ik:s I'kiI omil (he sliny ot mass imir
der; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he the*, something else—he mentions the truth qujcldy and goes on 1<i other thitigN more important to him. Outright lying i>r ■]■■-• I : 1-111 ■■ sion takes the nsL of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer, lb state the facts, however, and then to bury 1 bein in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder uxiL place, bin it's. not that important—it should weigh very litde in our final judgments;, it should affect very little what we do in the world,
Ii is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who. In order n> produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic in formal inn ihose things needed inr the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable lor I■■ >ih cartiijiraplKTs .mil historians But the rnap-makcr's distortnm is n technical necessity ior a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where ain chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual,
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is uhvious ("This is.i Mcmator pro jeebon for long-range navigation—lor short-range, you'd better use a different protection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability, This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in w huh edi cation and knowledge are pin forward as (ethnical problems o: excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.
OOLL..S1HL.S, IMf INDIANS, AND HLMAN J'ftOORI SS p
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to decmphasi/e their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done.
My point is not thai we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus m ai>rcntia. It is too late lor thflt; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and \ letnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save .1 iii-iii. in: L'.ir prolifendim, '.■> -1 all 1 -In- s ---iill wjtr u-. ' >ne reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are hurled in containers in the earth. We have learned GO give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the must respectable oi classrooms and textbooks. l"his learned sense of mural proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of ihe .scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The rrcatmem of heroes (Columbus) and their victim* {the ■\rnwaks)—the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress—is only one aspen of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal ■CCCpUnce, as if they—the Founding Fathers. Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading mmtfwrs of Congress, the ■.iiiii.us Justices of the Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole, The pretense is that ihere really is such a thing as "the United Si air v," subiect to occasional conllk-ts and quarrels, but fundamental!) a community of people with common interests. It is as if there realty is i "national interest" represented in the Constiiiiiiiin, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, ihe development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
"I listory is the memory of states,'" wrote. I leim ki winger 10 his first nnuk,.4 World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history nf nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the trench Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. Bui fi ir factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the
1w
A PEOPLi's HISTORV OF 1'HE. UNITED STATES
CňlĽMmrs.THE INDIANS, ltl'MAM nUOHII
upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world flnr restored but disintegrated.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different ihi.11 v.e must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in rate and se* And in such a world :• I • •::ili-.-. .1 -rlil 1'I victims and executioners, it is the job of chinking people, as Albert Camas suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable talcing of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in hi story, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of \inuriL-j from thu •■< \r\:<nu\ id :he Viamaks. of the Constitution from die standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by Mini hern farmers, the First World W5k as seen by ■socialists, the Second World Wrsr as seen by pacifists, the New Deal a* seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on. to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of < it he: v
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our muni energy for the present. And the Lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In die short run (ami far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on Other victims.
Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical or governments and then attempts., through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending 10 a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they arc jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them, But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.M
I don't want to invent victories for people 5 movements. Bur to think
that history-writing most ami simple 10 recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborator* in an endless cycle of detent If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by diseasing thi^e hidden episodes of the oast when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found m the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its -olid centuries of warfare.
That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the 1 nited States. The reader may as well know that before goingorir
Wh« Columbus did to the Arawala of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the ^recs ot Metien. Pizarroto the Ineas of Peru, and the English settlers id7 Virginia and Massachusetts to the Pom ha 1 a 11-. and tht Pniuín-..
The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapoiee, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and h priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlivil this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared 11 Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the leij ■ endary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return—the mysterious Quetzakoad. And s*j they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality-.
I hat was Hernando íiortŕs, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. J n the mind of Montci.uma, the king n if the Aztecs, there mist have been a certain doubt about whether txirtes was indeed Oucizalcoad, because he sent a hundred runners to Cones, bearing enormous treasures, gold and siber wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at ibe same time begging him to go back, fľhe painter I >un r ,1 tun years, liter described wtiat he saw just arrived in Spain from thai expedition—a sun orgold, a moon of silver, worth a lortune.)
Cones then began his march of' death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliber-ateness that accompanies a strategy—to paralyze the will of the popula-t n m In a Midden fŤighrfiil deed. And so, in Chorálu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers. Cones's small army of Spaniards,
A *>:oM.ErS H1STUHV OF TKK UNITED STATES
COLUMBUS, CUE INDIANS, a.so mil AN PROc.hk.SS
posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Merit" Ciiy, Montezuma was dead, :nu! die \r.cc civilization. sh.it tered, w as in the hands of the Spaniards.
All this is told in the Spaniards' own accounts.
In Peru* thai other Spanish conquistador Piwirro, used the same tactics, and for the same reason*—the frenzy in the early capitalist states *•< Europe lor gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later tall "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, polities, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
In the N'orth American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville lau.led there with sever ships. I he Indians he mel wi r< hospitable, bui when one of them stole a small silver cup. Grenville Sicked and burned the whole Indian village.
Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indian omltd-eracy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, hut did not attack, maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their "starving time" in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed- When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan in return the runaways, whereupon Powhatan, according io ihe English account, replied wiih "noe other than prowde and disdayncfu.ll Answers" Sonne soldiers were therefore sent "in "to cake Rev-endue." They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the com growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe ami he* children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard "and shoteinge OWtt their Braynes in the water." The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.
Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept crowing in nrimhees, apparently decided to try to wijie ihcm out for good. They went on a rampage and massacred 347 men, women, and children. Prom then on it was total war-
Not ahle to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided lu exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Stwrryt American f'n-fWow:
Since die Indians were better woodanen ririan (tie English and virtually impossible to h-»rk down, th* method was to feiyn peaceful intentJems, In them serde duwn and plant their nun wherever they chose, and then, iu&t before harvest, fall upon rhem. killing as many as possible and kirninji: the eorn.... Within two or three years of the irusorrr The English hid avenged the deaths of that day many rime* ewer.
In that first year of the white man in Virginia. 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much lite so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:
I have seen two generations of my people die____I know the difference
between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am nrm grown old. and must die soon; my authority must descend to my lxrorhers, Opiichapoii, Opecfl*rKanouj(fc and CatSTOUgh—dien en my two sisters;, and dien to my two daughter*. [ wish them tn know as mueli as I An., and dut your Imne to them may be tike mine to you. Why will you ajfta by force what you lliay have quietly by \aver Why will you destroy us who supply you with, food? What ear ynu get by war? We can hide our provision* and run into the woods; then you will starve For wronging your friends. UTiv are you
jealous ' if mi Wt n .11111:1 ltd. ii-.il u III Hi; :.:ivl' '..,n I,.,r ..„„ .,..[■., come in a friendly manner, and not m simple as not to know dial it is. much in- to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives, and children, laugh and be mercy with the English, and trade for their copper and hateheti, than to run away rrcnn them, and to lie cnld in me wood*, feed nn scorns, roots and such trash, and lie so hunted ihat 1 ran neither eat nnr deep. In these wars,, my men muse sit uu watching, and if a twig freak, they all cry <jut "I lere comes. Captain Smithf" Su I musr ertd my muenUc life, lake away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all <lie in the same manner.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited l>y tribes of Indians, The governor of the Massachuicits Fay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring- the area legally a "vacuum," The
a noři i'% nit Htm -Ii   im iMini vmis
COLL'MBL'S, THE INUIANS, AND HUMAN I1 H ill i K t s S
Indians, he mi id. had nm "siiklm-d" the land, mid therefore lud mily a "mi li ,il" righi in ii. I> ii mi .1 "i.ui -iL'ln," \ "nar.ir.il niihi" ud not have liyjl s.1 ;i UlIi ii ii.
11 I 11'it jih also appealed co die Bible, Psalms 2:H: "Ask of me, und l -li.JI up.:- thee, ili:' licatheo -"<- daw alMribiiee, and the unermosi pans of the earth fur thy possession." Anil to justify their use of force to tike the land, they cued Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the povcr, resisteth the ordinance of Cod: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
I Iii: Human- liv.v. i:\ i.ki.is;.  Iiikl- villi :1k- Pi ip i:I I
occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. Hut they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut setders in that area. 1 he murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an eicnse to make war on the Pequots in 16 Jo.
A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narraganscn Indians on Blink Island, who were lumped with the Pequots, As Governor Winthrop wtoic:
They had commission to put ro death the men of Block Island, but tu spare
the wunien and children, »nd tn bring; thrm away, and to take possession of i.l il island: and fruit) dienet: tu tpo tu the Pequod» tu demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom uf v. j.m|>:nn fnr damages, etc. and snme of their children as hostages, which if thev
should refuse, they were tu obtain it In' fence.
The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the- English u ■. n: ii..m inn- li.--> rt1 vil-läge to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back m the main land and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. { )ml dt the of Meets ol that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: "i hu Indians sp\ hit: nl u- cr-n; run nine; in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer. Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking wc intended war, went on cheerfully- - - ."
So, the war with the Pequots began. Massacres tonic place nn forth sides. The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by t Jones, and later, in the twentieth century, even more systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy. This is ethnohistonan Francis Jennings's interpretation of Captain J< ihn Mason s attack on a Pequot village on the Mystic River near Long Island
Sound: ".Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose, Battle is only one of the vays to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and \lavin had determined that massacre would be his objective."
So the English set rire to the wigwams of the village. By their own account: "The Captain also said. Wc must Burn Them; and immediately stepping into the Wigwam .. . brought out a Fire Brand, and putting it into die Marts with which ihcy were ccmtncd, set the Wigwams on Eire." 'A ill lam Bradford, in his History ofibe Ptymmh Plantation wrjeten at the time, describes John Mason's raid on the Pequot v illage:
Those dial scaped the fire were sliire with the sword; some hewed to poeees, others rune throw wjih their rapiers, so as rhcy were quickly dis-patch.lL. and very few escaped. It was enlKvivcd they thus desTroyed about 41)1) at this dint. Il was a fearful sight to see them thus frying; in the fycr, grid the streams of blood quenching the same, and hotriblc was the stineke and sentc there uf, Imt the ■victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who hid wrought so wonderfully f<w them, thus t» inclose their eiKmisc in their hands, and give them so speedy a vtetnry over x.i pmud and insulting *n enimie.
A* Dr, Cotton Mather, Puritan theologian, put it "It was supposed that no less ilurn fii'MJ Pequot souls were hmu^ht down to hell that day."
The war conimued- Indian tribes were used against one another, and never seemed able to join together in lighting the English. Jennings sums up:
The ictfur wis very real among the Indian-,, but in time they came to medicate upon its luundatiom. They drew three lessuiis fruni die Pequnt War: (I) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever ubiigatiun conflicted with advantage; (2) that the Pnglish way of war had mi limit of scruple ur; meicy, and (J) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians tool to heart,
A footnote in Virgil Vogel's book This LmJ H'm Our* (1971) says: "The official figure on the n urn her of Pequots now in Connecticut is twenty-one persons,"
Forty years after ihe Pequot War, Puritans and Indians fought again. This time it ssai the Wainpannapv occupying the simih shwe of
i6
■\ IM<>ri.«'» iimokv OF THE UNITED STATES
columbus, thk ISIIMX5.axd HL'man MHirjRESS
J7
Massachusetts Bay, who were in die way and also bejrinniiig n> trade sonic of their land to penile outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony: Thdr chief, M.isN.iM.11, .li .nl In-, sim \V.i:r>i.iM had been killed b\ englishmen, unit WamsunaV In-othiT Mtwuim (later to be called Kinii Philip by the English} became chief. The Enghsh found their encuse, • murder which 11 .iMrihuted to Metacom, and they began a war of conquest against the U'ampanoairs, a war to take their land. They were clearly the ajy,nre5si.ir\ but claimed they attacked fc* preventive purposes. As Roger Williams, more fritftidly to the Indians than most, put it: aAll men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, m maintain their wars to be defensive."
Jennings says the elite of ihc Puritans wanted the war, the ordinary white Englishman did not want it and often refused to light. The Indians certainly did not want war, but they matched atrocity with atrocity. When it was over, in ln7n, the English had wort, but their resources were drained:, they had U ise six hundred men. Three thousand Indians were dead, including Metacom himself Yet the Indian raids did not
Mll-p.
bar a while, the English tried softer tactics. Bur ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian population or' 10 million that li^ed north of M<iio. when (.o.umVais came would ultimately be reduced to Ion than a million. Huge numliers of Indian* would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in ]<ct\ -\i.-r "the Indians ... affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst ihem, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them nave died." When the English rirst settled Marthas Vineyard in 1642, the Waiujiiinciags there numbered perhaps thrtr thousand. There were no war* on that island, but by 17n4, only 31 3 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians- numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.
Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, ibeir brutality, was that special powerful dnve born in civilizations hased on private property, It war a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples. Roger Williams said it was
i depraved appetite after the great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing lite, great portions nt land, Land in this wilderness, as if men were in
great necessity and danger for want of (treat pnrnnns of land, aa poor, hungry, thi rsty teamen have, iftcr a skk and stonily, a lung and starving passage. Thi* is one of the gods uf New F-ngtond, which the living and most high Eternal will d«trny and famish.
Uas all i his bloodshed and deceit—from Columbus to Cortes, Pi/arro, the Puritans—a necessity' for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization? Was Morison right in burying the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be made—as it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and Ihiman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment be made it the benefits and losses cannot be habmeid hecau.se the losses are either unrrientioned or mentioned quickly-
Hint quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to he done") to the middle and upper classes of the en muuerinjr. and "advanced'* countries. But is it accepts hie to the poor of Asia, Africa, I -atin America, or ro the prisoners in Soviet lahor camps, or the black* n urban ghettos, or the Indians on reservations—to this victims of that progress which Itenefits a privileged minority in the world? Was it acceptable (or just inescapable?) to the miners and railroaders of America, the factory hands, the men and women who died by the hundreds of thousands from accident* or sickness, where they worked or where they lived—casus Ides of progress? And even the privileged minority—must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened hy the anger of the sacrificed, whether in oig-aniiwd rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts id desperation labeled crimes hy law and the state?
If there itrr necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves? We can all decide to give up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even imr own children, h>r a progress which is not nearly as dear or present as sickness or health, life or death:
W^at did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? For a brief period in hiscory, there was the glory of a Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere. As I [ans Koning sums it up in his book Cokmtms: Hit Enttrfrist:
\ 1-f.OPLí'S HISTORY Of THE OITED STATUS
COLUMBUS, THE INDIANS, AND HUMAN MOťiftKSS Jp
Far «11 the puld uikI lilvcf MnU-n and shipped to Spam did not make the srini..li i h'i i| ill in lux It ftvt- their Icings in edge in thehilunnc nif power bir.i inlín-, i i kuiiiť tu lure mure mtatnin- soklitrs tur lliťii nan. I buy ended up Iiiuiik thinr uan anyway, aftd ill dial uas.left wJ tLc&dh intlitiirfl. 1 Starving
|Kf|Hil*LicHi. (he rich richer, die poor poorer, ind a mined peasant d»s-
Hcvoiid all that, how certain arc wc chat what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who tame out on the beach and swam to bring present* to Cohimlxi* ami his L-rew, whn watched Cone's and Pi/.arm fide through their ctwncrysidc, who peered out of the forests at the first white seeders of Virginia and Massachusetts?
Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated die size of the earth. In this book we kid l-jII them Indians, with some reluctance, because it happens too often that people are saddled with names given them by their conquerors.
And yet, there is some reason to call them Indians, hta-ju.se they did come, perhaps 25,000 years ago, from Asia, across the land bridge of the Bering Straits (later to disappear under watert to Alaska.. Then they moved southward, seeking warmth and land, in a trek lasting thousands of years that nxik them into North America, then Central and South America. In Nicaragua, Braid, and F.cuadur their petrified footprints can sail be seen, along with the print of bison, who disappeared about five thousand years ago, %i> they must have reached Smith -Vm-iica at least that tar hack.
Widely dispersed over the great land mass of the Americas, they numbered approximately 75 million people by the tune Cnbitnlnts came, perhaps 25 million in North America. Responding to the difterem environments of soil and climacc, they developed hundreds of different tribal cultures, perhaps two thousand different languages. They perfected the art of agriculture, and figured out how to grow maize {com),
n Iv.i-h i-.i.....:-i j,      In ii-clf and must be planted, cultivated, fertilized,
harvested, husked, shelled. They ingeniously developed a variety of other vegetables and fruits, as well as peanuts and chocolate and tobacco and rubber,
On their own, the Indians were engaged in the great agricultural rev-alum m thai other penplcs in Asia, Europe, Africa were going through about the same time.
Whilr many of the tribes remained nomadic hunters and kind gatherers in wandering, utilitarian. communes, irthcrs began to live in more settled communities where there was more food, larger populations, more divisions of labor among men and women, more surplus to feed
chiefs and pricsis, more leisure time fur artistic and social work, for building houses. Aboui » thousand years before Christ, while compara-li.- Lonsiructions were going on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Zuni and Hopi Indians of what is now New Mexico had begun to build villages consisting of Large terraced buildings, nestled in among cliffs and mountains for protection from enemies, with hundreds of rooms in each sillage. Before the arrival of the Kuropean explorers, they were using irrigation canals, dams, were doing ceramics, wearing baskets, making L'lrrth out of cotton.
By the time of Christ and Julius Caesar, there had developed in the Ohio River Valley a culture of so-called MoundbuiJders, Indians who ci instructed thousands of enormous sculptures out of earth, sometimes in the shapes of huge humans, birds, or serpents, sometimes as burial sites, sometimes as foranarions. One of them was $/i miles long, enclosing 100 acres. These Mouuidbiiilders seem to have been part nf ,i simplex trading system of ornaments and weapons from as far off as, the Great Lakes, the Far West, and the Gulf of Mexico,
About a.d. 500, as this Moundhuilder culture of the Ohio Valley was beginning to decline, another culture was developing westward, in the talley of the Mississippi, centered on what is now St. Louis. It had an advanced agriculture, included thousands of villages, and also built huge earthen mounds as burial and ceremonial places near a vast Indian metropolis rhat may have had thirty thousand people. The largest mound was 100 feet high, with a rectangular hase larger than that of the Creat Pyramid of Egypt. In die city, known as Cahokia, were toolmak-ers, hide dressers, porters, jewelrymakers, weavers, salrmakers, nipper engravers, and magnificent ceramists. One funeral blanket was made of twelve thousand shell beads.
From the Mirondacks to the Great Lakes, in what is now Pennsylvania and upper New York, lived the most powerful of the northeastern tribes, the League of the Iroquois, which included the Mohawks {People of the Flint), Oneidas (Permit of the Stone), Onondagas (People «f jhe Mountain), Cavugas (People at the Landing), and Senecas (Great Hill People), thousands of people bound together fry a common Iroquois language.
In the vision of the .Mohawk chief Hiawatha, the legendary Dekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois: "U'e hind ourselves rogciher In i.;k ing hold of each other's hands so firmly anil ftirrning a circle so strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it. so that our people and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and happiness."
C01.LW1BL S, IHt.lMlUSS, AND Hl'MAN PROft RKSS
1 r
In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village, Houses were considered connm>n property and were shared hy several families. T"he concept id private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A Trench Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 165Cte wrote: "No poihrhouses are needed among them, because, they are rieilher mendicants nor paupers.. .. 'Iheir kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common,"
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Kami lies si ere marrilineal. That is. the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands pined the family, while sons who married
then joined their wise-,' families. Karb extended lamili. lived in :i "Inn;;
hotise." When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband's things outside the door.
Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans ar village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood kxrlliml (lie calcic ut men vitui spoke and voted, and icmovcd the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.
The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or hshing. Ami since tiny su|i plied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Rrd, Whitr, ami Bimk; "Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male di >minarvey and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.'*
Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the irih*, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were uuii.ru equality" in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-cure.
All of this was in sharp contrast ro European values as brought over by the first colonists, a sociecy of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim eidoriv, John Robinson, thus advised his parishi<<ucis In",. n> deal with their children: "And surely there is in all children ... a srub-
la witness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pndc, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be huili ihereon," (Jary Nash describes Iroquois culture:
No laws iiid cwdinancies, sheriffs and constables, pudges and Junes, or courts or iails—the apparatus uf authority in luiropcan societies—were ti> he tin:ml in th* nnrthe+sr woodlands pnor to F-iirnpean Arrival. Yet boundaries of
acceptable liehavior were firmly set. Though priebng themsah'es on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong. . Hi- u,lu> ,trde another's food or acted invalourtJU-sly in war was "shamed" hy his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for has action; and demonstrated to their sarisfactinn thai he had morally purified luiiLielf.
Not only the Iroquois but other Indian trihes behaved the same way. In 1635, Maryland Indians responded to the governors demand that if any of them killed an Englishman, the guilty one should be delivered up for punishment according to English law. The Indians said:
It is the manner amongst us Indians, tfiat if any such accident happen, wee dtxz redceme the life uf a man dut is so slairnr, with a 100 amies lenjrth of Beadex and since that you arc heerc strangers, and come into our Countrey. you sficwld rather ennfnrm yourselves to the Custnmes of our Countrey, rhan impose yours upon us.. . .
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were mure beautifully worked ' nit than perhaps anyplace in the world,
They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by song, dance, tad ceremonial drama. I'hey paid careful attention to the development ■ >l personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility', passion and potency, to their partnership with one another ami with nature.
John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: "Could
21
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
we make it our own, there would he an eternally mexhau-Mihle earth and a forever lasting peace."
Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But the evidence from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, ami eighteenth centuries, put together n.et-nily hv an American specialist on Indian life, William Brandon, is overwhelmingly supportive of" much of that "myth-" Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to malte us iiucsnon, for that time and ours, the excuse ol pn^ass in the annihilation of races ami ihe telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.