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Native
American Voices
Introduction:
Part II
European
Perceptions
In 1646, a Christian convert asked the Massachusetts missionary
John Eliot: "Why do you call us Indians?" The answer
is readily apparent even to young schoolchildren. Because Columbus
mistakenly believed he had arrived in the East Indies, near Japan
and China, he called the islanders "indios." Even though
European realized within a quarter century that Columbus had not
reached the East Indies, the name Indian continued to be used.
The
term Indian was a European-imposed concept. There was not a single
monolithic Indian culture, nor did the diverse indigenous inhabitants
of North America think of themselves as a single people. They
were acutely conscious of the diversity of beliefs, customs, and
cultures. European colonists, however, were unable to appreciate
or comprehend the rich diversity of the Native Americans and tended
to conflate the Indian people into a single, undifferentiated
group. They classified this vast indigenous population as "Indian,"
described their color as "red," and considered their
religions pagan, their languages incomprehensible, their politics
disorganized, and their agriculture and land use patterns primitive.
The French philosopher Montaigne reflected a pervasive ignorance
about Indians when he pronounced that the Indians had "no
knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate,
nor of politics...no occupation but idle, no apparel but natural...."
Europeans
were shocked by the contrasts between the cultures, particularly
in gender roles and childrearing practices. They invariably commented
on the essential economic roles performed by Indian women, as
farmers, house-builders, traders, and sometimes as sachems. And
they were also shocked to discover that Indians did not physically
punish their children. The Indian young were encouraged to behave
properly largely through praise and public rewards for achievement,
and were seldom spanked. Convinced that corporal punishment made
children timid and dependent, parents praised children when they
were good and publicly shamed them when they misbehaved.
Indians
offered a screen on which Europeans projected Old World fears
and fantasies. Many Europeans regarded the Indians as "natural
man," free of all of civilization's restraints. According
to this stereotype, the Indians embodied innocence and freedom,
lacking sexual restraints, law, and private property, yet possessing
health and eternal youth. Arthur Barlowe, who visited Roanoke
Island, off the coast of North Carolina, in 1584, described the
Native Americans as nature's nobility:
We
found the people most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all
guile and treasure, and such as live after the manner of the
golden age.
Another
favorite stereotype was the somber, wise Indian, divorced from
his tribe, who assists whites in their plans to civilize the wilderness.
This early stereotype would persist into the nineteenth century
in James Fenimore Cooper's literary creation of Chingachgook,
the friend of the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo, and into the
twentieth century in Tonto, the Lone Ranger's sidekick.
But
if some Europeans regarded Indians with fascination, many others
looked at them with hatred and fear. A contrasting stereotype,
often invoked to legitimate white aggression, was the "bloodthirsty
savage" who stood in the way of progress and civilization.
Colonists repeatedly referred to Indians in the most pejorative
terms, as "inhumanly cruel," "brutish beasts"
of "most wilde and savage nature." If the "noble
savage" deserved to be "civilized" and "Christianized"
in the white man's image, then the "bloodthirsty savage"
had to be eliminated. Such self-serving stereotypes long prevented
Europeans from seeing Native Americans in their true diversity
and individuality.
From
an early date, the English colonists were convinced that "civilization"
could not coexist with "savagery." Either Indians would
have to be reformed in the image of whites or else they had to
be removed. This view did not bode well for future relations between
the English settlers and their descendants and North America's
Indian people.
The
Clash of Cultures
Relations between Indians and Europeans during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries ran the spectrum from cooperation and accommodation
to bitter conflict. Where the number of colonists was fewest,
relationships were based on trade, and the Indians viewed the
Europeans as potential allies, relations were friendliest. Where
European numbers were greatest and their primary objective was
Indian land or labor, relations were least friendly. By the early
eighteenth century, however, it was already clear that friendly
relations and cooperation would be the exception, since in areas
as diverse as New Mexico, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Chesapeake
Bay region of Virginia and Maryland, European colonizers were
encroaching on Indian lands and radically disrupting the Indian
ways of life.
In Mexico and Central and South America, the Spanish, unlike the
English or the French, viewed Indians as a usable labor force--to
be put to work to raising crops, tending animals, and extracting
valuable minerals from mines. In the early 1500s Spanish policy
forced many Indians to work on Spanish estates. Under the encomienda
system, colonists were granted the right to demand tribute from
Indians living on a given piece of land. Often the colonists forced
the Indians to farm or work in mines as payment. Gradually, the
Indians became bound to the land because they had no other way
to pay tribute.
North
of Mexico, Spain's perspective changed. Relatively few Spaniards
migrated to New Spain's northernmost frontiers, because the area
lacked mineral riches. Here, Indians were viewed essentially as
buffers to protect Spain's New World empire and as objects of
religious conversion. Beginning in the 1560s, Jesuit and Franciscan
priests established missions in what are now Florida and Georgia
and then, starting in the early 1600s, in present-day Arizona,
California, New Mexico, and Texas. In Florida and much later in
California, missions were enclosed, self-sufficient communities
combining farming with the manufacture of pottery, woven blankets,
and other goods. In New Mexico, in contrast, where a large Pueblo
population inhabited settled villages, Franciscan missionaries
established churches on the edge of towns.
During
the sixteenth century, cultural conflicts between Spanish missionaries
and Indians periodically erupted into violence. The most dramatic
uprising took place in New Mexico in 1680, after Franciscan missionaries
sought to suppress traditional Pueblo religious practices by desecrating
a Pueblo kiva--a special room where religious activities took
place--flogging Pueblo priests, and destroying sacred Indian artifacts.
A Pueblo holy man named Pope led a revolt which killed over 400
Spanish colonists and destroyed every church in the New Mexico.
Six years later, Spain restored its authority. But in order to
maintain peace, Spain reached an accommodation with the Pueblo.
In return for a pledge of loyalty to the Spanish crown and attendance
at Catholic religious services, Spain promised to protect Pueblo
lands from exploitation, abandon force Indian labor, and tolerate
the secret practice of traditional Pueblo religion.
The
French and the Indians they encountered reached a different kind
of accommodation. France's New World empire was based largely
on trade. In 1504, French fishermen sailed into the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, looking for cod. Gradually, the French realized that
they could increase their profits by trading with the Indians
for furs. In exchange for pelts, the French coureurs de bois (traders)
supplied Indians with textiles, muskets, and other European goods.
By the end of the sixteenth century, a thousand ships a year were
engaged in the fur trade along the St. Lawrence River and the
interior, where the French constructed forts, missions, and trading
posts.
Relations
between the French and Indians were less violent than in Spanish
or English colonies. In part, this reflected the small size of
France's New World population. The French government had little
interest in encouraging immigration and the number of settlers
in New France remained small, totaling just 3,000 in 1663. Virtually
all these settlers were men--mostly traders or Jesuit priests--and
many took Indian wives or concubines, helping to promote relations
of mutual dependency. Common trading interests also encouraged
accommodation between the French and the Indians. Missionary activities,
too, proved somewhat less divisive in New France than in New Mexico
or New England, since France's Jesuit priests did not require
them to immediately abandon their tribal ties or their traditional
way of life.
English
Encounters
Popular mythology recounts many instances of cooperation between
English colonists and Native Americans. Grade schoolers learn
about Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan, an Indian chief in
Virginia, who is said to have rescued Captain John Smith when
her father was about to kill him. They encounter Squanto, a member
of the Patuxet tribe of eastern Massachusetts, who taught the
Pilgrims how to grow corn. They also hear about William Penn,
the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, who maintained friendly relations
with the Indians. But there was another side to this story, missing
from popular mythology: settlers poisoning Indians at peace parleys,
offering them clothing infected with smallpox, and burning their
villages and cornfields.
In
fact, encounters between the English and the Indian peoples were
more problematic--and violent--than historical mythology suggests.
Some English settlers dreamed of discovering gold or silver; others
envisioned a lucrative trade in furs. But gradually the primary
goal of the English was to acquire land. Unlike the French and
Spanish, the English created self-sustaining settler colonies,
populated with English, Scot, and Scots-Irish immigrants. And
this meant displacing the indigenous inhabitants and expropriating
their land.
In
English eyes, the Indians held only an ambiguous title to the
land. They may have had some vague rights due to discovery and
prior occupancy, but they lacked true title since they failed
to make improvements. As early as 1609, an Englishman insisted
on the right of English colonists to "plant ourselves in
their places." "The greater part" of the land,
wrote Robert Gray, "possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild
beasts, and unreasoning creatures, or by brutish savages, which
by reason of their godles[s] ignorance, and blasphemous Idolatrie,
are worse than...beasts."
The
initial English-Indian encounters took place in the Southeast,
where the Indian population was better prepared than elsewhere
to resist English encroachments. On the eve of contact an estimated
one million Indians lived in the region; and even though disease
and warfare would soon reduce the indigenous population to just
75,000, these people revealed a remarkable capacity for resistance.
In the Southeast, the Mississippian tradition of an urbanized
population with centralized political authorities persisted. These
people lived in villages, which were often quite sizable, with
populations of a thousand or more, protected by wooden fences.
In this region, the basic political unit was the chiefdom, consisting
of a village or a group of villages ruled by a chief who gained
his position through merit, and, in turn, distributed presents
and other goods to the people he controlled. When the English
entered their land, tribal chiefs in the Southeast were better
able than elsewhere to mobilize their people against the outside
threat.
The first English settlement in North America was established
in 1585 at Roanoke Island, off the cost of what is today North
Carolina. A year earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh had sent an expedition
to explore the region, and brought two Algonquian Indians back
to England: Manteo, who converted to Christianity; and Wanchese,
who later led opposition to English colonization.
The
English planned to explore Roanoke and the mainland for gold and
silver, trade for furs, and raise bananas and sugar and other
crops on plantations. Even though the colonists relied on the
Indians for food, they treated them in a brutal manner, kidnapping
women, burning cornfields, and ultimately beheading the local
chief, Wingina. Then, the expedition returned to England.
In
1587, another expedition returned to Roanoke. Unlike the first,
which consisted of soldiers and adventurers, this one was made
up of families. Clashes erupted between the colonists and local
Indians. Later that year, the colonists' leader, John White, returned
to England for supplies. He did not return until 1590, when he
discovered a shocking sight: buildings in ruin, food and armor
scattered on the ground, and the word "CROATOAN" carved
on the door post of the colony's crumbling fort. There was no
sign of a cross, which White and the settlers had designated as
a distress sign. The colony's 84 men, 17 women, and 11 children
had vanished.
What
happened to the "Lost Colony"? Some scholars believe
that Manteo had led the colonists to Croatoan village, fifty miles
south of Roanoke Island, where they intermarried with the Indians.
Others speculate that the colonists later moved northward toward
Chesapeake Bay, where the powerful Chief Powhatan executed the
intruders. To this day, no one knows the answer to this historical
mystery.
The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, was built in
1607 in a swampy area, along Virginia's James River. Approximately
30,000 Algonquian Indians lived in the Chesapeake region, divided
into some forty tribes. Thirty tribes belonged to a confederacy
led by Powhatan. Relations between the colonists and the Indians
rapidly deteriorated. Food was the initial source of conflict.
More interested in finding precious metals than in farming, Jamestown's
residents got part of their food from the Indians, which they
exchanged for English goods. When the English began to simply
seize Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off supplies, forcing the
colonists for a time to subsist on frogs, snakes, and even decaying
corpses.
Relations worsened after the colonists began to clear the land
and plant tobacco. Since tobacco production rapidly exhausted
the soil of nutrients, the English began to acquire new lands
along the James River, encroaching on Indian hunting grounds.
In 1622, the growing hostility erupted into violence. Powhatan's
successor, Opechancanough, attempted to wipe out the English in
a surprise attack. Two Indian converts to Christianity warned
the English; still, 347 settlers, or about one third of the English
colonists died in the attack. Warfare persisted for ten years,
followed by an uneasy peace. In 1644, Opechancanough launched
a last, desperate attack. After two years of warfare, in which
some 500 colonists were killed, Opechancanough was captured and
shot and the survivors of Powhatan's confederacy, now numbering
just 2,000, agreed to submit to English rule.
Farther
south, English settlers manipulated tribal rivalries to open land
to white settlement. In South Carolina, the English effectively
pitted groups like the Tuscaroras, the Cherokees, the Creeks,
and the Yamasees against one another. The Tuscaroras had taken
many Algonquians captive and sold them into slavery. Between 1711
and 1713, the English took advantage of intertribal hostility
by convincing the Algonquians to join them in a war against the
Tuscaroras. When the conflict was over, over 1,000 Tuscaroras
(a fifth of the tribe) were sold into slavery. Half the remaining
Tuscaroras then migrated to New York, where they became the sixth
nation of the Iroquois League. Then, in 1715, the European settlers
succeeded in mobilizing the Cherokees against the Creeks and the
Yamasees, forcing the Creeks to move westward and the surviving
Yamasees southward into territory controlled by Spain, clearing
valuable rice land of Indians in the process.
In
the Northeast, Indians found it difficult to resist the English
invaders unless they were able to ally themselves with a European
power. Compared to the Southeast, the Northeast was much less
densely populated. The 140,000 who inhabited the area in 1600
fell to just 10,000 by 1675. The tribes in this area were also
more fragmented politically; except for the Iroquois, they were
not organized into political confederacies. Politically, this
was a region of autonomous villages that made decisions by consensus.
It was also a region with a long history of tribal rivalries.
The
migration of Puritan colonists into western Massachusetts and
Connecticut during the 1630s provoked bitter warfare. Part of
this land was claimed by the Pequots, the region's most powerful
people. In 1636, English settlers accused a Pequot of murdering
a colonist; in revenge, they burned a Pequot settlement on what
is now Block Island, Rhode Island. In 1637, the Pequots struck
at Wethersfield in Connecticut, killing several colonists. A force
of Puritans and Narragansett Indians retaliated a month later
by surrounding and setting fire to the main Pequot village on
the Mystic River. Between six and seven hundred Pequot men, women
and children were burned alive. The force's commander declared
that God had "laughed at his enemies...making them as a fiery
oven."
The
defeat of the Pequots allowed white settlers to move into the
New England interior, where they intruded on Indian homelands.
In 1675, the chief of the Pokanokets, Metacomet (whom the English
called King Philip), forged a military alliance of two-thirds
of the region's Indians. In 1675, he led an attack on Swansea,
Massachusetts. Over the next year, both sides raided villages
and killed hundreds of victims. Twelve out of ninety New England
towns were destroyed. Relative to the size of the population,
King Philip's War (1675-76) was the bloodiest in American history.
Five percent of New England's population was killed--a higher
proportion than Germany or Russia lost during World War II. Indian
casualties were far higher; perhaps forty percent of New England's
Indian population was killed or fled the region.
The
colonists captured Philip's wife and son, and sold them into slavery.
Metacomet was killed in 1676, ending the war in southern New England.
Fighting in the north continued until 1678. When the war was over,
the power of New England's Indians was broken. The region's remaining
Indians would live in small, scattered communities, serving as
the colonists' servants and tenants.
Even
in Pennsylvania, whose Quaker founder William Penn envisioned
a "peaceable kingdom" where people of diverse backgrounds
and religious beliefs could live together harmoniously, Indians
were displaced from their lands. Before leaving England, he wrote
to the Delawares, the dominant tribe in the region, expressing
his hope that "we may always live together as neighbors and
friends." True to his word, Penn met with the Delawares and
told them that he would not take land from them unless sanctioned
by tribal chieftains. Committed to treating Native Americans fairly
in negotiating land rights, Penn purchased Delaware lands before
reselling them to settlers and prohibited the sale of alcohol.
Penn's policies were so unusual that they encouraged the Miamis,
the Shawnees, and other peoples to move to Pennsylvania. However,
after his death, Penn's own sons and agents reversed his policies,
and Pennsylvania's colonists pushed the Delaware and other peoples
off their land without compensation.
Native
Americans and European Contests for Empire
Along the eastern coast, England, France, the Netherlands, and
Spain all competed over trade with the Indians. In the Northeast,
England, France, and the Netherlands struggled to control the
immensely valuable fur trade. In the Southeast, it was not furs
that drew the English, the Spanish, and later the French, but
deerskin (used to make clothes, gloves, and book bindings) and
Indian slaves. During the early eighteenth century, Indian slaves
(many of whom had been converted to Catholicism at Spanish missions
before capture) made up a sizeable proportion of the slaves in
South Carolina and other southeastern colonies.
Competition
over furs, skins, and slaves had many destructive effects on Native
Americans. It made Indians increasingly dependent on European
manufactured goods and firearms. The trade also killed off animals
that provided a major part of the hunting and gathering economy.
And traders spread disease and alcohol. The fur trade also conflicted
with traditional Indian religious beliefs, which charged hunters
with never killing more animals than they needed.
Above
all, competition over trade encouraged intertribal warfare and
thus undermined the Indians' ability to resist white incursions.
In what is now New York, for example, the Dutch and the English
pitted their allies, the Iroquois, against the Huron, who served
as middlemen between French traders and other tribes. In the ensuing
warfare, the Hurons were driven westward.
During
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indians frequently
became embroiled in European wars to control North America. Four
times between 1689 and 1763, France, England, and their Indian
allieswaged wars over land between the Allegheny Mountains and
the Mississippi River, fishing grounds off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland,
and control of the fur trade. The last and most important conflict,
the French and Indian War (1754-1763), began partly because the
Iroquois started to allow British settlement in the Ohio River
valley. The French, afraid that they would be cut out of the fur
trade, retaliated by building a chain of forts along Pennsylvania's
Allegheny River. France's defeat permitted English colonists to
move into newly acquired lands in the interior.
No
longer able to play the French off against the British, Indians
found it increasingly difficult to slow the rapid advance of white
settlers into western parts of South and North Carolina, Virginia
and Pennsylvania, New York's Mohawk Valley, and the lower Mississippi
River. To stop encroachments on their lands in the Southeast,
the Cherokees attacked frontier settlements in the Carolinas and
Virginia in 1760. Defeated the next year by British regulars and
colonial militia, the Cherokees had to allow the English to build
forts on their territory.
Indians in western New York and Ohio suffered a serious defeat
in Pontiac's War (1763). With the French threat removed, the British
reduced the price paid for furs, allowed settlers to take Indian
land without payment, and built forts in violation of treaties
with local tribes. In the spring of 1763 an Ottawa chief named
Pontiac led an alliance of Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, and other
western Indians in rebellion. Pontiac's alliance attacked forts
in Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that Britain
had taken over from the French, destroying all but three. Pontiac's
forces then moved eastward, attacking settlements in western Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Virginia, killing more than 2,000 colonists. Without
assistance from the French, however, Pontiac's rebellion petered
out by the year's end.
To
restore western peace, royal officials issued the Proclamation
of 1763, which prohibited colonists from purchasing Indian lands
and closed the trans-Mississippi West to white settlement. This
scheme failed when land-hungry frontiersmen and speculators repeatedly
petitioned the British government to negotiate treaties allowing
them to purchase millions of acres of Indian land in the Ohio
River valley. To end this pressure, Parliament passed the Quebec
Act of 1774, transferring control of Indian trade in the area
between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the French-speaking
province of Quebec. But this act provoked outrage among American
colonists, convinced that British government was seeking to transform
the West into a preserve for "papists" and "savages."
The prohibition on English settlement in the West was a major
cause of the American Revolution.
In the 1770s, such tribes as the Delaware, the Wyandot, the Shawnee,
and the Cayuga, staged raids into what is now Kentucky and West
Virginia in response to an influx of white traders and farmers
into the area south of the Ohio River. Whites accused the Indians
of transforming Kentucky into a "dark and bloody ground,"
and struck back. In Lord Dunmore's War (1774), 3,000 British soldiers
defeated 1,000 Indians, forcing the Indians to abandon their hunting
grounds south of the Ohio River.
During
the American Revolution itself, both the British and the American
patriots sought to keep Indians neutral. In 1775, the Second Continental
Congress asked Indians "not to join on either side,"
since "you Indians are not concerned in it." Two peoples
tried to use the revolution as an opportunity to halt white settlement
on their territory, the Shawnee in Kentucky and the Cherokee in
frontier Carolina and Virginia. But in each case, these people
suffered defeats at the hands of the colonial militias, forcing
them to give up land in Kentucky, the western Carolinas, and eastern
Georgia to the Americans. The Revolution also had fateful consequences
for another group of Indians, the Iroquois Confederacy, who divided
over whether to support the British or the Americans. Those Iroquois
tribes that aligned with the British--the Cayugas, Mohawks, and
Senecas--were defeated in battle in 1779, and left New York State
and western Pennsylvania to resettle in British Canada.
Even
after the revolution, the eastern Indians still represented a
formidable barrier to white expansion. In 1790, there were approximately
150,000 Native Americans east of the Mississippi River--a population
greater than the number of European colonists in 1700. The Senecas
inhabited the western portions of New York; the Kickapoos, Miamis,
Wyandots, and other tribes populated the areas that would become
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, while the Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks considered the future states
of Alabama, Mississippi, and western Georgia their territory.
But pressure on these areas was mounting.
The
end of the revolution unleashed a mad rush of pioneers to Kentucky
and Tennessee. Between 1784 and 1790, clashes with the Cherokees,
Chickasaws, and Shawnees left more than 1,500 whites dead or captured.
Pressure to open up other areas was increasing. In 1790, the United
States paid a large bribe to a Creek leader, Alexander McGillivray,
to sign a peace treaty allowing whites to occupy lands in central
Georgia. Under pressure from Spain, the Creeks renounced the treaty
in 1792.
President
George Washington also wanted to open the country north of the
Ohio River. The British, eager to maintain the lucrative fur trade,
had refused to relinquish their military posts from this area
and provided aid to the region's Delawares, Iroquois, Miamis,
and Shawnees. During the 1790s, George Washington dispatched three
armies to clear the Ohio country of Indians. Twice, a confederacy
of eight tribes led by Little Turtle, chief of the Miamis, defeated
American forces. In the first campaign, the United States suffered
200 casualties and in the second, Indians killed 900 soldiers.
But in 1794, a third army defeated the Indians. A 3,000-man force
under Anthony Wayne destroyed Indian villages in northwestern
Ohio and then overwhelmed a thousand Indians at the Battle of
Fallen Timbers. Under the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Native
Americans ceded much of the present state of Ohio, in return for
cash and a promise that the federal government would treat the
Indian nations fairly in land dealings. |
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