Before Columbus - 1

III

In the most fundamental quantitative ways, then, recent scholarship has begun to redirect inquiry and expose falsehoods that have dominated characterizations of the Americas' native peoples for centuries-although very little of this research has yet found its way into textbooks or other nontechnical historical overviews. It now appears likely, for example, that the people of the so-called New World were already well-established residents of plains, mountains, forests, foothills, and coasts throughout the Western Hemisphere by the time the people of Europe were scratching their first carvings onto cave walls in the Dordogne region of France and northern Spain. It also is almost certain that the population of the Americas (and probably even Meso- and South America by themselves) exceeded the combined total of Europe and Russia at the time of Columbus's first voyage in 1492. And there is no doubt at all, according to modern linguistic analysis, that the cultural diversity of the Americas' pre-Columbian indigenous peoples was much greater than that of their Old World counterparts.¹⁴ A bit of common sense might suggest that this should not be surprising. After all, North and South America are four times the size of Europe. But common sense rarely succeeds in combating cultural conceit. And cultural conceit has long been the driving force behind the tales most European and white American historians have told of the European invasion of the Americas.

The native peoples of the Americas are far from unique, of course, in traditionally having the basic elements of their historical existence willfully misperceived. In his sweeping and iconoclastic study of modern Africa, for instance, Ali A. Mazrui makes the cogent point that ethnocentrism has so shaped Western perceptions of geography that the very maps of the world found in our homes and offices and classrooms, based on the famous Mercator projection, dramatically misrepresent the true size of Africa by artificially deflating its land area (and that of all equatorial regions of the world) in comparison with the land areas of Europe and North America.¹⁵ Because the Mercator map exaggerates the distance between the lines of latitude for those regions that lie closest to the poles, North America is made to appear one and a half times the size of Africa when in fact Africa contains in excess of 2,000,000 more square miles of land. A proportional cartographic distortion also affects the comparative depiCtions of Africa and Europe. Thus, the literal "picture" of Africa in relation to the rest of the world that schoolchildren have been taught for centuries is in fact an outright fraud.

A parallel ethnocentrism.;_this time historical, however, not geographic-traditionally has distorted conventional European and American views of the native American past. While texts on the subject routinely acknowledge the high civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas (although the more sordid aspects of their religious rituals never fail to dominate discussion), the rest of North and South and Central America prior to the arrival of Europeans generally is seen as a barbaric wasteland.

Outside the perimeters of the Aztec and Inca empires, in that portion of the Americas lying sourh of the Rio Grande, most accounts tend to imply that there was nothing deserving of a modern reader's attention. One historian suggests that this myopia only indicates "that the geographical focus of modern scholarship parallels closely the political and economic realities of colonial times" in Meso- and South America, when the Europeans' hunger for gold caused them to focus their interests and concerns disproportionately on central Mexico and Peru.¹⁶ As for the area north of the Rio Grande, the millions of Indians who lived for many centuries in permanently settled agricultural and sometimes urban communities on this vast continent are most often described as "handfuls of indigenous people" who were "scattered" across a "virgin land," "a vast emptiness," or even a "void," to cite the descriptions of some recently published, well-regarded, and symptomatic historical texts. The Indians themselves, according to these accounts, were simply "a part of the landscape" who lived, like other "lurking beasts," in a "trackless wilderness," where they had "no towns or villages" and either lived in "houses of a sort" or simply "roamed" across the land. The cultures of these "redskins" were, at best, "static and passive" (except when they were indulging in their "strange ceremonies" or taking advantage of their "compliant maidens"), though once encountered by Europeans, these living "environmental hazards" showed themselves to be "treacherous" and "belligerent," "savage foes" and "predators," for whom "massacre and torture were [the] rule," who introduced to Europeans the meaning of "total war," and whose threat of "nightly terror ... haunted the fringes of settlement through the whole colonial era."¹⁷

This hostile attitude of stubbornly determined ignorance, it should be noted, is not confined to textbook writers. Recently, three highly praised books of scholarship on early American history by eminent Harvard historians Oscar Handlin and Bernard Bailyn have referred to thoroughly populated and agriculturally cultivated Indian territories as "empty space," "wilderness," "vast chaos," "unopened lands," and the ubiquitous "virgin land" that blissfully was awaiting European "exploitation." Bailyn, for his part, also refers to forced labor and slavery at the hands of the invading British as "population recruitment," while Handlin makes more references to the Indians' "quickly developed taste for firewater" than to any other single attribute.¹⁸ And Handlin and Bailyn are typical, having been trained by the likes of the distinguished Samuel Eliot Morison who, a decade and a half earlier, had dismissed the indigenous peoples of the Americas as mere "pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of hope for any future." (Earlier in his career Morison referred to Indians as "Stone Age savages," comparing their resistance to genocide with "the many instances today of backward peoples getting enlarged notions of nationalism and turning ferociously on Europeans who have attempted to civilize them.")¹⁹

It should come as no surprise to learn that professional eminence is no bar against articulated racist absurdities such as this, but if one example were chosen to stand for all the rest, perhaps the award would go to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, who wrote at the start of his book The Rise of Christian Europe of "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe," who are nothing less than people without history. "Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach," he conceded, "but at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history."²⁰

The Eurocentric racial contempt for the indigenous peoples of North and South America, as well as Africa, that is reflected in scholarly writings of this sort is now so complete and second nature to most Americans that it has passed into popular lore and common knowledge of the "every schoolboy knows" variety. No intent to distort the truth is any longer necessary. All that is required, once the model is established, is the recitation of rote learning as it passes from one uncritical generation to the next.

As Mazrui points out with regard to the cartographic distortions that uniformly minimize Africa as a physical presence in the world, the historical distortions that systematically reduce in demographic and cultural and moral significance the native peoples of the Americas are part of a very old and enduring political design. They constitute what the historian of South Africa, Leonard Thompson, calls a "political mythology." In Thompson's words, a political myth is "a tale told about the past to legitimize or discredit a regime," whereas a political mythology is "a cluster of such myths that reinforce one another and jointly constitute the historical element in the ideology of the regime or its rival."²¹ The occasion for these observations by Thompson was his book analyzing South Africa's system of apartheid. Two of the basic building blocks of this particular political mythology are the fabricated notions, embedded in Afrikaner imperialist history, that the blacks of South Africa-apart from being barbaric, socalled Hottentot brutes-were themselves fairly recent arrivals in the southern part of the continent, and that they were relatively few in number when the first European colonizers arrived.²² Thus, in the Afrikaners' mythical version of the South African past, European settlers moved into a land that was largely empty, except for a small number of newly arrived savages who in time succumbed to progress and-thanks to the material comforts provided by the modern world, compared with the dark barbarism of their African ancestors-ultimately wound up benefiting from their own conquest.

One of the functions of this particular type of historical myth was described some years ago by the historian Francis Jennings. In addition to the fact that large and ancient populations commonly are associated with civilization and small populations with savagery, Jennings noted that, in cases where an invading population has done great damage to an existing native culture or cultures, small subsequent population estimates regarding the pre-conquest size of the indigenous population nicely serve "to smother retroactive moral scruples" that otherwise might surface.²³ Writing a few years after Jennings, Robert F. Berkhofer made much the same point regarding manufactured historical views of native barbarism: "the image of the savage," he stated flatly, serves "to rationalize European conquest."²⁴

Jennings and Berkhofer could well have been writing about South Africa and its morally rationalizing post-conquest historians, but they were not; they were writing about America and its morally rationalizing postconquest chroniclers. For the political mythology that long has served to justify the South African practice of apartheid finds a very dose parallel in America's political mythology regarding the history of the Western Hemisphere's indigenous peoples. Indeed, this same form of official mendacity commonly underpins the falsified histories, written by the conquerors, of colonial and post-colonial societies throughout the world.

Employing what Edward W. Said has called "the moral epistemology of imperialism," the approved histories of such societies-the United States, Israel, South Africa, and Australia among them-commonly commence with what Said refers to as a "blotting out of knowledge" of the indigenous people. Adds another observer, native peoples in most general histories are treated in the same way that the fauna and flora of the region are: "consigned to the category of miscellaneous information. . . . they inhabit the realm of the 'etc.' "²⁵ Once the natives have thus been banished from collective memory, at least as people of numerical and cultural consequence, the settler group's moral and intellectual right to conquest is claimed to be established without question. As Frantz Fanon once put it: "The colonialist . . . reaches the point of no longer being able to imagine a time occur ring without him. His irruption into the history of the colonized people is deified, transformed into absolute necessity."²⁶ Then, as Said has cogently observed, the settler group adorns itself with the mantle of the victim: the European homeland of the colonists--or the metropolitan European power that politically controls the settlement area-is portrayed as the oppressor, while the European settlers depict themselves as valiant seekers of justice and freedom, struggling to gain their deserved independence on the land that they "discovered" or that is theirs by holy right.

In such post-independence national celebrations of self, it is essential that the dispossessed native people not openly be acknowledged, lest they become embarrassingly unwelcome trespassers whose legacy of past and ongoing persecution by the celebrants might spoil the festivities' moral tone. This particular celebration, however, has gone on long enough. Before turning to an examination of the European invasion of the Americas, then, and the monumental Indian population collapse directly brought on by that genocidal siege, it is necessary that we survey, however briefly, some of the cultures of the Americas, and the people who created them, in the millennia that preceded the European conquest.