Before Columbus - 2


      III

    Much the same thing that Sauer says about the Arawak can be said for many of the other peoples we have surveyed here, and for countless others we had neither the time nor the space to mention. Certainly not all of them, however. And again, this is what would be expected on any large body of land containing such remarkable geographic and cultural diversity. Some of the native peoples of the Americas did indeed suffer from want, at least from time to time, and some lived hard and difficult lives. Some had little time or talent for great art or architecture, or for elaborate games or music or dance. Others lived in societies that, far from being characterized by peace and amity, frequently were at odds with their neighbors.

    There is no benefit to be gained from efforts to counter the anti-Indian propaganda that dominates our textbooks with pro-Indian propaganda of equally dubious veracity. For the very plain fact is that the many tens of millions of people who lived in the Americas prior to 1492 were human — neither subhuman, nor superhuman — just human. Some of the social practices of selected groups of them we would find abhorrent to our cultural tastes and attitudes at present, in the same way that we would find loathsome certain social practices of earlier European and Asian cultures. Thus, for example, few of us today would countenance the practice of human sacrifice as a way of propitiating an angry god, as was done by a few of the highest urban cultures in Mesoamerica during the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century. However, neither would many of us support the grisly torture and killing of thousands of heretics or the burning of tens of thousands of men and women as witches, in a similar effort to mollify a jealous deity, as was being done in Europe, with theocratic approval, at precisely the same time that the Aztecs were sacrificing enemy warriors.

    Conversely, other social practices of certain native Americans in the pre-Columbian era — from methods of child rearing and codes of friendship and loyalty, to worshiping and caring for the natural environmentappear far more enlightened than do many of the dominant ideas that we ourselves live with today. (Even in the sixteenth century the conquering Spanish wrote "with undisguised admiration" of Aztec childrearing customs, notes historian J.H. Elliott. "Nothing has impressed me more," commented the Jesuit Jose de Acosta, "or seemed to me more worthy of praise and remembrance, than the care and order shown by the Mexicans in the upbringing of their children.")96 If these attitudes and behaviors varied in emphasis from one native group to another, one characteristic of America's indigenous peoples that does seem almost universal, transcending the great diversity of other cultural traits, was an extraordinary capacity for hospitality. We have noted this in our discussion of the Iroquois and the Indians of California, but in fact, the native peoples' affectionate and fearless cordiality in greeting strangers was mentioned by almost all the earliest European explorers, from Vespucci in South America in 1502, where the Indians "swam out to receive us . . . with as much confidence as if we had been friends for years," to Cartier in Canada in 1535, where the Indians "as freely and familiarly came to our boats without any fear, as if we had ever been brought up together."97

    And these were more than ceremonial, more than passing generosities. Indeed, without the assistance of the Indians in everything from donated food supplies to instruction in the ways of hunting and fishing and farming, the earliest European settlements, particularly in North America, could not have taken root. As Edmund S. Morgan has shown, with regard to Roanoke in the 1580s:

      Wingina [the local chief] welcomed the visitors, and the Indians gave freely of their supplies to the English, who had lost most of their own when the Tyger (their ship] grounded. By the time the colonists were settled, it was too late to plant corn, and they seem to have been helpless when it came to living off the land. They did not know the herbs and roots and berries of the country. They could not or would not catch fish in any quantity, because they did not know how to make weirs. And when the Indians showed them, they were slow learners: they were unable even to repair those that the Indians made for them. Nor did they show any disposition for agriculture. Hariot admired the yields that the Indians got in growing maize; but the English, for lack of seed, lack of skill, or lack of will, grew nothing for themselves, even when the new planting season came round again. Superior English technology appeared, for the moment at least, to be no technology at all, as far as food production was concerned.98

    Indeed, Morgan later notes, "the Indians . could have done the English in simply by deserting them."99 They did not desert them, however, and in that act they sealed their fate. The same was true throughout the Americas: the culrural traits and the material achievements of the native people were turned against them once the European invasion began. Indian openness and generosity were met with European stealth and greed. Ritualized Indian warfare, in which few people died in battle, was met with the European belief in devastating holy war. Vast stores of grain and other food supplies that Indian peoples had lain aside became the fuel that drove the Europeans forward. And in that drive they traveled quickly, as they could not otherwise have done, on native trails and roadways from the northeast and northwest coasts to the dizzying heights of the Andes in Peru.

    Some who have written on these matters — such as one historian who recently has shown how the Spanish conquest of Mexico was literally fed by the agricultural abundance that the Aztecs had created-have commented on the irony of native achievement being turned against itself.100 Perhaps the greatest and most tragic irony of all, however, was that the extraordinary good health of the native people throughout the Americas prior to the coming of the Europeans would become a key ingredient in their disastrous undoing. For in their tens of thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the earth's human populations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of disease that had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to the Middle East, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medieval Paris.

    This is not to say that there were no diseases in the pre-Columbian Americas. There were, and people died from them. But the great plagues that arose in the Old World and that brought entire Asian, African, and European societies to their knees — smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and more — never emerged on their own among the Western Hemisphere's native peoples and did not spread to them across the oceans' barriers until 1492. Thus, when smallpox was introduced among Cree Indians in Canada as late as the eighteenth century, one native witnessing the horrifying epidemic that was destroying his people exclaimed that "we had no belief that one man could give it to another, any more than a wounded man could give his wound to another."101 Such devastating contagion was simply unknown in the histories of the Cree or other indigenous peoples of the Americas.

    Debate continues as to the existence or extent of tuberculosis and syphilis among native peoples in the pre-Columbian era, with most recent research suggesting that at least some sort of "tuberculosis-like pathology" was present in some parts of the New World prior to 1492, though of a type not associated with pulmonary disease, as well as a relatively benign nonvenereal (that is, not sexually transmitted) treponemal infection that was related to syphilis.102 However, there is no evidence that either disease (whatever it may have been) was at all widespread in either North or South America. And the most detailed recent studies of large-scale sedentary societies in the Americas--where such diseases would have taken hold if they were to do so anywhere--have found no evidence of either tuberculosis or syphilis (or anything like them) as causing significant damage prior to European contact.103 Similarly, ancient small-scale migratory societies, even in such harsh environments as those of the frigid northwestern plains, produced people who, in the words of the most recent and extensive study of the subject, "appear to have lived very long lives without significant infectious conditions, or even much serious injury."104 Moreover, the limited range of potentially serious diseases that did exist among the Americas' indigenous peoples (primarily gastrointestinal disease and various minor infections) had long since been mitigated by millennia of exposure to them, as well as by generally beneficent living environments and more than adequate nutrition.105

    All that was to change, however, with shocking and deadly suddenness, once those first three Spanish ships bobbed into view on the rim of the Caribbean horizon. For it was then only a matter of months before there would begin the worst series of human disease disasters, combined with the most extensive and most violent programs of human eradication, that this world has ever seen.