This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land
A challange to the conventional notion that the European conquest of America and its natives was peaceful and justifiable.
By Ivan Cash - February, 2008
The European domination of America and the subsequent Western influence on the land dates back to 1492 when Christopher Columbus inadvertently ‘discovered America.’ The European colonists’ lust to acquire an excess of wealth led them to commit an unfathomable number of atrocities on the Native Americans, despite their [the natives’] unprecedented generosity and endless hospitality (Zinn, 2003, p.17).
As historian Howard Zinn (2003) implies in his book, A People’s History of the United States, the Europeans likely justified their actions by reasoning that it was natural human progression for them, the ‘furthered culture’, to defeat the inferior Indians (p. 17). In their naivety, the average modern American is not apt to seeing it any differently. From the once uncontested Native Americans who lived harmoniously to the determined European settlers whose destruction was costly, the American transition to European dominance is now a widely celebrated historical event in the United States. The American observance of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving—two national holidays that give appreciation for the arrival and prosperity of Europeans in America—is indicative of portraying this sentiment.
I’d like to present a counter-argument to the notion that the annihilation of the seemingly inferior Indians can be excused by natural human progression where a superior civilization conquers a less-advanced culture. I believe the Native Americans, namely the Iroquois, to have been a far more advanced culture than the primitive-minded, ethnocentric Europeans, and I implore my fellow Americans to reexamine the history of their nation’s land.
The first European interaction with the natives was at the shores of the Bahama Islands when they encountered the Arawaks, who were accurate representations of Indians on the mainland (Zinn, 2003, p. 1). The natives were very welcoming and friendly, running to greet the foreign sailors, offering them food, water and gifts (Zinn, 2003, p. 1).
In reciprocation, the Europeans, focused on their mission to acquire gold and slaves, advantageously oppressed the natives to no end. A first hand account from Barolomé de Las Casas, a priest who, alongside Columbus, participated in the conquest of Cuba, describes the “irreparable” crimes against the Indians to be so ‘foreign to human nature’ that his hands trembled as he wrote about them (Zinn, 2003, p. 7). These offenses included cutting Natives’ hands off until they bled to death, separating husband and wife for nine or so months at a time (they were so exhausted and depressed that they ceased to procreate), and bearing responsibility for 7,000 child deaths due to overworked and famished mothers who had no milk to nurse them (Zinn, 2003, p. 4-7). As an increasing number of Europeans came to America, bloodshed and genocides on the natives increased. The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus and company first encountered the land would ultimately be reduced to less than a million (Zinn, 2003, p. 16).
One of the most powerful Indian nations in the Northeast was the Iroquois, thousands of people from different tribes, drawn together by a common language. Describing the Iroquois strength, Legendary Mohawk chief Hiawatha elaborates, “We bind ourselves together by taking hold of each other’s hands so firmly and forming 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” (Zinn, 2003, p. 19). In synchrony with this mentality, the Iroquois lived a community-driven lifestyle where everyone followed the golden rule of “treat others as you would like to be treated.”
Members of the Iroquois villages enjoyed equal land distribution and shared houses. They also did hunting and catching together, dividing the earnings up among the villagers. As a French Jesuit priest who came across the Iroquois in the 1650s explained, “No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers… Their kindness, humanity, and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common” (Zinn, 2003, p. 20).
Women had an extensive amount of power in the Iroquois society, families being matrilineal (Zinn, 2003, p. 20). As renowned historian Gary Nash describes, “Power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society” (Zinn, 2003, p. 20).
All of this is in stark contrast to the European colonists of the time where the poor were ever-present, the inequality of land and wealth distribution vast, and the political power of women, along with other disadvantaged members of society, marginal at best. Anthropologist Wilcomb Washburn describes Virginia in 1676 as having “genuine distress, genuine poverty … All contemporary sources speak of the great mass of people as living in severe economic straights” (Zinn, 2003, p. 40). So prevalent was the lower class, that, in the early 1770s, a newspaper editor wrote about the growing Number of Beggars and Wandering Poor” in the streets of New York (Zinn, 2003, p. 40). A letter to the paper sheds additional light on the tremendous poverty issue: “How often have our Streets been covered with Thousands of Barrels of Flour for trade, while our near Neighbors can hardly procure enough to make a Dumplin to satisfy hunger” (Zinn, 2003, p. 60)? In addition to the large number of poor, the division of land was so uneven that, by 1770, the top one percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth (Zinn, 2003, p. 49).
Even the Declaration of Independence had vast political disparities between the privileged and the disadvantaged. “Some Americans were clearly omitted from the circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence,” Zinn (2003) writes: “Indians, blacks slaves, women” (p. 49). Early historian Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: “The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement.” She goes on to explain that, “the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to the husband” (Zinn, 2003, p. 106-107).
In addition to these cultural and societal differences, the Iroquois also possessed a unique set of ideological beliefs, values, and traditions. Having “no laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of European societies,” Nash explains that the Iroquois still “maintained a strict sense of right and wrong … He who stole another’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself” (Zinn, 2003, p. 21).
In harmony with their appreciation of the natural, free-flow of things, and their weariness of excessive amounts of structure, materialism, and confinement, the Iroquois’ value of independence and equality is emphasized in the way their children were raised. Iroquois children were taught the importance of the cultural heritage of their people and tribe, as well as shown not to submit to overbearing authority (Zinn, 2003, p. 20). Moreover, members of Iroquois society did not use harsh punishment against children and instead allowed them to learn things, such as early toilet training, on their own (Zinn, 2003, p. 20).
Many early colonists, as do many modern Americans of today, overlooked the complexity and brilliance of the Native Americans’, particularly the Iroquois’, culture: One where humans and nature lived in harmony, where the value of compassion and autonomy were ever-present, and where egalitarianism and communal living were synonymous with the way of life. Zinn affirms that this progressive lifestyle was in severe contrast to the early European colonists’ values of “a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families” (Zinn, 2003, p. 20).
The Native Americans, the people who lived on this Western land long before any Europeans, were as advanced a society as any. While their technological and economic achievements may be viewed as rudimentary in comparison with the superfluous, excessive, and greed-filled lifestyle of the early colonists and modern day Americans, the Native Americans’ sociological, philosophical, and ecological outlooks were of unsurpassed excellence and progression. As American scholar, John Collier who lived among a tribe of Southwest Indians in the 1920s and 1930s, incisively observes; If we “could … make [the Native American spirit] our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace” (Zinn, 2003, p. 21-22).
Sources
Zinn, Howard. (2003). A People's History of the United States. New York: HarpersCollins.