American history, in the minds of many, started just 500 years ago, when Columbus "discovered" the New World. Shunning electricity, 3,000 Pueblo Indians live today in Acoma atop a mesa in the high New Mexico desert. The town's adobe apartments have been inhabited since the 12th century, through droughts, Apache raids and a brutal occupation in which the enslaving Spaniards chopped off one foot of each adult male. Acomans are reluctant to promote the fact that their settlement is nearly twice as old as St. Augustine, Florida., the Spanish-settled city that is generally considered the nation's oldest community. The people of Acoma figure they have had enough visitors.
On Interstate 70, across the Mississippi from present-day St. Louis, there was once a town that boasted a trade network that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Dakotas and probably had as many residents as did London at that time. Its 15-acre ceremonial mound is 2 acres bigger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. But modern textbooks barely take notice. Those who found thousands of abandoned mounds in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys refused to believe they had been built by Indians. ''The natural indolence of the Indian and his averseness to any kind of manual labor are well known,'' wrote author William Pidgeon in 1858. Other 19th-century writers speculated that the mound builders were stray Vikings, Phoenicians or a lost tribe of Israel, obviously an intelligent people who were annihilated by Indian savages. Settlers liked that theory, because it seemed to justify the treatment they inflicted on the Indians on the frontier.
For years the Native Americans lived and died throughout the vast, rich continent of North America. The burgenoning United States balanced brute military force with one economic transaction after another, on one hand slaughtering entire tribes, on the other "buying" enormous tracts of land for exploitation. Tribe after tribe were massacred or driven off their ancestral homelands and were forced onto reservations. With control over nearly all Native American land, leaving only small plots for "reservations", the Native American way of life was destroyed and the clear choice became: be assimilated into "modern" life, or rot in "irrelevance" on the reservation.
371 treaties were made by the US government with Native Americans. The United States govenment violated 370 of those treaties, to date. Millions of Native Americans have been killed by the US (and Canadian) government. Entire villages were wiped out by diseases such as measles, smallpox, cholera and pneumonia to which the Indians had no inbuilt immunity. Others, forced to leave their traditional hunting and farming lands found it difficult to re-establish themselves elsewhere and suffered malnutrition and death. Within two centuries, Old World diseases killed probably two thirds (a conservative estimate) of the New World's natives, and America did indeed seem empty. Four years before the Mayflower landed, disease killed tens of thousands of Indians on the New England coast, including the inhabitants of a village where Plymouth would stand. John Winthrop, admiring the abandoned cornfields, saw the epidemic as divine providence. ''God,'' he said, ''hath hereby cleared our title to this place.''
Tribes escaped the white man’s expansion and moved west, pushing whatever band was in their way. The Chippewas pushed the Sioux out of the woods of Minnesota into the Dakotas. The Sioux pushed the Cheyenne into Nebraska. The Cheyenne pushed the Kiowas into Oklahoma. Yet not every Indian fled. The Comanches, with horses descended from Columbus's stock, thwarted Spain's colonial designs on Texas with frequent raids on Spanish outposts. Apaches did the same thing in Arizona and New Mexico. Parts of Pennsylvania and New York today might be part of Quebec had the Iroquois submitted to the French.
Many who didn't move perished. A generation after their gifts of corn saved England's
toehold settlement at Jamestown, the Powhatan Indians were systematically wiped out,
their crops and villages torched by settlers who wanted more land to grow tobacco. Florida's Timucuas -- of whom it was said ''it would be good if among Christians there was
as little greed to torment men's minds and hearts'' -- vanished in the early 19th century,
victims of epidemics and conflicts with the Spanish, English and Creeks. Natchez's Great
Sun wound up with his feet on the ground, enslaved in the West Indies by the French,
who eradicated his tribe. California's Chumash shrank from 70,000 to 15,000 toiling for
the friars. Soon after the Gold Rush, the tribe, like most in California, ceased to exist. The
four-century clash of cultures made 2 of every 3 tribes as extinct as the Carolina parakeet.
The late Pete Seeger observed that “The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.” Some were. Some weren’t. Marx and Engels used the research of Lewis Henry Morgan in their study of how social systems and societes can be defined in stages.
Most of the hundreds of languages the Indians spoke were as different from one another
as Farsi is from French. Some Indians loved war. Others hated it. After every reluctant
fight, Arizona's Pimas subjected their warriors to a 16-day cure for insanity. Some tribes
banned women from their councils. Others were ruled by female chiefs, like Georgia's
''Lady of Cofitachequi,'' who greeted Hernando DeSoto with pearls from the Savannah
River. (He ungraciously kidnapped her.) Puppies were a gourmet's delight in some huts.
Elsewhere, Indians would rather die than eat dog meat. Premarital sex was unthinkable
among the Cheyenne. But Mississippi's Natchez tribe encouraged teenagers to have
flings while they could. Once a Natchez girl wed, an extramarital affair could cost her her
hair or even an ear.
With torches and stone hatchets, the Nootkas and Haidas of the Pacific Northwest toppled giant redwoods and turned them into whaling canoes. In the eastern forests, Indians slashed and burned to clear the way for cornfields fertilized by the ashes and to create meadows for grazing deer and elk. Every autumn, Indians burned huge chunks of woodland to clear away underbrush. The sprouts that poked each spring through the charred ground boosted populations of game animals, which the Indians could easily spot in the open forests. The trees that survived flourished, too. Sycamores in Ohio grew seven feet in diameter, and the white pines of New England towered 200 to 250 feet
The white man's Bible taught that it is better to give than to receive, and the Indians couldn't agree more. Long after the Arawaks showered Columbus with birds, cloth and 'trifles too tedious to describe,'' natives were offering Europeans virtually anything they had, from fish and turkeys to persimmon bread and the companionship of a chief's daughter. Colonists interpreted the Indians' generosity as evidence they were childlike. That they had no desire to accumulate wealth was seen as a symptom of laziness. The Indians, concluded one New Englander, must develop a love of property. ''Wherever this can be established, Indians may be civilized; wherever it cannot, they will still remain Indians.'' The Indians felt quite civilized with what they did own, often things a Puritan wouldn't appreciate. Colorado's Pueblos kept parrots that came from Mexico. The Cayuse of
Eastern Oregon swapped buffalo robes for the shells of coastal Indians. The Ottawas, whose name meant ''to trade,'' traveled the Great Lakes exchanging cornmeal, herbs, furs and tobacco. The Chinooks of the Northwest even developed their own trade jargon. Their word hootchenoo, for homemade liquor, eventually became the slang word ''hooch.''
Indians were religious. They saw order in nature and obeyed elaborate sets of rules for fear of disturbing it. Land was to be shared, not owned, because it was sacred and belonged to everyone, like the air and sea. Animals also were precious. A hunter risked stirring the spirits if he killed two deer when one was all his tribe needed. Europe's view of nature, though rooted in religion, was much different. Man should subdue the Earth, Genesis dictated, ''and have dominion ... over every living thing.''
Rituals surrounded each important Indian event. To prove their courage, the Arikara of
North Dakota danced barefoot on hot coals and, with bare hands, retrieved and devoured
hunks of meat from pots of boiling water. Timucuan leaders started council meetings in
Florida with a round of emetics brewed from holly leaves. The Hurons of the Great Lakes
carried smoldering coals in their mouths to invoke a spirit to cure the sick. But often the
rituals were painless. From New York to New Mexico, tradition allowed a woman to end
her marriage by putting her husband's belongings outside their door -- a sign for him to
live with his mother.
Three centuries before the U.S. Constitution took shape, the Iroquois League ran a
Congress-like council, exercised the veto, protected freedom of speech and let women
choose officeholders. The New Yorkers ran a classless society, as did many tribes across
America. But ancient caste systems also endured. The Great Sun of the Natchez, a
mound dweller like Cahokia's Great Sun, used his feet to push his leftovers to his noble
subordinates. The nobles were not about to complain; below them was a class known as
''Stinkards.'' Besides, the chief's feet were clean. He was carried everywhere, a French
guest reported, and his toes never touched ground.
Long before the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act transformed tribal government, before nepotism and retaliation became plagues upon reservation life, there were nacas. Headsmen, the Lakota and Dakota called them. Men designated from their tiospayes, or extended families, to represent their clans when they came together for larger tribal matters, such as where to hunt that year. Their meetings could last for days, said Richard Iron Cloud, who teaches Lakota leadership at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge reservation. But then reaching consensus was a given to their way of life.
“This wasn’t a system where majority rules,” Iron Cloud said. “Wherever majority rules, there will be three or four people who walk away really upset or mad because things didn’t go the way they wanted. But the nacas met until they came to a resolution that everyone could live with.”
It was different in the old days, when grandfathers ruled over their extended families, said Victor Douville, acting chairman of the Lakota Studies program at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud reservation. Each spring, eight to 10 families would gather to form a band, make plans for the hunt or a war party, then put forth leaders to help govern them, Douville said. It was common back then for the chosen leaders, the nacas, to rely on elderly women within their tiospayes for guidance, said Valerian Three Irons, a retired educator who spent 15 years at South Dakota State University as a diversity officer and teacher of Native Studies. “That’s even true today,” Three Irons said. “The elder female would often be the one the family came to for advice. Often the young man who was the representative really was a mouthpiece for the elderly woman who held the power.”
It’s a different world today, tribal observers attest. When the federal reorganization act in 1934 instilled the white man’s model of rule to the reservations, traditional governance disappeared. In time, what they found was that millions of dollars flowing into Indian Country because of treaty obligations turned leaders into despots — even criminals — in places where poverty makes every job a lifeline. Today, poverty and social breakdown on the reservations have changed everything.
As a result, “tribal government gets to do what it wants,” Douville said. In the days of Brulé Lakota tribal chief Spotted Tail 150 years ago, leaders were effective because they took care of their families but understood their obligation to the bands and tribes as well, Douville said.“There was a really fine line where you walked,” he said. “Spotted Tail mastered that technique by keeping control of the non-relatives but helping them out, too. Other leaders, Red Cloud, were able to control nepotism. Now, nepotism spreads pretty largely throughout many reservation systems. It’s rampant in all of them.”
Of course, malfeasance occurs at every level of government, tribal leaders are quick to point out. But they aren’t blind to how pronounced favoritism appears in the isolated microcosms that are the reservations. In these poorest pockets of America, it isn’t unusual for jobs, housing and justice to be gained or lost depending on who rises to power as tribal president or council member.
“What the IRA did was centralize the power base and impose a real hard system of bureaucracy,” said Victor Douville. “Under the IRA model, the tribal government has absolute power to do what it wants. You get injustices; one side takes sides over another. And as it is in places like Rosebud, the nepotism runs wild.”
Iron Cloud said the Iroquois Confederacy still operates with a traditional form of government. The women in that system, called clan mothers, are heavily involved in the placement and removal of leaders, he said. You still have to deal with technology and fast-paced business and economic development, Iron Cloud said.“But then have this other part,” he said, “where the culture needs to be valued also. Creating a mechanism that can satisfy both of those, I think that’s out there. We just need to sit down and create it.”
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