Our
current president has a habit of insulting Native America, not only
by calling Senator Warren “Pocahontas,” but by installing a
portrait of Andrew Jackson, architect of Indian Removal and of
genocide, in the Oval Office in the place of honor before bringing in
Native Code Talkers to honor them for their contribution to the war
effort in World War II. The worst, however, is when he says,
“our
ancestors tamed a continent,” and “we
are not going to apologize for America,” referring
to the destruction of millions of Native lives.
“Our
ancestors tamed a continent,” of
course, refers to the idea of the North American continent as
an empty wilderness, devoid of human life, a place ripe for the
taking. Of
course, our current president is not famous for his intelligence or
his knowledge, but this concept of the “Virgin Soil” has had
plenty of play among academics, as well.
This
kind of misguided and, in some cases, deliberately dishonest,
information is why I always caution my students in workshops and
classes I teach on writing about other cultures to regard the works
of outside academics as questionable and to give greater weight to
first-person narratives from people within that culture or diaries,
letters, writings, such as poetry or fiction, from people within that
culture. The paragraph below is in every talk I give on this subject
and every lesson in any online class that I teach and speaks directly
to that issue.
“As
a part of this second danger, one thing you must remember about doing
research on other cultures in books, libraries, on the internet, is
that much of it is wrong, accidentally or willfully. Accidentally,
because journalists, anthropologists, other scholars, and explorers
may have misinterpreted what they saw or heard or because—and this
was common—their informants deliberately misinformed them to
protect their people or to protect their own source of whatever the
white man was providing them. Consequently, even primary sources from
past times can be contaminated if they are “as told to” or are
translated. Willfully, because a lot of that research was done by
people, usually white men, who had an agenda that placed wealthy
white male Europeans at the pinnacle of creation and everyone and
everything else downhill from that, which led to eugenics and a lot
of other horrid, stupid things. So there's your second caveat: You
can do your research and still get it wrong in some way.”
This
idea that there was no Native genocide because disease alone killed
all the Indigenous peoples on the continent, leaving it conveniently
vacant for Europeans is a race-based “intuitive” theory from the
1970s that has been refuted since the end of the 20thcentury
by scholars actually working with primary documents and other
evidence. The “virgin soil thesis,” based on the belief that
Natives’ lack of immunities and their inept healers were
responsible for their downfall, was propounded by Alfred Crosby in
1976. This theory was quite popular for a time early in the last half
of the 20th
century
because it placed all the responsibility for the massive death counts
among Indigenous peoples after European arrival on the Indigenous
people themselves because they were genetically weak, lacking in
acquired immunity, and lacking in competent medical care, rather than
on the violence waged against them by Europeans from the very
beginning of contact and continuing into the early 20th
century.
As
David S. Jones points out in “Virgin Soils Revisited” in The
William and Mary Quarterly(October
2003), “Perhaps the idea that Indian depopulation can be explained
by the Indians' lack of immunity took hold because it served an
ideological purpose. White physicians in South Africa, for instance,
used virgin soil theory to explain the prevalence of tuberculosis
among African mine workers. … theories of immunological determinism
can still assuage Euroamerican guilt over American Indian
depopulation, whether in the conscious motives of historians or in
the semiconscious desires of their readers. … the epidemics among
American Indians, despite their unusual severity, were caused by the
same forces of poverty, social stress, and environmental
vulnerability that cause epidemics in all other times and places.”
David
Stannard argued in American
Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New
York, 1992) that "by focusing almost entirely on disease, by
displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of
invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the
impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people
was inadvertent."
Paul
Kelton, author of Cherokee
Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight Against
Smallpox, 1518-1824 (University
of Oklahoma Press, 2015) and "Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits:
Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival,"
Ethnohistory, 50 (Fall 2003), is yet another of the many scholars who
have gone to actual primary documents and other evidence to examine
this thesis as it pertained to the Cherokee Nation and found that
many epidemics were not as severe as had been claimed or assumed and
that the Cherokee healers and spiritual beliefs were as effective as
the primitive medicines of the Europeans in dealing with smallpox. He
also discusses the part that the overwhelming violence—the bitter
wars that decimated population, the actions of the white settler
armies in destroying towns, homes, farms, and stored harvests in an
attempt to starve the Cherokee, the forced surrender of huge swathes
of territory necessary for a hunting-gathering existence—played in
rendering the surviving remnant of Cherokees susceptible to smallpox
and other illnesses.
As
far as the idea that the Europeans thought the continents were empty,
there is such abundance of evidence of the contrary that the idea
that academics would put that forth as fact in university classrooms
and scholarly publications is ludicrous. The history of the United
States is filled with statesmen lamenting the fact that American
Indians own the land they want and with their plans and chicanery to
force them to sell or give it or to just force them off the land.
That relentless push westward that came to be called Manifest Destiny
in the 1840s continued from the first landings of Europeans on the
Atlantic Seaboard through the war with Tecumseh, the Indian Removal
Act and many Trails of Tears (killing tens of thousands—one would
think that alone would qualify for designation as ethnic cleansing or
genocide), to the Indian Wars of the 19th
century,
while in California, the Spanish mission system devastated the Native
population, and when the Americans took over, they offered official
government bounties on Indian heads. Not exactly the acts of people
who thought the continent was vacant.
As
far as various academics’ statements that the destruction of the
native population could not be genocide because it was not
“deliberate or on purpose,” I offer a tiny sampling of the
quotations from speeches, letters, newspaper articles, and other
documents to be easily found in a search through American history.
The researcher will easily find many, many more quotations from
Franklin, Jefferson, Monroe, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln, and many
other Founding Fathers and presidents, as well as governors and other
civic leaders, all speaking of the need to wipe out the Indigenous
population of the continent.
“The
only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” – General Phil Sheridan
“Damn
any man who sympathizes with Indians. I have come to kill Indians,
and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under god’s
heaven to kill Indians! Scalps are what we are after… I long to be
wading in gore!” – Rev. John M. Chivington, co-founder of the
University of Denver and leader of the Sand Creek Massacre
"Civilization
or death to all American savages." – Major James Norris
“Discovery
gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy,
either by purchase or by conquest.” – Chief Justice John Marshall
“The
immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of
their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age
and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the
ground and prevent their planting more.” – General George
Washington, orders to troops, 1779 [Those captured prisoners of every
age and sex were then sold as slaves to the West Indies.]
This erasure of the destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is a pervasive problem in this country. Witness the proponents of the virgin soil thesis of the past century, who were the modern versions of the Puritans rejoicing, after one massacre, that they hadn’t had to commit another due to disease and starvation, thanks to the mighty hand of God. The history of this country is a history of broken treaties with Indian nations, a history of massacres and forced removals that killed many thousands, a history of continuous greed for the land and other possessions of the Indigenous people and violence and wars to obtain what was so desired. The history of this country is a history of theft and slavery, a history of prisoner of war camps called reservations (that Hitler studied and used as models for his concentration camps—he admired the efficiency of the U.S. genocide of its Native population and emulated it in his own Final Solution), a history of official bounties on Indian heads, skins, and scalps. The history of this country is a history of kidnapping children and imprisoning them in boarding “schools,” rife with physical and emotional abuse—“Kill the Indian to save the man!”—a history of forced sterilization and medical experimentation without consent. If you look at it openly, it adds up to something that can hardly be called anything but ethnic cleansing and genocide.
So,
of course, as a country, we don’t look at it openly—and when
someone forces us to face it, we cry, “Not true! Get over it!
Victim studies! PC,” anything we can to make the awful truth go
away and be buried once again. Still, it happened, and the results of
it remain with us, especially embedded in Native communities and
lives. American popular culture is still in the grip of Manifest
Destiny and “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” with the
enshrinement of the Hollywood Western as one of our great art forms.
I would hope for better from academia, however, where the truth is
supposed to have value above belief in American exceptionalism, but I
am often disappointed.
This
situation is a perfect example of why we need ethnic studies
classes—and why they should be part of the required core of classes
and not electives that only a few students will take. Our citizens
need to know our history, to know what we’ve done as a country, to
know how we got here today, to know the truth and not the
photoshopped Hollywood version of who we really are. Without that
knowledge, we will continue to make the same mistakes, doomed to
repeat the past we choose not to know.
