Most people are ignorant of or mistaken about the history of North America and can be easily swayed by misleading scholarship. Ignorant or myth-driven individuals use anti-Indian terms like “savage” or “bloodthirsty” to describe American Indians/Native Americans at the time of European settlement.
Four Arrows, part Cherokee, is one among many who indict the genre of anti-Indianism, which he says is rampant in academic scholarship and popular (trade) books (see list below). You’d think we’d insist on the truth about the history of this continent and the United States. But, no. Apparently, major publishers and scholars still purvey myths about indigenous peoples generally and Native Americans in particular.
In his recent essay, The Continuing Saga of Anti-Indianism in America, Four Arrows points out that authors may not be consciously trying to “prove” how Indian cultures are inferior to the European cultures that took over the Americas but they tend to just assume superiority (one of the dangerous attitudes that often leads to destruction of whatever is deemed inferior).
In the essay, Four Arrows mentions books that presume that the savagery of indigenous societies was rightly replaced with the culture of the Europeans who invaded their places:
- The Invented Indian
- Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Edgerton
- Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization
- Robert Whelan’s Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Peaceful Eco-Savage (1999)
- Shepard Krech’s, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History
- Steven A. Lablank’s Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage
- Steven Pinker’s text, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
- The Heart of Everything That Is by Drury and Clavin (2014 book)
Note: If you look these up, pay attention to the low-star reviews by indigenous people and scholars.
Four Arrows points out the misdirection of attention and interpretation:
- “by applauding the Indian’s warrior traits while also picturing them as dirty, blood-thirsty, women-dominating savages, they show that this part of human nature, i.e. being war-oriented, proves that it is a good thing modern civilization took over.”
- Four Arrows points out that “the deeply held values of the Indians … would have shown how the violence was a forced diversion from their most cherished ways of being in the world, ways that caused many European invaders in the early days of conquest to desert in order to live with the Indians.”
- “What is missing from the Red Cloud story [Drury & Clavin] through and through is a sense of worldview differences between the Euro-Americans and the Indians”.
Here are some recent alternative books to read to get a more accurate understanding:
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that should Haunt America
Note: Although this book describes what in other contexts is considered genocide, the author argues that it represents “only” ethnic cleansing. But see: The Strange Case of Genocide Denied.
It’s time we seek to understand the different worldviews that indigenous people (and most cultures of the world) hold from the Euro-centric perspectives that dominate USA and Western cultures. Here are books that informed me about what really happened in the European conquest of the Americas:
Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness by Frederick Turner
The Conquest of Paradise by Kirkpatrick Sale
American Holocaust by David Stannard
The following books opened my eyes to the clashing worldviews between Western and indigenous perspectives:
Original Wisdom by Robert Wolff
In the Spirit by Calvin Luther Martin
The Way of the Human Being by Calvin Luther Martin
There is also a variety of comparisons between worldviews and how they development and their consequences in my book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom.
References