Excerpts from American Genocide
by
David Stannard
Before Columbus
Combined,
North America and South America cover an area of 16,000,000 square
miles, more than a quarter of the land surface of the globe. To its
first human inhabitants, tens of thousands of years ago, this enormous
domain they had discovered was literally a world unto itself: a world of
miles-high mountains and vast fertile prairies, of desert shrublands and
dense tropical rain forests, of frigid arctic tundra and hot murky
swamps, of deep and fecund river valleys, of sparkling water lakes, of
canopied woodlands, of savannahs and steppes-and thousands upon
thousands of miles of magnificent ocean coast. There were places where
it almost never rained, and places where it virtually never stopped;
there were places where the temperature reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit,
and places where it dropped to 80 degrees below zero. But in all these
places, under all these conditions, eventually some native people made
their homes.
By the
time ancient Greece was falling under the control of Rome, in North
America the Adena Culture already had been flourishing for a thousand
years. As many as 500 Adena living sites have been uncovered by modern
archaeologists. Centered in present-day Ohio, they radiate out as far as
Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West
Virginia. We will never know how many hundreds more such sites are
buried beneath the modern cities and suburbs of the northeastern United
States, but we do know that these early sedentary peoples lived in towns
with houses that were circular in design and that ranged from
single-family dwellings as small as twenty feet in diameter to
multi-family units up to eighty feet across. These residences commonly
were built in close proximity to large public enclosures of 300 feet and
more in diameter that modern archaeologists have come to refer to as
"sacred circles" because of their presumed use for religious ceremonial
purposes. The buildings they constructed for the living, however, were
minuscule compared with the receptacles they built for their dead:
massive tombs, such as that at Grave Creek in West Virginia, that spread
out hundreds of feet across and reached seven stories in height-and that
were commonplace structures throughout Adena territory as early as 500
B.C..
In
addition to the subsistence support of hunting and fishing, and
gathering the natural fruit and vegetable bounty growing all around
them, the ancient Adena people imported gourds and squash from Mexico
and cultivated them along with early strains of maize, tubers,
sunflowers, and other plant domesticates. Another import from the
south-from South America-was tobacco, which they smoked through pipes in
rituals of celebration and remembrance. From neighboring residents of
the area that we now know as the Carolinas they imported sheets of mica,
while from Lake Superior and beyond to the north they acquired copper,
which they hammered and cut and worked into bracelets and rings and
other bodily adornments.
Overlapping chronologically with the Adena was the Hopewell Culture that
grew in time to cover an area stretching in one direction from the
northern Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, in the other direction from
Kansas to New York. The Hopewell people, who as a group were
physiologically as well culturally distinguishable from the Adena, lived
in permanent communities based on intensive horticulture, communities
marked by enormous earthen monuments, similar to those of the Adena,
that the citizenry built as religious shrines and to house the remains
of their dead. Literally tens of thousands of these towering earthen
mounds once covered the American landscape from the Great Plains to the
eastern woodlands, many of them precise, geometrically shaped, massive
structures of a thousand feet in diameter and several stories high;
others-such as the famous quarter-mile long coiled snake at Serpent
Mound, Ohio-were imaginatively designed symbolic temples.
No
society that had not achieved a large population and an exceptionally
high level of political and social refinement, as well as a
sophisticated control of resources, could possibly have had the time or
inclination or talent to design and construct such edifices. In
addition, the Hopewell people had trade networks extending to Florida in
one direction and Wyoming and North Dakota in the other, through which
they acquired from different nations of indigenous peoples the copper,
gold, silver, crystal, quartz, shell, bone, obsidian, pearl, and other
raw materials that their artisans worked into elaborately embossed and
decorative metal foil, carved jewelry, earrings, pendants, charms,
breastplates, and other objets d'art, as well as axes, adzes, awls, and
more. Indeed, so extensive were the Hopewell trading relationships with
other societies throughout the continent that archaeologists have
recovered from the centers of Hopewell culture in Ohio more materials
originating from outside than from within the region.
To the
west of the Hopewell there emerged in time the innumerable villages of
the seemingly endless plains-large, usually permanent communities of
substantial, multi-family homes and common buildings, the villages
themselves often fortified with stockades and dry, surrounding moats.
These were the progenitors of the people-the Mandan, the Cree, the
Blood, the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Piegan, the Hidatsa, the Arikara,
the Cheyenne, the Omaha, the Pawnee, the Arapaho, the Kansa, the Iowa,
the Osage, the Kiowa, the Wichita, the Commanche, the Plains Cree,
various separate nations of Sioux, and others, including the Ute and
Shoshoni to the west-who became the classic nomads on horseback that
often serve as the popular American model for all Indian societies. But
even they did not resort to that pattern of life until they were driven
to it by invading armies of displaced Europeans.
***
p49
Arawak is
the general, post-Columbian name given to various peoples who made a
long, slow series of migrations from the coast of Venezuela to Trinidad,
then across open ocean perhaps first to Tobago, then Grenada, and on up
the chain of islands that constitute the Antilles-St. Vincent, Barbados,
St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua,
Barbuda, St. Kitts, Anguilla, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Puerto
Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba-then finally off to the Bahamas, leaving
behind at each stop populations that grew and flourished and evolved
culturally in their own distinctive ways. To use a comparison once made
by Irving Rouse, the people of these islands who came to be known as
Arawaks are analogous to those, in another part of the world, who came
to be known as English: "The present inhabitants of southern Great
Britain call themselves 'English,' and recognize that their ethnic
group, the English people, is the product of a series of migrations from
the continent of Europe into the British Isles, beginning with various
prehistoric peoples and continuing with the Celts, Angles, Saxons,
Vikings, and Normans of protohistoric time."
Similarly, Arawak (sometimes "Taino," but that is a misnomer, as it
properly applies only to a particular social and cultural group) is the
name now given to the melange of peoples who, over the course of many
centuries, carried out those migrations across the Caribbean, probably
terminating with the Saladoid people sometime around two thousand years
ago. By the time of their encounter with Columbus and his crews, the
islands had come to be governed by chiefs or caciques (there were at
least five paramount chiefdoms on Hispaniola alone, and others
throughout the region) and the people lived in numerous densely
populated villages both ,' inland and along all the coasts. The houses
in most of these villages were similar to those described by the Spanish
priest Bartolome de Las Casas:
The
inhabitants of this island . . . and elsewhere built their houses of
wood and thatch in the form of a bell. These were very high and roomy so
that in each there might be ten or more households.... On the inside
designs and symbols and patterns like paintings were fashioned by using
wood and bark that had been dyed black along with other wood peeled so
as to stay white, thus appearing as though made of some other attractive
painted stuff. Others they adorned with very white stripped reeds that
are a kind of thin and delicate cane. Of these they made graceful
figures and designs that gave the interior of the houses the appearance
of having been painted. On the outside the houses were covered with a
fine and sweet-smelling grass.
These
large buildings conventionally were arranged to face the great house
that was inhabited by the local cacique, and all of them in turn faced
an open field or court where dances and ball games and other festivities
and ceremonies were held. In larger communities, several such fields
were placed at strategic locations among the residential compounds.
The
people of these climate-blessed islands supported themselves with a
highly developed level of agriculture-especially on Cuba and Hispaniola,
which are among the largest islands on earth; Cuba, after all, is larger
than South Korea (which today contains more than 42,000,000 people) and
Hispaniola is nearly twice the size of Switzerland. In the infrequent
areas where agricultural engineering was necessary, the people of the
Indies created irrigation systems that were equal in sophistication to
those existing in sixteenth-century Spain. Their staple food was cassava
bread, made from the manioc plant yuca, which they cultivated in great
abundance. But also, through so many long generations in the same benign
tropical environment, the Arawaks had devised an array of unique methods
for more than satisfying their subsistence needs-such as the following
technique which they used to catch green sea turtles weighing hundreds
of pounds, large fish, and other marine life, including manatees:
Noting
that the remora or suckerfish, Echeneis naucrates, attached itself to
the body of a shark or other larger fish by means of a suction disc in
its head, the Arawaks caught, fed, and tamed the remora, training it to
tolerate a light cord fastened to its tail and gill frame. When a turtle
was sighted the remora was released. Immediately it swam to the turtle,
attaching its suction disc to the under side of the carapace. The canoe
followed the turtle, the Arawak angler holding a firm line on the remora
which, in turn, held tightly to its quarry until the turtle could be
gaffed or tied to the canoe.
In
addition to this technique, smaller fish were harvested by the use of
plant derivatives that stupefied them, allowing the natives simply to
scoop up large numbers as though gathering plants in a field. Water
birds were taken by floating on the water's surface large calabashes
which concealed swimmers who would seize individual birds, one at a
time, without disturbing the larger flock. And large aquaculture ponds
were created and walled in to maintain and actually cultivate enormous
stocks of fish and turtles for human consumption. A single one of these
numerous reed marine corrals held as many as 1000 large sea turtles.
This yielded a quantity of meat equal to that of 100 head of cattle, and
a supply that was rapidly replenished: a fertile female turtle would lay
about 500 eggs each season. Still, the Arawaks were careful not to
disturb the natural balance of these and other creatures; the evidence
for this is that for millennia they sustained in perpetuity their
long-term supply of such natural foodstuffs. It was only after the
coming of the Spanish-and, in particular, their release of dogs and pigs
that turned feral and ran wild-that the wildlife ecology of the islands
found itself in serious trouble.
In sum,
as Caribbean expert Carl Sauer once put it, "the tropical idyll of the
accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true" regarding the
Arawak. "The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings,
were dextrous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They
designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic
expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball
games, dances, and music. They lived in peace and amity."
***
p54
AII 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, this
world has ever seen.
reprinted from the Third World Traveler
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