Attitudes Towards Native History

Apalachee Falcon Dancer. Drawn from a from a copper plate found at Lake Jackson site (close to ancient Anhayca), northern Florida, A.D. 1100-1500, by Theodore Morris.
>From "Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun", by Charles Hudson, Page 125

The ruins of great civilizations lie strewn haphazardly throughout the United States, Canada and northern Mexico. Their history is barely remembered today. For many reasons, these remains have often been ignored and callously destroyed. The descendants of Europeans have had little interest in the history of the people they conquered. Today, few people have a casual or passing knowledge that these civilizations even existed, or how accomplished native North Americans were. There are many reasons for this

The devastation of the native civilizations in some areas was almost complete. After the Europeans had finished massacring and obliterating, there was often little left. So few native populations survived that they themselves later had only dim memories of who had built these great centres or what had passed before the native holocaust. Some lost all record of their own history.

Oral histories of this period are usually vague and unclear. In many cases, the native peoples encountered by the later British and Americans had no idea who had built these cities and could barely reconstruct their own past.

Many people don't see native history as a priority for research. It's not "our" history, it's not "settler" history, it's not "european" history. It's simply not the history of modern European-settler states. Avoiding this history is understandable, as the history of the majority is what most people want to hear. They want to know about their own ancestors, and if their ancestors did deplorable things, they don't want to remember them.

Frequently, when native history is examined, it's in the context of native contact with Europeans. Again, it's only seen as relevant when it has something to say about the early European invaders of the Americas. This is common in most Western and European views of world history. Most books which denote themselves as "world histories" or survey works are utterly consumed with Europe, ignoring the majority of the world's people and even other recorded histories in areas with a long tradition of urban life, cultural innovation and social insight.

There are limited funds for research and investigation into the past, and it's natural to prioritize academic and cultural work. Archaeology is the preserve of societies that can afford to spend extra resources. When these are spent, it usually has to be in an immediately justifiable way.

As valid as this attitude may seem, however, there's more than a bit of social ideology involved.

There are many reasons this history is not commonly taught or known. One of these is ideological.

Spanish records of pillage and conquest existed for most of the Americas, from Peru to Mexico to the southern U.S.A. The French kept detailed reports of their early explorers. The colonial English settlers were prolific writers, and documented many native states and their own worst atrocities. Despite these records, and the stories of the locals, native civilizations were almost forgotten by the time the Dutch, French and English arrived on the scene.

Because of prejudice, arrogance and myth-making, European colonists couldn't believe that "savages" and "non-Christians" could develop the skills needed to build a civilization or complex societies. Europeans constructed elaborate fantasies about the archaeological remains, despite the total lack of evidence for their ideas.

The process was repeated around the world by foreign conquerors and invaders. A good example is found in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, which was renamed "Rhodesia" by pompous and arrogant British Empire adventurer / conqueror Cecil Rhodes. There, the white-minority rulers refused to believe that the ancestors of the local black population, the Shona, had built the city of Great Zimbabwe in the 12th-14th centuries. Officially, they maintained that the "white Queen of Sheba" descended on the area in the remote past and subjugated local Africans. Europeans badly mistreated the site, and even prevented the truth from getting out once an archaeologist showed up the white rulers for the racist idiots they were. It wasn't until Zimbabwe won its freedom that the truth became widely known.

The Europeans in North America, notably the English and Americans, concocted elaborate hypotheses about who built the ruined cities. They speculated about wandering "white" people from the Mediterranean, Phoenicians, Romans and even Hebrews(!). Of course, it's possible that there was some limited contact over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but evidence shows that the local cultures, crops and societies were entirely indigenous, and had a long and complex local history.

This ideological process reached its height in 1830-1860, when it (probably) even gave birth to a new American religion, the Mormon Church, the Church Of Latter-Day Saints. This is a newer version of the Christian story in which the reborn Jesus was meant to have led a tribe of Israelites to North America, who naturally fought with the local "savages". The modern Indians, of course, were descendants of the "Barbarians". This helped justify anti-Indian attitudes and the right of Christians, Mormons and other Europeans to take Indian land and mistreat or ignore local populations.

For most people, a sense of pride and self relies heavily on a strong feeling of ancestral achievement, glory or even cultural superiority. Many cultures have patterns like these, from Europe and China to India and the Middle East. Ethnic, religious and cultural tribalism is all-too-common.

The ancestors of the English and French, and especially the later Americans and colonial British, took land from the Indians. They justified this by treating the Indians like savages. No-one wants to believe that their ancestors, their culture's revered heroes, their own history and their society could be brutal, savage and monstrous, whether or not it's the truth. We all want to believe that we are and represent a moral force for good. Reality is sacrificed to ideology, so that people can maintain a disney-ified false pride.

The fact that the North American natives were highly "civilized" disturbs many people today, because it attacks their sense of national legitimacy and cultural superiority, and shows that their concepts of their own peoples' histories are blatant and shameless lies. It rightly reduces respect for their European ancestors. It attacks institutionalized class systems and modern social hierarchies, which have native or non-European peoples on the bottom and "White European"-descendants on the top.

This is common to all countries in the Americas, from "white"-ruled Peru, Brazil and Mexico to the U.S. and Canada.

If there were civilizations where we built our modern nations, how could our ancestors so casually destroy them and reduce them to their current state? How can we continue to badly mistreat surviving native people? To avoid asking any difficult questions, we need to believe propaganda. This "common history" propaganda says that the native populations were primitive and uncivilized, and thus unworthy of thought or mention.

A common way of rationalizing nasty policies towards others involves dehumanizing the victim, considering them somehow "unworthy" or "animal-like", so that a person can attempt to justify past actions or present policies.

Consciously or subconsciously, on a wider social level, denying Native history helps make modern native people seem "less than fully human", or implies that the Europeans were justified in taking native land. Once we've rationalized this, we don't need to consider the obligations we have to modern native populations or the "memory of the dead". We white-wash our own history, scour the treachery and nastiness away, and imagine our own people's past to be nothing but wonder and glory. At the very least, we don't want to be reminded that Native people still exist, that our societies forced them into poverty and despair, and that our own sense of history is warped and distorted.

We de-emphasize all aspects of native culture that indicate achievement. We under-value native history and deny what we can't arrogantly dismiss. Despite its inaccuracy, the image of feathered, wild, "animal-like" warriors howling in the woods remains firmly entrenched in the public consciousness.