The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over scientists’ slanderous portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which Pilgrims and Native Americans enjoyed a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash, and corn. This episode seemed to support the view, often attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful, “noble savages.”
Prominent scientists now mock depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. “Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage,” psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, pre-state societies “were far more violent than our own.” According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes “got it right” when he called pre-state life a “war of all against all.”
Pinker expanded on this claim in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Hobbesian thesis has been advanced in other influential books, notably War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley. Referring specifically to the pre-Colombian New World, Keeley asserted, “The dogs of war were seldom on a leash.”
Popular culture has amplified these scientific claims. In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull complains to a U.S. Army colonel about whites’ violent treatment of the Indians. The colonel retorts, “You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent.”
Yes, Native Americans waged war before Europeans showed up. But as I show in my book The End of War, Pinker and other Hobbesians have exaggerated warfare among early humans. In two momentous early encounters, Native Americans greeted Europeans with kindness. Here is how Christopher Columbus described the Arawak, tribal people living in the Bahamas when he landed there in 1492:
“They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
How that passage — which I found in historian Howard Zinn’s 1980 classic A People’s History of the United States — captures the whole sordid history of colonialism! Columbus was as good as his word. Within decades, the Spaniards had slaughtered almost all the Arawaks and other natives of the New Indies and enslaved the few survivors. “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide,” wrote historian Samuel Morison (who admired Columbus).
A similar pattern unfolded in New England in the early 17th century. After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day feast with the Wampanoag. The event my classmates and I reenacted in grade school really happened!
The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases caught from previous European explorers. Europeans had also killed, kidnapped, and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, had even stolen grain and other goods from the Wampanoag.
The good vibes of that 1621 feast soon dissipated. As more English settlers arrived in New England, they seized more and more land from the Wampanoag and other tribes, who eventually resisted with violence — in vain. We all know how this story ended. “The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million,” Zinn wrote.
The Arawak and Wampanoag were kind to us — and by “us” I mean whites of European descent. We showed our thanks by sickening, subjugating, and slaughtering them and other indigenous people. And we have the gall to call them more savage than us. Please ponder this dark irony as you celebrate Thanksgiving.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one he wrote for his Scientific American bog, “Cross-check.”
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