As we study American history, “first contact,” and
the tectonic engagement of two widely disparate cultures, it seems pertinent to
ask: how many European colonists actually came face-to-face with a Native
American, and vice versa?
My reading suggests that this
wholesale reduction of Native American populations is typically noted, and the
range of impacts is listed. It is acknowledged that diseases repeatedly
eliminated whole families, destroyed kin networks, silenced whole villages,
felled elders and chiefs and matriarchs, killed healers and others with special
skills, and, most destructive of all, blanked out generational memories of
tribal/clan traditions and stories that kept cultural and spiritual values
alive. However, there is little reflection on how the philosophies and the
world views, and the public and private aspirations, and the nightmares of the
few survivors were affected. James Merrell suggests that 60,000 Catawbas were
reduced, in merely 100 years, to a remnant population of only 500 in 1759. [1] Death by disease is not, inter alia, simply a
circumstance of history if it kills nearly everyone who lived within the span
of memory of the few survivors.
The magnitude of Native
American populations, both before and after diseases took their toll, is a
frame of reference in colonial history that I believe should receive more
attention. Contemporary students have only limited awareness of the eventual
minimal population numbers and sparse population densities of Native Americans
throughout North America. For example, the celebrated and powerful Iroquois
Confederacy in colonial New York had an estimated combined population of less than 22,000 when Europeans made first
contact; an unrelenting decline of almost 80% reduced their numbers to only
about 4,700 in mid-18th century. [2] In 1775 the largely British
inhabitants of the New York colony outnumbered the Haudenosaunee about 8-to-1.
[3] Analyses of alliances and the balance of power among Iroquois and Europeans
do not typically make reference to these population data; such omission is a
detriment to full understanding of military, political, commercial and social
dynamics in the colonial era.
Population densities were quite
low in colonial times. At the beginning of the 16th century, it's
estimated that Northern New England Native American populations had a density
of only 41 persons per 100 square miles; for comparison, an equivalent
population in modern Massachusetts would be only about 4,328 people—in fact,
Massachusetts today has 6.6 million residents. The English population in all of
New England after 100 years of colonial settlement was only 93,000. [4] That’s
just about the same as the current population of Brockton, MA. One wonders if
any Native Americans and colonials seriously considering avoiding all contact
with each other. It might have been relatively easy to do so for quite a long
time.
I suggest that we too easily
think of Native Americans and colonial Europeans as an undifferentiated mass
that can be understood by characterizing groups. However, the fact of short
life spans in the 16th and 17th and 18th
centuries means that we should work hard at probing the evolving intentions and
experiences of the relatively rapid succession of individuals who lived their
lives and contributed in greater or lesser degrees to the making of "new worlds"
on the North American continent. Average life expectancy of Europeans in the
American Colonial era may have been under 30 years.[5] We can estimate that
eight generations of Native Americans and Europeans lived during the period
from initial settlement to the Revolutionary War. Manifestly, the Native
Americans who dealt with the British after the close of the Seven Years' War (1763)
were not similar to their own ancestors in the early 1600s. They had lived
through many successive "new worlds." I think it's an error, for
example, to blandly refer to the history, diplomacy and social/cultural
dynamics of the Iroquois or the Catawbas without explicitly acknowledging that
heterogeneous generations of them played their distinctly different roles in
transforming their environment and their ways of life. In some traditional
views, the European colonists were uniformly courageous, adventuresome, and
hardy pioneers intent on creating the American dream. In fact, many of the
European colonists were desperate escapees from Europe; their intentions were
less exalted.
I think this is a fascinating
question: from initial European settlement through the early years of the
American republic, how many Native Americans were personally face-to-face with
an Englishman or a Frenchman or a Spaniard, and vice versa? How many Europeans
ever saw more than a few Native Americans during their lifetimes, and vice
versa? Of course there was extensive trading and ultimately commerce, and there
was some intermarriage, and social mixing, military alliances and armed
conflict that brought some Native Americans and Europeans together. "New worlds"
emerged because people came together, shared ways of survival and experienced
mutual, social transformations. Nevertheless, I wonder if the multiple,
transformative interactions were at the periphery of the lives of many or most of
the individuals who lived during the transformations, but may not have felt
much of the kiss, or the sting, of change.
Sources:
1
- James H. Merrell, "The Indians' New World: The Catawba Experience,"
The William and Mary Quarterly, Third
Series 41, no. 4 (October 1984): XX.
2
- Dean Snow, The Iroquois (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), XX.
3 - The Papers of Sir William Johnson, Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York State, vol.
6, 993.
4
- William Cronon, Changes In The Land:
Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang,
a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), XX.
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-wisdom-of-lewis-grizzard.html
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-wisdom-of-cherokees-part-32.html
No comments:
Post a Comment