In which we sense the presence of an absence
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| Chickasaw Warrior |
Yes, Ethan. But it's more like the Mars of the
1600s. And one particular, and fairly remote northern corner of Mars. And today
we're going to spend a little time with some actual Martians.
—Martians. How nice. Are they little green men?
Well, no, Emily. They're red men. And women.
And they're relatively tall.
—Oh I get it. We're talking about the Indians.
—And a gold star for Kylie.
—Make that a red star.
Yesterday we surveyed the ambitious, the desperate,
the committed, and the coerced people who journeyed to the Americas. But there
is one other set of people we need to consider here, and that is those who
already were here. They too were a varied lot, who had been
loving, killing, and otherwise dealing with each other for many centuries. The
arrival of the Euros was something new under the sun, and, indeed, some of the
natives resorted to astrological mythology to explain it.
Generally speaking, the arrival of these
outsiders was a catastrophe whose scope defies human imagination. A big part of
the reason were the microbes that Europeans brought with them: susceptible to
diseases they had never been exposed to before, the natives died in numbers
that are so shockingly large that they’re impossible to comprehend. The Tainos
who greeted Columbus, and who jousted with their rivals, the Caribs, in a
cluster of islands around Cuba, were virtually wiped out within a generation.
One wonders if a nuclear war would—will?—be as deadly as the
holocaust that was visited upon the native inhabitants once the Spanish
arrived.
But this story is not one of pure destruction.
For one thing, mortality rates from the epidemics brought by Europeans were not
uniform. Those living in the mountains of Central America enjoyed relative
insulation, as did many peoples of the North American interior. The natives had
their own array of ambitious, desperate, committed and coerced people, and the
introduction of a new element in the politics of their world meant there were
new alliances to be made, old enemies to be vanquished, and goods (if guns and
whiskey can be described in such terms) to be traded. In North America,
powerful organizations like the Iroquois Confederacy, centered in what is now
upstate New York, formed in response to European settlement and held their own,
playing French and British colonists against each other while maintaining
longtime feuds with Huron peoples to the west. If there were fatalists among
them, there were also rising leaders who saw, and exploited, opportunities
arising from a European presence. Yes, in the long run, they were defeated,
displaced, and (partially) absorbed. But it was a long run,
and for those peoples in the beyond the seaboard or closer to the Pacific
one—Shawnees, Shasta, Sioux and Shoshone—it was even longer.
Back in the days of early American History, by
which I mean the days in which histories of America began to be written down in
books, Native American peoples were often portrayed as treacherous and warlike,
whether because the threat they represented was raw and immediate—it’s hard to
be fair-minded about people who scare the hell out of you—or because it felt
necessary to justify their conquest. Other times, they were portrayed as
tragic, noble doomed savages (they could afford to be seen that way because
their doom was regarded as inevitable).
I sometimes see a Native American
warrior—let's call him an Chickasaw, in what is now the Carolinas,
around 1700, feeling literally or figuratively besieged but able to plausibly
picture the prospect of better days. That man’s wife or mother, with little
patience for men’s games, frets that in his daydreaming he’s neglecting the
family that needs him.
No, no. Let's make it this: The warrior's
mother is impatient that he assert himself, to move beyond picturing things
and actually doing things. Like his late brother. And her own father.
—I don’t understand.
Right.
—No, I mean I don’t get it.
Yes.
—No, I mean I don’t know what you’re talking
about. Who those people were.
That’s correct, Jonah. You don’t.
—He’s imagining them, Jonah.
He’s trying to tell you what it was like.
Correct, Sadie. But of course I don’t know any
better than Jonah does. I’m just guessing.
—What’s the point of that?
A fair question. There are things
I can tell you with a fair amount of confidence. Facts, dates. They’re points
on a map of time. But that map won’t mean anything if you don’t have an idea of
who lives in those temporal villages. You don’t know any of them. But I’m
hoping you’ll see these people as people—people who
were different than us, and also the same. Your ability to do that is a muscle
I’m hoping to strengthen.
Of course all those hopes and plans of our
Native American warrior, circa 1700, are a moot point now—maybe he perished in
battle, or got sick and died before he got the chance, or maybe won some glory
for himself and made a nice life that lasted for decades—but in that moment
he’s still alive and his life is unresolved, just as there are any number of
things in your life are unresolved in this moment.
When we’re lucky we live as if the things we do matter. When even our defeats
can distract us from our irrelevance.
Anyway, this imaginary Ottawa, or Mohawk, or
Catawba—
—I don’t know those names. Were they in the
reading?
No, Yin. Again, I mean for you not to
know them. These identities, once so distinct, are now incomprehensible.
Someday words like “African American,” or “Latino,” or “American” are likely to
be the same, even as surviving strands of DNA from those people, literal and
figurative, courses through the blood of future beings.
—That’s so sad.
—That’s so creepy.
—That’s kinda cool.
Yes. I agree. But here in 1700, where we’ve
time-traveled, these identities that Yin doesn’t know did mean
something. In this moment, that Ottawa or Catawba warrior lives against a
backdrop of vast global struggle that spans oceans and continents that has
intruded into the smallest detail of everyday life. By now England, France and
their various allies have been whacking away at each other in America in seemingly
endless warfare. Despite the fact that it takes weeks, even months, for
information to travel back and forth from Europe to America, his majesty’s
ministers are making plans and issuing orders that sucks our Native friend into
an imperial vortex. A paper is signed in London or Paris and months later an
Indian raid gets launched (they were paid to make it, you see; they needed the
money) that results in raping, scalping, and pillaging. It also results in
prisoners who get adopted by their captors who get converted to new ways of
life and new places to call home.
Home. In the end, that’s what all
this comes down to for most of these people: the longing for a place to call
their own. The words place and own are
relative and figurative. Native Americans, who did not conceptualize land
ownership the way Euros did, nevertheless had territory they considered theirs
collectively—Acadia as Micmac or Abenaki land, for example. But it was
hard, and eventually impossible to maintain.
Home was even harder for the African
immigrants. After their first few decades on North American shores, slaves lost
the possibility some initially had to own property the way white men (and a few
white women) did. Yet it requires no great leap of imagination to believe that
some African immigrants formed attachments to landscapes, buildings and people,
precisely because they knew all too well how fragile and temporary they could
be.
Even those with relative freedom could find
home to be a complicated, even elusive, concept. Young men and women might long
to escape the shadows and oppressions of parents who laid claim to their lives
and labor. Or they might simply feel an inchoate restlessness, an impulse to
wander that could not be suppressed. (Maybe this comes close to what the essence
of what youth actually is: a desire to test and redraw boundaries.) To this
day, Americans are known for their relatively high degree of geographic
mobility, though that has eroded in recent years.
And then there were those who did feel at home
but who knew that those homes rested on shaky foundations. That was Anne
Bradstreet’s problem.
—Who’s she?
Someone I want you to meet tomorrow.
We’re going to spend a few days at the home of a friend of mine. I think
you’ll like her.
