I'm reading yet another wonderful book, American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor, and I wanted to share a passage that might shake up your ideas about "ancient tribes." After describing the grim consequences of the Spaniards' delusion that there had to be more rich cities laden with gold and silver somewhere north of Mexico, including the devastation of Mississippian culture caused by Hernando De Soto's 1539-43 expedition, Taylor says:
The demographic and cultural disaster profoundly disrupted the geography of power in the Mississippi watershed. At the time of Soto's expedition, the densely settled villages of the powerful chiefdoms occupied the fertile valleys. Poorer and weaker peoples dwelled in small, scattered villages in the less fertile hills, where they lacked the means to sustain a centralized chiefdom. After Soto's invasion and epidemics, the hill peoples became comparatively powerful as the valley chiefdoms collapsed. Indeed, the dispersed hill peoples suffered less severely from the microbes that fed most destructively on the human concentrations in the lowland towns. And the upland peoples absorbed refugees fleeing from the valleys to escape the epidemics.In the depopulated valleys, forests and wildlife gradually reclaimed the abandoned maize and bean fields, while the refugees farmed the less fertile but safer hills. The resurgent wildlife included bison, common in the southeast by 1700 but never sighted by Soto's conquistadores 160 years before. Far from timeless, the southeastern forest of the eighteenth century was wrought by the destructive power of a sixteenth-century European expedition. Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization.
By 1700, the paramount chiefdoms encountered by Soto had collapsed, with one exception: the Natchez people dwelling along the lower Mississippi River. Elsewhere, the paramount chiefdoms gave way to loose new confederations of smaller and more autonomous villages. The new chiefs possessed little coercive power; their people built them no pyramids; and their graves contained no human sacrifices. Eighteenth-century colonists called the principal confederacies the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee.The more history I study, the more I realize how fluid, permeable, and ever-changing are the human groupings we have been taught to think of as fixed and ancient. Once again: there is no such thing as purity. Posted by languagehat at August 1, 2005 05:49 PMThe new confederations exemplified the widespread process of colonial "ethnogenesis"—the emergence of new ethnic groups and identities from the consolidation of many peoples disrupted by the invasion of European peoples, animals, and microbes. Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian "tribes" were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.
It sounds like Alan Taylor's scholarship and history are right for the most part. However, one thing historians frequently ignore is that the American Indians were not a united people and that they frequently fought and wared with each other. Despite his transgressions against some Indian tribes, Hernando DeSoto found convenient allies in the Cherokees of Tennessee and North Carolina who were traditional enemies of the Creeks of Georgia and Alabama. The Cherokees continued to have a loose alliance with the Spanish until the arrival of the English in the Carolinas in the 1660's, after which the Spanish retreated into a defensive shell in Florida where they would remain until 1819 when Andrew Jackson expelled the last of them.
Posted by: Brian at August 1, 2005 06:23 PMTaylor doesn't at all ignore that. For instance, in the section I've just been reading, he says of the Pueblos: "Not even the speakers of a common language shared a political union. Instead, the Pueblo divided into at least sixty autonomous villages that were often at violent odds with one another. They began, however, to find a new commonality in their common treatment by the Spanish invaders during the winter of 1540-41."
I'm afraid we humans have a hard time getting along with each other unless there's a common enemy.
Posted by: language hat at August 1, 2005 06:50 PMAn excellent summary of the effects of contact from both ecological and cultural angles. Sounds like a book I should read. Thanks.
Posted by: Dave at August 1, 2005 08:48 PMLanguage Hat,
Thanks for your response to my last post. It really needs a little editing but I simply didn't have the time on a library computer that gives you just 60 short minutes.
If I may go on a little more...
Re: "They began, however, to find a new commonality in their common treatment by the Spanish invaders during the winter of 1540-41."
This is probably true. The Spanish after all, actually enslaved them and put them on a miserable corn diet which by itself is not good since corn promotes tooth decay and too much of it depletes the body of certain nutrients, especially iron.
Whether a common enemy unites a people, however, is a mute point. History provides us with examples of situations where it does and doesn't. For example, The Arab-Israeli conflict has certainly created a lot of unity within the ranks of the Jews and a substantial degree of unity within the ranks of the Arabs. Normally, Jews and Arabs both tend to fight not only between themselves but amongst themselves too. On the other hand, neither the threat of Romans nor the Germanic peoples caused the Celts of Western Europe to unite and most of their territory was later conquered by Romans, Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a result. Likewise, during the war of 1812, some Indian tribes rallied around Tecumseh and took the British side while others sided with the Americans. During this time, Andrew Jackson deftly played the Cherokees off against the Creeks and the Shawnees. Later, the U.S. Army played the Sioux and the Crow off against each other in a simalar manner.
Oh, sure. Having a common enemy certainly doesn't guarantee unity, it's just helpful.
Posted by: language hat at August 2, 2005 08:26 AMA few years back, the Atlantic Monthly published an interesting article called "1491" discussing some of the controversies surrounding scholarship of the pre-European Americas. Among the concepts discussed in the article are the idea that the Amazon rainforest may be a manmade, or at least managed, artifact, a sort of garden. Evidence comes from some genetic analysis of leaf-molds and the satellite obsevation of certain geometric regularities in floodplains. Another subject mentioned was the amazing, swarming populations of bison and passenger pigeons that the eighteenth and nineteenth century had. Such concentrations of species are indicative not of a pristine wilderness, but of an imbalanced ecosystem. The theory mentioned in the article was that the collapse of the lowland Mississippean civilizations opened land and opportunity for the bison, who suddenly lacked a top-predator in sufficient numbers to keep their population in check, and the collapse of farming meant a return to forest for wide swathes of the southeast, all of which came into peak hardwood forestland at about the same time, a few hundred years later. Since passenger pigeons were nut-eaters, their populations boomed and the stage was set for the massacre.
Posted by: Nick at August 3, 2005 01:53 AMThis is the start of the 1491 article here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200203/mann
Unfortunately need a subscription :(
Posted by: bathrobe at August 3, 2005 03:08 AMAnd the whole article is here :)
http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=143
Posted by: bathrobe at August 3, 2005 03:10 AMThanks! Here's the direct link; it's "1491" by Charles C. Mann.
Posted by: language hat at August 3, 2005 08:04 AMAnd here's a version that's easier on the eye.
Posted by: language hat at August 3, 2005 08:54 AMI just stumbled onto this site through google and noticed ALan Taylor's name. I had him for a class at UCD and he is a great professor, save his chronic leftist rants e wasted my time with in class.
Posted by: ScummyD at August 25, 2005 01:17 PM