Following the War of 1812, the young United States had no further need for Indian allies against the British, and as a result the fortunes of the Indians declined rapidly. By 1848, twelve new states had been carved out of the Indian's lands, two major and minor Indian wars had been fought, and group after group of Indians had been herded westward, on forced marches, across the Mississippi River.
...the intensity of the indignation was in direct proportion to a White's distance from the Indian. On the frontier, the Indian was regarded as a besotted savage; but along the eastern seaboard, where the Spaniards, Dutch, English, and later Americans had long since exterminated all the Indians, philosophers and divines began to defend the Red Man.
About 1790 the Cherokee decided to adopt the ways of their White conquerors and... established churches, mills, schools, and well cultivated farms... they adopted a written constitution providing for an executive, a bicameral legislature, a supreme court, and a code of laws.
...they were set off on a thousand mile march—called to this day "the trail of tears" by the Cherokee—that was one of the notable death marches in history.
The Whites were in full control ... remnants were shifted about again and again... All of which led Sioux chief Spotted Tail, grown old and wise, to ask the weary question: "Why does not the Great Father put his red children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?"
No sooner did the first Whites arrive in North America than a disproportionate number of them showed that they preferred Indian society to their own. ...Throughout American history, thousands of Whites exchanged breeches for breechcloths.
Why did transculturalization seem to operate only in one direction? Whites who had lived for a time with Indians almost never wanted to leave. But almost none of the "civilized" Indians who had been given the opportunity to savor White society chose to become a part of it. ...Nor does this problem relate solely to the American Indian. Some of the first missionaries sent to the South Seas from London, in the eighteenth century, threw away their collars and married native women.
One of the things that amazed the earliest explorers, almost without exception, was the hospitality with which Indians received them. When the Indians later learned that the Whites posed a threat, their attitude changed, but the initial contacts were idyllic. ...Hospitality and sharing were characteristic of all Indian societies.
Why did not Indians enter White society, particularly in view of the numerous attempts by Whites to "civilize" them? The answer is that White settlers possessed no traditions and institutions comparable to the Indians' hospitality and sharing, adoption, and complete social integration. ...Whites who educated Indians did so with the idea that the Indians would return to their own people as missionaries to spread the gospel, not that they might become functioning parts of White society.
Voluntary assimilation, known as Indianization in the Americas, is one response that has occurred at other places and in other times when two cultures collided. An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered. That does not happen very often, but it did occur when the Hyksos conquered Egypt about 1700 B.C. and when the Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B.C.
When today's remnants of Indian societies are examined closely, it is seen how well some have worked out a compromise with their White conquerors—acculturation without assimilation.
By the time the United States took possession of the Southwest in 1848, after the Mexican War, the Navajo had become the dominant military force in the area. ...The American soldiers who marched into Santa Fe had no trouble with the Mexicans, but the Navajo stole several head of cattle from the herd of the commanding general himself, not to mention thousands of sheep and horses from settlers in the vicinity.
Inspired by the teachings of Smohalla, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé in Idaho rebelled in 1877. Before he was trapped only thirty miles short of refuge in Canada, he had consistently outwitted and outfought a superior United States Army... although he forbade his warriors to scalp or to torture, the Whites massacred his women and children.
The movement known as the Ghost Dance first appeared around 1870... soon after the Union Pacific Railroad completed its first transcontinental run. ...that event inspired the vision of the prophet Wodziwob, who declared that a big train was coming to bring back dead ancestors... a cataclysm would swallow up all the whites and leave behind their goods for his followers.
Every Messianic movement known to history has arisen in a society that has been subjected to severe stress of contact with an alien culture—involving military defeat, epidemic, and acculturation
Invariably the prophet emerges from his hallucinatory vision bearing a message from the supernatural that makes certain promises: the return of the bison herds, a happy hunting ground, or peace on earth and good will to men. Whatever the specific promises, the prophet offers a new power, a revitalization of the whole society.
The Indians have not only refused to vanish, but have... managed to salvage a part of their native culture through revitalization and messianic movements. ...they are of further interest to anthropologists for the light they shed on such movements in general.
As this cultural inadequacy becomes apparent even to the most conservative of its members, the culture may deteriorate to such an extent that it literally dies.
All routinized religions today (including the Native American Church, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) are successful descendents of what originated as messianic movements—that is, the vision of a new way of life for a culture under extreme stress.
A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America.
Today's American bemoans the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the threatened extinction of the whooping crane and the ivory billed woodpecker; he contributes to conservation organizations that seek to preserve the Hawaiian goose, the sea otter of the Aleutian Islands, the lizard of the Galapágos Islands... But who ever shed a tear over the loss of the native American cultures?
Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians—but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendents of those who made them. Modern man is prompt to prevent cruelty to animals, and sometimes even to humans, but no counterpart of the Humane Society or the Sierra Club exists to prevent cruelty to entire cultures.
Perhaps we, who for so long regarded ourselves as bringers of light to the shadowy recesses of North America, will finally admit that there is much about which the Indians can illuminate us.
To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them.
Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations. ...the habitual liar faces social sanctions ...Speakers are not allowed to misrepresent... to defame other people in public, to maliciously shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, or to utter obscenities on the telephone.
Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.
For tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years, people regarded language as a holy instrument that let them look out upon the world... Only in the last few decades have people suspected that their window on the world has a glass that gives a distorted view.
Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.
Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.
The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.
Wilhelm von Humboldt... stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."
About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought.
A human being cannot survive alone and be entirely human. It is through the nature of their social and political institutions that the differences and similarities among cultures are to be accounted for.
The members of a society do not make conscious choices in arriving at a particular way of life. Rather, they make unconscious adaptations. ...they know only that a particular choice works, even though it may appear bizarre to an outsider.
Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.
The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. ...what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.
An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...
An incestuous marriage establishes no new bonds between unrelated groups; it is an absurd denial to the right to increase the number of people whom one can trust. Marriages in simple societies are... usually alliances between families rather than romantic arrangements between individuals.
Complex civilization is hectic... such hunters and collectors of wild food as the Shoshone are among the most leisured people on earth.
The more simple the society, the more leisured its way of life.
The Shoshone did not wage war, because it served no purpose.
In the far north, where humans must face the constant threat of starvation, where life is reduced to the bare essentials—it turns out that one of these essentials is art. Art seems to belong to the basic pattern of life of the Eskimo, and of the neighboring Athapaskan and Algonkian Indian bands as well.
The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.
Balanced reciprocity is as much a social compact as it is an economic advantage. It is particularly important in hunting-gathering societies, where no individual could possibly accumulate a surplus, live independently of other members of the band, or become so successful in the quest for food as never to need meat from someone else's kill.
Sharing is a kinsman's or a friend's obligation, and it is not in the category of a gift.
The debate as to where "magic" ends and "religion" begins is an old one, and it appeared to have been settled some decades ago when scholars concluded that no discernible boundary was to be found. As a result, the two were often lumped together in the adjective "magico-religious"...
The League [of the Hodenosaunee] favorably impressed the White settlers, and some historians believe it to have been one of the models on which the Constitution of the new United States of America was based.
We are in the habit of thinking in terms of great leaders largely because the leaders themselves want it that way. The pharaohs ordered that a record of their accomplishments be carved on stone; medieval nobles subsidized troubadours to sing their praises; today's world leaders have large staffs of public-relations consultants. No culture can be explained in terms of one or more leaders...
To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.
For a tribe to endure, it must find some way to achieve internal unity—and that way usually is external strife. The tribe exists at all times in a state of mobilization for war against its neighbors. The slightest incident, or often merely a desire to increase prestige, is enough to set off a skirmish, and in such circumstances hatred against external enemies must be unremitting.
At the time of the Europeans discovery of North America, the American Indians already cultivated a wider variety of plants than did the Europeans.
Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations suddenly soared, cities were founded, and many trappings of civilization made their appearance. ...The food-production revolution turns out to be a slow evolution, a long period of experimentation rather than a sudden explosion.
Numerous sophisticated inventions undoubtedly originated in the New World. They include many aspects of plant domestication and horticulture, the hammock, the tobacco pipe, an intricate system used for ventilating and cooling ceremonial chambers, the enema, the hollow rubber ball, the toboggan, and numerous other objects and ideas that were brought back to the Old World after Columbus.
The culture of the Anasazi is still the best known of all prehistoric southwestern cultures. ...Their architecture... is distinctly their own, and unique among all the southwestern cultures.
The most imposing characteristic of the Mississipian is the pyramidal mound, built not to cover a burial but as a foundation for a temple or a chief's house.
Only a few years after the permanent settlement of Virginia, some fifty missionaries arrived to begin the massive task of converting the heathen. The Indians on their part, did not respond with alacrity to the idea of adopting a culture that to them, in many cases, seemed barbarous, indeed.
The Puritans failed miserably in their dealings with the Indians of New England, with scarcely a glimmer of kindness to illuminate black page after black page of cruelty and humiliation. ...conversion of the heathen was not one of the compelling motives—or justifications—for the Puritan settling of New England...