In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Ned Blackhawk argues that
”the most traumatic development in American history [is] the loss of indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.”Read Rich’s Post →
Friends texted and emailed me this yesterday to tell me that Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik
Alaskan Native, had won election in her state for the short remainder of a congressional term. She’ll run again for a full term in the fall. Even the short term marks a win for the Democrats, for women, and for Natives. And I will add her name to the celebratory list of Native achievements and achievers that I seem to be assembling—Chuck Sams, head of the National Park Service; Jaime Pinkham at the Defense Department; Shelly Lowe at the National Endowment for the Humanities; Marilynn Malerba, Treasurer of the United States; and Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior.Read Rich’s Post →
Several friends quickly sent me the NYTimes review of a new book on the old subject of human origins in the Americas. The book is ORIGIN: A Genetic History of the Americas, and the author is Jennifer Raff. According to the reviewer, Raff consulted the sciences of “archaeology, genetics, and linguistics” in her book—which I have not read, but have ordered!Read Rich’s Post →
On Monday night, on NPR’s coronavirus question and answer show, a listener asked whether there might be something in African Americans’ unique vulnerability to sickle cell anemia that related to their high rates of infection—and death—with COVID-19. The medical person answering questions thought it an interesting observation that deserved study—she knew of none. The host then turned the conversation immediately to related environmental issues: jobs, neighborhoods, stress, diabetes, etc.Read Rich’s Post →
In my last post I told a story about Native Alaskan firefighters, who had come south to fight fires, getting sick on MRIs (“meals ready to eat”) and being fed suet to right their stomachs. A long-time Alaska firefighter tells me that this is mostly “urban legend,” that she has seen Native crews in Alaska consume MRIs “with gusto.”
Nevertheless, I think most of us Euro-Americans would not do well on a diet of seal and fish. Human digestive systems have adapted to different physical worlds in amazing ways. Yet that means that putting any of us into alien worlds—or bringing alien diets and physical circumstances to us—can cause distress. I don’t know why many South Asians are lactose intolerant, but they are. And many Indians do fine with a lifetime of vegetarian diets, but we are warned to make sure that we have the right mixes of fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts to make our Euro-American bodies work vegetarian.
And it is not just foods and diet. I don’t know why sickle cell is more prevalent in Africans and African descendants in other places than it is in other populations. But it is. I don’t know how long it took and don’t understand the long process that bleached human skin as we moved north. I know it has something to do with capturing the sun’s vitamins. And I know that too much sun can be toxic to my northern European inherited skin tone.
In other words, we all carry a big bucket of inherited advantages and proclivities as we move about in the world. And I believe that these buckets that we humans bring to particular physical and mental stresses is a mixture of nature and nurture—and the interrelationships of both. Scientists can make rats suffer from post-traumatic stress generationally! We now think that the same is true of humans.
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I am horrified by the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on black and latinx populations in America, and agree with most of the media that lays much of the blame on the high percentage of jobs in the vulnerable service industries, and the overall incidence of poverty that affects them more severely than it does the Euro-American population. I also believe that racism—often but not always unconscious—leads to stress and stress-related diseases, and often to unequal medical treatment, from the ambulance to the surgery room. Black people, the studies show, are assumed to have more tolerance for pain!
I am also pissed that the leadership and the national media pay little attention to the equally hard times that American Indian populations are experiencing with COVID-19. As of April 14, the Indian Health Service had tested a paltry 13,385 people, with 1212 testing positive. More than half of the positives were on the Navajo Nation (a local Arizona paper reports over 1000 Navajo cases and 41 deaths as of 4/16). A recent HuffPost article on the Navajo Nation reports “more confirmed cases of COVID-19 per capita than almost every U.S. state, behind only New York and New Jersey.” It goes on to say that “Experts have warned that Native populations are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 given their high rates of diabetes, heart disease and other underlying conditions.” In other words, American Indians, like blacks and latinx, suffer more because of environmental conditions.
But if the virologists that Charles Mann quotes in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus are correct, Native American populations were—and might still be—genetically more susceptible to infectious diseases than are other populations.
I understand that we are all humans together, and that the differences in skin color, eye shape and body shape are “superficial” in any grand mapping of genes. And that the genetic differences across a given population might range as widely as they do across the entire human population.
But those lumps of accumulated genetic material—shaped at least in part by millennia of environmental factors—that make Africans disproportionately more susceptible to sickle cell anemia, and me more susceptible to sunburn than are they, and that once made the indigenous people of the Americas extremely susceptible to European born infectious diseases, might just be part of the COVID-19 equation today.
And somewhere in the current frenzy of scientific research, closely examining all environmental factors as they go, I would think that researchers might look for genetic clues to acceptance and resistance to this—and other related—infectious diseases.
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Years ago, when I was the Director of an organization called Fishtrap, we had a conference at Wallowa Lake on “Fire.” Stephen J. Pyne, the McArthur Fellow who wrote the books on fire in America, was the featured speaker. Forest Service and BLM firefighters from across the Northwest come to hear Pyne and talk with each other. But one strong memory of that conference had nothing to do with fire directly; it had to do with ethnicity and digestion.Read Rich’s Post →
Measles, smallpox, influenza—what a tragic and painful experience the first European contacts must have been for the first Americans! We now know that huge numbers, unfathomable numbers, of American Indians were killed by European diseases.
Imagine Tisquantum (Squanto) coming back to his homeland after years in Europe as a slave, making his way to England and then coming home, where he finds his village deserted, his tribe gone to disease.Read Rich’s Post →
The article in the New York Times last week about Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman was so good, so inspiring, that I just have to pass it on: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/dining/new-native-american-cuisine.html?emc=edit_th_20160817&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66175474
I was born and lived my first ten years in Minnesota, so the talk of walleye, deer, and game birds, chokecherries and wild rice is all familiar. Not so the other wild greens and spices that Sherman has traced back to tribal usage and brings now to sophisticated tables.
What I know about American Indian cuisine is small—because the subject is so big. But the article reminded me that the role of Indian agriculture and the adoption of Indian foods worldwide are constantly overlooked. I know I have said this in other posts, but it is always worth repeating: over half of today’s world food crops started in the Americas! Where would Russia, Norway, and Ireland be without potatoes, Italy without tomatoes, Africa without cassava (manioc)? The Americas are huge, and the food gifts to the rest of the world are immense—think beans, squash, maize, sweet potato and more, which, in the decades after Columbus, changed the faces (and tastes) of Europe, Africa, and Asia. American Indians before the Europeans were not all hunter-gatherers, and most who hunted and gathered also farmed.
This piece on Indian cooking got me thinking in another direction too, the milpa. In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann describes “maize milpas” in Central America in which a dozen plants are grouped in a small field. A dozen plants that feed each others’ needs as they provide a balanced diet to their farmers. Some milpas have been productively “farmed” for 4,000 years!
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| Milpa four months after planting the maiz canopy shades beans, squash, macal, amaranths and quiniopods and much more. Credit: MacduffEverton.com |
One of the earliest images of Indian North America which many of us learned as third or fourth graders mimicking the first Thanksgiving is of an Indian named Squanto hunched over a hole in the ground in which he is placing a fish in preparation for planting corn, beans, and squash. The fish will succor the plants, the corn will provide stalk for the beans to climb, and the squash will cover the ground and keep down weeds and enhance moisture for it all. Squanto was really Tisquantum, and the scene which we all saw was about indigenous American agriculture. There is no doubt in my mind that there were other useful plants in Tisquantum’s milpa—herbs and medicinals, plants the English probably saw as weeds.
The English and Spanish adapted the American plants, took many back to Europe, and planted them all in rows on both sides of the ocean. They ignored the milpa, and one can argue that the agricultural journey that they launched led to monocultures that eventually depends on hybrids and fierce amounts of chemical fertilizers while ignoring companion planting and even the related idea of crop rotation.
Jack Weatherford, in Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, says that North Americans continued to plant corn in hills until the 1930s. Even without the entire milpa, Weatherford argues that moving away from hilling has increased soil erosion in the Mississippi River system dramatically.
Mann recognizes that the milpa might be impractical in today’s large-scale agriculture, but suggests we might learn a thing or two from “gardens” that have been around for thousands of years.
And, I’ll add, from chefs like Sean who are exploring the same cultural legacy.
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| Joseph Canyon USFS photo |
Alvin Josephy talked about Indians’ relationship to land, and how, from the get-go, Europeans did not understand it. Europeans saw land as an economic resource, not just a “home” place to live on and live with. In fact, the Book of Genesis in pocket and mind, Christian Europeans thought themselves lords and masters of the land, with Biblically ordained dominion over it and all of its non-human inhabitants.
After a long slog through feudalism, during which most Europeans worked the land to the benefit of a ruling class, Euro-Americans saw opportunities to be their own lords and masters. A few years of indentured servitude and then Indian lands theirs for the taking. Thomas Jefferson legitimized it, promoting the idea of a nation of self-sustaining small landholders, free men who would forward humanity’s march towards democracy.
No one paid much attention to Indians’ relationships to land—except to take it. Well, Europeans did pick up the many crops Indians had developed over millennia in the “new” world, and shipped potatoes, corn, chocolate, tomatoes, manioc and dozens more around the globe. They also shipped gold—enough of it to change world economies, and tobacco, enough to start a new European rage. And they enslaved Indians and brought in African slaves to dig the gold and farm the tobacco. Etc.
The world changed, continents “exchanged,” as Charles Mann recounts so well in his two books on the subject, 1491 and 1493.
But not all of America changed immediately, and the Indians in many parts of the country, after suffering diseases and wars, losing buffalo and land, being chased or “removed” from one place to another, held onto little pieces of earth, where many of them still live. These “reservations” (lands “reserved” from much larger areas of life and influence) are cruel reminders of how much land was taken from Indians, but their existence has also been a bulwark against total assimilation. That is what Alvin said—reservations, however small and humble, have allowed some Indians to maintain tradition and culture that is intrinsically tied to land.
The “better” lands—most not reserved for Indians—were generally lands most suitable to agricultural production. And, although it is another strand in this long story of land and lost lands, the notion that “ownership” of land should somehow be tied to its “improvement” is a recurrent theme in the homesteading tradition and the takeover of Indian lands. God, said settling pioneers and their preachers, had ordained men to make the best use of the land; God, retorted Plateau tribesmen, did not want mother earth scarred with a plow.
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The land on Joseph Creek in the Wallowa Country was homesteaded late in the 19th century. The Tippetts arrived there in 1916 or 17. Thirty years ago Biden Tippett, who grew up there and went to country school there, took Alvin Josephy and a tape recorder on a tour of the area. Biden told me about this “lost” tape a year or more ago, and a month ago Ann Hayes brought in a box of cassette tapes, one marked “Alvin Josephy—Biden Tippett 1986.” We had it digitized, and I listened my way to Portland with it on Saturday.
There is nothing earth-shattering, nothing that is going to change the reading of local history, but it is another chunk in my own understanding of the difference between improving land and living with land, owning land and being part of it, European and Northwest Plateau Tribal notions of relationship to land.
The Tippetts of course are of European stock, but something drove them from the Midwest to Heppner, Oregon, and then to the Chesnimnus Country in Wallowa County, and then took one of them, Jidge Tippett, to Joseph Creek, deep in the canyons of Snake River Country.
His son, Biden, born in 1926, said there were three or four other families on Joseph Creek at the time, enough to make the school and to help each other through calving, haying, and hard times.
What comes out of the interview is how self-sufficient the canyon dwellers were. They were good neighbors, and they all grew a little food, had their beef and wild berries, and traded for most everything else. Cows for a pig, and, Biden remembers, hides—wild and domestic—that the kids collected and traded to the Indians for gloves and moccasins.
Trading was one of the things that American Indians excelled at, and one of the most underreported in standard histories. The Nez Perce dried salmon and traded it in buffalo country. The Tippetts traded for gloves and bacon, and, like the Indians, ate the salmon and steelhead, game and berries. Like the Indians, they gaffed steelhead at the “narrows” on the Grand Ronde River.
Like the Indians, they traveled with seasons, wintering along Joseph Creek, summering in the high country, and moving cattle through the breaks in spring and fall. At one point on the tape, Alvin says “you lived like Indians.” And Biden pretty much agrees, though he says that ranchers today (meaning 1986) make use of some modern conveniences. But he describes the way he sees wild animals—as “part of the habitat,” the way he travels horseback on narrow trails, the way he visualizes a day’s work and travel, reads sign, and lives with and loves the land, as the probable ways of its the old inhabitants.
Alvin asked him if he’d ever been lost in the canyons. “No,” Biden says, but he did get lost one time in Spokane.
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I’ve always thought that Alvin’s Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968, was extraordinary in its examination of the Americas before contact. He started with languages. Ironically, it was often missionaries, intent on Christianizing and changing people, who learned indigenous languages, intent from that day through today’s Moody Bible Translators on giving them back scripture.
But some missionaries were captivated by language itself, as were some army officers, adventurers, and a few academics who described themselves as “ethnologists.” In 1891, Major John Wesley Powell—of Colorado River fame but then Director of Ethnology at the Smithsonian—submitted the seventh annual report to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, in which he described attempts at learning the proper names of North American Indian tribes and the classification of their languages. The volume published the field work of 1885-86, including the first classification of North American Indian languages. (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Langs_N.Amer.png for a current language map)
Alvin picked up their work, and began Indian Heritage with detailed maps and accompanying “updated” classification tables of language groups (Powell had grouped them into 56 linguistic families). “The study of Indian languages,” Alvin said, “can be extremely valuable in the knowledge it provides of the backgrounds and historic origins, movements, and cultural developments of individual tribes and bands.” This, in a time before DNA analysis, was a remarkable way of marrying biology and history.
The number of languages—Alvin quotes one source suggesting over 2200 mutually unintelligible pre-Columbian languages in the Americas—was fuel in the debate over the length of habitation and the number of migrations from Asia. Some have proposed three major migrations related to three language parent stocks, but as far as I can tell, this is still an open field. Estimates on times of migration vary greatly as well, but increasingly, the first are thought to have been more than 30,000 years ago.
Language, for similar reasons, also enters into the argument between “long counters” and “short counters” as regards pre-contact populations (languages have “half-lives,” and linguists estimate the time it takes for languages to grow and change). According to Charles Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the gap on this score was huge: short counters arguing that there were probably fewer than 10 million people on the continents when Columbus hit shore; long counters suggested as many as 112 million. In 1968, Josephy thought some high middle number the best current estimate; in a radio interview 30 years later he upped his numbers to 90 million or more.
And here we come to cataclysmic events—diseases, it is agreed, decimated huge numbers of indigenous Americans, often before the affected Indians saw a European. Slavery and violence took huge tolls on Indian populations as well—some Caribbean peoples were exterminated in Columbus’s quest for gold.
1492 was a signal year in the history of the planet, and the movement of its peoples and languages. Not too far on either side of that date were major disease epidemics in Europe—and climate change. The Great Warming brought the Norse to Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland and multiplied Europe’s population; warming and drought killed civilizations and thousands of people in Africa and the Americas. The plague, poxes, typhus and a myriad of diseases hit and killed millions in Europe before they were brought to the Americas. Mann says that a world population of 500 million at the beginning of the sixteenth century might have been reduced by one-fifth by the early seventeenth century. Maybe the greatest die-off in human history!
History is full of such catastrophes. In recent memory, WW II and its fallout killed millions, created other millions of “stateless” people, and scattered refugees around the globe. The Little Ice Age and accompanying droughts and freezes sent Europeans to the New World; slavery sent Africans in all directions; the Inquisition scattered European Jews; the Potato Famine scattered the Irish. In all cases languages traveled, collided, morphed, and joined as well.
We might now be in the middle of something as significant as any of the above. The pretty plans of the WW I victors for nation states cooperating on oil and speaking English as a strong second language are fast disintegrating in the Middle East. The European Union is being stretched by African and Middle Eastern refugees as some of its members and member citizens cling to cultural and religious identities. Refugee camps bulge—old ones dating to the 1947 Palestinian War; new ones in Turkey, Jordan, and Africa.
And language is again a measure of movements and adjustments. There is little talk now of English as “the world language,” and Spanglish and Arab hip-hop are in the media. As Syrians, speaking in English to reporters, describe hopes of learning German, one is reminded of an older Middle Eastern dispersion, described in Genesis:
“Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
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| Syrian refugees LA Times |
Other Powells and Josephys will trace these movements 500 years from now.
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In preparation for my Portland presentation on the Nez Perce in the Wallowa Country tomorrow night, and thinking about this ecosystems/ Pacific NW tribes class I am teaching in La Grande, I got to wondering about which elements of Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange had the greatest impact on the Nez Perce.
But as our friend Alvin Josephy reminded often, Europeans were met by real people living here. Columbus met, enslaved, and in some cases destroyed indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The learned scribes in fifteenth century Spain did have to decide whether these were people with souls or some lesser form of life—they quickly opted for souls in need of conversion, and, as they had not brought European women along, the conquerors quickly developed relations with the indiginous people.
The Pilgrims who landed in the northeast of what we now call North America were met by people who grew corn, squash and beans, crops their ancestors had bred and transformed over centuries from Mesoamerican beginnings. In popular history, Indians—mis-named from the beginning, have been mis-understood as uniformly hunter gatherers, when in fact their languages, cultures, and economies were as diverse as were those of the Europeans of the time. And these crops and cultures were critical in many cases to the survival of the 15th and 16th century immigrants.
We learn from Charles Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus that Africans far outnumbered Europeans in early immigrations (though their journeys were not by choice of course). This does—or should—change the mental image anyone talking about a nation of immigrants carries.
“The realization has finally begun to dawn that American society as a whole has suffered from ‘forked tongue’ history books… Year after year, the distortions, misrepresentations, and failure to tell the whole historical story foster erroneous and stereotyped thinking about Indians, and lead to still further misrepresentations, prejudice and contempt.”
Alvin Josephy, Learning Magazine, 1973
“…for the most part these revelations—the great antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the public… Why don’t intelligent non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about stem cells and read contemporary literature, already know something about how researchers think of the Americas before Columbus?… Why isn’t this material already in high school textbooks?”
Charles Mann, Afterword to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2006
In Charles Mann’s brilliant 2005 book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, he scans the results of hundreds of recent ethnographic, linguistic, archeological, anthropological, and biological studies. He calls and visits noted field scientists, travels with them along the Amazon and atop the Andes, and paints vivid pictures of what we now know about the pre-Columbian Americas. There are stories of monumental architecture, glyph writing systems, complicated leadership patterns, and information about the size, depth, and breadth of major agricultural settlements and civilizations. Importantly, there are many stories about the extent to which indigenous peoples managed their environments. They used fire, built soil, and found and adapted plants–corn, squash, legumes, etc.–to a wide range of climatic conditions–Mesoamerican corn taken all the way to northeastern North America, for example. .In an afterword to the paperback edition, Mann laments the fact that this knowledge—of digs, studies, discoveries—and new interpretations of pre-Columbian history have not penetrated textbooks and popular culture. At one university appearance, an American history professor innocently asks Mann where he can find all of this information. Mann is happy that he asks, but sad that the historian fails to realize that his answers are in the room with him—the archeologist in the next building, the anthropologist down the hall.
In the past, Mann says, it would have been easy to blame institutional racism for our limited and distorted views of the ancient Americas, but in an era of ethnic and gender studies, this seems unlikely. The “culprit,” he conjectures, is disciplinary boundaries. Charles Mann is a journalist, not beholden to any one academic discipline and anxious to learn from all of them. In this he is a direct descendent of Alvin Josephy, who was also a journalist, who cited linguistic and archeological studies as leading tools for learning about the past in his award winning 1968 book, The Indian Heritage of America. In my mind, Mann’s 1491 reads like its sequel.
Mann, and Josephy before him, says that we—most Americans—have settled on an archetypical North American Indian. He is a Plains Indian on a horse—though horses arrived very late in the history of human habitation of the continents. And hunting and gathering were the economies of some but not all indigenous western hemisphere civilizations. And he has disappeared, vanished into myth and story. Or he—and she—should have got on with it and become totally assimilated by now.
Mann, like Josephy before him, thinks that Indian history reaches back to antiquity, but lives in the present. And that Indian cultures—especially the ways they have and still do deal with agriculture, societal organization, and the “two-leggeds” place and roles in the whole of the world—have much to teach us today.
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