Two Views of Native American Society
Beard, Charles A. & Mary. The Beard’s New Basic History of the United States. (1944)
The prime task confronting the stream of immigrants, of varied national origins, backgrounds, and religious faiths, who poured into the English colonies in America, was that of establishing a substantially self-sufficient agricultural society in the New World. This was to be a laborious enterprise.
A few emigrants at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it is true, were lured by the original dream of the London company that gold and silver for quick riches would be found in its territory. A year before the tiny settlement had been planted on the James River, an actor in the English metropolis had declared on the stage that the Indians’ dripping pans were of “pure golde,” that their “chaines with which they chained up their streets were of massive golde,” that their prisoners were “fettered in golde,” and that the “Goe forth on holy days to gather rubies and diamonds by the seashore.” But neither in Virginia nor anywhere in the colonies were the English to discover, conquer, and loot Indian societies fabulously rich in rare treasures, such as the Spaniards had found in Mexico and Peru. So all the pioneers had to come down to hard earth and create the real wealth which was alone valuable for life-farms, houses, food, clothing, and all the material commodities necessary for the living of civilized people. They had to cherish the values of a working society, one firmly based on agriculture.
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In the new environment the pioneers confronted primitives such as they had never seen before. All along the shores from Maine to Georgia were scattered tribes of native Indians ranging in degrees of social organization from marauding nomads to more or less settled communities engaged in practicing the economic arts of forest, stream, field, and domesticity. With the Indians the pioneers entered into varied relations: from peace and friendship to treachery and massacre on both sides. In terms of peace, the newcomers sometimes bought lands from the Indians, giving them in exchange such English goods as cloth, beads, hoes, knives, axes, and other implements. For example, when Roger Williams founded his first plantation in Rhode Island in 1636, he displayed good will toward the Indians at once and bought from them the land on which he settled with his companions. Sometimes colonial leaders, occasionally in connection with the purchase of land, made treaties of amity with the Indians. William Penn, for instance, besides protecting the Indians of his colony from the rapacity of white traders, made treaties of friendship with them which they faithfully kept. By the marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahontas, daughter of the warlike chief, Powhatan, in 1614, peace was brought to settlers of Virginia for eight years. More than once an English settlement was saved from starvation by timely supplies of food furnished by neighboring tribes.
From red Indians “the palefaces” recovered some of the primitive arts of survival which had been lost to the English since their own primitive times. Indian women were farmers, cooks, and practitioners of other domestic arts, and from them English women learned how to handle native foodstuffs, especially Indian corn, and provide nutritious meals. Indian men also had their arts of hunting, fishing, and woodworking, and from them English men acquired various new skills which, combined with their own, enabled them to make rapid progress in every form of economic operation. As hunters adept in the ways of wild animals, Indians knew how to procure fish, game, and furs for their own people. By studying the hunting arts of the Indians and by trading with them, white pioneers were able to get meat more quickly and stocks of fur.
Unhappily, relations with the Indians were not all confined to genial exchanges of arts and commodities. Human nature, red and white, also displayed cruelty and stupidity. From time immemorial Indian tribes had fought among themselves, the warlike nomads preying upon the tribes that tilled the soil, the settled tribes trying to defend themselves, tribes battling against other tribes for other reasons or without rationality. Under the thin veneer of their civilization the barbaric greed and brutality of innumerable whites led them to rob, murder, betray, and try to enslave Indians. White traders sold them whisky and firearms and cheated them in transactions over furs and the purchase of lands. Thus, the whites incited retaliations even among Indians formerly disposed to be friendly.
So sporadic brawls, local conflicts, and general wars punctuated the relations of whites and Indians all along the line from North to South and all through the years from the early days in Virginia to the close of the colonial period. After whites had introduced the Indians to “fire water” and guns the fighting became more desperate and bloody as the years passed and as the frontier advanced upon the Indian hunting grounds. Nothing but stockades, militiamen, and eternal vigilance prevented the Indians from exterminating many of the early settlements and keeping the frontier constantly aflame.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. (1980)
In the village of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: “No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers….Their kindness, humanity, and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.”
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a “long house.” When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door.
Families were grouped in class, and a dozen or more clans might make a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.
The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: “Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.”
Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-care.
All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their children: “And surely there is in all children…a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.”
Gary Nash describes the Iroquois culture:
No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of authority in European societies—were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong….He who stole the author’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.
Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved in the same way. In 1635, Maryland Indians responded to the governor’s demand that if any of them killed an Englishman, the guilty one should be delivered up for punishment according to English law. The Indians said:
It is the manner amongst us Indians, that if any such accident happen, wee doe redeeme the life of a man that is so slaine, with a 100 armes length of Beades and since that you are here strangers, and come into our Countrey, you should rather conform yourselves to the Customes of our Countrey, than impose yours upon us….
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.
They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.
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Two Views of Native American Society
Directions: Read the two articles that give different perspectives on Native Americans then thoroughly answer the following questions.
1. How do the Beards describe Native American civilization. Please use specific examples from the article.
2. How do the Beards describe the tension and violence between Native Americans and whites?
3. Were there white leaders that were peaceful with the Native Americans? Who? Explain how they were peaceful.
4. How does Zinn describe Iroquois society? Please use specific examples from the article.
5. Which reading do you think is more accurate? Why? Explain.
6. Is the year that these books were published significant? Why/why not? Explain.