Reading Like a Historian. 

INTRODUCTION.  After completing this exercise, it should become clear that there is no such thing as objective history. Even textbooks that seem to be "the whole truth" reflect history's subjectivity. Second, like everyone else, textbook writers are products of their own time.  Attitudes about the Indians at different times in the twentieth century surely influenced historians' views about the role of Native Americans in history.  Each textbook's publication date is an important clue to why these historians could come to such different conclusions about Indian culture and white-Indian relations.  Finally, you may have determined that you need more "firsthand" information.

ASSIGNMENT.  This unit has three selections from American history textbooks with varying perspectives about the Indians. The first selection is from a text first published in 1927; the last is from one published in 2000. Two of the selections are from different editions of the same text. Your primary task is to identify the main idea of each selection, and a few representative details for each, that show how views of the Indians differ in these accounts.  

__Do the textbook accounts agree on some points? 
__What are the major differences in what you are being asked to remember?
__Which account do you find most credible and why?

HISTORY TEXTBOOKS:  Indians and the Settlement of America.  Chapter 1: "The Truth About Textbooks: Indians and the Settlement of America."
SOURCE:  John Hollitz, Thinking Through the Past: A Critical Thinking Approach to U.S. History.  Volume I: to 1877.  3rd ed.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.

CONTEXT/BACKGROUND OF ASSIGNMENT.  One of the best aids to learning history is also one of the biggest hindrances to understanding the past. It is the textbook, the traditional authority on American history. Textbooks impose a welcome order on the past by organizing events chronologically and explaining historical relationships. How then do these helpful companions sometimes obscure our understanding of the past?

Readers of textbooks often start with the false assumption that these books simply report facts predetermined by the "dead hand" of the past. That miscon­ception is encouraged by a certain tone: textbooks seem to speak with authority. "To us as children," historian Frances FitzGerald writes: "texts were the truth of things: they were American history. It was not just that we read them before we understood that not everything that is printed is the truth, or the whole truth. It was that they, much more than other books, had the demeanor and trappings of authority. They were weighty volumes. They spoke in measured cadences: imperturbable, humorless, and as distant as Chinese emperors.'

Many college students make the same mistake, even if their textbooks speak in more familiar tones. They too assume that their history textbooks "contain only the truth of things."  Of course, the case is more complicated. Textbook authors select facts and shape history in ways that reflect their own times. Thus, like all works of history, textbooks contain interpretations. Readers who see only the cold, immovable facts of history have difficulty spotting them, yet the interpretations are there, like graveyard ghosts lurking amid the headstones. Comparing the way textbooks present the same topic is one good way to detect these elusive spirits. In this chapter we examine what several textbooks say about the Indians when Europe discovered America and when England settled Virginia.

Ravaged by strange diseases, attacked by land-hungry settlers, and dispossessed from their land, Indians were among the biggest losers in the American past.  Because history is mostly written by winners, Native Americans have been big losers in history books too. For a long time, historians treated them as little more than "an exotic if melancholy footnote to American history,"? Worse, their accounts were based on questionable ideas about the Indians' lack of "civilization."

Discussions about population show how historians' assumptions about Indian culture influenced their conclusions. In the early twentieth century, historians believed that 1 million Indians lived north of Mexico in 1492 and that fewer than 10 million lived in the entire Western Hemisphere. In fact, at least 2 million people lived in the United States and Canada, with another 15 million In central Mexico. Some researchers now think the total population of the New World in 1492 was around 60 million. One reason for this difference is that earlier population estimates failed to take into account the devastating effects of Old World germs on Indians. They were also based on an assumption that uncivilized Indians were incapable of supporting large numbers of people on their land. Following the lead of anthropologists and ethnographers, historians now understand the sophistication of Native American culture and so have dramatically raised their estimates of the Indian population.

Today's historian: also have a much greater understanding of the varied ways that whites and Indians interacted. The Indians' role in American history began with their impact on the environment.  English settlers encountered a land already cleared and cultivated, a condition that made English settlement much easier. Cultural exchange began immediately, aided by a rough technological equality between the Europeans and Indians. With the exception of the Europeans' ability to navigate the oceans and make iron into tools and weapons, the technological differences between the English settlers and their indigenous neighbors were not great. While the English learned to cultivate tobacco, corn, squash, and other crops, the Indians quickly learned to use kettles, knives, needles, and guns.

An understanding of Native American culture makes clear that English settlers were influenced by Indians in ways they did not understand. It also puts some familiar events in Virginia's early history in a new light. When the Jamestown settlers fell ill in 1607, the powerful Indian Chief Powhatan provided food to keep the starving colony alive. Captain John Smith could only explain this gift as an act of God, who had "changed the heart of the savages."! Later Smith was captured by Indians and saved from death, so he believed, by Powhatan s daughter Pocahontas. Just before Smith's executioners were sup­posed to strike their fatal blows, the Indian "princess" threw herself at the Englishman's feet and pleaded for his life. Once again, Smith saw only the hand of God. He did not see that his remarkable "rescue" was a ceremony designed to demonstrate Powhatan's power and desire to have friendly relations with the English. Nor did he understand that Powhatan, who wanted to extend his authority over dozens of unruly tribes around the Chesapeake, viewed the English as a useful ally. Within a year the suspicious Smith had begun to burn Indian fields and Villages to coerce Powhatan and other chiefs to provide more food to the growing settlement.

Events soon ran their tragic course. After Smith left Virginia in 1609 other settlers continued to use force to extract food from the Indians. In 1613 they also kidnapped Pocahontas and held her ransom. Only when John Rolfe vowed to marry her did Powhatan sign a peace treaty. More settlers poured into Virginia, however, and continued to pressure Indians for land. In 1622 the Indians attacked, wiping out about one-third of Virginia's white population. It was the final blow to the Virginia Company, which soon declared bankruptcy. The attack also led to a new attitude about the Indians. As one settler put it, "Our hands which were before tied with gentleness and fair usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the savages .... [We] may now ... invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us .... "  Virginians began to exterminate the Indians. Only much later, when they began to examine their own cultural assumptions, would historians question why.

---

SOURCE 1.  History of the American People (1927) DAVID S. MUZZEY
Source: David Saville Muzzey, History of the American People (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1927), pp. 1, 2, 39, 40, 43.

America is the child of Europe. Until the discoverers and explorers from the maritime nations of western Europe began to come to the shores of these con­tinents, more than four hundred years ago, the vast regions now occupied by the United States, the British Dominion of Canada, and the Latin-American republics of Mexico, Central and South America were a wilderness of tribes of copper-colored barbarians or savages, whose ancestors had crossed by Bering Strait from north-eastern Asia to Alaska, we know not how many cen­turies before, and had slowly spread southward and eastward to Patagonia and Labrador. These American Indians (or "Amerinds," to use the cable­code name by which scholars distinguish them from the inhabitants of the country of India) showed great diversity of character and attainments, due to differences in climate, soil, food, building material, and the activities neces­sary to preserve life. The Mayas of Yucatan, the Incas of Peru, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Hopis of New Mexico, the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Island, and the Iroquois of central New York furnish examples of Indian tribes who had learned to construct quite elaborate calendars and temples, to weave beautiful rugs and baskets, to bake pottery, to build houses of clay or of cedar beams, shaped with stone implements and ornamented with huge carved totem poles, to devise rude political institutions, and to raise crops of beans, pumpkins, and Indian corn. Other tribes were sunk in bestial savagery, shel­tering themselves from wind and snow behind piles of brushwood, wallow­ing in the southern mud like hogs, eating roots, grass, snakes, and lizards, and dying by thousands from the ravages of the beasts and the diseases against which they were powerless to protect themselves. Nowhere had they risen above the stage of barbarism. It was for the European settlers to introduce civilization into the New World. They brought hither not only tools for the conquest of the wilderness, such as firearms, iron implements for building And farming, horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, wheat and barley, vegetables and fruits, but also the forms of government, the religion, the books, and the languages of the Old World. For the ethnologist the American Indians have been a picturesque object of study; for the government, since the days of the earliest settlers, they have been an obstruction to be removed, by methods often unnecessarily cruel, from the path of civilization. They have contributed almost nothing to the making of America. The New World was a virgin continent for the European discoverers and their descendants, to make of it what they would ...

An early map of Virginia [Engraved by Theodor De Bry after one or more drawings by John White or others; from Part I of De Bry's U America" (1590)]

... On May 6, 1607, three small ships with one hundred and four colonists, of whom a large part were "gentlemen" unused to labor, arrived at the capes guarding the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.  Their instructions were to chose a healthful place on a navigable river, by which they might arrive at "some spring which runs the contrary way toward the East India Sea, to avoid giving offense to the Indians, and to conduct themselves "for the good of your country and your own." ... [T]he colonists' supplies had been almost exhausted during the four and a half months' voyage from England, and they neglected the necessary planting of corn for the search for gold and the passage to the Indies.  Indeed, had it not been for the supplies obtained from the Indians, the colony could hardly have lasted through the first winter. As it was, more than half the settlers died of fever from the malarial air and the brackish water of the James. The survivors owed their life, probably, to the energy and resourcefulness of one man, John Smith, a seasoned veteran of many a war in Europe and the hero, in his own tales, of hair-raising adven­tures among the Turks and the Russians. Smith was a braggart and a mar­tinet, but he made the men work, kept the Indians in awe by a combination of boldness and cleverness, and obtained frequent supplies of corn ....

. . . By 1624 there were about a thousand persons in the colony (though more than five times that number had been sent out from England since the first settlement) .... Yet the results were disappointing. It must be remem­bered that the colony was not started as an experiment in democracy or a refuge from oppression, but as a business venture. The stockholders were looking for returns on their investment. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been put into the enterprise and the returns were ridiculously small .... An Indian massacre in 1622, which cost the colony three hundred and forty­seven lives, was a good pretext for declaring the government by the com­pany a failure, and two years later James had the charter annulled by the royal judges and took the government into his own hands.
 

SOURCE 2.  The American Pageant (1966) THOMAS A. BAILEY
Source: Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant, 3rd ed. Copyright © 1966 by D. C. Heath and Company. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

The American republic, which is still relatively young, was from the outset singularly favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they could be eliminated or pushed aside. Such a magnificent opportunity for a great democratic experiment may never come again, for no other huge, fertile, and uninhabited ar­eas are left in the temperate zones of this crowded planet. ...

As the realization gradually dawned that the American continents were a rich prize in their own right, Spain became the dominant exploring and colonizing power in the 1500s ....

The bare statistics of Spain's colonial empire are impressive. By 1574, thirty-three years before the first primitive English shelters in Virginia, there were about two hundred Spanish cities and towns in North and South Amer­ica. A total of 160,000 Spanish inhabitants, mostly men, had brought some 5,000,000 Indians under their yoke. Majestic cathedrals dotted the land, printing presses were turning out books, and literary prizes were being awarded.  Two distinguished universities were chartered in 1551, one at Mexico City and the other at Lima, Peru.  Both of them antedated Harvard, the first college established in the English colonies, by eighty-five years.

It is clear that the Spaniards, who had more than a century's head start over the English, were genuine empire builders.  As compared with their Anglo-Saxon rivals their colonial establishment was larger and richer and as an entity lasted a quarter of a century longer. The English settlers, disagree­able though the thought may be, were more successful than the Spaniards in killing off the Indians. . . .   

In 1606, two years after peace with Spain, the finger of destiny pointed to Virginia. A joint-stock company, known as the Virginia Company of London, received a charter from King James I of England for a settlement in the New World. The main attraction was hoped-for gold, although there was some desire to convert the heathen Indians to Christianity and to find a passage through America to the Indies.

The early years at Jamestown proved to be a nightmare for all concerned except the buzzards. Hundreds of wretched souls perished from disease, from actual starvation ("the starving time," 1609-1610), and later from Indian massacres. Ironically, the woods rustled with game and the rivers flopped with fish. Soft-handed English gentlemen and deported criminals wasted valuable time seeking gold when they should have been hoeing corn. They were spurred to their frantic search by edicts from the directors of the company, who threatened to abandon the colonists If they did not strike it rich.

Virginia was saved from going under at the start largely by the leadership and resourcefulness of an incredible young adventurer, Captain John Smith. Taking over in 1608, he whipped the gold-hungry colonists into line with the rule "He who will not work shall not eat." The dusky Indian maiden Pocahontas may not have saved the captured Smith's life, as he dramatically relates, by suddenly interposing her head between his and the Indian war clubs. But there can be little doubt that Pocahontas, who married John Rolfe in 1613, helped save the colony by enlisting the aid of the Indians and by helping to preserve the peace during these critical years.

 

SOURCE 3. The Brief American Pageant (2000)
DAVID M. KENNEDY, ELIZABETH COHEN, THOMAS A. BAILEY, AND MEL PIEHL

The First Discoverers of America

... By the time the Europeans arrived in 1492, perhaps 72 million people in­habited the two American continents. Over the centuries they split into nu­merous tribes, evolved more than two thousand separate languages, and developed many diverse religions, cultures, and ways of life.

Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, and Aztecs in Mexico shaped stunningly sophisticated civilizations. Their advanced agricultural practices, based primarily on the cultivation of maize, which is Indian corn, fed large populations-perhaps as many as 21 million in Mexico alone. Though lack­ing such technologies as the wheel, these peoples built elaborate cities and carried on far-flung commerce. Talented mathematicians, they made strik­ingly accurate astronomical observations. The Aztecs also sought the favor of their gods by offering human sacrifices, sometimes cutting the hearts out of the chests of living victims.

The Earliest Americans

Agriculture, especially corn growing, accounted for the size and sophistica­tion of the Native American civilizations in Mexico and South America. About 5000 B.C., hunter-gatherers in highland Mexico developed a wild grass into the staple of corn, which became the foundation of the complex, large­scale, centralized Aztec and Incan nation-states. As cultivation of corn spread across the Americas from the Mexican heartland, it slowly transformed no­madic hunting bands into settled, agricultural villagers.

Corn planting reached the present-day American Southwest by about 1200 B.C. and powerfully molded the Pueblo culture. The Pueblo peoples in the Rio Grande Valley constructed intricate irrigation systems to water their cornfields, and they built villages of terraced, multistory buildings. Corn cultivation reached other parts of North America considerably later, and the timing of its arrival explains the relative rates of development of different Native American peoples. North and east of the Pueblos, elaborately devel­oped "societies" in the modern sense of the word scarcely existed. The lack of dense concentrations of population or complex nation-states was one of the reasons for the relative ease with which the European colonizers subdued the native North Americans ....

Unlike the Europeans, who would soon arrive with the presumption that humans had dominion over the earth and with technologies to alter the very face of the land, Native Americans had neither the desire nor the means to manipulate nature aggressively. They revered the physical world and endowed nature with spiritual properties. Yet they did sometimes ignite mas­sive forest fires, deliberately torching trees to create better hunting habitats, especially for deer. This practice accounted for the open, park-like appearance of the eastern woodlands that so amazed early European explorers.

But in a broad sense the Native Americans did not lay heavy hands on the continent because they were so few in number. In the fateful year 1492, probably no more than 4 million Native Americans padded through the whisper­ing primeval forests and paddled across the sparkling, virgin waters of North America. They were blissfully unaware that the historic isolation of the Americas was about to end forever, as both the land and the native peo­ples alike felt the full shock of the European "discovery." ...

England Plants the Jamestown Seedling

In 1606, two years after peace with Spain, the hand of destiny beckoned to­ward Virginia. A joint-stock company, the Virginia Company of London, received a charter from King James I, who had assumed the English throne in 1603, for a settlement in the New World. The main attractions were the promise of gold and the desire to find a passage through America to the Indies. Like most joint-stock companies of the day, the Virginia Company was intended to endure for only a few years, after which its stockholders hoped to liquidate it for a profit. This arrangement put severe pressure on the luckless colonists, who were threatened with abandonment in the wilderness if they did not quickly strike it rich on the company's behalf. Few of the investors thought in terms of long-term colonization. Apparently no one even faintly suspected that the seeds of a mighty nation were being planted ....

The early years of Jamestown proved to be a nightmare for all concerned­-except the buzzards. Once ashore, the settlers died by the dozens from disease, malnutrition, and starvation. Ironically, the woods rustled with game and the rivers flopped with fish, but the greenhorn settlers, many of them self-styled "gentlemen" unaccustomed to fending for themselves, wasted valuable time grubbing for nonexistent gold when they should have been gathering provisions.

Virginia was saved from utter collapse at the start largely by the leader­ship and resourcefulness of an intrepid young adventurer, Captain John Smith. Taking over in 1608, he whipped the gold-hungry colonists into line with the rule "He who shall not work shall not eat." He had been kidnapped in December 1607 and subjected to a mock execution by the Indian chieftain Powhatan, whose daughter Pocahontas "saved" Smith by dramatically in­terposing her head between his and the war clubs of his captors.  Pocahontas became an intermediary between the Indians and the settlers, helping to pre­serve a shaky peace and provide needed food ....

North American Indian Tribes at the Time of European Colonization. This map illus­trates the great diversity of the Indian population-and suggests the inappropriateness of identifying all the Native American peoples with the single label Indian. The more than two hundred tribes were deeply divided by geography, language, and lifestyle. The map also identifies geographical areas that are similar in climate and terrain.

Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake

When the English landed in 1607, the chieftain Powhatan dominated the few dozen small tribes in the James River area. Powhatan at first may have considered the English potential allies in his struggle to extend his power over his Indian rivals, and he tried to be conciliatory. But relations between the Indians and the English remained tense, especially as the starving colonists took to raiding Indian food supplies.

The atmosphere grew ever more strained after Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610. He carried orders from the Virginia Company that amounted to a dec­laration of war against the Indians in the Jamestown region. A veteran of the vicious campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr now introduced "Irish tac­tics" against the Indians. His troops raided their villages, burned houses, confiscated provisions, and torched cornfields. A peace settlement ended this First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe-the first known interracial union in Virginia.

A fragile peace prevailed for eight years. But the Indians, pressed by the land-hungry whites and ravaged by European diseases, struck back in 1622. A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John Rolfe. Pushed westward by retaliatory settler raids, the Indians made one last effort to dislodge the Virginians in the second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644. Again they were defeated. The peace treaty of 1646 repudiated any hope of assimilating the native peoples into Virginian society or of peacefully coexisting with them. Instead, it effectively banished the Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally separated Indian from white areas of settlement the origins of the later reservation system. By 1669 an official census revealed that only about two thousand Indians remained in Virginia, perhaps 10 percent of the population the original English settlers had found in 1607.  By 1685 the English considered the Powhatan peoples extinct.

It had been the Powhatans' calamitous misfortune to fall victim to three Ds: disease, disorganization, and disposability. Like native people throughout the New World, they were struck down by European epidemics of smallpox and measles. They also lacked the unity to oppose the relatively well-organized and militarily disciplined whites. Finally, the Powhatans served no economic func­tion for the Virginia colonists, having no gold, labor, or valuable commodities to offer in commerce. Indeed the Indian presence frustrated the colonists' desire for a local commodity the Europeans desperately wanted: land.
 

FURTHER READING

William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New Eng­land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1979).
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1995).
Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1982).
Grace Steele Woodward, Pocahontas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969).