Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

War with the Indians started in Acoma, now New Mexico, in 1599, when a Spanish leader avenged the death of his brother by enslaving most of the villagers and chopping off one foot of all males over 25 years of age. It spread to the Southeast where, because of fierce and implacable Indian resistance, the Spanish were unable to colonize Florida for over a hundred years.

The Indian-white wars that dominated our history from 1762 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have disappeared from our national memory. General Sherman – who is notorious for having said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” – understood. “We took away their country and their means of support, and it was for this and against this they made war,” he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?”

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. For almost two hundred years, almost continuous warfare raged on the America continent, its conflict more threatening than any the nation was to face again. Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington’s administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense.

War of 1812 - Turning Point

The most important cause of the War of 1812 was land – Spanish land [Florida], British land [Canada], but most of all Indian land. The War of 1812 cannot be understood so long as its Indian origin is obscured. Whites along the frontier wanted the war, and along the frontier most of the war was fought, beginning in November 1811 with Harrison’s attack on the Shawnees and allied tribes in Indiana, called the Battle of Tippecanoe. The United States fought five of the seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against the Native Americans. One reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England was that New Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by slave owners to appropriate Indian land.

The result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. After 1815 Indians could no longer play what sociologists call the role of conflict partner so Americans forgot that Indians had ever been significant in our history. Even terminology changed: until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans.

Form 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations. Although European nations professed to be shocked by our actions on the western frontier, before long they were emulating us. British exterminated the Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total war against Namibia. Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and even combat as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies.

In 1823 Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court decreed that Cherokees had certain rights to their land in Georgia by dint of their “occupancy’ but whites had superior rights owing to their “discovery.” How Indians managed to occupy Georgia without having previously discovered it Marshall neglected to explain.

The never-ending source of dispute was land. To explain this constant conflict, half of the textbooks examined rely on the cliché that Native Americans held some pre-modern understanding of land ownership.

Not one pointed out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction within a much larger nation. Often they didn’t really care; they merely sought justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another. The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the textbooks tell how Jefferson doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France. Not one points out that it was not France’s land to sell – it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners before selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. France merely sold its claim to the territory. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks do, is Eurocentric.

Enslaving Native Americans

The Europeans’ enslavement of Native Americans has a long history. Textbooks used in elementary schools tell that Ponce de Leon went to Florida to seek the mythical fountain of youth; they do not say that his main business was to capture slaves for Hispaniola.

In New England, Indian slavery led directly to African slavery: the first blacks imported there, in 1638, were brought from the West Indies to be exchanged for Native Americans from Connecticut. On the eve of the New York City slave rebellion of 1712, in which Native and African slaves united, about one in four was enslaved and one slave was Indian. A 1730 census of South Kingston, RI, showed 935 whites, 333 African slaves, and 223 Native American slaves.

The center of Native American slavery, like African American slavery, was South Carolina. Its population in 1708 included 3,960 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured servants, presumably white. These numbers do not reflect the magnitude of Native slavery, however, because they omit the export trade. From Carolina, as from New England, colonists sent Indian slaves [who might escape] to the West Indies [where they could never escape], in exchange for black slaves. Charleston shipped more than 10,000 Natives in chains to the West Indies in one year!

Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered stable settlements no longer safe, helping to de-agriculturize Native Americans. To avoid being targets for capture, Indians abandoned their cornfields and their villages and began to live in smaller settlements from which they could more easily escape to he woods.  Ultimately, they had to trade with Europeans even for food. As Europeans learned from Natives what to grow and how to grow it, they became less dependent upon Indians and Indian technology, while Indians became more dependent upon Europeans and European technology. Thus what worked for the Native Americans in the short run worked against them in the long run. In the long run, it was Indians who were enslaved, Indians who died, Indian technology that was lost, and Indian cultures that fell apart. By the time the pitiful remnants of tribes converted to Christianity and joined the Puritans’ “praying Indian towns,” they did so in response to an invading culture.

Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. Democracy is an example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native America. Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically.

American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and “all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights.” Without the Native example, “do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance of questions of religion?”

In 1516 Thomas More’s Utopia, based on an account of the Incan empire in Peru, challenged European social organization by suggesting a radically different and superior alternative. Politically, nations like the Arrawaks – without monarchs, without hierarchy – stunned Europeans.

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took actions to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party, they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.

If we recognized American Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure, we would have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimates the entire conquest.

Just as Native American societies changed when they encountered whites, so European societies changed when they encountered natives. Textbooks completely miss this side of the mutual accommodation and acculturation process. Our history textbooks obliterate the interracial, multicultural nature of frontier life. Interculturation took place from the start in Virginia, facilitated by the fact that some Indians lived among the English as day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to Indian villages rather than endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, including the death penalty, if caught by whites. Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Indian nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.

African Americans frequently fled to Indian societies to escape bondage. What did whites find so alluring? According to Benjamin Franklin, “All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” Probably foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admiration of European observers. Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Most Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Profit was the primary reason most Mayflower colonist made the trip. Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history. Textbooks omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. The Early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting themselves out to Indian families as servants – hardly heroic founders that a great nation requires.

In 1623 the British indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River. The British offered a toast “symbolizing eternal friendship,” whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison.

 Pocahontas (Disney), The Virginia Company (Song), 1995

On the beaches of Virginy

There's diamonds like debris

There's silver rivers flow

And gold you pick right off a tree

With a nugget for my Winnie

And another one for me

And all the rest'll go

To The Virginia Company

It's glory, God, and gold

And The Virginia Company