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Europe's discovery and conquest of the Americas is told as a great saga of achievement from the European point of view. This book tells the Indians' story, one of plague and invasion that crippled great civilizations and killed one fifth of the human race.
I began this book because I am Puerto Rican and I don't know much about what exactly occurred when Christopher Columbus landed in present day Dominican Republic. This book does not touch upon this, however. Instead, Ronald Wright details the events of the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, Cherokees and the Iroquois. I figured that reading about the demolition of these ancient civilizations would paint some type of picture of what occurred in the Greater Antilles.
Wright does a fantastic job illustrating events and breaks up the histories of each group by speaking about Invasion, Resistance, Rebirth, and Rediscovery. We learn about when the Spanish and Europeans arrived, how the indigenous fought back, what happened decades or centuries after the invasions took place, and where the peoples of these groups are today (as of 1992, when this book was written). We learn about the atrocities as seen by those who were there.
Most of the sources used are from journal entries and other literature from both the invading soldiers and the natives that were able to keep records.
Some might say that his book is one-sided, making the indians look like docile and friendly peoples that were needlessly slaughtered by more advanced peoples. Why shouldn't this be true? The Spanish and Europeans were armed with guns, germs, and steel. The weapons the natives had were no match. As soon as the explorers landed on the shores of these countries, they native population was doomed.
Most if not all of these civilizations were raped and pillaged for the three G's: Gold, God, and Glory. No other reason is given. It was the "Haves versus the Have Not's." If the invaders could commit robbery and murder with little or no problems, then why not? It was "God's will" according to their beliefs. It is profoundly sad how many artifacts and records were probably lost and destroyed during the intrusions and encroachments of the whites. They were seen as "savages", but really, what do you call the ones committing the slaughter and plunder?
I think eventually these civilizations would have collapsed somehow. Either another group would have discovered them and annihilated them or they would have done themselves in with civil war. It is the human way to explore and discover. We constantly need to go further and further. We want want want until there is nothing left. This book is a great platform for those who want to learn more about the great "discoveries".
I also recommend reading Wright's A Short History of Progress where he goes into more detail about humankind's thirst and hunger for progress. ( )
"History is written by the winners, and so the 'discovery' of the New World in 1492 has been clebrated as one of hamanity's great moments." Mr Wright looks at the America's through Indian eyes since 1492 and tells us a different story than the one we have been told for hundreds of years. ( )
A good companion to Guns, Germs and Steel. Stolen Continents is the depressing tale of how Europeans came to power in the Americas. A depressing litany of death and destruction. ( )
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How I loathe the term “Indian”. . . “Indian” is a term used to sell things—souvenirs, cigars, cigarettes, gasoline, cars. . . . “Indian” is a figment of the white man’s imagination.
—Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, Ojibway, 1990
Any book about the Americas is fraught with problems of terminology. Until 1507, when the name first appeared on a map, there was no “America” and there were no “American Indians.” The idea that America might be part of Asia wasn't scotched until 1522, when the survivors of Magellan’s fleet returned. The word Indian merely commemorates Columbus’s mistake. America has since become established as a name for the entire so called New World and, confusingly, for its dominant nation; we are left with the problem of what to call its peoples.
In 1492, Europeans seldom used the term “European”; they defined themselves by their nations and ethnic groups, or as Christians. Ancient Americans did the same, calling themselves Mexica, Maya, Tsalagi, and so forth. In English, these aboriginal people and their descendants should collectively be called Americans, just as the people of Asia are Asians. (That America is not a native word is beside the point: neither is Asia.) This was indeed the primary usage until the eighteenth century, when British settlers became “Americans” in the way that South African Dutch became “Afrikaners.”
Today some American Indians call themselves Indians; others dislike the word. The main objection is that “Indian” hides the true diversity, and the true names, of widely differing cultures. (And in Spanish, indio became a term of racial abuse.) But one needs a generality to set against “white,” “European,” and “invader.” So I use “Indian.” I also use “Native American,” “Amerindian,” and the adjectives “aboriginal” and “indigenous.” Objections, semantic and political, can be raised to any of them.
These are not the only loaded words. An entire vocabulary is tainted with prejudice and condescension: whites are soldiers, Indians are warriors; whites live in towns, Indians in villages; whites have kings and generals, Indians have chiefs; whites have states, Indians have tribes. Indians have ghost dances, whites have eschatology. In 1927, the Grand Council Fire of American Indians told the mayor of Chicago: “We know that school histories are unjust to the life of our people. . . . They call all white victories, battles, and all Indian victories, massacres. . . . White men who rise to protect their property are called patriots—Indians who do the same are called murderers.”
Another minefield surrounds the origin of America’s peoples. Many American Indians believe that they were created in America, that, in the words of the eighteenth-century Iroquois, they “came out of this ground.” Archaeology and genetics suggest that their remote ancestors peopled America from Asia via a Bering land bridge that existed between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago (long before the growth of civilization anywhere on earth). The same lines of inquiry, taken further back, indicate that all human beings came from Africa.
There need be no conflict between sacred tradition and scientific evidence. The traditions are philosophically true. Native Americans have been here since time immemorial; their languages, cultures, and civilizations developed here. They are American in a way that no others can be. Even if we suppose that their ancestors arrived “only” 15,000 years ago (the archaeological minimum), they have been here thirty times longer than anyone else. If we call that time a month, Columbus came yesterday.
Finally, a word on crackpot ideas that the American Indians and their achievements hail from Egypt, Phoenicia, the lost tribes of Israel, medieval Welsh princes, Irish monks, Atlantis, or outer space. Such “theories” are a measure of Europeans’ inability to accept Native Americans for who they are. The implication behind them is often subtly racist: that Amerindians could not have done what they did without help.
There may indeed have been odd contacts between the hemispheres from time to time, but these were neither culturally nor genetically significant. No New World artifact has been shown to have an Old World prototype, or vice versa. And Native Americans’ terrible vulnerability to Old World disease is proof enough of long isolation. So is the uniqueness of plant and animal kingdoms: not even rats or cockroaches—good sailors both—had reached America before Columbus.
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In 1813 several hundred Cherokees enlisted under the command of a bush lawyer turned general, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory, as he became known for his intractable personality, was forty-six, gaunt, shrewd, violent, one arm crippled by dueling wounds—the latest from a duel with his own brother. Of Carolina frontier stock, he hated Indians but was more than willing to employ them as high-grade cannon fodder. His Creek War, hailed by Jackson as a victory for civilization, was notorious for the savagery of white troops under his command. They skinned dead Creeks for belt leather; and Davy Crockett, who was there, told how a platoon set fire to a house with “forty-six warriors in it” and afterward ate potatoes from the cellar basted in human fat.
The decisive victory came in March 1814 at Horseshoe Bend, fifty miles northeast of Montgomery, Alabama. In this action, a Cherokee chief named Junaluska saved Andrew Jackson’s life. This didn’t stop Old Hickory from winking while his Tennessee troops shot livestock and terrorized civilians for amusement on their way home through the Cherokee Nation. And in the vindictive peace treaty by which he dispossessed all the Creeks—friends as well as foes—Jackson took more than 2 million acres in northern Alabama that belonged to the Cherokees. No sentimental obligation would stop him from opening the country for settlers from Tennessee to the Gulf.
The Cherokees were now encircled, and Andrew Jackson would devote the next twenty years to getting rid of them.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1784
I never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.
— George [H. W.] Bush, 1988
Among those who fought as officers in Jackson’s army were Kahnungdatlageh, He-Who-Walks-on-the-Mountaintop, known in English as Major Ridge, and Kooweskoowee, or John Ross, who had more Scots blood than Cherokee in his veins but was deeply loyal to the Nation. Unlike the generation before them, these men achieved a synthesis of Cherokee identity and cultural change. Their solution was nationalism, the creation of a Cherokee polity with a written constitution that would enshrine the ancient sense of kinship with the land and transform ethnic ties into a sovereign republic like the one the Americans were building around them.
And so, on December 29, 1835, in the parlor of Elias Boudinot’s [Kuhleganah Watie] fine house on the square of the Cherokee capital, the pro-removal faction put their names to the infamous Treaty of New Echota. Boudinot, the Ridges, and several others signed away the last 20,000 square miles of the Cherokee Nation for $5 million and the promise of land in “Indian Territory,” now Oklahoma. Some had perhaps been bribed; most believed sincerely that they were doing the best thing for their people. They knew the ancient penalty for ceding Cherokee land without consensus, and many would pay it. “I have signed my death warrant,” said the elder Ridge [He-Who-Walks-on-the-Mountaintop] prophetically. Elias Bodinot spoke with his usual eloquence: “We can die but the great Cherokee Nation will be saved. . . . Oh, what is a man worth who will not dare to die for his people?”
In May 1836, the fraudulent treaty came before the United States Senate. John Quincy Adams denounced it as an “eternal disgrace upon the country.” Jackson bullied it through: it passed by one vote.
The Cherokees were given two years to get out, years during which they were invaded more than ever by those impatient for the rich carcass of the nation they had built. In June, Major Ridge protested to Jackson:
The lowest classes of the white people are flogging the Cherokees with cowhides, hickories, and clubs. We are not safe in our houses – our people are assailed by day and night by the rabble. Even justices of the peace and constables are concerned in this business. This barbarous treatment is not confined to men, but the women are stripped also and whipped without law or mercy. . . . We shall carry off nothing but the scars of the lash on our backs.
General John E. Wool, sent to enforce the removal, agreed: “The whole scene since I have been in this country has been nothing but a heartrending one. . . . The white men . . . like vultures, are watching, ready to pounce upon their prey and strip them of everything they have.” Wool also confirmed that the Cherokees were “almost universally opposed to the treaty. . . . So determined are they in their opposition that not one . . . would receive either rations or clothing from the United States lest they might compromise themselves.”
It is one of history’s darkest ironies that a Cherokee had saved Jackson’s life in 1814. This man, Junaluska, went to Washington to make a personal appeal. Jackson listened impatiently, then said, “Sir your audience is ended, there is nothing I can do for you.” In the best Cherokee tradition, Junaluska kept his temper, but later, when he saw a woman die after being torn from her home, he raged: “Oh my God if I had known. I would have killed him that day at the Horseshoe.”
In the summer of 1838 the United States army rounded up all 16,000 Cherokees and confined them for months in disease-infested camps. The trek west, begun that autumn, has been known ever since as the Trail of Tears. For the whole winter, the hungry, frostbitten people shuffled at bayonet point across a thousand miles of frozen woods and prairie. By the time it was over, 4,000 – one quarter of the Cherokee Nation – had died. Among them was Quatie, the wife of Chief John Ross [Kooweskoowee].
Europe's discovery and conquest of the Americas is told as a great saga of achievement from the European point of view. This book tells the Indians' story, one of plague and invasion that crippled great civilizations and killed one fifth of the human race.
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