The Earth Shall Weep

A History of Native America

James Wilson

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802197467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"A sweeping, well-written, long-view history" of Native American societies and "a sad epic of misunderstanding, mayhem, and massacre" ( Kirkus Reviews ). In this groundbreaking, critically acclaimed historical account of the Native American peoples, James Wilson weaves a historical narrative that puts Native Americans at the center of their struggle for survival against the tide of invading European peoples and cultures, combining traditional historical sources with new insights from ethnography, archaeology, oral tradition, and years of his own research. The Earth Shall Weep charts the collision course between Euro-Americans and the indigenous people of the continent—from the early interactions at English settlements on the Atlantic coast, through successive centuries of encroachment and outright warfare, to the new political force of the Native American activists of today. This "stylishly written... Beautifully organized" ( Boston Globe ) tour de force is a powerful, moving chronicle of the Native American peoples that has been hailed as "the most balanced account of the taking of the American continent I've ever seen" ( Austin American-Statesman ).

Part II
INVASION

3. Northeast: One
‘You will have the worst by our absence’

Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions, and fly into the woods; and then you must consequently famish by wronging your friends. What is the cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed, and willing to supply your wants, if you will come in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy.

Wahunsonacock, Powhatan, 1609

Perhaps more than anywhere else in North America, the coastal rim of the Northeastern United States seems to deny its Indian past. Cities such as Baltimore, Providence and Boston have some of the evolved, organic feel of European towns, and their historic centres - handsome classical public buildings, Georgian terraces, even the occasional half-timbered house - are clearly deeply rooted in English culture. Much of the countryside, particularly in New England, is even more Old World (and Olde Worlde), with a mellow patchwork of farms, villages, woods and neat little colonial towns undisturbed by any evidence of a different human reality. The Indians seem to survive merely as part of New England’s love affair with autumn melancholy: bittersweet figments living on rather wispily in the annual Thanksgiving celebration and the litany of melodic Algonquian placenames that still haunt the landscape.

This minor-key wistfulness is nothing new. In 1787, the poet Philip Freneau was nostalgically evoking an already lost past in his poem ‘occasioned by a visit to an old Indian burying ground’:

By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews;
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer, a shade!

And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.

The transformation of most of the coastal Indians, in less than two centuries, from living people into ‘shadows and delusions’ creates enormous difficulties in trying to understand their world and what happened to it. Although there are a few tiny native communities left in the area from southern New England to Virginia, their languages and much of their oral tradition are extinct. Our view of East coast Indian cultures and ways of life therefore depends almost entirely on the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans -missionaries, explorers, traders, colonists - who generally had a strong conscious or unconscious interest in presenting native people in a particular way and who sometimes, it seems, straightforwardly lied. Even those who were most sympathetic and/or tried most scrupulously to be honest were understandably entrenched in their own culture and probably misinterpreted much of what they saw.

The long absence of the Indians themselves has also allowed an unusually rich profusion of ideas about them and the reasons for their disappearance to take root and flourish. By the mid-nineteenth century, the wistful tendency represented by Freneau had evolved into a heartfelt yearning for the vanished world of native New England. In 1845, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson plaintively confided to his journal:

We in Massachusetts see the Indians only as a picturesque antiquity. Massachusetts, Shawmut, Samoset, Squantum, Nantasket, Narraganset, Assabet, Musketaquid. But where are the men?

Underlying this catalogue of defunct peoples is an unmistakable feeling of loss, a pang at the decline of modern New England from a more natural and innocent state. Emerson’s friend Henry D. Thoreau made the point explicitly eleven years later when, listing the animals that had become extinct since the start of European settlement, he complained: ‘... I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?’ The implication here is plain: like the late-lamented ‘cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose’ and other animals, Native Americans were part of nature, a people who, after thousands of years, had made no discernible impact on the ‘perfect’, ‘untamed’ and ‘unmaimed’ wilderness of North America. Europeans, on the other hand, had debauched the virgin landscape in a little more than two centuries, destroying the pristine habitat on which Indians - like other wild creatures - depended, and so driving them to extinction.

But a second, apparently contradictory strand of thought saw the New England natives as their own worst enemies. ‘The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them,’ growled the historian Francis Parkman in 1867, ‘but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence.’ This view echoed the opinion of the early nineteenth-century politician and self-proclaimed authority on Indians Lewis Cass, who believed that some ‘strong exciting’ racial characteristic impelled native people to ‘Their own ceaseless hostilities [which] have, more than any other cause, led to the melancholy depopulation

It is precisely because untangling these ideas about the East coast Indians is so difficult that it is also so important. The English colonies in the seventeenth century were a crucible, creating a precedent for the invasion and conquest of the rest of America and, at the same time, a template for justifying and understanding it. And, despite the lack of certain kinds of evidence, the work of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians over the last thirty years has created a fragile but rich historical mosaic (much of it gleaned from the contradictions, omissions and interstices of contemporary accounts) which both challenges and explains the apparently conflicting simplicities of Emerson and Parkman.

* * *

Scholars classify the native peoples of New England and the mid-Atlantic states as part of the larger Northeast Woodlands culture area, a vast region extending from Maine to the Carolinas and sprawling inland as far as the Great Lakes and the Mississippi drainage. The 400 years since the start of European settlement represents only a tiny fraction of the human history of this part of North America: according to archaeologists, the first ‘palaeo-Indians’ entered it 12,000 years ago or more, starting a process of continuous occupation, experiment and cultural development which led ultimately to the distinctive way of life found at the time of contact.

The first inhabitants of the Northeast were probably nomadic Ice Age hunters who lived by hunting mammoth, musk ox, giant beaver and other large mammals. As temperatures rose, however, this way of life became impossible: the big game animals died out or moved north, and the retreating glaciers gave way first to treeless tundra, then to spruce and birch forest and finally to the present mixture of deciduous and coniferous woodland. The palaeo-Indians responded by hunting smaller species and gradually diversifying into fishing and - eventually - food-gathering.

A limited form of agriculture began to appear about 3,500 years ago, and as it spread to other areas, generating a larger and more settled population, it fuelled the development of bigger, more complex societies. The most influential were the ‘mound-building’ Adena and Hopewell cultures, which built massive earthworks and burial mounds in geometric, plant and animal forms (the effigy of a snake near Locust Grove in Ohio, for example, is more than two hundred yards long) and developed an extensive trade network across and beyond the region. After about AD 700, a new civilization in the Mississippi Valley brought several innovations to the Northeast - notably maize - which gradually mingled with the existing cultures of the area to form the pattern of societies and ways of life encountered by Europeans.

By the time the first French and English explorers tentatively probed the Atlantic seaboard in the sixteenth century, the Northeast was home to scores of different peoples. Members of North America’s largest linguistic stock, the Algonquians, occupied most of the region, but a wedge of Iroquoian-speaking nations drove up through what is now upper New York State and along the St. Lawrence, and along the southern and western fringes of the area were a scattering of other Iroquoians and Siouans. Scholars speculate that the northern Iroquoians may have been relatively recent migrants from further south, whose more intensive maize-based agriculture allowed them to displace or absorb existing Algonquian groups.

If you try to grasp this picture by looking at a map, it can at first glance seem confusing. There are none of the simple straight lines we expect from political divisions: the names - particularly along the Atlantic seaboard, which bore the first brunt of contact - are a wild jumble, all squashed together or tilted at odd angles to fit. South of the St. Lawrence, in what is now Maine and Nova Scotia, you find Micmacs, Malecites, Passamaquoddies, Penobscots and Abenakis; below them, along the southern New England coast, are Massachusetts, Narragansett, Wampanoag and a scattering of smaller tribes, with, just to the west, Nipmucs, Pequots and Mohegans; south again, between Long Island and Chesapeake Bay, are Montauks, Wappingers, Lenni Lenape (or Delawares) and Powhatans. To make sense of it, you have to realize that what you are seeing is a snapshot of one moment in a constantly changing situation: these are not nation states, but groups of culturally - and often physically - related peoples who move within frontiers shaped by custom and mutual understanding rather than legal definition. But the impression of chaos - one of the key European perceptions of the eastern Indian - is illusory: although they managed their relationship with the land and with each other in a profoundly different way, their world was at least as orderly as contemporary Europe’s.

The more fluid approach starts with subsistence. Except in what is now Maine, where the northern Algonquians remained almost exclusively dependent on hunting, eastern Native Americans generally practised a mixed economy based on an annual cycle of activities closely adapted to the resources of their own area. During most of the year, they lived in permanent towns or villages of birch-bark covered ‘longhouses’ or wigwams - often surrounded by a tall defensive palisade of logs - and cultivated maize, beans and squash in nearby fields or ‘gardens’. At different seasons, however, some or all of the people would spread out from this base community to harvest a rich variety of other foods - deer, fish, wildfowl, clams, nuts, berries and more - from woods, rivers, lakes and ocean.

Although men often cleared the fields, most of the farming was done by women, who followed a distinctive pattern that puzzled many European observers. After centuries of selective cultivation in Meso-America to increase its nutritional value, maize had become - in the words of the Dutch traveller Isaack de Rasieres - ‘a grain to which much labour must be given, with weeding and earthing-up, or it does not thrive.’ The Algonquians painstakingly planted it, five or six grains at a time, in ‘heaps like molehills’, and then, as it started to grow, piled on more earth to protect the roots from birds. Beans, squash, pumpkins and tobacco were planted around the maize (which created a natural beanpole, often growing to five or six feet), and women would then tend the crops, meticulously keeping the weeds down with clamshell hoes, until, by the end of the summer, the fields had become a dense carpet of intertwined foodplants. When, after eight or ten years, the soil began to become exhausted, the Indians simply left it to regenerate and cleared new fields.

Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have viewed this system not as real farming at all but simply as a kind of part-time horticulture. The anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, for instance, claimed that the Native American ‘was not a farmer in our sense of the word’ at all, and that ‘Agriculture ... was not basic to life in the East; it was an auxiliary, in a sense a luxury ... excess planting was not practised, nor would it have led to anything in the way of economic or social benefit nor of increase of numbers. Ninety-nine per cent or more of what might have been developed remained virgin...’

It is worth looking a moment at this contention because it seems to confirm the central idea of both the Thoreau and Parkman traditions: that North America at the time of contact was more or less an untouched wilderness. As with the related subject of Native American population figures, this is more than simply an academic issue. Behind it lurks the ever-present question of how far Indians really ‘used’ the land and how justified or inevitable, therefore - in European eyes -was their removal. The eighteenth-century theorist of international law, Emerich Vattel, succinctly expressed what - to the conventional Western view - is at stake:

While the conquest of the civilized Empires of Peru and Mexico was a notorious usurpation ... colonies upon the continent of North America might, if done within just limits, have been entirely lawful. The people of those vast tracts of land rather roamed over them than inhabited them. [My italics]

Although the idea that American Indians ‘roamed’ remained a basic tenet for advocates of - and apologists for - European colonization, the recorded experience of early travellers and settlers give a very different picture of native life. As early as 1585, Thomas Hariot, describing the Algonquians of the Carolinas, commented on their ‘ingenious’ agriculture, including the use of ‘a graine of marvelous great increase; of a thousand, fifteen hundred and some two thousand fold’; a generation later, one Jamestown colonist estimated that a single Indian group, the Kecoughtans, had 3,000 acres of cornfields under cultivation. More conclusive proof of the extent of native agriculture comes from the simple fact that the first English colonies were only able to survive their first years because the surrounding Native Americans supported them with a ceaseless supply of maize and other produce. Clearly, this would have been impossible if Indian farming had not generated regular surpluses.

* * *

While women’s lives revolved largely around the rhythm of sowing, hoeing and harvesting, men’s work was still to a great extent dictated by the older, more irregular pattern of hunting and fishing, in which bursts of intense activity (and sometimes danger) away from home alternated with periods of relative idleness. In spring they erected fishing weirs on the rivers, hunted migratory birds and burnt the undergrowth from large areas of forest to create grassy ‘parks’ that attracted game and were easy to move through; later in the year, they might travel into the woods to hunt or build canoes, or make fishing trips to the coast; in autumn, after the harvest, there was often a second cycle of brush-clearance.

In October, villages generally broke up into family units to hunt, meeting a couple of months later and then remaining together for the rest of the winter. Often, continuous use and occupation had deforested a large area around their main settlements, and they would spend the coldest part of the year at a different site - perhaps a well-wooded valley - with plenty of fuel. One colonist, seeing the importance the Indians attached to warm fires, commented: Their Fire is instead of our bed-cloaths.’

The mobility of Algonquian societies was one factor in making Europeans underestimate the importance of farming in their economy. Another, almost certainly, was the division of labour, which English colonists found constantly surprising. The men bestowe their times in fishing, hunting, wars and such manlike exercises,’ wrote John Smith of the Indians of Virginia, ‘scorning to be seene in any woman like exercise, which is the cause that the women be verie painefull and the men often idle. The women and children do the rest of the worke. They make mats, baskets, pots, morters, pound their corne, make their bread, prepare their victuals, plant their corne, gather their corne, beare all kind of burdens and such like.’ Further north, in New England, Christopher Levett stated even more bluntly: Their wives are their slaves, and do all the work; the men will do nothing but kill beasts, fish, etc.’ What made this even more remarkable was the women’s apparently uncomplaining acceptance of their role, which, according to Lescarbot, they were ‘neither forced nor tormented’ to perform. (Colonists recorded that the Indians, for their part, retorted - as John Clayton put it - by calling ‘the Inglish men fools in working themselves and keeping their wives idle.’) While it may be that Indian men really worked less than their wives, it is also true that a visitor to a native community would have seen very little of what they did contribute, since most male pursuits took them away from home. Unlike Native Americans, moreover, Europeans tended to see the male preserves of hunting and fishing as leisure rather than subsistence activities. This heightened the impression of male indolence and further undermined the Indians’ - to European eyes - already tenuous claim to ‘use’ the land. During the course of the seventeenth century, these initially innocent misapprehensions were transmuted into arguments to justify dispossessing native people, leaving - long after it had outlived its political usefulness - a powerful legacy of ideas about the ‘virgin wilderness’ supposedly discovered by the first settlers.

Other aspects of Native American life offered further rich opportunities for European misunderstanding and exploitation. East coast Algonquian society could not be understood in the simple binary terms of a nation state (you’re either English or not English): it was woven together from several distinct strands which created a complex web of allegiances and obligations and gave each individual a set of complementary identities. As Nanepashemet explains: ‘... people had different ways of identifying themselves. There was personal self identification. There was being a member of a lineage, which might extend into many other communities. There was the community identification, and identification with people who spoke the same language/Which one of these complementary identities was paramount at any given moment depended on circumstances: the time of year, what you were doing, where you were.

Probably the most fundamental element was the ‘clan’ or lineage’, a group of blood relatives tracing their descent from a common - usually female - ancestor. This form of kinship often bound together not just a few families but hundreds of individuals, because, as a seventeenth-century Dutch observer reported, the Indians ‘reckon consanguinity to the eighth degree.’

But the Algonquians also belonged to extended families, bands and villages which cut across the ties of blood relationship. Because they were exogamous (i.e., you could not marry within your own lineage), any marriage not only united the very different worlds of men and women but also created a bond between two kin groups. Each level of society, from the single household up, inevitably connected the individual to a network of people outside the clan and created another focus for loyalty. Social scientists tend to view this sort of arrangement simply as a mechanism for extending mutual obligations: as Edward B. Tylor breezily put it in 1888, ‘Among tribes of low culture there is but one means known of keeping up permanent alliance, and that means is intermarriage.’ We get a more intuitive - if still only dim - sense of what it meant to the Algonquians themselves by thinking about our own overlapping feelings for our families, our in-laws, our neighbourhood, our workplace, our country.

The ‘nations’ encountered by Europeans were, in effect, alliances of two or more interrelated lineages. What gave them, to a great extent, their collective identity and power was the quality of the leaders -generally known as werowances in Virginia and sachems or sagamores in New England - who represented and acted for the whole group in areas of common interest such as the allocation of hunting territories or diplomacy with other peoples. A werowance or sachem normally inherited his office, but the degree of real authority he was able to exercise depended largely on his personal attributes: family connections, wealth, charisma, political skill and - sometimes - military or religious prowess. To retain power he had to attract and keep the support of his people, and if - in the colonist William Wood’s blunt phrase - his ‘fair carriage bear him not out the better, they will soon unscepter him.’

The Algonquian form of leadership confronted Europeans with an apparent conundrum: as Roger Willia...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note About Terminology
• Prologue
• I: Origins
• II: Invasion
• III: Internal Frontiers
• Epilogue
• Sources and Further Reading
• Permissions Acknowledgements
• Index