“A Collision of Cultures”

Michael Dorris

Author of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Paper Trail: Essays

 

Imagine the scene:  it is an autumn day in the late fifteenth century.  On a beach with rose-colored sand, somewhere in the Caribbean, two groups of people are about to meet for the first time.  The world will never again be the same.

            Emerging from a small landing boat are a group of men exhausted from a long and frightening ocean voyage.  They didn’t trust where they were going and now they don’t know where they’ve arrived - but it doesn’t look at all like the India described by Marco Polo.  They come from Spain and Portugal and Genoa, are Christian and Jewish.  The more superstitious and uneducated among them feared that, by sailing west across the Atlantic, they would fall off the edge of the planet.

            The men seek treasure and adventure, fame and glory, but the people who greet them seem quite poor.  They are not dressed in fine brocade encrusted with precious jewels, as one would expect of subjects of the great Khan.  They are, in fact, not dressed at all, except for a few woven skirts and dabs of paint.  Are they demons?  Are they dangerous?  Do they know where the gold is hidden?

            Watching the boat draw near are a cluster of men, women, and children.  They speak a dialect of the Arawak language and are delighted to receive new guests, especially ones who aren’t painted white-signifying death.  Strangers arrive often, anxious to barter parrot feathers or new foods or useful objects made of stone or shell.  These particular visitors look rather strange, it’s true: their bodies are covered with odd materials, not at all suited for the warm climate, and they communicate with each other in a tongue as indecipherable as Carib or Nahuatl.

            Up close there are more surprises.  There are no women in the group, and some among the hosts speculate on why this may be the case.  Have their clan mothers expelled these men, banished them to wander alone and orphaned?  Has their tribe suffered some disaster?  And another thing:  they have the strong odor of people who have not had their daily bath.  Are they from some simple and rude society that doesn’t know how to comport itself?

            But all this notwithstanding, guests are guests and should be treated with hospitality.  They must be offered food and shelter, must be entertained with stories and music, before the serious business of trade begins.

            DIVERSITY OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES  

The earth was much larger than Christopher Columbus imagined, and its human population, was far more diverse.  The land mass he encountered on his transatlantic voyages was thoroughly inhabited by more than one hundred million people, from the frigid steppes of Patagonia at the furthest extremity of South America to the dark forests of Newfoundland.  In the inhospitable Arctic, Inuits foraged for much of the year in small nuclear of extended family groups, assembling only sporadically to carry on the necessary business of marriage, remembrance, or collective action, and only when the availability of food was at its peak.  In the lush and verdant jungles of Yucatan and Guatemala, Mayas had invented agriculture, writing, and an accurate calendar fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, and they had gone on to become populous in complex, class-oriented societies supported by a nutritionally balanced diet based on maize, squashes, and beans.  In the Andes of northwestern South America, early Quechuas domesticated the potato, engineered an intricate system of roads and bridges, formed a nation in which the state owned all property except houses and movable household goods, and collected taxes in labor.

            The Western Hemisphere was home to literally hundreds of cultures whose people spoke a multiplicity of languages and dialects derived from at least ten mutually exclusive linguistic families.  Many societies had well-developed traditions of science and medicine—some forty percent of the modern world’s pharmacopoeia was utilized in America before 1492 – and literature, visual art, and philosophy flourished in a variety of contexts.  Yet beyond a shared geography, there were few common denominators; due to the haphazard and long process by which immigrating peoples had distributed themselves throughout the continents, the Western Hemisphere thrived as a living laboratory of disparate lifestyles, linguistic variety, and cultural pluralism.

            The Karok in California were no more likely to share social values with the Anishanabe of Wisconsin or the Yanomamo of Venezuela than they were with groups in Polynesia or Persia.  Every type of social organization existed: theocracies among the Natchez, matrilineal clan descent among the Delaware, incipient forms of representative government among the Arawak, confederacies among the Huron, loosely knit bands among the peoples of the Amazon.  The Zunis maintained stable towns and the Toltecs dwelled in cosmopolitan cities.  Vast trading networks linked the so-called Mound Builders of central North America with the tribes living along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as with peoples on the North Atlantic seaboard.

            Obviously, no single group was directly aware of more than a fraction of the other extant societies - and there was no conception of an overarching group identity.   “We” was the family, the community, the tribe, and “they” were everyone else, know and unknown.  The fact of cultural diversity, however, was manifest.  Within a day’s walk of virtually every indigenous population could be found at least one and probably more than one unrelated community whose inhabitants, relative to the visitor, spoke a totally foreign and incomprehensible language, adhered to a unique cosmology, dressed in unusual clothing, ate exotic foods, and had a dissimilar political organization with peculiar variations on age and gender roles.

            Native persons in most regions of precontact America could and undoubtedly did believe that they belonged to the smartest, most tasteful, most accomplished, and most handsome human constellation in the universe, but clearly they knew that their particular culture was not the only one.  Variety, in whichever way it was construed and explained, was inescapably the human norm.

            It is little wonder, therefore, that for Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, America proved to be much more than a single new world:  it was an unimagined universe.  The sheer heterogeneity of Western Hemisphere societies challenged every cherished medieval assumption about the uniform and orderly nature of human origin and destiny.  It was as if the cultural hodgepodge of America revealed a whole new set of potential operating mores – or, even more disconcerting, served as an ego-threatening intimation that there were no dependable rules at all.  Imagine the shock!  To have believed for a thousand years that everything and everybody of consequence was known and neatly categorized, and then suddenly to open a window and learn that, all along, one had been dwelling in a small house with no perspective on the teeming and chaotic city that surrounded one’s accustomed neighborhood – with no map or dictionary provided.

           

THE EUROPEAN VIEW OF OTHER CULTURES

Practically speaking, prior to the so-called “Age of Discovery”  Europeans had little contact with populations substantively dissimilar to themselves – certainly not in a sufficient quotient to shake their entrenched ethnocentrism.  But with the dramatic appearance of Western Hemisphere, the dazzling implications of global heterogeneity could no longer be avoided.

            The argument for the centrality of Europe, if the concept were to remain intact, was forced to alter its traditional rationalizations in order to account for all else that turned out to exist on the rest of the planet.  The initial solution, analogous to the ostrich that sticks its head into the sand at the first sight of trouble, was abject denial.  If new data didn’t fit into old explanations, then it couldn’t be accurate.  Later, as the diversity of humanity became increasingly manifest, the working definition of “true human being” became more and more rigid, more and more narrow, and long theological debates took place on such esoterica as whether or not natives of America or Australia even had souls. 

            This condescending approach was hard to maintain in the face of the intelligence and industry evident in the cities, plus the bountiful agriculture, science, art and especially, wealth reported by conquistadors like Cortes and Pizarro.  Indeed, the empire civilizations of Meso – and Latin America – those of Aztec and Inca, specifically – were probably easiest for Europeans to swallow.  Though the customs varied and the official religions were strange to the early Spanish explorers, at least the motivation goals were recognizable: a thirst for conquest, the accumulation of gold, a consolidation of political power in the hands of single leader and his coterie.

            Smaller, tribally based cultures of North America, on the other hand, must have struck Europeans as otherworldly upon first encounter.  By and large these groups maintained no standing armies, practiced a mind-boggling variety of inordinately flexible religions, and were non-literate; they were often passing property and authority through a female line of descent.  Few North American societies sought to impost ideology on neighboring cultures, insisting instead, that freedom of the individual predominated over the power of the state.  Leadership tended to spring from expertise or proven ability rather than from dynastic heredity, and in any given society there might exist a multiplicity of “chief’s” – each a specialist in a limited arena of group life, none supreme over all the others.

            Furthermore, most native North American peoples considered land to be an abstract commodity similar in kind to air or water or fire – something necessary for human survival but above personal ownership.  While the notion of a group or a person’s rights to use a certain piece of property was widespread, there was almost no corresponding idea of “title” or of land owned exclusively and permanently by those who didn’t directly work it.   Concepts of accumulation varied widely, from those that held all nonpersonal items in common, to Northwest Coast “potlatch” society lie the Kwakiutl and Nootka where family status depended on formal giveaways of property – to the point of temporary impoverishment.

            Armed conflict could occur between tribes, parts of tribes, or individuals for a variety of reasons, but usually the hostilities lasted no longer than a single season or encounter, and loss of life was minimal.  As a rule, there was no insistence upon “total victory” or the complete annihilation of an enemy.  Battles were fought for personal reasons – revenge, honor, or greed – and once these limited objectives had been achieved, the reason for a prolonged hostile action no longer existed.  Last year’s antagonists might be next year’s hunting partners.

            AS competition with European invaders became increasingly intense, few indigenous societies mounted effective resistance, and those that did were soon vanquished.  Not only had most Native American cultures by and large failed to invent effective weaponry or support standing military forces, but they were almost immediately devasted by an unseen foe that, according to some demographers, wiped out ninety-five percent of the precontact population.  A pandemic of diseases which had long existed in the “old world” but never previously in the “new” – influenza, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and cholera prime among them – were inadvertently carried to the Western Hemisphere by the first European visitors, and in a matter of several generations the virulent bacteria, spread from one indigenous population to the next.  Often by the time the first Spanish or British traders or settlers arrived in the interior of the continents, most Indians were already dead, the straggling survivors traumatized and in despair.  These lands, which in their naiveté some European chroniclers called “empty,” had only recently been depleted of their native inhabitants.

            In fact, they were simply “different” parts of the mosaic of human possibility and potential -- the laboratory of cultural experiment – that characterized the American of 1491.  Collectively, its societies left tremendous legacies to the contemporary – world, from cultivated crops (corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, manioc) to political structures (models of representative government, gender equality) and philosophical approaches toward environmental conservation and peaceful coexistence.  Many of the ideas and ideals first developed among its native peoples remain viable, sane options for a world that grows, through technology, increasingly small, increasingly homogeneous.  Diversity that multifaceted reflection of human ingenuity, has come under suspicion just when it is clear that our stripped and exhausted planet needs it most.