http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/09/04/native_ingenuity?mode=PF
Interesting little article.
LIKE EVERY AMERICAN schoolchild, I learned the story of the Pilgrims in school–how half of the Plymouth colonists died of starvation in the first winter, the remainder surviving only by squatting on an abandoned Indian village and ransacking Indian homes and graves for caches of food. But it was only as an adult, visiting the splendid reconstruction of the colony in Plymouth, that it occurred to me to wonder why the local Wampanoag Indians had let them stay.
The Wampanoag confederation, which occupied coastal Massachusetts, was bigger and more numerous than the Plymouth colony, and jealous of its territory. Why would it let these foreigners, whom the Indians must have regarded as thieves and interlopers, occupy a valuable piece of coastal real estate? For that matter, why did Indians permit any of the first European colonies–all of which were poor, fractious, and ill-prepared–in North America?
When I asked one of the authentically costumed, '‘living history" workers at the reconstructed village why the Indians hadn’t driven away the Pilgrims, she told me that the Wampanoag wanted European goods, especially metal items like cook pots, hatchets, and guns. Her explanation precisely reflected the Pilgrims’ view. After the Wampanoag signed an alliance with the colony, Edward Winslow, a future Plymouth governor, wrote that the Indians were lured by superior European technology–especially European guns, ''for our peeces [guns] are terrible unto them."
In my American history classes such stories recurred time and time again. Although European colonies were feeble at the outset, the teachers explained, they eventually triumphed over the natives because of their better technology. This explanation is still common today. ''The fires of modernization and industrialization…never took light over most of the non-European world," explains historian Eric L. Jones in ''The European Miracle," a widely cited text. ''Europe was a mutant civilization in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology." Native Americans, poor laggards, didn’t have a chance.
Contemporary research suggests, though, that this picture is too simple. Indeed, the conventional view of Indians’ technological backwardness says less about the relative sophistication of the two societies than our own abiding misconceptions about the nature of technology. As the University of Texas historian Alfred W. Crosby has noted, in Columbus’s day Europe ''had a greater proportion of individuals who understood wheels, levers, and gears than any other society on earth." Perhaps naturally, European elites ranked other societies by the number and complexity of their mechanical devices, a practice still commonly followed by their descendants. Living in the bubble of our own computers and automobiles, we tend to think of technology in terms of electricity, plastic and metal, motors and wheels.
Pedro Pizarro, Francisco’s nephew and page, survived enough bloody battles with the Inca to be under no illusions about indigenous technology. In his memoirs, he attributed the Spanish victory not to overwhelming European technology but to overwhelming European diseases. A few years before Pizarro arrived, smallpox–introduced from Europe via Mexico–swept the Inca realm, killing the emperor, his chosen heir, much of the court and the military leadership, and as many as one out of three inhabitants of the empire. The vacancy at the top led to a ruinous, multi-year civil war that killed thousands more. ‘’[Had the emperor] been alive when we Spaniards entered this land," Pedro remarked, ''it would have been impossible for us to win it… And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land." Germs, not guns or steel, conquered the Inca.
The same held true in the Northeast–the region wasn’t conquered so much as infected. By the time of the Pilgrims, Europeans had been visiting New England for a century. Thickly populated and heavily armed, Indian villages had welcomed the trade but fended off permanent settlement. In 1616 a French ship wrecked off Cape Cod. Indians captured the few survivors and distributed them into different villages. At least one sailor had a disease, perhaps viral hepatitis, which he bequeathed to his captors. The results were devastating. Indians ''died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton wrote. Death rates in coastal New England reached 95 percent. Among the victims were the great majority of Wampanoag.
Although statements like Morton’s are scattered throughout colonial accounts, most historians did not take note of them until 30 years ago, and they still have not percolated into high-school lesson plans. Part of the reason for the holdup, no doubt, is due to the disciplinary boundaries that long kept historians of politics and historians of science apart. But another part, one assumes, is simple ethnocentrism, an intellectual vice in every society. Europeans and their descendants have long assumed that cultures were behind the intellectual eight ball if they didn’t do things Europeans were good at. But this view may only be the luxury of those whose triumphs were ensured by microorganisms that they neither understood nor controlled.
Well. For discussion: does this change the moral content of stealing the land or not?