Savage Truth-Richard Brookhiser - Review

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is author most recently of Alexander Hamilton, American.

The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, by James Wilson (Atlantic, 496 pp., $27)

What do you call the aboriginal inhabitants of North America? "Indians" brings to mind athletic teams, Jeep Cherokees, and westerns. "Native Americans" evokes red-skinned Thoreaus and New Age drumming ceremonies. James Wilson, the British author of The Earth Shall Weep, uses both terms for lack of better, though he doesn't much like either. "What unites them," he says, is an assumption that Indians are "exotic relic[s] of some earlier stage that we have passed through: either . . . a kind of primitive anarchy that we have overcome (in nature, in ourselves) or an innocent Golden Age that we have forfeited through greed and destructiveness." He wants instead to show Indians as very much alive, and to recount their past in all its variety.

Wilson is foiled at the outset by the Indians' lack of written records. This tilts his book to the last 400 years of white-Indian contact-as if a history of Japan began with St. Francis Xavier and Commodore Perry. Even in that restricted slice of time, American Indians showed an array of cultures, from cities with tens of thousands in the Southwest and the Mississippi Valley, to hardscrabble scavenging on the Great Plains.

The first and most devastating effect of European-Indian contact was disease, particularly smallpox. Illnesses borne by passing traders ran ahead of settlers and soldiers; the mortality rates in populations without immunity were often higher than in Hiroshima after the atom bomb. The enfeeblement and despair caused by such outbreaks meant that Indians were reeling even before the challenge of direct encounter.

Whites pursued various strategies in dealing with their new neighbors. Franciscan missionaries in the Southwest were impressed by the hierarchical societies of the pueblos, co-opting what seemed to them anticipations of Roman Catholic practice. At the opposite extreme, the settlers who blitzed into California after the Gold Rush pursued a policy of extermination. Wilson quotes the judgment of a 19th-century historian that the state lacked "a single Indian war bordering on respectability." The usual pattern was a two-step of land hunger on the part of whites, followed by conflict. Battle for battle, the Indians fought well. Some tribes and leaders, such as the Iroquois, and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, showed real diplomatic and military flair. But overall the Indians lost every war to the weight of numbers.

After victory, some whites tried new strategies. Richard Pratt, an Army captain who had commanded Cherokee scouts, wanted to give the vanquished the Christian religion and the 3 Rs. John Collier, a free spirit of the lost generation who became Franklin Roosevelt's Commissioner of Indian Affairs, wanted to send the Indians back to their shamans.

Various Indian nations tried various means of coping with their new situation. The Plains Indians rode into history on the backs of Spanish horses, while the Cherokees, who originally lived in the old Southeast, adopted slavery, newspapers, and other white ways. A recurring pattern in different societies was a prophetic dream, rebuking the visionary and his people for abandoning their old customs. There would follow a neo-traditionalist revival, sometimes deluded-as in the belief of Great Plains ghost dancers that they would be immune to bullets; sometimes quite practical-the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake preached temperance, after recovering from an alcoholic coma.

If North America had remained a stage for contending European empires, some Indians might have held on to spectral independence as client "states," like the maharajahs of British India. But an expansionist republic was destined to overwhelm them (one of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the British attempt to keep Americans east of the Alleghenies, and out of the territory of their Indian allies). As America's sense of itself frays away into multiculturalism, now might be the time for Indians who wish to remain distinct to seize some room to maneuver, though all they have managed to do so far is open casinos. Video poker may be a poetically apt answer to fire water, but surely the Great Spirit has loftier goals for His children than pandering to white vices. Many Native Americans, meanwhile, will prefer to become plain Americans, assimilating culturally or genetically. John Randolph of Roanoke was part Indian; so is Jesse Jackson.

Wilson should have included the native peoples of Alaska in his survey: The Aleut experience with Russian fur trappers and Orthodox missionaries covers the gamut. He should also have worked harder to free himself from noble-savage myths. He tells us that the Anasazi of the Southwest made "spectacular" baskets and pots, but not (as a recent New Yorker article reports) that they were tyrannical cannibals. Still, The Earth Shall Weep is a useful introduction to a rich subject. Indians' "experience over the last five centuries has been a story of almost unimaginable pain and suffering," Wilson concludes, "but also of extraordinary transformation and rebirth. The wily, shapeshifting, contradictory, heroic trickster, whom many contemporary Indians regard as the key motif of Native American culture, will surprise us again."

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group