VI
I want to move beyond the exclusivists themselves because in this connection
they’re just support troops. The main weight of denial where Indians
are concerned is carried by mainstream American historians, like James
Axtell at the College of William and Mary, who’s considered the
dean of U.S. “ethnohistorians.”124 He’s our David
Irving, so to speak. Actually, we’ve got a bunch of Irving look-alikes
operating in this area—try Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., managing to
win a Pulitzer Prize with a biography of Andrew Jackson that never once
mentions the “Trail of Tears,” that is, removal of the Five
Civilized Tribes from the Southeast, which I highlighted earlier and
which Jackson was instrumental in initiating;125 or Patricia Nelson
Limerick’s writing a new, revised and very popular “history
of the West” that avoids all reference to such uncomfortable events
as major massacres.126 But I want to use Axtell as exemplar, partly
because he is, and partly because I can do it anecdotally.
Before I go into
the anecdote, however, I want to ask what an “ethnohistorian”
is supposed to be. I mean what is “ethnohistory”? Sounds
kind of exotic doesn’t it? But how do you distinguish it from
“history,” per se? History, “real” history,
is the history of Europe and its offshoots; white people’s history,
as it were. “Ethnohistory,” then, is all the sideline stuff
concerning everybody else. But, then, what does that imply? That white
folks have no ethnicity? That the term “ethnicity” itself
applies only to people with a certain melanin content, and is thus being
used as a euphemism for “race”? If so, isn’t the whole
procedure of prefixing certain disciplinary subparts with “ethno-”
a covert racialist construction, and isn’t “racialist”
just a polite way of saying “racist”?127 As for myself,
I figure all history is ethnically-oriented, so, either you call the
whole field “ethnohistory,” or none of it.
Anyway, Axtell is
quite happy being described as an “ethnohistorical” heavy-hitter,
and, it follows perhaps, he’s always been avid to utilize that
peculiar standing in defense of orthodoxy, no matter how illogically.
He ran around all over the country during the prelude to the Quin- centennial
publicly bashing graduate students for using the term “genocidal”
to describe the Columbian legacy, although he himself had already acknowledged
five separate genocides as occurring in North America between 1630 and
1765. He was also prone to railing against comparisons of conquistadors
to nazis because, in his words, “after all, the conquistadors
were human beings and we need to understand them as such.”128
One can only wonder what he thinks the nazis were. Space men? Anyhow,
needless to say, there were a few of us out there who were gunning for
him in return, and Don Grinde, the Yamasee historian, and I finally
caught up with him in public at the American Historical Association
conference in 1993.
He was conducting
a workshop for high school history teachers, running his usual line,
when Grinde and I sauntered in and started popping inconvenient questions.
Pretty soon, his face looked like a beet and we were embroiled in a
demographic argument and the high school teachers’ eyes were getting
real big. Finally, in sheer exasperation, he threw up his hands and
said something to the effect of, “Fine. Just to end this damned
argument, let’s say I accept your contention that there were 15
million people here when the first European arrived. It doesn’t
matter. It still wasn’t genocide.” When I asked why, he
replied, and this one I can quote verbatim, “Because no matter
how many there were, 75 percent of them still died of disease.”129
Now, there’s Smithsonian-style “science” at its finest.
He can’t tell you with any certainty how many there were, but
he can tell you with precision what proportion died of what cause. This
is the cornerstone denier’s position with regard to what I’m
going to follow David Stannard and call the American Holocaust.130
Well, Grinde and
I just glanced at each other and smiled, because we knew we had him.
And Don says, “Okay Jim, just to be fair, let us accept that.
So what?” Axtell gets all puffed up like he’s ready to accept
another award and delivers his “crushing” blow, speaking
as if he’s delivering a lecture to 4-year-olds. “Because
nobody can be held responsible for the deaths attributable to disease,”
he replies. Now’s my chance, so I say, “That’s funny.
Something like half the victims of the Holocaust died of disease, and
the Nuremberg Tribunal held that the nazis were as guilty in relation
to those deaths as they were for those they shot, gassed and burned
alive.”131 Now, he looks a little flustered. “That’s
true,” he says, “and I agree with the decision, but you’re
comparing apples and oranges.” He got a chorus on that one, not
just Grinde and I, but some of the teachers joining in: “How’s
that, Jim?”
“Because,”
he responds, “whatever else can be said of the nazis, they were
20th century men. Even the guards in the camps, who were mostly uneducated,
were aware of how disease is communicated. They knew they were forcing
people to live under conditions where epidemics would run rampant, and
so they were properly held accountable for the deaths that resulted.
You simply can’t apply that standard to Columbus, or the conquistadors,
or anyone, really, until the end of the 19th century. They had no idea
what a microbe was, no scientific understanding of what was happening
to the Indians. So, even though they brought in the microbes that caused
mass death, they can’t be held accountable for it.132 And to argue
otherwise, as you two are doing for your own obviously political reasons,
is not to further historical understanding but to preclude it altogether.”
There it is in all
its glory. The whole rap, succinctly framed, by which American historical
orthodoxy has sought to make the virtual disappearance of North America’s
indigenous population seem benign. An “inadvertent tragedy,”
is the usual term deployed.133 Can you really buy that? Well, let’s
interrogate it a little. Did Columbus, and the conquistadors, and the
other Europeans importing pathogens to the New World understand the
cause/effect relationship of their conduct, and can they therefore be
legitimately seen as culpable? The answer is “absolutely.”
How can I know this? Because, as any specialist like James Axtell knows
perfectly well, they wrote it down, not once or twice or on occasion,
but more-or-less continuously. It’s there in ships’ logs
and the reports of expeditionary leaders, in official correspondence
and private diaries, in clerical documents and published travelogues.
Some bemoan it, others celebrate it, and most attribute it to intervention
of the “Hand of God”; but they all agree on one thing: “We
come, they die in huge numbers.”134 And what was their collective
response to this understanding? Did they recoil in horror and say, “Wait
a minute, we’ve got to halt the process, or at least slow it down
until we can get a handle on how to prevent these effects”? Nope.
Their response pretty much across-the-board was to accelerate their
rate of arrival, and to spread out as much as was humanly possible.135
For anyone who might
still find the situation too “ambiguous,” I’ll hand
you the smoking gun. It comes in the form of an order written in 1763
by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, a ranking official in North America, to a colonel
named Henry Bouquet. In it, Amherst instructs Bouquet to invite representatives
of a multinational military alliance assembled by the Ottawa leader
Pontiac to a peace parlay in the Ohio River Valley. Since the English
were doing the asking, Amherst observed, frontier diplomatic protocol
required that they bestow gifts upon the Indians who showed up. “Make
these,” he instructed, “items taken from a small pox infirmary,
in order”—and I’m quoting him directly—”in
order that we may extirpate this execrable race.” A couple of
weeks later, Bouquet writes back, saying that he’d done as he
was instructed, distributing blankets, handkerchiefs and “other
sundry items,” and that “hopefully, this will obtain the
desired result.”136 It did. Even by the Smithsonian’s low
count, somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 Indians died of smallpox
over the next six months.137
There are a few
items worthy of mention in this connection. First, Howard Peckham, longtime
president of the American Historical Association, discovered the documents
I’m referring to in the British Royal Archive during the mid-1930s,
but then proceeded to sit on them for years.138 Second, the “incident”
has been described as “history’s first documented instance
of biological warfare.” That’s wrong on two counts. On the
one hand, it’s well documented that Tamerlane was catapulting
the bodies of plague victims into besieged cities in order to spread
disease a full century before Columbus (which means that Columbus and
his peers weren’t quite so ignorant of how disease is communicated
as Axtell would have it).139 On the other, “war” is directed
against combatants. Amherst said in so many words that his goal was
to “extirpate the race .” So, what we actually have here
is history’s first documented instance of genocide attempted by
bacteriological means.
It’s important
not to view what Amherst did as an isolated matter. It wasn’t.
It’s simply the best documented. There are several earlier cases,
one involving Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame. There’s some
pretty strong circumstantial evidence that Smith introduced smallpox
among the Wampanoags as a means of clearing the way for the invaders.140
Over the next century, both the Pequot War and what’s called King
Philip’s War were fought in the same area, at least in part because
the Indians had become convinced—and, again, there’s evidence
to support it—that the colonists were deliberately infecting them,
using contaminated trade goods for the purpose.141
I don’t want
to leave the impression that this sort of thing happened only in the
Northeast, or only at the hands of the English. In 1836, at Fort Clark,
on the upper Missouri River, the U.S. Army did the same thing as Amherst.
It was considered desirable to eliminate the Mandans, who were serving
as middlemen in the regional fur trade, and, by claiming a share of
the profits in the process, diminishing the take of John Jacob Astor
and other American businessmen. So the commander of Fort Clark had a
boatload of blankets shipped upriver from a smallpox infirmary in St.
Louis, with the idea of distributing them during a “friendship”
parlay with the Mandans. There’s a bit of confusion as to whether
they actually started passing them out, or whether some young Indian
men “stole” a couple of blankets, but it really doesn’t
matter, because the army was planning on distributing them anyway. Irrespective
of the particulars in this regard, when the first Mandans began to display
symptoms of the disease, they went straight to the post surgeon. They
knew nothing about treating smallpox, but they’d heard about it
and were terrified of it, and, since it was a white man’s disease,
they went to the white doctor to find out what to do. What did he tell
them? To scatter, to run for their lives, to seek shelter in the villages
of healthy relatives as far away as possible.142
It follows that
what might have been a localized epidemic—the Mandans were pretty
much doomed the moment the smallpox broke out among them, but it might
have ended with them—ends up a pandemic that rages for 15 years,
from the Blackfeet confederation in southern Canada all the way down
into Texas, killing who knows how many people. The Smithsonian acknowledges
about 100,000 fatalities. Thornton suggests it may have been as many
as 400,000.143 Whatever the number, it made the subsequent U.S. military
conquest of the Great Plains region, which began in earnest about the
time the pandemic was ending, a whole lot easier than it would otherwise
have been. Of this, there can be no doubt. The fact that the army still
had a tough time subduing the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Comanches and other
peoples of the Plains is simply a testimony to how hard those peoples
fought to preserve their ways of life, not that the effects of the disease
were less than they were.144
The “Fort
Clark episode,” as it’s often called, has always been passed
off by mainstream historians as just another one of those “inadvertent
tragedies.” There aren’t any documents as explicit in their
expression of intent as there are in the Amherst case, so they very
conveniently chalk it up to “ignorance” on the part of the
officers involved, including the post surgeon. And it’s of course
true that they weren’t yet acquainted with microbes, but let’s
consider what they did know. Lady Mary Wortley Montague had introduced
the principle of vaccination to England somewhere around 1715. By about
1750, the whole English army had been inoculated against smallpox—that’s
what allowed Amherst to do what he did—and, by 1780, George Washington
had ordered that his Continental Army be inoculated as well.145 So,
unquestionably, the surgeon at Fort Clark was aware of the procedure.
It had long since become standard. Indeed, a whole supply of vaccine,
designated for inoculating Indians, was sitting in his store-room when
the disease broke out. It had been there for several months, and there
is no evidence that he’d ever tried to use it for its intended
purpose.146 Both the surgeon and the post commander were also quite
aware of the principle of quarantine. Quarantining people who’d
come down with the pox had been standard medical practice for the better
part of 50 years. All things considered, then, it seems to me you’d
have to have undergone a lobotomy to actually believe that the surgeon’s
telling the Mandans to “scatter” and “run for their
lives” was either “accidental” or an “honest
mistake.”
And this isn’t
the end of it. Items appeared in the San Francisco press in the early
1850s indicating that the pox had been deliberately introduced among
the Indians of northern California, and a decade later the papers in
that city were still discussing the efficacy of “exterminating”
Indians by disease.147 It’s their word, not mine. Later in the
19th century, there seems little question but that a group of traders
did the same with the Carriers and other peoples in northern British
Columbia.148 It continues right on into the early 20th century when
it’s fairly clear that an epidemic was unleashed among the Dene
of the Northwest Territories. At least no particular effort was made
to provide medical treatment once the disease took hold.149 So what’s
that come to? A dozen instances, including three that were hugely lethal,
where it is either known, or where there’s very good reason to
suspect, that disease was consciously and intentionally used to destroy
native populations.150 There’s also a whole backdrop of discourse
in which newspaper editors and the like are both celebrating what’s
been done and arguing that there should be more of it. It’s in
the face of this record—which is quite preliminary, very little
research has been done as yet—that people like James Axtell persist
in asserting that the erosion of native population through disease was
“benign,” free of perpetrators, and that it “precludes
proper historical understanding” to so much as suggest anything
else.151 I don’t know how you define denial, but this works pretty
well for me.
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