Discussion Board 2
Please respond to the following prompts thoroughly and thoughtfully. To see grading rubric for your post, please click the three vertical dots in the right hand corner and then click Show Rubric.
1. Give one example of the way dominant cartography/mapping has contributed to the erasure of Indigenous histories on the landmass of Turtle Island (North America).
2. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, what did “discovery” actually mean and how was it connected to white supremacy?
3. Remember to respond thoroughly and thoughtfully to another classmate’s post.
CHAPTER 1
Borders and Borderlands
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
JULIANA BARR
This essay collection rests on the straightforward premise that American
Indians are crucial to the teaching of U.S. history. Yet some might ask,
“Why Indians?” The clearest response is that North America was not a
“new world” in 1492 but a very old one with a history far lengthier than
what has come since. More specifcally, at the time of European invasion,
there was no part of North America that was not claimed and ruled by
sovereign Indian regimes. The Europeans whose descendants would create the United States did not come to an unsettled wilderness; they grafed
their colonies and settlements onto long-existent Indian homelands that
constituted the entire continent. We cannot understand European and
Anglo-American colonial worlds unless we understand the Native worlds
from which they took their shape.
It seems an odd realization that in teaching American history we discuss
Indian sovereignty and bordered domains primarily in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries when they were most under assault by U.S. policies
that sought to dispossess Indian nations of land and disenfranchise them
of their power. Thus we tend to talk about Indian sovereignty in negative
terms—as something they were always in the process of losing over the
course of U.S. history. Yet we need to address sovereignty in positive terms
because we cannot begin to understand how Euro-American colonialism
wore away at it unless we frst know how Indians exercised power over
the land and vis-à-vis their Native and European neighbors.
Thus we must begin by acknowledging the fundamental essence of
Indian sovereignty—“the power a nation exerts within unambiguous borders.”1 More specifcally, we must recognize “how Indians understood
territory and boundaries, how they extended power over geographic space,
and how their practices of claiming, marking, and understanding territory
difered not only from Europeans’ but also from each other’s.” In my
own research, if one compares the border marking of hunter-gatherers,
sedentary agriculturalists, and mounted hunters and raiders in the region
that would become Texas and the southern plains, one fnds that residency,
economy, trade, politics, raiding, horticulture, hunting, ethnicity, kinship,
9
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
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alliance, and enmity all played a part in shaping diferent Indian nations’
geographic dominion. Yet, no matter the political economy, all of them
governed and defended bounded, sovereign domains.
Let us look briefy at those three case studies in Texas and the southern
plains in order to get the conversation about Native borders going. It is
ofen assumed that hunter-gatherers may be better understood for what
they lacked as opposed to what they had, but they maintained clearly
delineated ethnic domains defned by kinship and marriage. For huntergatherers such as Coahuilteco and Karankawa speakers, territories were
ofen shared spaces of control within which certain groups maintained
exclusive rights to collective ranges and resources. The allegiances among
the groups meant that they joined together to hunt and to defend the lands
they held in common. The boundaries of their territory were well established, known to all, and marked by natural sites such as rivers or bays and
manmade phenomena such as watering holes, petroglyphs/pictographs, or
painted trees. Trespass was a legal concept, and once Europeans arrived
in the region they were subject to that charge.
Sedentary agriculturalists such as Caddos exercised control over a more
expansive bordered domain made up of rings of settlement. Hunting territories manned and defended by small family groups in hunting lodges
made up the outermost ring. Moving inward, the next ring was a space
made up of farming homesteads surrounded by cultivated felds and small
hamlets, each represented by a subchief. At the core, one found the ceremonial complex and primary township of the head political and religious
Caddo leadership. To secure their domain Caddos had border control as
well as passport and surveillance systems, and within their territory were
internal boundaries between member nations.
For mobile groups such as Comanches and Apaches, raiding served geopolitical as well as economic purpose in aiding territorial expansion. Both
groups evinced clear growth strategies by extending control over greater
and greater subsistence zones. Their boundaries might move regularly,
but that did not diminish the security of their borders; indeed, mobility
was the key to border defense and resource management within extensive
territories. Apaches and Comanches too marked their borders with landmarks, cairns, and trees made to grow in particular forms or directions.
Thus when Europeans arrived, all set to colonize the region, they found
their border-making aspirations ran smack up against the border defense
and border expansion of Indian nations. Spaniards and Frenchmen found
no empty spaces into which to expand their empires; they had to seek
10
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Native acceptance and permission to build settlements, trading posts, and
missions within recognized Indian domains. “Indian homelands brushed
up against one another, their edges and peripheries creating zones of
shared and contested indigenous dominion. The lines drawn between
Indian polities more ofen than not took precedence over newer boundaries drawn between themselves and Europeans, even long afer Spanish,
French, and English arrival.”2
As it turns out, my scholarly concern with Indians’ borders, as outlined above, grew out of frustrations in the classroom teaching American
history—frustration with two things particularly. One is the conceptual
notion that as soon as Europeans put their frst big toes on the American
coast, all the Americas became a “borderland” up for grabs to the frst
European taker—a notion that denies Indian sovereignty, control of the
land, and basic home feld advantage. The second thing that set me of
was the way in which our textbooks encourage this cockeyed vision of
America with their maps.
Taking these two issues in turn, the concept of borderlands sometimes
appears to be used alongside or in place of frontiers, but either way, when
we map it out on the ground it remains essentially a European-defned
space. In American history, borderlands, frontiers, hinterlands, and backcountry customarily refer to the edges and peripheries of European and
Euro-American occupation and the limits of their invasion, expansion,
conquest, and settlement, where Europeans and Euro-Americans confront
Indians or rival European powers. Like frontiers, borderlands appear just
beyond the reach or sphere of centralized power associated with imperial
European governance. Like frontiers, borderlands are zones “in front”
of the hinterlands of Euro-American settlement, or “in between” rival
European settlements—think of the “Spanish borderlands” that are caught
between the core of Latin America and the expansionary Anglo-American
world. Either way, they are supposed to be untamed, unbounded wildernesses waiting to be taken in hand by civilized Euro-Americans.
Frontiers and borderlands are far from the imperial cores of France,
Spain, Britain, and, later, the United States and by defnition are absent
of a monopoly of power or violence. So, on the one hand, these are spaces
into which Euro-Americans go without the force of the state or military
near at hand. Such conditions, by implication, are what make it possible
for Indians to stand on equal ground, to negotiate, and to struggle for
advantage. But, critically, Indians’ ability to stand their ground and to
struggle for advantage has nothing to do with capabilities of their own;
Borders and Borderlands
11
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
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implicit to the idea of borderlands and frontiers is the assumption that
Euro-Americans simply have not yet moved in or taken over, but, inevitably, they will. It is all part of a process, the frst stage if you will, of
inexorable conquest.
Borderlands are therefore spaces created by Europeans and EuroAmericans as they seek, explore, or expand into lands without borders.
Borderlands appear where independent explorers, frontiersmen, and
coureurs de bois launch themselves into the woods, in the process forging
new paths for others—surveyors, settlers, and armies—to follow eventually. Or they develop where missionaries, licensed traders, and presidial
soldiers move as representatives of church, state, or mercantile institutions
at the forefront of ofcial colonial projects. As Jeremy Adelman and Steve
Aron outline, borderlands exist prior to European or Euro-American
ability to claim, draw, and defend “real” imperial or national borders.
The meeting of peoples creates frontiers, and the meeting of empires
creates borderlands in their model. Most important, the only empires are
European, and borders come into being only with European and EuroAmerican sovereignty.3 The problem here is that such an equation not
only denies the existence of Indian borders but also credits the boundaries
claimed by European empires and the United States with undue clarity.
Meanwhile, whether intentionally or not, the maps in our textbooks
contribute to an image of the Americas as a big blank, with no political
divisions until Europeans and rival imperial colonizers arrive and begin
to draw lines, divvying up the continent. When textbooks start with the
obligatory section on pre-Columbian America, they feature maps that
detail geographical divisions—Eastern Woodlands, Northwest Coast,
Great Plains, Great Basin, Southwest, Subarctic, Arctic—or subsistence
zones—agriculture, hunting, hunting-gathering, and fshing. Or, the maps
detail the zones of diferent language families—Iroquoian, Muskogean,
Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Athabaskan, Salishan, Eskimo-Aleut, Algic. If and
when the names of Indian peoples—never nations—appear in textbook
maps, they foat free of borders, hovering above the landscape with no
defned boundaries to recognize the divisions of their territories. Thus,
textbooks implicitly and explicitly tell our students that Indians had cultural, economic, and language zones of variation, but they had no named
settlements or towns, no charted roads or highways, no territorial markers
and, most important, no sovereign borders. We end up with a vision of
North America ca. 1492 sparsely occupied by Indians living in tiny landless
groups that were constantly on the move to hunt and gather.
12
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
i)
tJ
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PACIFIC
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Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
□-
□□□-□-
□ ~at’ldCtntral~
o~ ..
FIGURE 1.1 “Culture Divisions among the Native Americans.” From Paul S.
Boyer et al., vol. 1 of The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 8th ed.
(Boston: Wadsworth, 2014), 1E. © 1990 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning,
Inc. Reproduced by permission, www.cengage.com/permissions.
Then, with European arrival, the map is wiped clean of wandering
Indians or Native language culture zones, and in their places are Spanish,
French, English, and Dutch “explorers” who tramp across a blank canvas,
cutting through wilderness, discovering “unexplored” lands, with the only
potential stumbling blocks along their paths being rivers, mountains, valleys, deserts and, for Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the Grand Canyon.
Borders and Borderlands
13
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
_
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Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
FIGURE 1.2 “The Spanish and French Invade North America, 1519–1565.”
From Michael Schaller et al., vol. 1 of American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global
Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29. By permission of Oxford
University Press, U.S.A.
At this point, colored lines begin to appear marking the diferent routes
of intrepid Europeans, with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de
Soto, Jacques Cartier, Samuel Champlain, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and
later John Smith competing to cover greater distances and claim more
territory for their rulers.
Political borders frst make an appearance in textbook maps of America
only with the establishment of the British colonies, New France, New
Netherlands, and New Spain—all of them “new” creations that rewrite
historical spaces as European and, in so doing, deny the past of America’s
indigenous populations. According to this cartographic vision, there are no
“old” worlds in the Americas. Only then does America have towns for the
frst time—Quebec, Montreal, Boston, Jamestown, New Orleans, Santa Fe.
The most ubiquitous map design for this period of American history
divides the continent into Spanish, English, and French territories—drawing borders for European claims far beyond the geographical reach of
any imperial presence much less imperial control. If European rulers did
14
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
indeed engage in a paper war of diferent colored spaces and imaginary
borders during this period, our textbooks reprint the imperial fantasy. In
stark contrast, Indian names may remain on the map, but they foat free,
with no moorings and no borders, subsumed under the authority of their
presumptive new European overlords.
Taking this “anticipatory geography” to the extreme are the textbook
maps that preordain the creation of the United States by backgrounding
maps of early America with the borders of all forty-eight mainland states
drawn in gray scale.4 Consider fgure 1.1. Pre-Columbian America already
bears the imprimatur of a United States that will not exist even as a twinkle
in Thomas Jeferson’s eye for another 300 years, thus the map tells our
students, implicitly and explicitly, that the conquest of North America was
a forgone conclusion even in 1491. Or examine map 1.1, charting the route
of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the frst decade of the nineteenth
century, and look for any sign of Indians. The only hint comes from the
location of the winter quarters of 1804–5, identifed as “Fort Mandan,”
but if a student did not know Mandans were Indians, he or she would
have no idea that the expedition’s survival that winter depended upon
the hospitality and generosity of the Mandans and Hidatsas with whom
its members traded for supplies.
More important, the student would have no idea from the map that
the expedition was at every point along the way transgressing the borders
of Indian nations. Rather, the entire continent appears to be fully in the
hands of the British, Spanish, and U.S. governments, with U.S. appropriation of territory an ongoing and inexorable process. Students are again lef
believing that the greatest obstacles along Lewis and Clark’s overland route
were the rivers, mountain ranges, and distances traveled rather than the
Native people who controlled the lands and thoroughfares through which
they moved. Adam Jortner’s essay in this collection ofers a compelling
examination of how textbooks undermine if not erase Indian territorial
legitimacy in the maps that accompany chapters on the nineteenth-century
United States.
If you scan through an entire U.S. history textbook, looking at the maps
from the colonial period through the present, all in all, you will fnd that
they depict North America as a space preeminently defned by Europeans
and then Euro-Americans in motion. First, Europeans transformed oceans
that had once been barriers into freeways of passage that brought them to
the Americas. Then they charted routes and passageways across the continent, relentlessly claiming and confning the landscape within borders of
Borders and Borderlands
15
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
mbia R.
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Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
MAP 1.1 The Route of Lewis and Clark. (From H. W. Brands, T. H. Breen,
R. Hal Williams, and Ariela J. Gross, American Stories: A History of the United
States, vol. 1 [Boston: Pearson, 2011]).
their own imaginations as they pushed from east to west. The regions of
North America still awaiting European or Euro-American arrival always
appear as blank spaces, thus there can be no sense of trespass, or invasion.
Textbook maps, just like scholarly spatial models, whether unintentionally or not, therefore deny Indian borders and territorial sovereignty. And
this is critical. Because if Indians had no borders then they had no claim to
land, and Europeans were not transgressing Native nations’ domains. They
were not taking what was someone else’s; they were taking something
that was up for grabs, there for the taking. The border contests that do
warrant attention in our textbooks are between Europeans as they vie for
territory with one another, not with Indians. Indians have no borders in
U.S. textbooks until we reach the reservation era, as if the United States
gave them their frst borders when it confned and imprisoned them. Yet
through the visual power of their maps, textbooks deny Indian sovereignty
long before their readers reach the chapters detailing how the United
States denied it on the ground through military and political coercion.
What is so striking, however, when we look at actual European docu16
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
ments and maps from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
is that Europeans themselves tell a completely diferent story from that
found in our textbooks. They tell of American worlds defned by Indian
sovereignty and power, power that they darn well recognized and before
which they ofen had to bow. When Europeans struck out into what they
believed to be uncharted wildernesses, they found instead networks of
Indian roads and thoroughfares; they crossed borders marking passage
from one Indian nation to another; and, most important of all, they met
border control. One Frenchman compared a highway running through
the Hasinai Caddo confederacy to one that ran between Paris and Orleans,
and found the Native road to be as wide, level, and well beaten. To travel
that road, moreover, the Frenchman and his companions had to carry
passports given them by one group of Hasinais to ensure their safe passage
into and out of other Caddo territories.5
The key for our purposes here is that, though our textbook maps refuse
to document these Indian worlds, European maps document them quite
clearly. Why?, one might ask. For Spaniards and Frenchmen, their colonial
ventures were inclusive of Indians; they needed to know where to fnd
Indian allies, trading partners, and potential converts if their imperial
endeavors were to succeed. But, more important for all Europeans, no
matter their colonial aspirations, they had to know whose land they were
in, whose land they entered when they followed a route or crossed a river,
because their survival might rest on that knowledge. They had to know
where they were safe and where they were endangered. Europeans did not
merely travel through Native homelands; they had to negotiate constantly
with the Indian polities that were the owners and stewards of the territory.
Indian nations controlled access to their land and its resources and the
roads by which one crossed them. Europeans were subject to the rules of
Indian jurisdiction. What we fnd then is that European maps charted
Indian boundaries and territory—and, in doing so, acknowledged the
power that Indian nations exerted within identifable borders.
This may surprise us, because we have been taught that European
maps were ofen “tools of imperialism as much as guns and warships.”6
Here it is important to distinguish between those maps made by and
for Europeans who were on the ground, seeking to get around, to make
contact, to establish ties and, fundamentally, to stay alive. It is the maps
used and promoted by rulers and diplomats back in Europe that reduced
swaths of the Americas to vying land claims painted in diferent tints of
imperial color.
Borders and Borderlands
17
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
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Early maps do have blank spaces, but more ofen than not, they indicate
lack of knowledge, not the erasure of Indians. Once those landscapes
became better known, Europeans did not fll them with imagined colonies but rather with Indian villages, towns, and trading centers with the
routes of how to get to and from them charted with precision. And the
power wielded by the Indian nations who controlled those spaces is clear.
Early maps showcased Indian “giants” as a means of conveying power
and threat—consider the Patagonian giants who tower over Spaniards in
South American maps or the Powhatan men who dominate John Smith’s
maps of Virginia. As well, it should be said, such images might convey
the ofen-better diets and sources of protein available to Indians who
grew to heights that did indeed sometimes make them tower over their
European counterparts.
Beginning with charts of coastlines and bays, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury maps marked Indian settlements thick on the ground, guarding the
shoreline and ofering witness if not challenge to any European landing.
Native cities appear in the earliest maps of the sixteenth century—and not
just in Meso and South America. Dutch and French cartographers documented the palisaded towns of northeastern Mahicans and Iroquoians.
Think of the Italian rendering of the Iroquoian town of Hochelaga, later
the site of Montreal, with its detailed chart of the city gate, home of the
king, inner walls, and outer fortifcations. It has been argued that cartographers were simply translating Indian sites into visual terms that Europeans
back home could better understand, but the reality is that Indian towns
did have gates, rulers, and palisades—all characteristics that rang true to
those familiar with European fortifed cities.
Or, consider the Caddo city described and mapped by multiple Frenchmen and Spaniards in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century in
fgure 1.3. Combining the estimates of various European observers, the
city was ffy miles long and eighteen miles across. It contained temple
mounds, multistructured homes, and a ceremonial complex used by rulers for political, diplomatic, and religious functions. Surrounding the
town were smaller hamlets, lavish gardens, miles of agricultural felds, and
beyond that, more extensive hunting grounds, all of which were enclosed
in marked and policed borders. One Frenchman concluded simply that
Caddos were a people “that had nothing barbarous but the name.”7 Perhaps
temple mounds and ceremonial complexes appeared new and foreign to
European observers, but Europeans had no dif culty recognizing the
economic and political power behind such structures.
18
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
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FIGURE 1.3 1691 map of a Caddo settlement along the Red River drawn by an
unknown member of the Domingo Terán de los Rios expedition of 1691–92.
Hand-drawn copy of the original located in the Archivo General de Indias,
Seville, Map AG1 61-6-2, Newberry Library, Chicago.
European maps show us landscapes in which Europeans learned quickly
and mapped carefully the Indian nations with whom they would have to
negotiate for trade, missions, and settlement. See for instance Samuel
Champlain’s excruciatingly detailed map of Canada (fgure 1.4), where
there is not an inch of space devoid of Indian possession and internal
improvements. Such maps depict a world of foreign diplomacy (and enmity) among Indians and between Indians and Europeans across national
borders. Why else did Europeans write of Indian nacións, kingdoms, confederacies, lords, and rulers? More ofen as not, these maps refected
information gained from Indian knowledge, not European exploration.
We now well know the Chickasaw and Catawba maps that chart not the
location of Indian nations connected by roads but the social and political ties that bound them in alliance. The earliest surviving Indian map,
preserved in a Spanish transcript drawn in 1602 in Mexico City, showcases
the information taken from an Indian known only as Miguel, who was
captured by Juan de Oñate and taken back to the Spanish capital for his
knowledge of the southern plains. The map shows the rivers, highways,
Borders and Borderlands
19
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
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FIGURE 1.4 Detail from Samuel Champlain’s Carte de la Nouvelle-France, 1632.
Accession # 02851 in Newberry Library Cartographic Collection, Map Vault,
Graf Drawer 642, Newberry Library, Chicago.
and Indian towns of the region in relation to the upper Rio Grande, with
distances and days of travel provided, along with an insert of Mexican
towns and outposts to the south. From Miguel, Spaniards did not merely
seek aid in navigating the land but information about the political relationships among Indian nations and the sources of Indian trade in precious
metals.8 Much the same is found in Dutch and French maps as they sought
to win over allies and partners who might allow them access to the proftable Indian fur trade far to the north.
Most crucially, many European maps testify to Indian territorial sovereignty directly. For example one 1728 Spanish map by Francisco Álvarez
Barreiro charts the region far north of Mexico that will later become the
North American Southwest, but it is covered with labels that recognize
all the known regions controlled by diferent Indian nations—tierra de
los Pampopas, tierra de los Cujanes, tierra de los Carrizos, and so on (fgure
1.5) The land of Pampopas, Cujanes, and Carrizos—their land, not that of
Spaniards. Indeed, these mapmakers acknowledged that European settlements existed as mere islands in a sea of Indian domains. Thus Miguel
Custodio Durán wrote that the Spanish towns and villas of Coahuila all
20
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdsu/detail.action?docID=3039536.
Created from sdsu on 2021-04-02 14:36:19.
.-
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Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
FIGURE 1.5 Detail from 1770 copy of Francisco Álvarez Barreiro’s 1728 map of
northern New Spain. © The British Library Board.
stood “along [the Indians’] border,” while the Texas presidio and town
of Los Adaes were located within the Caddo kingdom.9
All of this is critical for our students’ understanding not only of Indian
power and sovereign territory but also of the patterns and limits of European colonialism. We tend to imagine European colonizers put down
roots, built towns, established colonies whenever and wherever they
wished, according to resource location and imperial design. But what
these maps tell us is that, in fact, Europeans ofen located themselves only
where the whim and direction of their Indian neighbors allowed. Or,
later, they took over Native sites abandoned or destroyed in the wake of
epidemics and war. When we look then at the charts of European settlements, roads, and towns we must always be aware of the Indian sites that
rest below them and defned the landscape frst.
Signifcantly, it is in the maps of the British and Anglo-Americans
where we most see the erasure of Indians from North American landscapes. And this may be what most trips up our textbooks, as they continue
to defne the European heritage of North America as primarily British. In
contrast to Spaniards and Frenchmen, Anglo imperial goals rarely involved
Indians, and their exclusionary colonial policies aimed at the dispossession
Borders and Borderlands
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and removal of Indians from the land. It seems little coincidence that it
is in the historiography of French and Spanish colonial zones that we
fnd spatial models for understanding early America that make Indians
intrinsic to them. For the British colonies, Atlantic world models orient
our students across the ocean to Europe and Africa; it is only to the north
and west of the British colonies along the Atlantic Coast that we fnd a
“middle ground,” a “Native ground,” and a “divided ground.”10
More recently Pekka Hämäläinen has argued for a Comanche empire in
the middle of the continent that rivaled the Atlantic world, as it too was
“a historical phenomenon so complex and abstract in nature and so vast
in scope that contemporaries were able to grasp, at best, only fragments
of it.” In the Great Lakes region, Michael Witgen maps a “Native New
World” of indigenous social, economic, and political space that emerged
in the interior simultaneously to—but separate from—the Atlantic world
of settler colonies along the eastern coastline. Natale Zappia’s “Interior
World” envisions another geographic model for emergent systems of Native economic and political power, independent of European infuence,
located in the vast region of southern California and western Arizona. All
of these spatial models take as their core Native political economies and
Native sovereign territories and recognize them as existing concurrent
with but neither reliant upon, extensions of, nor subsumed by European
colonial spaces. Imagine the cartographic redrawing that such models
require of our textbooks.11
Nor were these Native worlds mere survivals of a pre-Columbian past;
rather they were dynamic, evolving, indigenous worlds that responded
actively and creatively to the presence of European newcomers. They not
only productively transitioned in response to European invasion but also
ofen made European colonialism bend to them. European colonies thus
took their shape from that of Native nations as they implanted themselves
within indigenous landscapes.
Moreover, the scholars of the middle ground, Native ground, interior
West, Native New World, and Comanche empire track these Native
spaces to a peak of power in the early to mid-nineteenth century, defying traditional declension narratives of American historiography. Thus,
looking across the entire continent, stories of Native demise become
exceptions to a continuum of Indian political narratives that found the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to be periods of economic
and political expansion. As transformations of both the human and natural
landscape took place, the broad scope of Indian autonomy outside the
22
JULIANA BARR
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21
.
eR
Blackfeet
Kutenai
6
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a
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Wind
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37 34
Conestoga Delaware
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52
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ATLANTIC
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80
78
72
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79
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75
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Timucua
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Kalapuya
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iss
.
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ran
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
de
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
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Klallam
Cowichan
Quileute
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Kalispel
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Spokan
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Walla Walla
Wishram
Tenino
Umatilla
Cayuse
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Chehalis
Kwalhioqua
19.
20.
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22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
Chinook
Tlatskanai
Tillamook
Alsea
Siuslaw
Coos Bay
Chastacosta
Takelma
Klamath
Karok
Shasta
Tolowa
Hepa
Yurok
Wiyot
Wailaki
Achomawi
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37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
Yuki
Pomo
Wappo
Coast Miwok
Costano
Salina
Chumash
Wintun
Washoe
Miwok
Tubatulabal
Kawaiisu
Gabrielino
Luiseno
Cahuilla
Kamia
Yuma (Quachan)
Maricopa
0
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0
800 km
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
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67.
68.
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Mohave
Walapai
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Missouri
Kiowa-Apache
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Nanticoke
Metoac
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Massachuset
Pennacook
MAP 1.2 American Indian Tribes, ca. 1600. (From C. Matthew Snipp, American
Indians: The First of This Land [Russell Sage Foundation, 1989.] Courtesy of the
British Library Board.)
worlds of European colonies meant that the demise of French and Spanish
colonial projects at the end of the eighteenth century saw Native nations
(think of Lakotas and Comanches) expanding in their place, side by side
with that of the early American Republic.
Such evidence should encourage our students to see that the North
American continent constituted not just homelands of Indians, but a landscape divided into bordered domains of indigenous nations, confederacies,
Borders and Borderlands
23
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and empires. Long before and long afer the arrival of Europeans, North
America was a political and economic landscape mapped with well-known
national and imperial boundary lines, circumscribing the geographic areas
within which Indian nations asserted control over resources, people, relationships, culture, ritual, and historical memory.
So what is the solution for our classrooms? We can hope that textbooks will eventually begin revising their maps under the weight of new
and ongoing scholarship. But in the meantime, we must encourage our
students to take the maps in their textbooks with a grain of salt. They
must consider, analyze, challenge, and question the explanatory power
of the maps and the assumptions built into them. I am struck by the idea
that mapmakers, no matter the time, culture, or society, draw maps with
their own location at the center—it speaks to the enormous importance
of perspective. What a diferent picture of North American history we
get if we take in the broad scope of the continent and include the vantage
points seen from within and without Indian borders.
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Notes
1. Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January
2011): 5–46. See page 9 for following quotes. The next three paragraphs summarize
material from that essay. A digital teaching supplement with interactive maps accompanied the article and can been found at http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Jan11/
Barr/index.html.
2. Barr, “Geographies of Power,” 43.
3. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires,
Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 818–41. For the most recent discussion of
borderlands, see the special issue of the Journal of American History, “Margins to
Mainstream: The Brave New World of Borderlands History,” especially the essay
by the two editors of the issue, Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338–61.
4. J. Brian Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (September 1992): 532.
5. Barr, “Geographies of Power,” 11.
6. J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter (Milwaukee: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990), 97.
7. Isaac Joslin Cox, ed., “Narrative of La Salle’s Attempt to Ascend the Mississippi in 1687, by Father Anastasius [Anastase] Douay, Recollect,” in The Journeys
of Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, vol. 1 (1905; repr., New York: AMS Press,
1973), 231.
24
JULIANA BARR
Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al.,
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8. G. Malcolm Lewis, “Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography,” Great Plains Quarterly 4 (Spring 1984): 91–108.
9. Jack Jackson, Shooting the Sun: Cartographic Result of Military Activities in Texas,
1689–1829, vol. 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 100.
10. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Kathleen
DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground:
Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York:
Vintage, 2006).
11. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008), 353; Michael Witgen, An Infnity of Nations: How the Native New World shaped
Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Natale
A. Zappia, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Copyright © 2015. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Sugested Readings
Albers, Patricia, and Jeanne Kay. “Sharing the Land: A Study in American
Indian Territoriality.” In A Cultural Geography of North American Indians,
edited by Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore, 47–91. Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1987.
Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western
Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Deloria, Philip J. “From Nation to Neighborhood: Land, Policy, Culture,
Colonialism, and Empire in U.S.-Indian Relations.” In The Cultural Turn in
U.S. History, edited by James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael
O’Malley, 343–82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Harley, J. Brian. “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter.” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 522–42.
Lewis, G. Malcolm, ed. Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American
Mapmaking and Map Use. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Borders and Borderlands
25
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CHAPTER 6
The Doctrine of Discovery,
Manifest Destiny, and American Indians
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ROBERT J. MILLER
The United States and most of the non-European world were colonized
under an international legal principle known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which was used to justify European claims over the indigenous
peoples and their territories. The doctrine provides that “civilized” and
“Christian” Euro-Americans automatically acquired property rights over
the lands of Native peoples and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants just by showing up. This
legal principle was shaped by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority over other races and religions of the world.
When Euro-Americans planted their fags and religious symbols in lands
they claimed to have discovered, they were undertaking well-recognized
legal procedures and rituals of discovery that were designed to establish
their claim to the lands and peoples.
The European colonists in North America, and later American colonial,
state, and national governments, utilized the doctrine and its religious,
cultural, and racial ideas of superiority over American Indians to make
legal claims to the lands and property rights of Indians. For example,
President Thomas Jeferson expressly ordered the Lewis and Clark expedition to use the principles of the Doctrine of Discovery to make American
claims over Native peoples and lands across the continent.1 Later, the idea
of American Manifest Destiny incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery to
justify U.S. western expansion, and it continues to be used today to limit
the governmental, sovereign, and property rights of American Indians
and Indian nations.
Ten elements constitute the doctrine as defned by the United States
Supreme Court:
1. FIRST DISCOVERY. The frst European country to discover land
unknown to Europeans claimed that it automatically acquired property
and sovereign rights over the lands and inhabitants. First discovery alone,
however, only created an incomplete claim of title.
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2. ACTUAL OCCUPANCY AND CURRENT POSSESSION. To turn frst
discovery into a complete title, a Euro-American country had to actually
occupy and possess the newly found lands. This was usually done by
building forts or settlements within a reasonable amount of time afer a
frst discovery.
3. PREEMPTION/ EUROPEAN TITLE. The discoverer acquired the right
of preemption, that is, the exclusive right to buy the land from the indigenous owners.
4. INDIAN TITLE. Indian nations were considered to have lost the full
ownership of their lands afer frst discovery. They only retained the right
to occupy and use their lands, although those rights could last forever if
they never consented to sell.
5. LIMITED TRIBAL SOVEREIGN AND COMMERCIAL RIGHTS. Indian
nations were also considered to have lost some of their inherent sovereign
powers such as the rights of free trade and international diplomatic relations. Thereafer, they were only supposed to trade and interact with their
Euro-American discoverer.
6. CONTIGUITY. Europeans claimed signifcant amounts of land contiguous to their actual settlements in the New World. In fact, this element
provided that the discovery of the mouth of a river created a claim over
all the lands drained by that river, even if that was thousands of miles of
territory.
7. TERRA NULLIUS. Terra nullius is land that is null, void, or empty.
This element provides that if land was not occupied by anyone, or if it was
occupied but was not being used or governed in a fashion that European
legal systems recognized, then the land was considered empty.
8. CHRISTIANITY. Religion was a major aspect of justifying and applying the Doctrine of Discovery. Non-Christians were not deemed to have
the same rights to land, sovereignty, and self-determination as Christians.
9. CIVILIZATION. Euro-Americans’ belief that God had directed them
to bring “civilized” ways to indigenous peoples was an important part of
the doctrine.
10. CONQUEST. First, the United States Supreme Court stated in Johnson
v. M’Intosh that the United States and European countries could legally
acquire Indian titles in just and necessary wars. But the court also defned a
frst discovery as a form of “conquest” because it automatically transferred
some sovereign and property rights to Euro-Americans.
All European countries that engaged in overseas exploration and
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colonization utilized the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their claims.
As Patricia Seed shows in Ceremonies of Possession, ofcial rituals were
developed to try to prove frst discoveries and to establish which country
could legally claim the rights of discovery. Many people misunderstand
the rituals European explorers performed when encountering new lands
and think they were just thanking providence for a safe voyage. In reality,
the explorers were primarily engaging in the legal rituals required by
discovery to establish their country’s claims.
In the 1400s, for example, Portuguese explorers erected stone and
wooden crosses on the coasts of Africa and Brazil to assert their Crown’s
sovereignty and rights to the lands they claimed to have discovered. In
April 1500, Pedro Cabral landed in Brazil and conducted an ofcial ceremony to take possession of the land. He named the country, proclaimed
that the land belonged to Portugal, had priests conduct mass, unfurled
the banner of Christ, and erected an enormous wooden cross to establish
Portuguese sovereignty. All of these acts of possession, or rituals of discovery, were designed to legally establish Portugal’s claim.
The Spanish government and its explorers also developed ritualized
ceremonies to claim new lands and establish Spain’s legal rights. Thus, Columbus, who traveled under a contract with the Spanish king and queen,
was designated the admiral of any lands he would “discover and acquire”2
and engaged in discovery rituals and ofcial ceremonies on the islands he
encountered in the Caribbean. He always planted the Spanish fag and the
cross to establish Spain’s ownership. In fact, Spain appealed to the pope
in 1493 to validate Spain’s rights over the lands Columbus discovered and
claimed through the discovery rituals.
Furthermore, in 1513, when Balboa crossed Panama and found the
Pacifc Ocean, he claimed the entire ocean and all its adjoining lands for
Spain. He also engaged in discovery rituals and acts of symbolic possession
by having a priest sing the Te Deum (a Christian hymn), and by having
his men erect a stone monument, cut a tree into a cross, and mark other
trees with crosses.3 In 1536, Cortez made Spain’s frst claim to the Pacifc
in North America on the west coast of Mexico. He also claimed the lands
by engaging in the rituals of discovery. Thereafer, Spain occupied several
locations on the west coast of Mexico and engaged in other ritual acts of
possession on the coasts of Mexico, Baja, and modern-day California in
1539–1602.
Subsequently, Spanish naval and land-based explorers engaged in disThe Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny
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covery rituals and symbolic and actual occupation of lands in the American
Southwest, modern-day California, and as far north as Alaska to claim
Spain’s title. In 1774, a captain was ordered to leave written proof of his
discovery and to “take possession, using the standard form attached to his
instructions, and erect a large wooden cross supported by a cairn of stones
hiding a glass bottle . . . containing a copy of the act of possession.”4 Numerous other expeditions were sent north to counter the growing Russian
presence in North America and to prove Spain’s ownership and discovery
rights by conducting the rituals of erecting crosses, conducting masses,
planting fags, cutting cross designs on rocks, and taking “possession of
these lands with all the required formalities.”5 Spain was certain that its
claim to the North Pacifc was secure “by virtue of previous discovery
and symbolic acts of possession.”6
Russia also used the elements and rituals of discovery in North America.
In 1786, Catherine II ordered an expedition “to afrm the right of Russia
to all lands discovered by Russian seafarers . . . in the Pacifc Ocean” and
to engage in the ritual acts of “placing or fastening of crests and burying of metals inscribed in Russian and Latin in suitable places.”7 She
expressly claimed her rights “on the basis of prior discovery by Russia.”8
For decades thereafer, Russian fur traders were ordered to perform acts
of possession and rituals of discovery and were given metal plaques and
royal crests to mark the areas Russia claimed by frst discovery and possession. Ultimately, Russians buried up to thirty separately numbered metal
plates from 1787 to 1811 in Alaska and as far south as San Francisco Bay to
establish their claims of “discovery and possession.”9
French ventures in North America also included discovery rituals.
In 1749, for example, a French expedition traveled throughout the Ohio
Valley burying lead plates to reassert France’s claim to own the area due to
frst discovery in 1643. A French expedition also claimed land in Alaska in
1786 by “taking possession of the land with the usual formalities” by burying a bottle with a written inscription describing the act of possession.10
In addition, England used discovery rituals to claim new lands under
international law. In 1579, Francis Drake allegedly landed on the California coast north of San Francisco Bay and “proclaimed the territory part of
his Queen’s realm . . . [and] lay claim to the territory on the basis of prior
discovery.”11 Drake engaged in a symbolic act of possession by setting “on
a large post his famous plates of brass.”12 England claimed for centuries
that Drake’s frst discovery and discovery ritual gave it ownership of the
west coast of North America.
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Centuries later, Captain James Cook continued the English use of the
rituals of discovery. Cook was even ordered by the British Admiralty on
all three of his round-the-world voyages to engage in these rituals:
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You are also with the consent of the Natives to take possession,
in the Name of the King of Great Britain, of convenient Situations
in such Countries as you may discover, that have not already been
discovered or visited by any other European Power, and to distribute among the Inhabitants such Things as will remain as Traces and
Testimonies of your having been there; But if you fnd the Countries so discovered are uninhabited, you are to take possession of
them for His Majesty by setting up proper Marks and Inscriptions
as frst Discoverers and Possessors.13
In 1770, Cook claimed eastern Australia for England when he planted
a fag and carved a tree near present-day Sydney, and then he conducted
another ritual at what is called Possession Island in northeast Australia.
On his third voyage in 1778, Cook engaged in discovery rituals on three
occasions in modern-day Alaska to claim the lands for England. Cook personally performed the frst ritual on Keyes (Kayak) Island by depositing
a bottle containing an inscription with his ship’s name and the date and
two English coins.14 Cook later had ofcers perform the rituals. On June
1, 1778, Lt. King undertook an act of possession in modern-day Cook’s
Inlet. Cook called the location Point Possession, which is its present-day
name. Lt. King and his men hoisted the English fag, drank a toast to the
king’s health, and claimed to take possession of the country in the king’s
name by burying a bottle containing English coins and a paper containing
the ship’s name and the date.15 On July 16, 1778, Lt. Williamson conducted
another ritual when he “climed the highest hill [and] took possession of
the Country in His Majestys name, lef on the hill a bottle in which was
in[s]cribed on a piece of paper, the Ships names date &c and name[d] the
Promontory Cape Newenham.”16
Incredibly, even as late as the 1930s, the United States, England, and
Germany were still engaging in discovery rituals to claim islands in the
Pacifc by posting signs and raising fags. On some occasions in the 1920s,
English and American representatives few over remote islands and
dropped fags from their planes, claiming that this act established their
countries’ ownership.
The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny
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The United States and Discovery
The establishment and expansion of the United States relied heavily on
the elements of the Doctrine of Discovery. English claims to eastern
North America were based on John Cabot’s frst discoveries of the coast
in 1496–98 and the subsequent occupation of these areas by English colonies. The American Founding Fathers were well aware of these discovery
claims and utilized them while they were part of the English colonial
system. Understandably, they continued to use the doctrine in the creation and operation of the United States. From George Washington and
Benjamin Franklin onward, American leaders utilized this legal principle to justify claims of property rights and political dominance over
the Indian nations. The elements of discovery and their legal impact on
Indian nations and Indian peoples are evident, for example, in the United
States Constitution of 1787, federal laws from 1781 onward, and federal
judicial decisions, most notably when the U.S. Supreme Court adopted
the Doctrine of Discovery in Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823,17 as well as in
numerous state constitutions, laws, and court decisions.
Thomas Jeferson, in particular, applied discovery against Indians during his political career. In addition, Jeferson’s launch of the Lewis and
Clark expedition in 1803 was purposely targeted at the mouth of the
Columbia River in the Pacifc Northwest to strengthen the United States’
discovery claim to that area.18 Thereafer, the United States negotiated
with Russia, Spain, and England for four decades over who owned the
Pacifc Northwest under international law. The United States argued in
diplomatic negotiations that it owned the region due to its frst discovery and naming of the Columbia River by Robert Gray in 1792, the frst
exploration and occupation of the region by Lewis and Clark in 1805–6,
and then by John Jacob Astor’s construction of the permanent settlement
of Astoria in 1811 at the mouth of the river.
Not surprisingly, the Lewis and Clark expedition engaged in discovery rituals and used several of the elements of discovery to establish the
American claim to the Northwest. Meriwether Lewis, for example, carried
a branding iron (“US Capt. M. Lewis”) that was apparently not utilized
while the expedition was in the Louisiana Territory. But once the expedition crossed the Rocky Mountains the branding iron was used multiple
times to mark the landscape to prove the expedition had traversed the
Oregon country. Furthermore, William Clark and other men carved their
names on trees and sandstone clifs in the Oregon country. On November
92
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19, 1805, Clark traveled several miles up the coast of present-day Washington and carved on a tree, “William Clark November 19, 1805. By land
from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”19 These actions were clearly attempts to
emulate European rituals of frst discovery. Furthermore, the construction
and occupation of Fort Clatsop at the mouth of the Columbia River from
December to March 1805–6 was an obvious attempt to fulfll the second
element of discovery and to claim that Americans occupied the territory.
Finally, when the expedition departed Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806,
Lewis and Clark drafed the Fort Clatsop memorial, leaving a copy at the
fort and providing copies to Indian chiefs to convey to visiting sea captains.
The memorial listed the expedition members, marked their route, and
explained that the “object of this list” was that “through the medium of
some civilized person . . . it may be made known to the informed world”
that the U.S. expedition had crossed the continent and stayed at the mouth
of the Columbia River.20 The memorial was designed to strengthen the
U.S. discovery claim to the Oregon country.
The doctrine is also plainly visible in American law and politics in
1817–18, when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James
Monroe used discovery principles to reacquire the port of Astoria on the
Oregon coast. England had captured the post in the War of 1812 but was
required to return it to the United States by the treaty that ended the
war. Afer much delay, Monroe and Adams dispatched American representatives to retake symbolic possession of Astoria under the elements
of discovery to reassert America’s claim to the Pacifc Northwest. They
described this as asserting the American “claim of territorial possession
at the mouth of [the] Columbia river.”21 Adams wrote that the purpose
was “to resume possession of that post [Astoria], and in some appropriate
manner to reassert the title of the United States.”22
In 1817, the president and secretary of state dispatched John Prevost
and Captain James Biddle to take symbolic possession of Astoria using actions that relied on discovery rituals. In fact, Monroe and Adams ordered
Biddle and Prevost to sail to the Columbia and to “assert there the claim of
sovereignty in the name of . . . the United States, by some symbolical or other
appropriate mode of setting up a claim of national authority and dominion.”23
Biddle and Prevost arrived at separate times. Biddle raised the U.S. fag
on the north side of the mouth of the Columbia River, and in the presence
of Chinook Indians, turned over some dirt with a shovel and erected a lead
plate which read, “Taken possession of, in the name and on the behalf of
the United States by Captain James Biddle, commanding the United States
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ship Ontario, Columbia River, August, 1818.”24 He then moved upriver
and repeated the rituals on the south side, by using the exact rituals that
European explorers had utilized for centuries.
In October 1818, when John Prevost arrived at Astoria a joint ritual
was staged. The English fag was lowered and the United States fag was
raised in its place. The English troops fred a salute, and an English captain
and Prevost signed papers of transfer. The American claim to the Pacifc
Northwest was again legally in place.
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Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny, the phrase coined in 1845 to describe the predestined
and divinely inspired expansion of the United States across North America, relies on the same rationales and justifcations that created the Doctrine of Discovery.
Historians generally defne Manifest Destiny as exemplifying three distinct aspects that justifed American continental empire. First, the United
States possesses unique moral virtues other countries do not possess. Second, the United States has a mission to redeem the world by spreading
republican government and the American way of life around the globe.
And, third, the United States was divinely ordained to accomplish these
tasks.25 But these ideas were not new in 1845 and had pervaded American
political thought long before they were given the name Manifest Destiny.
This kind of thinking, which replicates ffeenth-century ideas, arises
from an ethnocentric view that one’s own culture, government, race,
religion, and country are superior to all others.
The term Manifest Destiny was not applied to American expansion
until 1845. But the idea that it was the destiny of the United States to
control North America was manifest long before then. Manifest Destiny
became even more certain afer the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the
Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803–6. In fact, Thomas Jeferson had this
very goal in mind when he ordered Meriwether Lewis to travel to the
mouth of the Columbia River to strengthen the United States’ 1792 frst
discovery claim to Oregon.
It is worth noting that it is difcult to even understand the statements
made by presidents, secretaries of state, congressmen, newspapers, and
citizens about Manifest Destiny if one does not also understand the Doctrine of Discovery. The advocates of Manifest Destiny used the elements
of discovery to bolster their arguments that it was America’s destiny and
94
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right to expand to the Pacifc. The Doctrine of Discovery became, in
essence, Manifest Destiny.
The journalist John O’Sullivan frst used the phrase “Manifest Destiny”
in a July 1845 editorial about the annexation of Texas.26 He used the term
again on December 27, 1845, in a very infuential editorial in the New York
Morning News about the Oregon country entitled “The True Title.” This
editorial and the term Manifest Destiny justifed the idea of American
expansion.
O’Sullivan used the Doctrine of Discovery in formulating his argument
that the United States already owned the title to Oregon:
Our legal title to Oregon, so far as law exists for such rights, is
perfect. Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Buchanan [U.S. secretaries of state]
have settled that question, once and for all. Flaw or break in the
triple chain of that title, there is none. Not a foot of ground is lef
for England . . . unanswerable as is the demonstration of our legal
title to Oregon . . . we have a still better title than any that can ever
be constructed out of all these antiquated materials of old blackletter international law. Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of
right of discovery, exploration, settlement, continuity, &c. . . . were the
respective cases and arguments of the two parties, as to all these
points of history and law, reversed—had England all ours, and
we nothing but hers—our claim to Oregon would still be best and
strongest. And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to
overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence
has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty
and federated self-government entrusted to us. . . . [In England’s
hands, Oregon] must always remain wholly useless and worthless
for any purpose of human civilization or society. . . . The God of
nature and of nations has marked it for our own; and with His
blessing we will frmly maintain the incontestable rights He has
given, and fearlessly perform the high duties He has imposed.27
O’Sullivan’s use of discovery, that “black-letter international law,” and
such elements as civilization, religion, the right of discovery, exploration,
settlement, and continuity demonstrate that he was fully conversant with
the elements of the international law of discovery, and that he used the
doctrine to justify America’s legal title to the Oregon country.
American expansion across the continent was alive long before the
use of the phrase Manifest Destiny. In fact, Thomas Jeferson’s push for
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a continental American empire prompted U.S. expansion toward the Pacifc. He was the primary architect of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the
1803–6 Lewis and Clark expedition, and economic and political activity
that targeted Louisiana and Oregon. One of Jeferson’s prime objectives
for the Lewis and Clark expedition was unquestionably the expansion of
the United States.
It is not surprising that the United States worked to bring the Oregon
country under American control basing its legal claim on frst discovery
due to the American Robert Gray’s discovery and naming of the Columbia
River in 1792, Lewis and Clark’s exploration of that river and their occupation of Fort Clatsop in 1805–6, and John Jacob Astor’s construction
in 1811 of the trading post Astoria, the frst permanent settlement at the
mouth of the river. The United States relied on these factors and the elements of international law to argue that it owned the Oregon country in
negotiations with England, Spain, and Russia.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams used the Doctrine of Discovery
in treaty negotiations with Spain and Russia and extinguished these nations’ competing claims to Oregon in treaties in 1821 and 1824. In treaties from 1818 and 1827, England and the United States agreed to jointly
occupy the Northwest, but they could not reach a conclusion on which
country had the strongest legal claim. Adams believed that the 1821 treaty
with Spain guaranteed American Manifest Destiny and wrote that “the
remainder of the continent should ultimately be ours.”28 These negotiations between the United States, England, Spain, and Russia refect just
how commonly understood the elements of discovery were and their
common acceptance as part of international law.
Congress also used the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny to
claim Oregon. In December 1820, a House committee studied the possibility of the United States occupying the Columbia River. The committee
issued a report in January 1821 and proposed a bill that the United States
occupy the Northwest and “extinguish the Indian title.”29 This report,
flled with lengthy discussions of the elements of discovery, justifed
American control of the Pacifc Northwest.
Members of Congress demonstrated how widespread the understanding of discovery was and how it related to Manifest Destiny and American
expansion. In 1838, Senator Lewis Linn told the Senate that the United
States needed to occupy Oregon because “discovery accompanied with
subsequent and efcient acts of sovereignty or settlement are necessary to
give title.”30 Linn also believed that Robert Gray’s 1792 discovery of the
96
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Columbia and Lewis and Clark’s expedition were “an important circumstance in our title . . . that was notice to the world of claim,” and that Lewis
and Clark’s “solemn act of possession was followed up by a settlement and
occupation, made by . . . John Jacob Astor.”31 Linn believed that the U.S.
right was based on the “certain ground of prior discovery.”32
Also in 1838, Congressman Caleb Cushing stated that the “priority
of discovery, therefore, is clearly with the United States . . . the United
States claim the Oregon Territory by right of discovery.”33 Cushing argued
that the contiguity element of discovery and the proximity of Oregon
to the Louisiana Territory gave the United States rights in the Pacifc
Northwest and “a claim of title superior to that of any other nation.”34 He
also argued that Lewis and Clark’s occupation of Oregon was signifcant
because they “erected the works called Fort Clatsop, and in the most
formal and authentic manner asserted the rights of the United States in
and to the whole country.”35 For Cushing, John Jacob Astor’s building of
Astoria “extended the bounds of empire [and he believed that] we have
the original title of the United States by discovery, fortifed by the rights
of France, continued by the exploration of Lewis and Clark, by the formal
taking of possession, and by regular occupation, and completed by the
recognition of Great Britain.”36
By 1844, the United States was gripped by an expansionist fever that
led the country to fnally settle the Oregon and Texas questions. The annexation of Texas was a boiling point in American politics for over two
decades, and desires to occupy Oregon had fermented even longer. The
Democratic Party presidential platform of 1844 confrmed that “our title
to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable; that
no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England or any other power;
and that the re-occupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at
the earliest practicable period are great American measures.”37
James K. Polk campaigned vigorously on this platform, and his slogan
“54–40 or fght” claimed the entire Pacifc Northwest, including much
of present-day British Columbia, Canada. When Polk won, he claimed a
mandate for expansion.
Polk’s inaugural address in 1845 discussed Oregon, discovery, and
Manifest Destiny. He called Oregon “our territory” and stated that the
U.S. “title to the country of the Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable,’
and already are our people preparing to perfect that title by occupying
it.”38 He believed that the opening of the Pacifc Northwest for American
settlement and the “extinguish[ment] [of the] title of numerous Indian
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tribes to vast tracts of country”39 was a benefcial development because
expansion strengthened the Union.
In December 1845, Polk delivered his annual message to Congress,
discussing the Oregon question at length. He stated that “our title to the
whole Oregon Territory . . . [is] maintained by [irrefutable] facts and
arguments,” and he asked Congress to maintain “our just title to that
Territory.”40 Polk suggested Congress grant land to the “patriotic pioneers
who . . . lead the way through savage tribes inhabiting the vast wilderness.”41 He was confdent that “the title of the United States is the best
now in existence” and that under applicable international law England
did not have a valid claim “to any portion of the Oregon Territory upon
any principle of public law recognized by nations.”42
Many American politicians wholeheartedly agreed. Senator Stephen
Douglass, for example, stated in 1846 that “we do hold the valley of the
Columbia in our own right by virtue of discovery, exploration, and occupation, and that we have a treaty-right in addition through the Louisiana
and Florida treaty.”43 He also expressly relied on the Doctrine of Discovery
and Manifest Destiny ideals of converting and civilizing the Indians in
the Oregon country, and he utilized the principle of terra nullius when he
claimed that the United States had rights to “the vacant and unoccupied
part of North America.”44 Secretary of State James Buchanan foresaw
America’s “glorious mission . . . [of] extending the blessings of Christianity
and of civil and religious liberty over the whole of the North American
continent.”45
The Doctrine of Discovery had truly become Manifest Destiny.
For forty years or more, American politicians, citizens, and newspapers
used the Doctrine of Discovery to justify Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the United States to the Pacifc Ocean. Under these ethnocentric
justifcations of discovery, Americans believed they possessed the only
“valid” religions, civilizations, governments, laws, and cultures, and that
Divine Providence allegedly intended Americans and their institutions to
own North America. As a result, the human, governmental, and property
rights of indigenous peoples and the Indian nations were almost totally
disregarded.
Notes
1. Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jeferson,
Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2006),
100–111.
98
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2. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1942), 78.
3. Warren L. Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacifc Northwest, 1543–
1819 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 58.
4. Ibid., 58.
5. Ibid., 97.
6. Ibid., 97–98.
7. Raisa V. Makarova, Russians on the Pacifc 1743–1799, trans. and ed. Richard A.
Pierce and Alton S. Donnelly (Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1975), 3, 155–56.
8. Ibid., 129.
9. Ibid.; Mary Foster and Steve Henrikson, “Symbols of Russian America: Imperial Crests & Possession Plates in North America,” Concepts (Spring 2009): 1–2.
10. Robin Inglis, “Laperouse 1786: A French Naval Visit to Alaska,” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacifc, 1741–1805, ed. Stephen Haycox, James
Barnett, and Caedmon Liburd (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 55.
11. Barry M. Gough, The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and Discoveries to 1812 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1992), 20–22.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. James Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The
Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London: The
Hakluyt Society, 1967), 3:ccxxiii.
14. Ibid., 341–42.
15. Ibid., 368.
16. Ibid., 399–400.
17. Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823).
18. David Nicandri, River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 203–17, 239–44; Stephen Dow Beckham,
Lewis & Clark: From the Rockies to the Pacifc (Portland: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 2002), 11, 92, 139; Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton
Mifin, 1952), 411, 420, 430, 512, 527–28, 538–39, 549.
19. “Memorandum of William Clark” (November 22, 1805), in vol. 6 of The
Defnitive Journals of Lewis & Clark, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987), 81.
20. Ibid., 429–30.
21. “Letter from John Quincy Adams to President James Monroe” (September
29, 1817), in Writings of John Quincy Adams, 1816–1819, ed. Worthington C. Ford
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1916; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968),
6:204–5.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 372–73.
24. Frederick Merk, The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy
and Politics (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), 22–23; James
P. Ronda, Astoria & Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 308.
25. See, e.g., Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 86; Anders
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Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 21–27, 46–47, 55–60.
26. “Annexation,” 17 U.S. Mag. & Democratic Rev. 5 (1845), quoted in Julius W.
Pratt, “The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” 32 American Historical Review (1927): 798.
27. New York Morning News, December 27, 1845, quoted in Pratt, “The Origin
of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” 796.
28. The Diary of John Quincy Adams 1794–1845, ed. Allan Nevins (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 211; “Letter from John Quincy Adams to Pierre de
Poletica,” (February 25, 1822), in Writings of John Quincy Adams, 7:213.
29. H.R. Doc. No. 213, 8–12 (1st Sess. 1821).
30. S. Doc. No. 25–470, 5–6 (1838).
31. Ibid., 146.
32. Ibid.
33. Cong. Globe, 25th Cong., 2d Sess. 567 (1838).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from
the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 105.
38. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature, 1913), 380–81.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 392–93.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 394–95.
43. Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st Sess. 259 (1846).
44. Ibid.
45. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. 337 (1854).
Sugested Readings
Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracy Lindberg.
Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Miller, Robert J. Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jeferson, Lewis
& Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2006.
Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed
Indigenous Peoples of Their Land. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World,
1492–1640. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The
Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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Created from sdsu on 2021-04-09 11:21:04.
A Navajo EmergenceStory and
an Iroquois Creation Story
H
quite what to make of stories and con
sequently dismiss them as myths, not appropriate or useful as historical
evidence. But oral transmission of stories is common to all human societies and
is “probably the oldest form of history making:’ They may not always provide
an accurate record of what happened, but stories do offer insights into the lives
of the people who told and heard them, and into how they recalled the past and
understood change. They interweave dramatic events with practical human
experience and are often moral tales, containing and preserving the values of the
society.Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, who worked for years with tribal elders
in Yukon Territory, learned that “narratives about a boy who went to live in the
world of salmon, about a girl who married a bear, … or about women who went
to live with stars provided pivotal philosophical, literary, and social frameworks
essential for guiding young and not-so-young people, framing ways of thinking
about how to live life appropriately:’ These narratives “erased any distinction
between ‘story’ and ‘history:” Although often told to children, such narratives are
not just for children. They frequently contain a society’s deepest-held values and
core beliefs.64
That is particularly true of stories that tell how a people came into being.
The late Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. explained that the idea of the people
usually began “somewhere in the primordial mists;’ at a time when the people
were gathered together “but did not yet see themselves as a distinct people.”
Then, “a holy man had a dream or a vision; quasi-mythological figures of
cosmic importance revealed themselves, or in some other manner the people
were instructed. They were given ceremonies and rituals that enabled them to
find their place on the continent:’ 65 “Through the stories we hear who we are;’
writes Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko. But, she adds, origin stories
“are not to be taken as literally as the anthropologists might wish:’ Rather, the
journey into the world was “an interior process of the imagination;’ a growing
awareness that human beings were different from other forms of life and yet
inseparable from them. 66 Like the legends of any people, Native American ori
gin stories embody communal experience, communal wisdom, and guides for
proper conduct. They explain how the world came to be and why things are the
way they are. They define people’s place in the world and tie them to the land
scape and history of their homeland, with lessons they must not forget. On the
44
ISTORIANS OFTEN DO NOT KNOW
DOCUMENTS:
A NAVAJO EMERGENCE STORY AND AN IROQUOIS CREATION STORY
basis of his experiences among the Western Apaches, the late anthropologist
Keith Basso explained:
For Indian men and women, the past lies embedded in features of the
earth – in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant
fields -which together endow their lands with multiple forms of signifi
cance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think. Knowledge
of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping
one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own commu
nity, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person. 67
The Navajo Indians, one of the largest Indian tribes in North America with
more than 300,000 people today, emerged into written history in the 1620s when
Spaniards began to distinguish from the Apaches a people whom they called
”.Apachesdel Navajo:’ Long before that-some scholars say as many as five hun
dred years earlier, others no more than a hundred- the ancestors of the historic
Apaches and Navajos migrated from northern Canada and traveled south. The
people who became the Navajos (or the Dine, in their own language) settled in
the Colorado Plateau country of what is now northeastern Arizona, northwestern
New Mexico, and southeastern Utah (Map 1.5).There they raided and traded with
Pueblos and Spaniards and adopted cultural elements from both of them. In time,
they evolved from a nomadic hunting people into a more settled farming and
herding society.
Sifting through early documents, scholars can piece together increasing
“sightings” of the Navajos as they emerge from the distant past into “recorded
history;’ where sources are richer and easier to analyze. Still, many Indian peoples
have a much clearer sense of their ancient past than recorded history captures for
scholars.
Navajo origin stories also tell how people emerged into this world from several
lower worlds. There are many versions of these creation and emergence stories,
but they share common themes and messages. In some versions, the first world
was black, the second blue, the third yellow, and the fourth or present world bright
or glittering. First Man and First Woman exist alongside, and talk with, insects
and animals – “people” of nonhuman form. But in each of the worlds they fight,
squabble, and behave badly. Each time, the people flee to a higher world, where
they meet new people. In one version, the fourth world is covered with water, but
eventually the waters recede. Finally, the people emerge into the present world.
Dinetah, the Navajo homeland, takes shape, bounded by four sacred moun
tains: Abalone Shell Mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, Dawn or White
Shell Mountain (Blanca Peak) in the east, Blue Bead or Turquoise Mountain
(Mount Taylor) in the south, and Obsidian Mountain (Hesperus Peak) to the north
(see Map 1.5,”The Navajo World”). About the time Dinetah takes form, the sun,
the moon and stars, night and day, and the four seasons of the year appear. With
the four sacred mountains in each of the four directions, the four seasons, men and
women living in harmony, and humans living together with the animals and plants,
the Navajos had moved from lower worlds of chaos and strife into a higher world
45
46
CHAPTER
0
1
50
AMERICAN
HISTORY BEFORE COLUMBUS
100 miles
COLORADO
o 50 100 kilometers
UTAH
Blanca Peak
.._(Sisnaajinl)
NAVAJO
Grand
Canyon
.._
R-
ARIZONA
TEXAS
♦
Map 1.5 The Navajo World
Whether they migrated from the far north of Canada or emerged from lower worlds, the
Navajos made their home in the Southwest, in an area bordered by sacred mountain ranges
representing the four directions, recognized as sources of knowledge and named for their
minerals or the colors they represent: Sisnaajini (shell white; Blanca Peak); Tsoodzil (tur
quoise; blue; Mount Taylor); Dook’oosliid (abalone; yellow; San Francisco Peaks); and Dibe
nitsaa (black jet or obsidian; Hesperus Peak). It was also a world surrounded by other peoples
with whom, over time, the Navajos experienced both contact and conflict.
of beauty and harmony. The stories establish proper relations with other peoples
and with other living things. Antisocial behavior and conflict produce misfortune.
Aberrant sexual behavior is destructive; good relationships between the sexes,
between First Man and First Woman, are crucial to creation and to social harmony.
The stories of recurrent movement emphasize the need to restore balance to pro
duce healing; they make clear the Navajos’ responsibility for maintaining order and
harmony through good living and ritual. The creation story is part of a dynamic
Navajo oral tradition. One scholar who studied it in depth found it to be not a
single story so much as a “boundless, sprawling narrative with a life of its own:’ It
could change from telling to telling, “depending upon the singer, the audience, the
particular storytelling event, and a very complicated set of ceremonial conditions
having to do with illness, departure, return, celebration, or any one of a number of
other social occasions:’68 Any written text can do only partial justice to the poetic
and social richness of the storytelling event.
The version of the Navajo creation story reprinted here was told to Aileen
O’Bryan in November 1928 at Mesa Verde National Park. The storyteller was a
DOCUMENTS:
A NAVAJO EMERGENCE STORY AND AN IROQUOIS CREATION STORY
47
Navajo chief named Sandoval or Hastin Tlo’tsi bee (Old Man Buffalo Grass) whose
words were translated by his nephew Sam Ahkeah. “You look at me and you see
only an ugly old man;’ Sandoval told O’Bryan, “but within I am filled with great
beauty. I sit as on a mountaintop and I look into the future. I see my people and
your people living together. In time to come my people will have forgotten their
early way of life unless they learn it from white men’s books. So you must write
down what I tell you; and you must have it made into a book that coming gener
ations may know this truth:’ O’Bryan recorded the story “without interpolation,
and presented it, in so far as is possible, in the old man’s words:’ 69 It is reprinted
together with the notes Sandoval provided.
When the French, Dutch, and English began to penetrate present-day upstate
New York in the early seventeenth century, they encountered the Haudenosaunee or
“People of the Longhouse:’ Five Iroquoian nations – the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onon
dagas, Cayugas, and Senecas- occupied the region from the Hudson valley in the
east to Lake Erie in the west and cooperated in a league that preserved peace among
its members and exerted tremendous influence upon its neighbors (Map 1.6).
Iroquois traditions recall how this remarkable political system was formed in the
mythic past (see pages 38-41), but, like the Navajos in the Southwest, the Iroquois
in the Northeast also have a rich tradition of stories recounting the creation of
the world and their place in it. Many indigenous peoples share a tradition that
they entered this world from a
lower world, but the Iroquois
0
50
100 miles
and many other peoples in the
100 kilometers
Northeast share a tradition
CANADA
that the world was created on
the back of a giant sea tur
tle (many still refer to North
America as Turtle Island) and
that their ancestors fell from
the sky. The Iroquois origin
story was passed from gener
ation to generation by word of
mouth and there are now more
than forty recorded versions,
the first taken down as early
as 1632.70 The versions vary in
PENNSYLVANIA
detail and emphasis but they
share the central story line and
essential themes, conveying
♦ Map 1.6 The Five Nations of the Iroquois
the importance of women in
The Iroquois saw their league as an extended longhouse, stretching
Iroquois society, the duality of from the Mohawk Valley to Lake Erie. Each member tribe occu
good and evil, and the need for pied a position and performed a role, and the longhouse could
balance in the world, in society, be extended to include other people who sought its shelter. The
and in individual lives. Most Tuscaroras joined the league as the sixth nation around 1722 after
accounts of the creation story
moving north from the Carolinas.
l
48
CHAPTER
1
AMERICAN HISTORY BEFORE COLUMBUS
were recorded by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
those are the ones most commonly related, but the account reprinted here is one of
the earliest to be written down, recorded by John Norton around 1816.
John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) was the son of Scottish and Cherokee par
ents and an adopted Mohawk. He played a prominent role in his people’s affairs
in the early nineteenth century, traveled widely among the Indian nations of the
eastern woodlands, and also visited England. He had a special interest in the
mythology of the Iroquois, and he gave a condensed version of the story recounted
here to an audience at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805.
HASTIN TLO’TSI HEE
The Beginning
THE FIRST WORLD
These stories were told to Sandoval, Hastin Tlo’tsi
hee, by his grandmother, Esdzan Hash kige. Her
ancestor was Esdzan at a’, the medicine woman
who had the Calendar Stone in her keeping. Here
are the stories of the Four Worlds that had no sun,
and of the Fifth, the world we live in, which some
call the Changeable World.
The First World, Ni’hodilqil, 0 was black as
black wool. It had four corners, and over these
appeared four clouds. These four clouds contained
within themselves the elements of the First World.
They were in color, black, white, blue, and yellow.
The Black Cloud represented the Female
Being or Substance. For as a child sleeps when
being nursed, so life slept in the darkness of the
Female Being. The White Cloud represented the
Male Being or Substance. He was the Dawn,
the Light-Which-Awakens, of the First World.
In the East, at the place where the Black Cloud
and the White Cloud met, First Man, Atse’hastqin,
was formed; and with him was formed the white
° Five names were given to this First World in its relation to
First Man. It was called Dark Earth, Ni’hodilqil; Red Earth,
Ni’halchi; One Speech, Sada hat lai; Floating Land, Ni’ta na
elth; and One Tree, De eastcia eith.
SouRCE: Aileen O’Bryan, The Dine: Origin Myths of the
Navaho Indians, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin
163 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1956), 1-13.
corn, perfect in shape, with kernels covering the
whole ear. Dohonot i’ni is the name of this first
seed corn, 0 and it is also the name of the place
where the Black Cloud and the White Cloud met.
The First World was small in size, a floating
island in mist or water. On it there grew one tree,
a pine tree, which was later brought to the present
world for firewood.
Man was not, however, in his present form. The
conception was of a male and a female being who
were to become man and woman. The creatures of
the First World are thought of as the Mist People;
they had no definite form, but were to change to
men, beasts, birds, and reptiles of this world.
Now on the western side of the First World,
in a place that later was to become the Land of
Sunset, there appeared the Blue Cloud, and oppo
site it there appeared the Yellow Cloud. Where
they came together First Woman was formed, and
with her the yellow corn. This ear of corn was also
perfect. With First Woman there came the white
shell and the turquoise and the yucca. 0
0
0 Where much corn is raised one or two ears are found per
fect. These are always kept for seed corn.
0 The Navaho people have always believed in evolution.
° Five names were given also to the First W…