A Troubling Read
In this comprehensive, masterfully written and deeply affecting history, authors Washburn and Utley chronicle an unremitting series of wars mounted against Native Americans by Europeans and their descendants. It is a story of injustice, of ethnocentrism, of courage, and of misunderstanding; what emerges clearly, from first page to last, is the hopeless yet often valiant nature of resistance to invasion, deceit, and genocide.
The book is curiously and misleadingly titled: One would seek in vain to discover a war which Indians clearly initiated, or one which they ultimately won. As the text amply demonstrates, most Native American peoples were dramatically ill-equipped, both culturally and technologically, for European-style warfare. Prior to "discovery," inter-tribal conflicts had for the most part been restricted to an occasional raid or foray, with the limited goals of exacting personal revenge, acquiring portable goods, or demonstrating bravery. This was a far cry indeed from the lethal, sustained, and land-grabbing campaigns carried out against them by Europeans and Americans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Progressively wracked by waves of Old World diseases which could wipe out a tribe within a matter of weeks, Native Americans were vulnerable, naive, and sub-divided into hundreds of distinct linguistic and ethnic populations. They never had a chance.
The Indian Wars is a difficult and troubling read; the horrors and atrocities it reveals - from Dutch women playing kickball with the heads of murdered Indian children to military commanders distributing as trade items blankets infected with smallpox - are painful to accept. But they must not be forgotten, for they testify to the fact that all cultures are capable of savagery and barbarism when selfinterest and racism blind aggressors to the humanity of their opponents.
As one might expect of a book in the American Heritage series, the volume is lavishly illustrated, with two superb maps. Unfortunately, many of the paintings and drawings, reflecting the anti-Indian sentiments of their day, seem to be at cross-purposes with the impeccable scholarship of the text, a situation exacerbated by several particularly dimwitted and over-generalized captions. This is a book to be read, and not simply leafed through.
For all its virtues, The Indian Wars leaves many questions unasked and unanswered. There is not enough attempt made to analyze and understand the peculiar European world view which permitted Indians to be selectively adjudged non-human. There is too little attention paid to such crucial issues as indigenous cultural diversity, and the devastating effects of contagion on New World societies. Regrettably, the book lacks a bibliography, leaving readers desiring to continue their study, with no directions into the vast and uneven array of literature on the subject. Perhaps when it is reissued (one hopes in a less expensive and more accessible paperback edition), this can be corrected.
But in the meanwhile, The Indian Wars stands as an impressive and important document. Far more effectively, concisely, and eruditely than almost any of its predecessors, it examines the tragedy of populations whose basic crimes were existence itself, the refusal to starve without protest, and the desire to be left alone and intact. "Unhappy people," wrote Ben Franklin after one massacre of Indians by white Pennsylvanians, "to have lived in such times, and by such neighbours ... they would have been safe in any part of the known world, except in the very neighbourhood of the ChristianWhite savages of Peckstang and Donegall."
THE INDIAN. WARSBy Wilcomb Washburn '48and Robert M. UtleyAmerican Heritage, 1977. 352 pp. $34.95
An anthropologist and chairman of NativeAmerican Studies at Dartmouth, ProfessorDorris is a member of the Modoc tribe ofsouthern Oregon. He is on leave this year,working under a Guggenheim grant on a studyof the Alaska Native Land Claims Act.
