Last week, we read the first three chapters of Richmond’s Unhealed History, which focused on the interactions between early settlers at Jamestown and Henrico and the Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy whom the English gradually drove out of their places of habitation. As I read, I was struck by two things:
1) The ubiquity of violence on a level that Americans (Native and otherwise) today would consider shocking, both between and within the two groups. Colonists killed and ate each other when starving and colonial authorities regularly beat rule-breakers within an inch of their lives. The Powhatan Confederacy was united by Wahunsenacawh (“Chief Powhatan”) partially through violent coercion and was at war with its Monacan neighbors. And of course both groups regularly slaughtered members of the other group. It may be tempting to say that these were not ordinary circumstances for either culture, as the Indians were under threat from colonial encroachment and the English were under threat from starvation and disease, and this is true enough—all cultures become stricter, harsher, and more violent or “closed” when they are under threat, and more permissive and gentle or “open” during periods of safety and prosperity. But it is not enough to say this, I think. It does not account for the utter casualness with which colonists recount the slaying of Native captives. In fact I have had this same experience with almost every culture or historical period I have studied—it appears to me that the norm throughout human history has been for people to hurt or kill each other much more frequently and casually than in our own society. I do not think my own upper-class American culture is less physically violent because we are somehow more moral or empathetic than other peoples, but rather simply because we have succeeded so completely in violently subjugating the rest of the planet that we rarely come into conflict within our own communities over resources—we first-worlders “export” our violence, if you will, to the third-world countries that grow our food and make our goods. So my question for you all is: how do we teach our children about violence in history? How do we explain to them that historic people were so much more violent without making them seem like heartless monsters? Or do we explain it to them? When are students ready to learn about the differences in values surrounding violence in other times and places?
2) The constant miscommunication between colonists and Natives. Really, reading these chapters I got the impression that maybe there was never a single significant conversation between an English and an Indian in which they really understood each other. The English came to the New World with a whole host of unquestioned assumptions about the way humans live our lives and relate to the land and the gods and each other. To their minds, all peoples either were Christian or had failed to be Christian, and in the latter case might either be naturally drawn to the universal truth of the Gospels or be unwilling to learn it; but to the Natives, of course, the religious practices of the English were just the barely-understood customs of a foreign tribe, with no relevance to the land, men or gods of Tsenacommoco, and Pocahontas’ own “conversion” was likely, from her perspective, merely the adding of her English husband’s god to her pantheon (Native spiritual practices having no provision for the ideas of “true” vs. “false” religion or monotheism). Concomitantly they judged individual Natives’ morality based on their adherence to English Christian customs that the Natives neither understood nor had any reason to revere: thus Pocahontas was esteemed the “nonpareil” of the Indians because, as a teenage girl with a pliable mind and heart and what seems to have been an anthropological curiosity about the English, she adapted easily to European society and dressed and acted as they thought she ought, while her brother-in-law Tomocomo was scorned as a subhuman “savage” because, as a man who was not brought up among the foreigners, he wore what would have been considered appropriate nobleman’s garb among his own people even when visiting London. And of course the English famously “bought” land from Natives who had no concept of private property rights by inducing them to sign contracts they didn’t understand. Finally, and relevantly to the point I made under (1) about violence, the English just assumed that Indians attacked colonists out of the reasonless perversity of naturally wicked “savages”, but that English attacks on Indians had specific motives that justified them. So my question for you all is: where, maybe, in your own thinking, might you be unknowingly limited by your own culture’s assumptions in judging the behavior of people from other cultures? How can one detect and avoid these sorts of biases? Or is it hopeless? Keep in mind that if an example of ethnocentrism in modern American culture comes to your mind quickly and easily, it probably isn’t the best example, because the fact that you thought of it so easily indicates that you and likely many others have already questioned it. Try to think of a bias that you have a harder time overcoming!