Today the banks are closed, the mail is not being delivered, and some people will watch a news story about a statue of some Genoan who sailed for Spain looking for China a long time ago. Some other people, generally more uppity about these sorts of things, will cite that today we celebrate half a millennium of genocide, cultural and physical enslavement, and all the other bad things that have happened since 1492. These people regret that Europeans ever made contact with the West Indies that year.
I am not one of them.
What happened in 1492 did not destroy the New World. The will and actions of individuals did that. Did the discovery of a pair of continents with exploitable resources and peoples open up the gateways to domination by these people? Yes, absolutely. All the same though, Europeans, as with ALL humans, were pretty good at these things even before they made contact with the New World. Let's be honest here, on that note: Native Americans are hardly innocent noble savages, no matter how much we would want them to be as a part of our common imagination. Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Haudenausonee, Crow, Commanches, etc... they were pretty rough cultures to be a part of, or worse, to be a neighbour to. No one is entirely innocent.
Did some truly terrible things happen? Yes, they certainly did. I dare anyone to visit Washita in Oklahoma and not feel some sort of compassion, dread, or sorrow. While away from the battlefield and in the comforts of one's armchair, Washita and other such slaughters of North America's first born can be rationalized away in the greater context of history and circumstance, witnessing the places where elders and children were mercilessly killed and horses shot simply for being beloved animals of the Cheyenne... I have problems even just typing this... well let's just say that the heart is moved.
All the same, I noted that such people were the first born of this continent. Regardless of the actions of others, we must not fall into logical fallacy and blame entire peoples for atrocities. The fact of the matter is that North America is now home to so many peoples. This continent is a very diverse place; it was even before European contact. There is no such thing as an "Indian", namely because there are so many different cultures and language groups present among the first born here. Now that new generations have come, should we ask them all to go back to the rest of the world simply because they wanted to live in harmony and peace in a land where origins contribute to destiny, rather than dominate it?
I am a North American, even if my roots are European. I think I first really came to know this when I returned home from living in London back in 2003 and looked down onto the shores of Labrador from my plane. I saw the waves of the cold northwestern Atlantic beating down on the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield, and I knew then that I was home. When I spent six weeks in Mexico refreshing my Spanish language skills back in 2008, I still felt at home among the pine-covered mountains of Morelos. When I have traveled out into the truly divine wonders of the West, I have still felt at home. Should we condemn the second child for the sake of the first? I am sorry that the first born was screwed out of an inheritance. That was wrong. But I am just as much in love with my homeland, from the jungles to the tundra, as my brothers and sisters of a different mother are.
Today is a day for reflection, for all the good and ill that has come of life here in this New World since that year (even if Basques, Celts, Norse, and East Asians probably had been here before then). Think about discovery, think about atrocity, think about a new chapter in the history of humanity. Think about so many of the peoples of the earth making a destiny for themselves set apart from their accident of birth and instead built around what they can make of themselves. Such are the hopes and dreams of Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans, no matter what their last name might be. Columbus Day is a good thing.
Oh, and by the way, today is also Canadian Thanksgiving. Yes, we have one too, and yes, it is largely about the same reason: thankfulness for the bounty of the land. While we don't have an iconography dominated by puritans and scantily clad native stereotypes, we do have turkey and stuffing. If this blog makes it to next year, count on an extended history of it then.
Always to the frontier
Showing posts with label Native Americans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Native Americans. Show all posts
Monday, October 8, 2012
Friday, July 13, 2012
Finding the Wendat (Huron) Civilization
Popular imagination tends to portray Native American existence before European contact as a peaceful, primitive situation replete with tepees and elaborate headdresses, but little in the way of any sort of settled, complex civilization. Popular imagination, of course, is sorely lacking. Not including the advanced civilization of the Aztecs (who, yes, had a pretty glaring dark side too) and other cultures in central Mexico and further south, there were a great deal of peoples in lands as diverse as the Rio Grande Valley to the Great Lakes area that raised great cities and engaged in extensive agriculture to feed large populations. The finest remains of such civilizations can be seen in the American southwest, but impressive mounds and fragments of cities can be found in key locations throughout the eastern part of North America, particularly in Illinois, Ohio, and Ontario. Disease and European involvement in already viscous warfare between various peoples would finish off these great, yes, urban cultures that had already begun to decline due to climactic shifts in rainfall patterns.
While we are fairly certain of conditions that have existed since the 1500s, however, we still know relatively little about what settled life was like for our true first-families, and exciting discoveries keep popping up on a regular basis. Such is the case of ongoing discoveries made at the "Mantle Site", a Wendat (Huron) where as many as 2,000 people might have lived in a large settlement of permanent structures laid out in a meaningful urban design. Some news about this can be found here:
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1222889--how-did-huron-wendat-get-cursed-european-axe-a-century-before-european-contact
So who were the Wendat (Hurons) and why is this a big deal? Well, that funny thing called popular imagination labels them as a weak people who lovingly embraced the French and Christianity when it was offered to them. As such, they became scattered to the winds by the other nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) attacked them in their weakened state, who had it coming anyway because they sided with the newcomers. In truth, the Wendat were no weaker than any individual nation of the Haudenosaunee and actually controlled a series of trade routes and contacts because of their strategic position located in the heart of territory that had long been contested by various Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations. Settled on the northern shores of Lake Ontario and the eastern and southern shores of Lake Huron (essentially southern Ontario and parts of Michigan), the Wendat saw passage of goods and peoples from the Algonquins, Ojibwa, Potawatamis, Illinois, Ottawas, Chippewas, Senecas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, the nations which surrounded them. Furthermore, as they were such a vital link between so many nations of two major cultural groups, they also had extensive contact with nations further afield such as the Cree, various nations of the Sioux, Shawnees, Delawares, Mahicans, and the various nations who lived further down the Mississippi and Atlantic corridors. The Wendat were big news, as they were not afraid to facilitate the passage of a lot of economy through their land.
So what else would such a nation do when in such a prestigious and dangerous position of being in contact with so many other nations? They dug in, made a pretty big city, and instead of fighting everyone else or making peace with them, opened up an exchange of commerce and ideas with them. The recent find of a Basque axe at the Mantle Site has only furthered proof that the Wendat drew in a lot of distant exchanges of various sorts. Even before they had seen a Basque or any other European, the Wendat were busy trading some stuff Europeans had traded to nations on the margins of the continent. Now this might be stretching, but it seems plausible that one of the reasons why the French were so eager to seek out contact, trade, and evangelistic efforts with the Wendat were because other nations, such as the Algonquins, told them that this was a people who were interested in working with others and freely moving around goods both material and intellectual. While the French found the other Haudenosaunee to be less than friendly towards them, and the Algonquins amicable but also largely ambivalent about helping a people that had set up camp right on their doorstep, they found the Wendat to be very willing to help them trade and explore in a mysterious land of pines, moose, and very cold winters.
In time, this would come to a very beautiful, and very tragic, sharing that would become one of the great marriages of culture that our Canada would be born from. That, of course, is a passionate story for me to tell you on another day.
While we are fairly certain of conditions that have existed since the 1500s, however, we still know relatively little about what settled life was like for our true first-families, and exciting discoveries keep popping up on a regular basis. Such is the case of ongoing discoveries made at the "Mantle Site", a Wendat (Huron) where as many as 2,000 people might have lived in a large settlement of permanent structures laid out in a meaningful urban design. Some news about this can be found here:
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1222889--how-did-huron-wendat-get-cursed-european-axe-a-century-before-european-contact
So who were the Wendat (Hurons) and why is this a big deal? Well, that funny thing called popular imagination labels them as a weak people who lovingly embraced the French and Christianity when it was offered to them. As such, they became scattered to the winds by the other nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) attacked them in their weakened state, who had it coming anyway because they sided with the newcomers. In truth, the Wendat were no weaker than any individual nation of the Haudenosaunee and actually controlled a series of trade routes and contacts because of their strategic position located in the heart of territory that had long been contested by various Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations. Settled on the northern shores of Lake Ontario and the eastern and southern shores of Lake Huron (essentially southern Ontario and parts of Michigan), the Wendat saw passage of goods and peoples from the Algonquins, Ojibwa, Potawatamis, Illinois, Ottawas, Chippewas, Senecas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, the nations which surrounded them. Furthermore, as they were such a vital link between so many nations of two major cultural groups, they also had extensive contact with nations further afield such as the Cree, various nations of the Sioux, Shawnees, Delawares, Mahicans, and the various nations who lived further down the Mississippi and Atlantic corridors. The Wendat were big news, as they were not afraid to facilitate the passage of a lot of economy through their land.
So what else would such a nation do when in such a prestigious and dangerous position of being in contact with so many other nations? They dug in, made a pretty big city, and instead of fighting everyone else or making peace with them, opened up an exchange of commerce and ideas with them. The recent find of a Basque axe at the Mantle Site has only furthered proof that the Wendat drew in a lot of distant exchanges of various sorts. Even before they had seen a Basque or any other European, the Wendat were busy trading some stuff Europeans had traded to nations on the margins of the continent. Now this might be stretching, but it seems plausible that one of the reasons why the French were so eager to seek out contact, trade, and evangelistic efforts with the Wendat were because other nations, such as the Algonquins, told them that this was a people who were interested in working with others and freely moving around goods both material and intellectual. While the French found the other Haudenosaunee to be less than friendly towards them, and the Algonquins amicable but also largely ambivalent about helping a people that had set up camp right on their doorstep, they found the Wendat to be very willing to help them trade and explore in a mysterious land of pines, moose, and very cold winters.
In time, this would come to a very beautiful, and very tragic, sharing that would become one of the great marriages of culture that our Canada would be born from. That, of course, is a passionate story for me to tell you on another day.
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