WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Early Colonial Perceptions of Native America. (03/11/2002)

At the beginning of the 17th Century (1619 AD), the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution meant to guide the colonists in the best methods of dealing with the indigenous population in their territory. The advice given was that the people of the colony should be cautious in their dealings with the natives and should "neither utterly reject them nor yet drawe them to come in." At the same time, a limit was placed on the number of natives that should be allowed to enter any particular township ("five or six may be admitted into every such place, and no more") with the added requirement that such arrangements had to be approved by the Governor beforehand. Anyone who was admitted had to come on a voluntary basis "to doe service in killing of Deere. fishing, beatting of Corne and other workes." While not explicitly stated, the sense here is that the natives could not be forced to enter into this relationship by the colonists but had to volunteer to do so. Since they were going to be brought in to do certain kinds of work for the colony, there is an implied prohibition against enslaving the Indians against their will. Further precautions, and the reasons why they were thought to be necessary, were also expressed; that is,

"Provided that good guarde in the night be kept upon them for generally (though some amongst many may proove good) they are a most trecherous people and quickly gone when they have done a villany. And it were fitt a house were builte for them to lodge in aparte by themselves, and lone inhabitants by no meanes to entertain them."

That it would be best to segregate ("lodge [them] aparte by themselves") and guard them carefully during the night, was thought to be a proper course of action because the natives were perceived as being "a most trecherous people," who would vanish without warning if they committed any crime against the colonists. While it is acknowledged that "some amongst many may proove good," it is just as clear that the greater expectation is that most will prove to be of a treacherous disposition. Precisely why the Europeans in Virginia believed it might be advantageous to "drawe . . . in" a limited number of natives, at the risk of attracting the "wrong" kind, probably rests on the fact that the natives were simply better at doing the kinds of labor (hunting, fishing, etc.) that were to be assigned to them than the colonists themselves were thought to be. Also apparent from the statement is the fact that the colonists do not seem able to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Indians on the strength of any prior knowledge or contact with them. The statement of this attitude, if nothing else, demonstrates an inherent fear of the other that is essentially racist, on the one hand, relying on stereotypes more than it does on knowledge, and silently acknowledges, on the other, that the climate of relations between the two groups has already degenerated into one best characterized as adversarial confrontation. This is especially obvious in the warning against having any natives living in isolation with any single colonist.

One reason for the distrust, and one addressed by the resolution, is that the natives were not Christians. Virginia's remedy to that problem was expressed in the following terms:

"Be it enacted by this present assembly that for laying a surer foundation of the conversion of the Indians to Christian Religion, eache towne, citty, Borrough, and particular plantation do obtaine unto themselves by just means a certine number of the natives' children to be educated by them in true religion and civile course of life . . . to be brought up by them in the first elements of literature, so to be fitted for the Colledge intended for them that from thence they may be sente to that worke of conversion."

The point here, of course, is that the Virginia colony intends to "obtaine" a number of Indian children "by just means" only for the purpose of educating them "in the true religion and civile course of life." The plan seems to be to introduce the children to "the first elements of literature," that is, to the rudimentary elements of the English language, so that they can then be taught the basic concepts of the Christian religion. Conversion to the true faith is the only objective behind the desire to educate the natives. In the 19^th Century this plan was widely adopted and resulted in the removal, even by force, of countless native American children from their parents so that they could be schooled away from their cultural traditions, which were considered to be unacceptable by their white European conquerors.

A second view of native people was recorded by Andrew White, a Jesuit father in Maryland, some twenty years after the Virginia assembly adopted its program of limited "outreach" to the naive population. White's perception is less severe in several ways than what was found in the Virginia account:

"Whoever shall contemplate in thought the whole earth, will, perhaps, nowhere find men more abject in appearance than these Indians; who, nevertheless, have souls (if you consider the ransom paid by Christ) no less precious than the most cultivated Europeans. They are inclined indeed to vices, though not very many, in such darkness of ignorance, such barbarism, and in so unrestrained and wandering a mode of life. . . . Idols, either many or few, they have, to whose worship they are greatly addicted. . . . They acknowledge one God of heaven; notwithstanding, they distrust that they know in what way he is to be worshipped, in what way to be honored. . . . They rarely think of the immortality of the soul, or of the things that are to be after death."

That the Jesuit father addresses issues associated with the existence of the soul in native people suggests that some among the Europeans must have thought otherwise. His assertion that native people "acknowledge one God of heaven," but persist in the worship of idols, is a view generally held by Europeans, even if the precise Eurocentric meaning of such concepts cannot really be applied transparently to anything that native Americans actually believed. The disparity between the European conceptualization of God as Creator, for instance, and what native Americans perceive as a creator-spirit, is so radical in most contexts that one cannot realistically be compare to the other. That native people "rarely think of . . . things that are to be after death," was generally taken by Europeans as a sign that they were somehow morally deficient, since threats of punishment in the eternal fires of Hell (which is the only way Europeans have ever defined the afterlife) was all that Christian ideology ever relied on to stimulate good, as opposed to evil, behavior among its adherents. The absence of such beliefs among the native population convinced the colonizers of a profound moral deficiency when in fact no such thing existed because native culture had evolved well beyond dependency on meaningless threats of eternal damnation in the afterlife for everyone (through original sin, for instance) and had come to rely instead on codes of honor that united people in securing what was best for everyone in the world of the here and now. Put differently: native beliefs addressed the real needs of real people and never created a system of prohibitions meant to divide everyone into rigidly defined hierarchical structures based on what secured privilege for the few who resided at the top of the social and political hierarchy and denied it to those who fell to the bottom of the arbitrary scales of "divine" justice that Eurocentric culture used to define such categories.

A final example of early colonial perceptions of native people based on their religion, and one which clearly defines social status in the hierarchical structures of Eurocentric bias, was written by George Alsop, also in Maryland, in 1666 AD. What might be the oddest aspect of this diatribe against native people is that it occurred last in this sequence, is the one that expresses the harshest opinion, contains the least amount of factual information, and appeared at a time in colonial history when the European war against native people was entering its final phase of eradication against them. That, at least in part, accounts for its intemperate view:

"As for their Religion, together with their Rites and Ceremonies, they are so absurd and ridiculous, that its almost a sin to name them. They own no other Deity than the Devill, (solid or profound) but with a kind of wilde imaginary conjecture, they suppose from their groundless conceits, that the World had a Maker, but where he is that made it, or whether he be living to this day, they know not. The Devil, as I said before, is all the God they own or worship: and that more out of a slavish fear then any real Reverence to his Infernal or Diabolical greatness, he forcing them to their Obedience by his rough and rigid dealing with them, often appearing visibly among them to their terrour, bastinadoing them (with cruel menaces) even unto death, and burning their Fields of Corn and houses, that the relation thereof makes them tremble themselves when they toil it."

"Bastinado," which is an extreme form of torture invented, and often used, by the Spanish against native people wherein the bottoms of their feet were beaten with cudgels, is such an odd term to show up here in the context of an Englishman's account of native religion that attributes the torture, not to any human agency (Spanish or English), but to the Devil, who Alsop claims is the only "God" native Americans worship. That the "cruel menaces" employed by the Devil (as "bastinado") take the form of burning native sources of food ("their Fields of Corn") and their houses is again curious for the simple reason that the most often used techniques of warfare in New England, and fully documented at the time, consisted of the English first burning the fields of their native American enemies and then endeavoring to trap them, usually while they slept, in their communal houses which were then set ablaze, burning men, women, and children alike to death before they even knew they were under attack. Any who attempted to escape the flames were shot as they fled. In one case, Cotton Mather brags from the pulpit that 600 natives in one such assault were roasted, to the greater glory of the true God, in a barbecue. Alsop's claim that the natives attributed such brutality to the Devil is a thinly disguised attempt on his part to deflect blame from the perpetrators of such atrocities, his fellow countrymen, and to place it instead on a force of Evil (Satan) that native Americans never imagined as part of any world view prior to their contact with European Christians. To say that native people feared the Devil they perceived under Eurocentric skin is certainly no exaggeration. Any race of monsters capable of justifying the act of burning children to death in their sleep certainly gets my vote for Devil.

Alsop concludes his diatribe by asserting that native Americans "Sacrifice a Childe" to the Devil every four years. If that were the case, and I have no idea where he came up with this claim, and if one-third of the native people killed by Englishmen in Cotton Mather's "barbecue" were children (200), that particular nation will not have to appease the Devil for another 500 years. I suppose all native Americans should be grateful to the Christians of New England for discharging that burden on our behalf.