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Although blatant racism against American Indians is not as evident in textbooks and scholarly research materials as it was decades ago, subtle racism is alive and well.
Many books claiming to be fair, and even some labeled pro-Indian, are riddled with half-truths and mistruths based on false assumptions. Many Web pages also perpetuate the stereotype that American Indian accomplishments were inferior to those of Europeans. Subtle racism is every bit as dangerous as the obvious kind – perhaps even more so.
It can be difficult to detect because it often omits critical facts about both American Indian and European history. The fact that it is frequently written by well-respected scholars and authorities makes it even more difficult to detect. Like a low-grade infection, it works below the level of awareness, affecting students from elementary school to graduate school.
No matter how carefully educators and librarians choose materials and no matter how diligently we work to eliminate subtle academic racism, we need to know that in an open society students will encounter it.
Rather than waiting for the damage to be done, we can take immediate action by teaching them how to recognize, question and counter racist assumptions in books and online. These critical thinking skills can help to vaccinate them against some of the effects of the subtle racism infection.
Pre-contact American Indians used trial and error, carefully observing the results of these trials. Three pieces of evidence, selected from many, are:
We can forget about neurochemistry. (A dream showed Nobel prizewinner Otto Lowei that the chemical messengers, we now call neurotransmitters, are responsible for the flow of information in the human brain.) We can write off pasteurization, penicillin, and hundreds of other modern discoveries and inventions while we’re at it.
Alexander Graham Bell used intuitions that he called "a conquering force within" to invent the telephone and Henri Poincare, the mathematician who created the science of topology, said, "It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."
Most scholars credit Francis Bacon, an English philosopher and statesman who lived from 1561 to1626, as the father of the scientific method. Sometimes Galileo, an astronomer, who lived from 1564 to 1642, is also credited. Both were born well after Columbus landed in the Americas. The fact that Galileo was arrested by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633 for heresy and held prisoner until he died in 1642 indicates that the scientific method was not only unwelcome in Europe for at least 150 years after 1492 – it was considered a sin and a crime.
Scholars who use wheeled transportation as a benchmark for measuring civilization rarely take the natural environment into account. Suitable draft animals did not exist in the pre-contact Americas. The two largest animals – bison and llamas – weren’t easily domesticated to pull carts or chariots
Terrain was another factor that discouraged the development of wheeled transportation in the Americas. European new to North America often found their wheeled wagons inappropriate for the land they were trying to cross. Frequently they traded this clumsy transport for American Indian forms of transportation – the canoe, snowshoes and toboggans. Indigenous people throughout the Americas used runners to deliver communications. The Inca built a road system that included suspension bridges for their runners.
Pre-Columbian metal workers invented sophisticated techniques for working with other metals. Pre-contact metallurgists living in what are now Ecuador and Guatemala learned how to work with platinum, a metal that has the extremely high melting point of 3218 degrees by developing a technique called sintering. Europeans were unable to work platinum until the 19th century. Metal workers in other parts of the Americas knew how to solder, could make foil and used rivets to fasten pieces of metal together.
In areas where no metal deposits lay close to the surface, American Indians made tools of bone, wood and stone. The blades of their flint surgical instruments were so thin that the incisions they made could not be duplicated until the advent of laser surgery.
Hammaurabi’s Code, considered a sign of emerging civilization by scholars, established the death penalty in Babylon for 25 crimes in the Eighteenth Century B.C. By the Seventh Century B.C., the Greeks of Athens had established the Draconian Code that established death as the punishment for all crimes. Roman law in the Fifth Century B.C. mandated drowning, impalement, live burnings, drowning or beating to death for executing prisoners.
According to limited archaeological evidence, some groups of the Celts, a dominant tribe of Western Europe that settled in what would become the British Isles, practiced both ritual sacrifice and headhunting. By the Eleventh Century A.D. William the Conqueror outlawed the death penalty except during war, but in the Sixteenth Century, Henry VIII ordered an estimated 72,000 people executed. Favored methods were burning at the stake, boiling, beheading hanging and drawing and quartering. In the 1700’s Britain had 222 crimes punishable by death including stealing a rabbit and cutting down a tree.
The Inquisition, begun by the Catholic Church in the early 13th century and that peaked between 1550 and 1650, focused on eliminating heresy. Researchers who studied court documents estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were put to death in Europe. Many more were tortured. Victims included midwives, herbal healers, single women who owned property and lived alone, pagans, people whose neighbors didn’t like them, and those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Indians of North, Meso and South America had developed so many botanical medications by the time of contact that the Spanish King, Philip II sent physician Francisco Hernando to the Americas in 1570 to record Aztec medical knowledge and bring it back to Europe. Eventually 200 American Indian botanical remedies were included in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, an official listing of all effective medicines and their uses.
Another area of scientific knowledge in which American Indians excelled was plant breeding. American Indian farmers, who had formed a working knowledge of plant genetics between 5200 and 3400 B.C., used seed saving to create hundreds of varieties of food crops.
By comparison Europeans showed little interest in plant genetics. In 1865 when Gregor Mendel made public his experiments with hybrids, the European scientific community scorned him. Not until the early 1900s did European scientists begin to take agricultural experimentation seriously.
On the other hand, scalping was a well-established tradition for Europeans. Ancient Scythians (Russians) practiced it. Herodotus, the Greek Historian, wrote of them in B.C. 440, "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together."
Much later the English paid bounties for Irish heads. Because scalps were easier to transport and store than heads, Europeans sometimes substituted scalping for headhunting. Records show that the Earl of Wessex England scalped his enemies in 11th century.
In 1706 the governor of Pennsylvania offered 130 pieces of eight for the scalp of Indian men over twelve years of age and 50 pieces of eight for a woman’s scalp. Because it was impossible for those who paid the bounty to determine the victim’s sex – and sometimes the age – from the scalp alone, killing women and children became a way to make easy money.
During the French and Indian Wars and later during the war between the British and the Colonists, both the British and the French encouraged their Indian allies to scalp their enemies providing them with metal scalping knives.
The practice of paying bounties for Indian scalps did not end until the 1800’s.
Excavations at a friary in Hull, England, have uncovered at least a dozen skulls displaying evidence of three-stage syphilis. These have been carbon dated to between 1300 and 1450 A.D. Pre-Columbian skeletons with syphilis have also been found elsewhere in Europe, including Ireland, Naples and Pompeii, as well as at an excavation in Israel. This physical evidence lends credence to historical writings from Europe that place syphilis in Europe between 150 and 200 years before Columbus set sail on his first voyage.
Proponents of the theory that syphilis originated in the Americas often cite historical reports that an epidemic of syphilis laid waste to French soldiers in 1494. Because the damage that syphilis does to the body progresses at a slow rate, it is unlikely that it could have been contracted the year before.
Authors who claim as fact that syphilis originated in the Americas, often fail to note that an estimated 65 percent or more of American Indians died from small pox, typhoid, scarlet fever, influenza, dysentery, diphtheria, chicken pox and cholera brought to the America by Europeans. (Smallpox alone had a mortality rate of 90 per 100 cases.)
By 1495, two years after Columbus’ first voyage, fifty-seven to eighty percent of the native population of Santa Domingo had died from small pox according to R.S. Bray, author of Armies of Pestilence-The Impact of Disease on History. (1994). By 1515, two-thirds of the Indians of Puerto Rico were dead from the disease.
Ten years after Cortez arrived in Mexico, 74 percent of the indigenous people there had died from disease so that only six million remained. Indians living in New England and Canada also died in great numbers. All the time, more Europeans continued to arrive on the continent.
Later small pox would sweep across the North American continent, leaving death in its wake. According to some estimates that about one million one hundred and fifty thousand Indians lived north of the Rio Grande in the early sixteenth-century. By the early 1900s only about four hundred thousand Indians lived in this area. Most died from European disease.
Not only were American Indians outnumbered, one can only imagine the fear, grief and social disruption these plagues caused them. In addition to taking lives and land, Europeans took Indian technological knowledge, claiming it as their own.
Although history books often leave the impression that Europeans were accomplished gun manufacturers well before contact, firearm technology was still in its infancy when Columbus set sail. The English did not have handguns until the 1375. The Italians did not have them until 1397. The first mechanical device for firing the handgun was not invented until 1427. Europeans used crossbows as weapons of war until 1485 when half of the English army was equipped with guns. Europeans did not use guns for hunting game until 1515.
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