Thanksgiving and Scientists’ Slander of Native Americans
Pilgrims piously celebrate Thanksgiving in Plymouth as Native Americans (far right) look on in a 1914 painting I found on Wikipedia. By 1621, when this peaceful get-together took place, European colonizers were already slaughtering, enslaving and sickening Native Americans. And yet Steven Pinker and other prominent scientists insist that pre-state people were more vicious than European colonizers.
November 21, 2023. This column is an edited version of one I originally wrote for Scientific American. I expand on these ideas in The End of War. –John Horgan
The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over scientists’ slanderous portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.
Thanksgiving, traditionally, presents Native Americans in a positive light. In grade school, I learned about the “first Thanksgiving,” in which Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This story supports the view—often (and apparently erroneously) attributed to 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful “noble savages.”
Prominent scientists, notably Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and the late Edward Wilson, claim that pre-state people in the Americas and elsewhere were actually quite vicious. “Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage,” Pinker has written, “quantitative body counts… suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.”
According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes “got it right” when he called pre-state life a “war of all against all.” This Hobbesian thesis has been propagated in bestselling books like The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward Wilson, The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond and Pinker’s own The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Yes, Native Americans waged war before Europeans showed up, but Pinker and other Hobbesians have exaggerated warfare among early humans. These scientists have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.
In two momentous early encounters, Native Americans greeted Europeans with kindness. Here is how Christopher Columbus described the Arawak, tribal people living in the Bahamas when he landed there in 1492:
“They willingly traded everything they owned…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
How that passage, which I found in historian Howard Zinn’s A Peoples’ History of the United States, captures the whole sordid history of colonialism! Columbus was as good as his word. Within decades the Spaniards had either slaughtered or enslaved the Arawak and other natives of the “New Indies.”
A similar pattern unfolded in New England in the early 17th century. After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with the Wampanoag in a three-day feast (depicted in the painting above). The event my classmates and I learned about in grade school really happened!
The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases spread by previous European explorers. Europeans also killed, kidnapped and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, stole grain and other goods from the Wampanoag, according to Wikipedia’s entry on Plymouth Colony.
The good vibes of that 1621 feast soon dissipated. As more English settlers arrived in New England, they seized more and more land from the Wampanoag and other tribes, who eventually resisted with violence—in vain. We all know how this story ended. “The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million,” Howard Zinn writes.
In “Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History,” an essay in The New York Review of Books, anthropologist Peter Nabokov notes that colonizers reduced California’s native population from 350,000 at first contact to under 17,000 by 1900. State laws allowed and even encouraged the slaughter of Native Americans. “Extermination,” Nabokov comments, was “considered no great tragedy for an entire people who were uniformly and irredeemably defined as savage and inhuman.”
Centuries earlier, the Arawak and Wampanoag were kind to us—and by us I mean white people of European descent. We showed our thanks by sickening, subjugating and slaughtering them and other indigenous people. And we have the gall to call them more savage than us.
Please ponder this dark irony as you celebrate Thanksgiving.
Further Reading: