At no time in history have human populations been static. From the earliest centuries, societies expanded, contracted, fought, cooperated, merged, conquered, collapsed, struggled, adapted, and innovated. Peoples of a variety of cultural backgrounds undertook lengthy explo­rations and sought to impose their will on neighbors or distant societies, often with little success. The indigenous societies of historic times (that is, typically and inaccurately tied to the point of European expansion) have not been fixed for all time, any more than have other human populations. Some had retreated into isolated corners in the face of the advance of other cultures, seeking to maintain a way of life. Others had been forced off traditional lands and pushed into less desirable territories, where they faced little competition for resources. For all peoples, the passage of time was marked by change, choice, and a struggle to determine their destiny.

For most of human history - and among many societies to the present day - subsistence living was the norm. These peoples lived off the fruits of hunting, fishing, and gathering, supplemented by minimal agricul­tural activity. These societies lived very close to the land, their prosperity resting on the ability to understand and adjust to the seasons, the movements of animals and fish, and the uncertainties of climate. They suffered at times and feasted on other occasions. They developed social structures, rules and codes, interpreted the spiritual world, and purposefully created a human infrastructure around their physical setting. Tribal peoples once inhabited the forests of France and Spain; the famed cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet Pont D'Arc came from these societies. The ancestors of contemporary Han and Cantonese (Chinese) and Japanese cultures migrated into new lands in ways strikingly similar to those of the Apache, Maori, and Saint.

Historians used to portray the human experience as a contest between primitivism and progress, and slotted societies into several key blocks: those locked in tribal barbarism, those which responded to the possibil­ities of agriculture and, at the top of the racial hierarchy these writers constructed, those whose commitment to "progress" resulted in greater social complexity, the development of surplus-based economies, and the early stages of industrialization and innovation. This simplistic evolu­tionary structure became the foundation of the European story, and was a potent element in the narrative of other expansive cultures, including several on the Indian subcontinent, China's ruling dynasties and the aggressive societies of Japan. While this culturally insensitive division of the peoples of the world into simple categories is no longer accepted uncritically, the reality holds that societies did not follow a common path throughout history.

Over centuries, major developments occurred in the economic and social structures of many peoples around the world. Societies living on rich soils and in temperate climates discovered the potential of agriculture and livestock raising. The adaptive process was often slow, and involved a great deal of experimentation and failure, but new social structures slowly emerged. Agriculture fostered a sedentary lifestyle, provided that the farmers learned how to replenish the nutrients in the soil-. The production of agricultural surpluses permitted other social changes, including specialization in work, more complex social hierar­chies, and greater emphasis on leisure time. These societies spent a great deal of time interpreting the spiritual world, thus developing the theological and organizational foundations of complex religions. Innovations in government, military structures, and economic relation­ships and procedures likewise built off the reliability of agricultural production and the certainty of sustainable surpluses.

For hundreds of years, the standard assumption was that this evolutionary path was unique to the European sphere. From beginnings in the Middle East, and gradually moving northward through Greece and Rome to Western Europe and the British Isles, western civilizations changed in response to the complex interplay of human invention, military conquest, and economic adaptation.

 

Discovery

First impressions matter. Rarely has this been as true as with the initial contacts between indigenous peoples and newcomers. The British were astonished at the seeming dismissal of their arrival by the Aborigines of Australia, who rejected their offer of gifts and new technology, and turned their attentions to the more responsive and interested Maori of New Zealand. Explorers venturing into new lands carried complex expectations, I ranging from the anticipated discovery of vast wealth to the prospect that the new worlds contains monsters and other ferocious life-forms. Harsh descriptions of newly identified lands and peoples were the norm, offering readers and other learners highly skewed first impressions of these “different” societies. If a newcomer described a land mass in favorable terms, the area became infused with the characteristics of a paradise of wealth and opportunity to be exploited by those courageous enough to venture forth. More commonly, descrip­tions tended to be self justifying, highlighting the bravery, fortitude, and determination of the explorer. They spoke of vast distances, endless hardships, impenetrable lands (holding certain wealth) and, most significantly, ferocious and strange peoples.

In an age of limited literacy in the expansionist countries, particularly in Europe, the ideas about newly experienced land and peoples nonetheless spread widely amongst the population. From the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, even if few people could read the penned accounts of the new worlds uncovered by mariners and adventurers, the stories nonetheless quickly seeped into the public consciousness. They spread, no doubt embellished and misrepresented, by word of mouth and from the pulpits of churches anxious to raise money and volunteers for overseas missions. As printing technologies and reading skills improved, broadsheets, pamphlets, and cheap books circulated widely, consumed voraciously by readers, who often read them aloud for their illiterate friends. Add to this the slowly growing number of individuals with direct experience – soldiers, sailors, government officials, business people, and settlers – and the mechanisms for the popularization of new societies were gradually put in place.

Remember, too, that discoveries of new worlds and new peoples ranked among the most important and interesting revelations of their day. Details and descriptions brought to the Old World by Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, the crew members from Magellan’s expeditions, fishermen returning from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, or clergy on leave from overseas missions matched in importance almost any other news in circulation. Over a period of centuries, as Europe developed a growing sense of its place on a circular orb, covered by vast expanses of water and ill-defined land forms, learning about the shape of the world and the inhabitants of foreign lands remained a high public priority. Working in an ill-connected and sporadic fashion, explorers, writers, and government officials gradually pieced together the puzzle for the world, filling in empty spaces and offering colorful descriptions of new territories and new peoples. The first explorers ventured forth expecting the best and the worst; many thousands perished in the attempt to define the unknown. Europe, more than any place on the earth, seemed desperate to know about the missing lands and appeared to be genuinely curious about the unusual cultures and lifeways encountered in far distant places.

 

Outsiders' Descriptions of Indigenous Peoples

The curiosity of newcomers rested in the remarkable "otherness" of the newly encountered indigenous peoples. When Prussians ventured east­ward into Polish territory, they discovered societies that looked, in many respects, like their own. Likewise, while the English might have dis­paraging notions of the Portuguese, they nonetheless met people with a similar level of technology, comparable religious values - even if both Protestants and Catholics viewed each other's spiritual formulations as antithetical - and approximately the same standards of living. This did not hold when they went overseas. They found, instead, people of different skin colours: they described the Asians as "yellow," Africans as "black," and North American indigenous peoples as "red," even though those descriptions scarcely captured the diversity of ethnic composition. They found people, too, who did not hold to European norms of mod­esty and public comportment. When Pedro Alvares Cabral reached the coast of Brazil in 1500, he and his colleagues were astonished by the public displays of nudity:

Three or four girls went among them, good and young and tender, with long very black hair hanging down their backs. And their privy parts were so highly and tightly closed and so free from pubic hair that, even when we examined them very closely, they did not become embarrassed.(1)

Cabral was impressed that they stood "so naked and exposed with such innocence that there was no shame there." These formulations, importantly, allowed Europeans to cloak themselves in the puritanical veil of "whiteness," a visual declaration of an intense sense of cultural and racial superiority.

The juxtaposition of the encounter with central Africa and the demonization of the concept of "blackness," created a potent situation. In the age of the Black Death, and at a time when the dangers of Satan were equated with darkness, the black peoples of the African continent seemed worthy of fear and dehumanization. The subsequent discovery that due to the intricacies of African politics, warfare and economics many thousands of these people were available as slaves fit nicely with the visual and cul­tural impressions of the newly encountered societies. The removal of the young men and women who were most attractive to the slave traders, of course, undermined the local economy and destroyed the ability of the peoples to sustain themselves. Europeans who had been controlling, indenturing, and dominating their own people for generations found it easy to accept the enslavement of such peoples. European religious and cultural values readily discounted Africans as sub-human, allowing the construction of images which encouraged the exploitation of black labor. The expansionists attempted to adopt this same model to North, Central, and South America, interpreting the "other" as being available for commercial use and European control. For a variety of cultural and economic reasons, these attempts failed, forcing the European powers to turn back to Africa and the slave trade for the human resources needed to capitalize on commercial opportunities in the New World.

The societies Europeans encountered did not look at all like the world the travelers left behind. In some places - parts of India, China, and Central America - the Europeans encountered elaborate and dramatic societies. These select peoples had large cities, often larger than those in Europe, advanced technologies, and complex social organizations. The description by Bernal Diaz of Cortez's travel along the causeway to Iztapalapa conveys the sense of wonderment about the scale of the Mexico civilization:

[A]nd when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going toward Mexico we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and build­ing rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? ... Thus, we arrived near Iztapalapa, to behold the splendour of the other Caciques who came out to meet us, who were the Lord of the town named Cuitlahuac, and the Lord of Culuacan, both of them near relations of Montezuma. And then we entered that city of Iztapalapa, the appearance of the palaces in which they lodged us! How spacious and well built they were, of beautiful stone work and cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet scented trees, with great rooms and courts, wonderful to behold, covered with awnings of cotton cloth.(2)

These people had, too, "strange" religiôns; clearly God had not visited his graces upon them. In dress, demeanor, and language, they shared little in common with the adventurers who now wandered nervously and uncertainly in their midst. They often marvelled at the richness and diversity of these lands, as the first Europeans did when they reached China and Japan, although they fixated as well on their "barbarism" and oddities. First and foremost, these societies were not European and, with careful attention, the flaws, vulnerabilities, and "uncivilized" elements of the new peoples could be identified.

More often, as they came across smaller indigenous societies, they found peoples who were truly "strange" and "savage." Most did not have the complex urban centers that the Europeans saw as fundamental to their economic and political success. They seemed scarcely more advanced than the animals, for they moved regularly across the land and did not demonstrate dominion over the natural world.

They showed no signs of understanding the important truths of human existence - God, government, material opportunity, literacy - and hence were readily dismissed as being only an impediment to the development of new territories. Amerigo Vespucci wrote of the Brazilian Indians, in a widely circulated 1503 description, They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recog­nize the immortality of the soul; they have among them no private property, because everything is common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself. [They have] no justice and no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code. They are a very prolific people, but have no heirs because they hold no property.(3)

In many instances, the newcomers feared their ferociousness and nervously described the barbarism which seemed built into the small societies they encountered from Africa to Australia and from Newfoundland to Patagonia, although the aggressiveness often began with the newcomers. Consider the account, written by Gâspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar travelling with Francisco Orellana along the Amazon in 1542:

This village as situated on a high spot back from the river as if on the frontier facing other tribes who made war on them, because it was fortified with a wall of heavy timbers. At the time that our companions climbed up to this village to seize food, the Indians decided to defend it and took up a strong position inside that enclosure, which had only one gate, and they set to defending themselves with very great courage. However, as we saw that we were in difficulty, we determined to attack them andso, in accordance with this resolu­tion, the attack was launched through the gate. Entering without any loss, our companions fell upon the Indians and fought with them until they dispersed them, and then they collected foodstuffs, of which there was an abundance.(4)

Most European observers, like Carvajal, found little to admire among these societies, save for basic animalistic qualities such as bravery, fero­ciousness, and skills on the land, and occasionally they discovered ways of using these traits and knowledge to their advantage. In the main, however, they simply discounted the pagan and ill-organized indigenous peoples as non-Europeans and, in the broader scheme of things, as mar­ginally important.

It is incorrect, however, to assume that the newcomers saw indigenous peoples in consistently negative terms. Although the Europeans found much wanting in the societies they encountered, they were nonetheless impressed with many aspects of the indigenous world. José Mariano Mozino, one of the first newcomers to visit the west coast of North America, wrote of the peoples he encountered:

A languid look is rather frequent among them, but rarely does one find a stupid-looking one. On the contrary, I noticed in many such a lively expression that, through it alone, one could guess many of their thoughts with little question.... Either because it is natural among them or because they have eliminated all sentiments of modesty entirely, the men frequently abandon this clothing and appear stark naked, without so much as covering their private parts with their hands, even though they might be in a group of numerous women. The women, on the contrary, preserve more decency.(5)

Mozino offered matter-of-fact descriptions of dress, housing, and lifestyle, making it clear that he did not see the people of Nootka Sound as either desperately poor or brutal beyond belief.

But harsh and unkind assessments dominated, as the 1899 description of the "wild men of the woods" in India by Donald McIntyre illustrates:

There are some curious specimens of humanity to be found dwelling among the forests about the Chipla, called "Razees," compared with whom the vil­lagers are quite civilized ... The villagers described these "jungle admi" (wild men of the woods), as they termed them to me, as being almost on par with the beasts of the wilds they inhabit, subsisting chiefly on what they can secure with their bows and arrows, and by snaring.

Admitting he had never seen a Razees person, McIntyre offered up the observations of a friend and government official:

The last time I saw a man or woman of the tribe was at Askote in 1866 and they were caught for my special benefit. We gave them a few rupees, but they seemed to value them as much as apes! They would eat anything given to them; and both the man and the woman wore long hair down the back, and used leaves stitched together for clothing.

Maclntyre concluded by commenting "From this, the condition of these remnants of an almost lost race appears to have been still much the same as, we may suppose, was that of Adam and Eve after the fall.(6)

A handful of observers in the years predating Rousseau's conception of the nobility of life attached to the land saw the indigenous peoples' relationship with the land and intense spirituality in positive terms, however. The positive elements of newcomers' descriptions of indigenous societies described an idyllic state of nature; many of the initial commentaries on the indigenous peoples of South America talked about sexual freedom, the absence of greed, and the gentleness of the newly found societies.

The image was transformed into public discourse through the writings of Erasmus and Thomas More, Montaigne, Locke, Spinoza, Shakespeare, and many others. Even as Europeans were occupying indigenous lands and conquering original peoples, they found positive elements that were worthy of emulation. In general, however, portraits highlighted the fact that more mobile societies, which newcomers assumed struggled daily for survival, were seen as uncivilized and were deemed an impediment to settlement and development. Caustic and harsh descriptions abound of such groups as the Aborigines, the northern hunter-gatherers in North America, the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, and small societies in South Asia, Africa, and South America. The expansionary powers assumed that their own military and technological prowess proved their superiority, blessed as it was by the hand of their God, and formed little understanding of the dynamics or complexities of the indigenous peoples.

On occasion, however, the newcomers were impressed with the people they encountered. Travelers in the Arctic, for example, marveled at the ability of the Inuit to find sustenance in such a harsh and forbidding land, even though they were initially reluctant to adopt the Inuit lifestyle and material culture. Early French and Portuguese observers wrote favorably about the gentleness, generosity, and sharing cultures of the Brazilian indigenous peoples. Many of the first observers of the Maori feared their warlike nature and saw them, legitimately, as a worrisome but truly impressive military threat. There was, in fact, something of an idealization of the original inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, who seemed to inhabit a tropical paradise and were freed from the worries and struggles of northern countries. Visitors to the west coast of North America described positively the large well-organized salmon-based communities in the region. Many of the early European explorers among the peoples of the American Northeast described such groups as the Mohawk in favorable terms. The discovery of the complex pueblo cultures of the American Southwest likewise generated relatively favorable descriptions. Even in these cases, however, observers quickly identified social elements they described as distasteful -just as indigenous peoples often found newcomers' customs disagreeable. Polygamous marriages, multi-deity world views, seemingly casual attitudes toward life and death, and the absence of material wealth, social stratification, or skills differentiation all provided evidence to the outsiders that the indigenous peoples, however impressive in some aspects, were far from equal beings or cultures.

As the British, Spanish, Portugese, and French imperialists expanded across North America and the Pacific, they discovered an innate domes­tic curiosity back home about the unusual peoples of the New World.

The indigenous travelers rarely fared well as they passed from city to city, country to country, on display as cultural abnormalities. In the most egregious cases, they were caged and highlighted in local fairs and circuses. Museums and galleries also presented the paying public with an opportunity to gawk at these strange human beings from distant lands. They were paraded before the public in their traditional, ceremonial garb, faces often painted to create a frightening countenance, all of this "prov­ing" that the non-European world was inhabited by ferocious societies. Lonely, thousands of miles away from home, dispirited and alienated, the indigenous peoples suffered greatly from their experiences. Many succumbed to European diseases or diet; others, their spirits broken by the punishing combination of entrapment and public display, withered and died. A few, including a number brought over as political emissaries to imperial governments, were treated more favorably, even comfortably, and returned to their homelands with many tales and images of their own (and not as flattering or awe-inspired as the Europeans expected).

By the nineteenth century, visits from strange and distant lands were quite commonplace in public exhibits and fairs across Europe. Ranging from caged "animals" and "sub-humans" to honored chiefs, cultural oddities, and artisans, these visitors provided Europeans with a first­hand opportunity to experience the diversity of the human experience. Okou-Ulah, one of a Cherokee delegation to England in 1730, was clearly impressed with the reception they have received and said:

We are come hither from a dark and mountainous country, but we are not in a place of light. The crown of our Nation is different from that which our father King George wears, but it is all one. The chain of friendship shall be carried to our people. We look upon King George as the sun, and our father, and upon ourselves as his children; for though you are white and we are red, our hands and hearts are joined together. When we have acquainted our people with what we have seen, our children from generation to generation will remember it. In war we shall be as one with you. The great King George's enemies shall be our enemies. His people and ours shall always be one, and we shall die together.

An Aborigine, Bennelong, was transported from Australia to London in 1792, and enjoyed a two-year run as a curiosity in the city. Numerous Maori visited England and Europe in the nineteenth century. One of these, Te Mahanga, journeyed to London in 1806. The man who took Te Mahanga to England, John Savage, said of this companion:

[N]othing escaped his observation. The church steeples - the shops - the passengers - the horses and carriages, all called forth some singular remark. Of the height of the steeples he observed, Piannah wurrie tauwittee tuwittee paucoora - Very good house, it goes up in the clouds. On noticing any sin­gularities, decrepitude, lameness, or infirmity, in a passenger, he always remarked, Kiooda Tungata, or Kiooda wyeena - Good for nothing man or woman . His eye was constantly seeking articles of iron, clothing, or food. Of some of the streets he observed, Nue mue Tungata, nue nue wurrie, itteee ittee eka, ittee ittee potatoe - Plenty of men, plenty of horses, but very little fish and few potatoes.

Another Maori, Nahiti, traveled to France to visit the king in the 1830s. Tumohe and Paraone made a similar journey to Austria. Entertainers traveled to England, where they played to appreciative crowds. None of this did much to dampen the European sense that they had been specially mandated by God to conquer, incorporate, and dominate these indigenous societies. Even the discovery of artistic talents, cultural distinctiveness, and technological creativity only seemed to add to the imperial continent's disappointment that otherwise gifted people could sink to such levels of depravity and economic irrelevance. The recogni­tion of difference proved, importantly, to be unrelated to the celebration of cultural distinctiveness. Knowing the world was peopled by societies of great variety did little to undermine the Europeans' sense that they were specially entrusted, by God and history, with the duty to spread their religion, values, and lifeways to the far corners of the world.

Indigenous peoples remained of continuing interest and, in many countries, remain so to this day. Public facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada proudly display the work of contemporary aboriginal artists, even as indigenous communities remain on the eco­nomic and social margins of the country. Inuit carving, print-making, and soapstone sculpture, introduced as commercial ventures to the Canadian Inuit by government officials in the 1950s and 1960s, remains very popular provided the artwork is restricted to traditional images of seal hunters, Arctic mammals, and traditional northern lifeways. Major fairs and expositions, from the world-famous Great London Exhibition of 1851 to modern world expositions, regularly featured prominent displays of traditional indigenous cultures and art - ironically, often designed to differentiate one European colonial society from another. One rarely sees, however, indigenous peoples paraded before gawking crowds for entertainment purposes; the values attached to the public presentation of indigenous culture are more authentic and positive, and are often designed to generate support for aboriginal causes. Supporters of the Pewan of Sarawak, for example, have introduced community members, decked in traditional clothes, at public speaking events in an effort to gain backing for their anti-logging campaigns.

From first contact through to the present, however, indigenous peoples have generally been viewed as "the other," not as variants on a central theme of humanity. Imperial citizens could scarcely believe that human existence was possible in the vast Arctic expanses and in the jungles, deserts, and harsh tropical environments. Nor could they understand how the indigenous societies in temperate zones - across North America, in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other lands - could make poor use of rich and prosperous territory. Clearly, to the dominant powers, these were lesser societies, less "advanced," less technologically sophisticated, and by definition less "civilized." At best, as the imperialists demonstrated over several centuries, the indigenous peoples were intellectual and social novelties, of interest more because of what they illustrated about the distant past of humanity and what they foreshadowed for dominant cultures which dropped their vigilance and their commitment to colonial expansion.

 

Indigenous Impressions of Newcomers

European assumptions of their superiority were not, however, matched by indigenous acceptance. The indigenous peoples may have been either awestruck or dumbfounded by their first sightings of the new­comers. The Maori, for example, equated the sailors who arrived off their shores with supernatural beings and thought that they have descended from the sky. When the indigenous peoples of Mexico first saw Cortez, they marvelled at the newcomers:

And when he [Montezuma] had so heard what the messengers reported, he was terrified, he was astounded. And much he did marvel at their food. Especially did it cause him to faint away when he heard how the gun, at [the Spaniards] command, discharged [the shot]; how it resounded as if it thundered when it went off. It indeed bereft one of strength; it shut off one's ears. And when it discharged, something like a round pebble came forth from within. Fire went showering forth; sparks went blazing forth. And its smoke smelled very foul; it had a fetid odor which verily wounded the head. And when [the shot] struck a mountain, it was as if it were destroyed, dissolved. And a tree was pulverized; it was as if it vanished; it was as if someone blew it away. All iron was their war array. In iron they clothed themselves. With iron they covered their heads. Iron were their swords. Iron were there crossbows. Iron were their shields. Iron were their lances. And those which bore them upon their backs, their deer, were as tall as roof terraces. And their bodies were everywhere covered; only their faces appeared. They were very white; they had chalky faces; they had yellow hair, though the hair of some was black. Long were their beards; they were also yellow.(7)

Te Taniwha's description of the encounter with Captain Cook's ships at Whitianga in 1769 captures the strangeness of the first contact:

We lived at Whitianga, and a vessel came there, and when our old men saw the ship they said it was an atua, and the people on board were tupua, strange beings or "goblins." The ship came to anchor, and the boats pulled on shore. As our old men looked at the manner in which they came on shore, the rowers pulling with their backs to the bows of the boat, the old people said, "Yes, it is so: these people are goblins, their eyes are in the backs of their heads; they pull on shore with their backs to the land to which they are going." When these goblins came on shore we (the children and women) took notice of them, but we ran away from them into the forest, and the warriors alone stayed in the presence of those goblins; but, as the goblins stayed some time, and did not do any evil to our braves, we came back one by one and gazed at them, and we stroked their garments with our hands, and we were pleased with the whiteness of their skins and the blue of the eyes of some of them."

The Maori reaction mirrored that of the Native Americans of the area later known as New York:

A long time ago, when there was no such thing known to the Indians as peo­ple with white skin, (their _expression) some Indians who had been out a-fishing, and where the sea widens, espied at a great distance something remarkably large swimming, or floating on the water, and such as they had never seen before. They immediately returning to the shore apprised their countrymen of what they had seen, and pressed them to go out with them and discover what it might be. These together hurried out, and saw to their great surprise the phenomenon, but could not agree what it might be; some concluding it either to be uncommon large fish, or other animal, while others were of the opinion it must be some very large house. It was at length agreed among those who were spectators, that as this phenomenon moved towards the land, whether or not it was an animal, or anything that had life in it, it would be well to inform all the Indians on the inhabited islands of what they had seen, and put them on guard ....These arriving in numbers ... con­cluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto (great or Supreme Being) himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them. (8)

Other groups were frightened by the discharge of cannons or firearms and believed that the newcomers had magical and dangerous powers. Still others were astonished by the pale skin color of the newcomers, or their clothing, language, or mannerisms. Put differently, indigenous peoples responded to the arrival of newcomers with much the same combination of puzzlement, fear and uncertainty that governed the other half of the contact experience.

In a late-twentieth-century variation of a common seventeenth- to nineteenth-century phenomenon, Yanomami leaders from the Amazon were brought by their supporters into western view, hoping to generate sympathy and to reinforce their claims to land and resource rights in their homelands. Dressed in their traditional garb, they were paraded before governments, presented to raucous soccer stadiums, taken to electronics shops and otherwise exposed to the material richness of the modern world. Implicitly, many of the government officials and non-indigenous observers believed, like their pre-twentieth-century counterparts, that the Yanomami would be awed by the wealth and technological sophistication of the major cities. Instead, the Yanomami reported considerable distaste for the noise, over-crowding, and material excesses of major centers, and expressed a heart-felt desire to return to their home territories.

So it was in earlier times. The first British settlers attempted - with considerable initial difficulty - to establish colonies in the Chesapeake (Virginia) in the 1570s. Historian Edmund S. Morgan later commented that the lot of the average aboriginal was not dramatically more chal­lenging than the British norm and was, in some areas, more comfortable and dependable. (Robert Hughes, an historian of Australia, made a similar claim about the nutritional standards of the Aborigines compared to Europeans.) Native Americans, it seemed, lived longer, had cleaner and better living quarters, enjoyed greater security of food supply, were less vulnerable to violent death, and lived in a less arbitrary society. Not sur­prisingly, then, the first Native Americans hauled across Europe did not necessarily gain favorable impressions of the broader society. They might, as their handlers hoped, be awestruck by the beauty and grace of the major cathedrals and state buildings, but these impressions were offset by the mess and slop of the city streets, the brutality of state justice, the viciousness of European warfare, and the inequities of societies that had not yet established secure food supplies for their people. Indigenous visitors to France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, if they survived the visit, as only a few did, left with greatly mixed impressions of the Old World. Most simply wanted to go back to their homelands.

The situation did not change much as time passed. Maori visitors to England in the nineteenth century, for example, despaired of the endless rain, fog, and cold, and found little beyond stately buildings that was more impressive than their Aotearoa homeland. So it was for Pacific Islanders and Asians, the former dissuaded by the inhospitable climate of much of Europe and the later hardly awestruck by public buildings and cities which were often smaller, newer, and less dramatic than those in their homelands. People of the forests, deserts, and Arctic ice experi­enced great hardship in adjusting to the chaos, noise, and disruptions of the industrial age. Minik, an Inuit from Greenland, was brought to New York in 1897 and paraded before audiences by his patron, Robert Peary. The attention only demoralized him, and rendered him ill-suited for reentry to Inuit society. When his father Qisuk died, in a last act of dehu­manization that tormented his young son, his bones were set aside for scientific investigation and preserved for research and display in a museum in New York City.

If indigenous observers were under-whelmed by their visits to the imperial homeland, they were often even less impressed by their encounters with the newcomers on Aboriginal land. The outsiders clearly had daunting technology; their guns, ships, and metal implements easily overpowered the simpler and smaller armaments of indigenous peoples. They could marshal frightening firepower and powerful armies, and often had little difficulty imposing their military authority over the smaller, more scattered, and less militaristic indigenous peo­ples. But on their own - traveling and living on the land - the newcom­ers were neophytes, often comically vulnerable and unable to adapt quickly to new environments. The speech of a Mik'maq elder, recorded by missionary C. LeClerc, captured the sentiment:

I am greatly astonished that the French have so little cleverness, as they seem to exhibit in the matter of which thou hast just told me on their behalf, in the effort to persuade us to convert our poles, our barks, and our wigwams into those houses of stone and of wood which are tall and lofty, according to their account, as these trees. Very well! But why now ... do men of five to six feet in height need houses which are sixty to eighty? For, in fact, as thou knewest very well thyself, Patriarch, - do we not find in our own all the conveniences and the advantages that you have with yours, such as reposing, drinking, sleeping, east, and amusing ourselves with our friends when we wish? This is not all ... my brother, hast though as much ingenuity and cleverness as the Indians, who carry their houses and their wigwams with them so that they may lodge wheresoever they please, independently of any seignior whatsoever?... As to us, we find all our riches and all our conveniences among ourselves, without trouble and without exposing our lives to the dangers in which you find your­selves constantly through your long voyages ....Which of these two is the wis­est and happiest - he who labours without ceasing and only obtains, and that with great trouble, enough to live on, or he who rests in comfort and finds all that he needs in the pleasure of hunting and fishing ... Learn now, my brother, once for all, because I must open my to thee my heart: there is no Indian who does not consider himself infinitely more happy and more pow­erful than the French. (9)

Several of the major explorers of the Australian interior perished or suffered due to their inability to read local signs. Alfred Gibson (1873) and Ludwig Leichhardt (1848), both died in the effort to describe and explore the "ghastly blank" of the outback. The first expedition to cross Australia from south to north, conducted by Robert Burke and William Wills in 1860-61, ended in disaster when both men perished in the desert. Inuit and Eskimo in the far north occasionally came to the rescue of foundering European it is only because we are gradually adopting your manner of living, for expe­rience is making it very plain that those of us live longest who, despising your bread, your wine, and your brandy, are content with their natural good of beaver, of moose, of waterfowl, and fish, in accord with the custom of our ancestors and of all the Gaspesian nation. (10)

There were reasons to dislike the colonial representatives. The first newcomers were often not particularly well-behaved. Unprovoked attacks on unsuspecting villages undermined the indigenous' peoples confidence in the newcomers. The soldiers, traders, whalers, and sailors who represented the first wave of European expansion did not always comport themselves in a manner that impressed even the colonial officials. As a French observer wrote about his compatriots in Brazil in the 1550s, I must record, to my great regret, that some interpreters from Normandy who have lived eight or nine years in that country accommodated themselves to the savages and led the lives of atheists. They not only polluted themselves with all sorts of lewdness and villainy among the women and girls ... but surpassed the savages in humanities: I have heard them boasting of having killed and eaten prisoners) (11)

It is hardly surprising that many indigenous peoples were dismayed, if not disgusted, with the habits, behaviour and the aggressive interventions of the newcomers.

Europeans, ensconced in their assertion of superiority, rarely noticed that the indigenous peoples were often unimpressed. The newcomers often lacked stamina and were loath to venture far from military bases and settlements. Most of the Hudson's Bay company employees at York Factory, on Canada's Hudson Bay, spent their whole time in the region without venturing far from the post. Many Europeans moved only a few hundred yards from the safety of a government, commercial, or military station during their time in the New World, such was their fear of the unknown. When on their own on the land, they often lost their way or relied on local indigenous peoples to lead them back to safety. In many instances - and historical evidence is fairly limited in this regard - the aboriginal peoples disparaged the sanitation habits of the newcomers - the use of scented powders and regular bathing appalled many nonEuropeans - and ridiculed their preference for facial hair. Father Gabriel Sagard Theodat, recorded in the early seventeenth century the reaction of Huron to the bearded Frenchmen:

 

They have such a horrorexpeditions, several of which had collapsed into cannibalism.

In the jungles of Africa and South America, newcomers learned very slowly how to handle the heat, insects, and diseases which plagued the area. Pacific Islanders marveled at the outsiders' inability to harvest the riches of the sea and wondered about their capacity to survive in this, the most salubrious of world climates. Indigenous peoples were comfortable in their traditional places and, like the Aborigines in Australia who turned their backs on the gifts proffered by Captain Cook and his crew, were not overly impressed with the newcomers. A First Nations person in North America said of the difference between his world and that of the recent arrivals:

It is true ... that we have not always had the use of bread and of wine which your France produces; but, in fact, before the arrival of the French in these parts, did not the Gaspesians live longer than now? And if we have not any longer among us any of those old men of a hundred and thirty to forty years, of a beard that sometimes when they try to insult us they call us Sascoinronte, that is to say, Bearded, you have a beard; moreover, they think it makes people more ugly and weakens their intelligence." (12)

The lonely soldiers, traders, and miners that represented the vanguard of much of European society often drank heavily and lusted after local indigenous women, whom they discarded when they returned to their homelands. Aboriginal peoples often spoke, with some dismay, about the sexual appetites of the newcomers, and of their mistreatment of women. European attitudes to battle and warfare struck most indigenous peoples as uncommonly brutal and vicious. Few indigenous societies around the world - the ones European described so readily as barbarian - came close to the British, French, Spanish, and other European societies in the intensity and destructiveness of their military tactics.

The Europeans who generally described indigenous populations in negative terms - they found many reasons, often rooted in religion, to disparage even the majestic cultures of India and China - were them­selves also defined in an unflattering fashion. Indigenous peoples were often impressed with elements of the newcomers' technology, especially sailing ships, navigational instruments, and metal implements. They might, at first, be over-awed by the technology of warfare and destruc­tion introduced by the Europeans. They often subsequently discovered that the newcomers' technological innovations were ill-suited for the battles of the forests and plains and, once they themselves had access to the armaments, the Europeans' aura of invincibility quickly faded. Indigenous peoples did not, as the newcomers expected, simply abandon their established ways and technologies in favor of superior European approaches nor were they awestruck by the manner in which colonizers and invaders entered their lands. They discovered, as did the Europeans, that lifeways, values, and technologies emerged from local conditions and realities; the newcomers soon learned that, without adopting indigenous ways they would suffer and founder in the new lands. Most learned to borrow selectively from the indigenous people.

Early aboriginal impressions of the newcomers varied dramatically depending on the nature of the initial contact. Some outsiders advanced with armies; others came offering trade goods. In many instances, missionaries formed the vanguard of European expansion, sparking reactions ranging from curiosity to horror. Explorers and government officials often commenced contact with gifts, ceremonies, and unclear promises.

On the economic frontier, the vanguard of expansion rested with soldiers, fishers, miners, and traders, a generally rapacious and culturally insensitive lot. And in virtually all territories, the newcomers came in waves, sometimes over­lapping, seemingly endless. Across the globe, favorable first impressions were shattered by subsequent developments. Indigenous impressions and expectations adjusted accordingly and generally in a less positive direction.

The images of indigenous peoples carried by the newcomers did not remain fixed over time, although the core assumptions about the superiority of the dominant society remained consistent. At no time - including to the present - did the colonial authorities and population revisit their understandings of the indigenous cultures so as to recast the basic relationship between the groups in a more positive light. What did happen, in many different locations, is that newcomer populations altered their impressions of the original inhabitants to suit their specific needs. Indigenous peoples who were defined in relatively generous terms in the first instance, albeit with a healthy dose of the "noble savage" running through the descriptions, were subsequently presented more negatively.

As numerous scholars have demonstrated, images of other popula­tions reveal almost as much as about the group creating and sharing the impressions as about the people being described. The endless European preoccupation with "heathenism" and "savagery" reflected the Old World debates about Christianity and doctrinal disputes between Protestants and Catholics. Efforts to comprehend indigenous relation­ships with their land and resources illustrated the growing gap between Europeans and the natural world, for they had by the time of colonial expansion largely destroyed their ancient forests. People, including indigenous societies, defined "others" within frames of reference and concepts that they understood. And as their needs and societies evolved - from a world of kingdoms toward nation-states, from the pre-modern to the industrial, from the spiritual rigidities of the Middle Ages to Protestant and Catholic doctrinal rivalries, from a largely rural existence to urban societies - the Europeans' perspectives on the rest of the world shifted. Non-European societies were defined by their deviations from European norms, with these differences, again, rarely conceived in a positive light.

As European usage of newly found territories shifted, so did their conceptions of the indigenous populations. When colonies were valued primarily for their military/strategic importance, Aboriginal peoples were defined largely in terms of alliances. They were friend or foe, useful allies or intractable enemies. When newcomer expansions required active indigenous participation in order to make colonial economies flourish, as in the North American fur trade, harsh assessments of indigenous societies were tempered by descriptions outlining the "use­fulness" of the original peoples. Settlement frontiers, in contrast, tended to view indigenous societies as either potential farmers (a rare phenom­enon) or as barriers in the way of "progress." In the latter case, by far the most common, the image of indigenous populations shifted from early and somewhat favorable portraits to more hostile characterizations. The aboriginal communities, in these descriptions, were non-economic, did not make effective use of local resources, and were an impediment to the advance of "civilization."

Images proved to be powerful weapons. Repeated in dozens of memoirs, government reports, and other published accounts, the pub­licly shared impressions of indigenous populations provided the moral and conceptual justification for the actions of the dominant societies. "Brutal savages" clearly had to be tamed by whatever military might was necessary. Colonial nations preparing for war disseminated descriptions of hostile, malicious, and ferocious indigenous fighters. "Primitive hunters" obviously had no use for lands which could be put to far more productive uses. Agricultural settlements seeking territory for expansion could, with such descriptions in place, take indigenous land with little compunction. "Barbaric heathens" cried out for conversion at the hands of missionaries and, if they stood in the way of the advance of Christianity, the conquering power had both the right and the God-given duty to assume control of their lives.

It often mattered little if the images accorded with reality. In many cases, indigenous peoples did not, even by the European standards of the time, fit the descriptions which filled the popular press. The writers sought to justify their actions - be it conquest, land occupation, missionization, or government administration - not to provide an accurate reflection of the people and societies they encountered. Individuals whom specific indigenous societies thought to be friends and allies nonetheless penned descriptions which would have appalled the original peoples. Authors also picked up on the expectations of their home audiences, who desired descriptions of ferocious, intractable, backward, and pagan peoples. There was less interest in more balanced, sympathetic, and accurate appraisals. Indigenous peoples, then, found themselves entrapped in the cant, or ideology, of conquest and domi­nation, controlled and understood through the portraits painted of them, in word and image, by the agents of newcomer societies.

 

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