Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures reinforces ethnocentrism
so long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-civilized continuum. This
continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday
conversation—“refined or enlightened”—with “having a complex division of
labor,” the only definition that anthropologists defend. When we consider the
continuum carefully, it immediately becomes problematic. Was the Third Reich
civilized, for instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes. In what ways
do we prefer the civilized Third Reich to the more primitive Arawak society
that Columbus encountered? If we refuse to label the Third Reich civilized, are
we not using the term to mean “polite, refined”? If so, we must consider the
Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his Spaniards
primitive, if not savage. Ironically, societies characterized by a complex
division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized
armies. Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to resort to savage
violence in their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.^22
Thoughtless use of the terms civilized and civilization blocks any real
inquiry into the worldview or the social structure of the “uncivilized” person
or society. In 1990 President George H. W. Bush condemned Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait with the words, “The entire civilized world is against Iraq”—an irony,
in that Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates valleys are the earliest known seat of
civilization.
The three new “from scratch” textbooks in my sample of new histories do a
somewhat better job than the legacy texts. They recognize diversity among
Native societies. They tell about the League of Five Nations among the
Iroquois in the Northeast, potlatches among the Northwestern coastal Indians,
cliff dwellings in the Southwest, and caste divisions among the Natchez in the
Southeast. In the process of presenting ten or twenty different cultures in six or
eight pages, however, textbooks can hardly reach a high level of sophistication.
So they seize upon the unusual. No matter that the Choctaws were more
numerous and played a much larger role in American history than the Natchez
—they were also more ordinary. Students will not find among the Native
Americans portrayed in their history textbooks many “regular folks” with
whom they might identify.
After contact with Europeans and Africans, American Indian societies
changed rapidly. Native Americans took into their cultures not only guns,
blankets, and kettles, but also new foods, ways of building houses, and ideas