during the seventeenth century. The Dutch in New Amsterdam quoted
prices in silver, beaver skins, and “wampum.” But wampum seems to have
had, at least initially, more symbolic or prestige value than what we consider
money; most trade was by barter.
Despite what they shared and how they moved, rarely could Indians
manage to create supra-village organizations that might have been capable
of withstanding the invasions by whites. Some steps in the direction of con-
federation were being taken—Lewis Morgan counts three among the
Ottawa, six among the Creek, and the “Seven Council Fires” of the Dakota,
in addition to the best-known of all, the Iroquois Five Nations (later called
the Six Nations when they were joined by the southern Tuscarora). Each of
these, however, was within a local language group; none managed to tran-
scend the language barrier until nearly the end of the eighteenth century,
when the Indians were driven by desperation and no longer had coherent,
single-language communities.
Meanwhile, Indian societies were frequently at war with one another.
Before they acquired firearms, they fought wars that were largely ceremo-
nial but with hard and painful elements. The first such element was that
booty consisted in part of slaves. Slavery was as common among Indian
societies in the New World as among Africans and Europeans. Practices
were equally cruel. As among some African groups, slaves who attempted
to run away were disabled by having their Achilles tendons severed or their
feet mutilated, as John Lawson observed among Indians in the Carolinas.
The difference between Indians enslaving Indians and whites enslaving
Indians was the scale. The accounts we have of slavery before the coming
of the whites are not explicit, but they suggest that the numbers involved
were small; under white supremacy, they became vast.
Scalping and torture of captured prisoners were both widely practiced
by American Indians before Columbus arrived in the New World. Some
Indians, notably the Mohawk, Algonquians, and Hurons—like the Caribs
whom the Spaniards met in the Caribbean—also practiced cannibalism.
These, to us ghastly, practices had separate and distinct meaning for the
tribes that engaged in them. In part, both scalping and cannibalism were
believed to transfer the strength and “persona” of the fallen warrior to the
victor and to allow the victor to demonstrate his prowess.
The Native Americans 21