The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Cultural Collisions 45

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Gothenburg

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1607

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1605–1607

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Delaware

French

Indians were puzzled that European men worked

so hard in the fields. In many Indian societies, crop

cultivation was women’s work. Moreover, the bounty

of the earth was such that no one needed to work all

the time. The Europeans’ ceaseless drudgery and

relentless pursuit of material goods struck the Indians

as perverse. In many Indian societies, sachems

acquired power by giving away their goods. The

Narragansett Indians even had a ritual in which they

collected “almost all the riches they have to their

gods”—kettles, hatchets, beads, knives—and burned

them in a great fire.

This lack of concern for material things led

Europeans to conclude that the native people of

America were lazy and childlike. “[Indians] do but

run over the grass, as do also foxes and wild beasts,”

an English settler wrote in 1622, “so it is lawful now

to take a land, which none useth, and make use of it.”

In the sense that the Indians continuously interacted

with nature, the first part of this statement contained

a grain of truth, although of course the second did

not follow from it logically.

That the Indians allowed their environment to

remain pristine is a myth. Long before contact with

the Europeans, Indians cleared fields, burned the

underbrush of forests, diverted rivers and streams,

built roads and settlements, and deposited immense

quantities of earth upon mounds.

But Europeans left a deeper imprint on the land.

Their iron-tipped ploughs dug into the earth and

made more of it accessible to cultivation, and their

iron axes and saws enabled them to clear vast forests

with relative ease. Pigs and cattle, too, ate their way

through fields. Indians resented the intensity of

English cultivation. After capturing several English

farmers, some Algonquians buried them alive, all the

while taunting: “You English have grown exceedingly

above the Ground. Let us now see how you will grow

when planted into the ground.”

The Europeans’ inability to grasp the communal

nature of land tenure among Indians also led to innu-

merable quarrels. Traditional tribal boundaries were

neither spelled out in deeds or treaties nor marked by

fences or any other sign of occupation. Often corn

grown by a number of families was stored in a com-

mon bin and drawn on by all as needed. Such prac-

tices were utterly alien to the European mind.

Nowhere was the cultural chasm between Indians

and Europeans more evident than in warfare. Indians

did not seek to possess land, so they sought not to

destroy an enemy but to display their valor, avenge an

insult or perceived wrong, or acquire captives who

could take the place of deceased family members. The

Indians preferred to ambush an opponent and seize

the stragglers; when confronted by a superior force,

they usually melted into the woods. The Europeans