47 The Americans includes a two-page section, “The Conservation
Controversy,” buried on pages 1122-23 in the midst of a two-page treatment of
a mishmash of topics after the last chapter of the book. It seems fair to predict
that no student will ever reach this section.
48 Lerone Bennett, Black Power U.S.A. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 345-46.
49 But see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown, 1991), 3.
50 Peter Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization (New York: Avon, 1969), 49-50.
51 Verrazano quoted in Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 26.
52 Quoted in Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 39.
53 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians (London: J. M. Dent,
1980), 58.
54 Psalm 90, verse 10. See also S. Boyd Eaton et al., The Paleolithic
Prescription (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and Marshall Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine and Atherton, 1972).
There are statistical issues here, one being that average life expectancy at
birth can be quite low if 40 percent of all newborns die in their first year, so a
better measure is life expectancy at age one or age ten. Measuring life
expectancy before European and African diseases is also not easy when those
diseases accompanied and even antedated first contact. On the other hand,
information from archaeology summarized by Jared Diamond in “The Worst
Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, 5/1987, 64- 66, suggests
the early European settlers quoted above may have been too optimistic in their
assessments of Indian longevity.
55 William A. Haviland, “Cleansing Young Minds, or What Should We Be
Doing in the Introductory Course to Anthropology?” (paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association, New Orleans,
1990), 3.
56 Special instruments were developed for the operation, and the whole thing
was done not only against the forces of nature but also uphill, against the force
of gravity. We might contrast Las Casas’s description of birthing on Haiti
before the arrival of Europeans: “Pregnant women work to the last minute and
give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as