The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

justifying genocide 107
tions (McManamon 1999). This systematic erasure of peoples and cultures was
justified according to the following assumptions about contemporary native groups:
(a) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian populations were not seen building
or using the mound complexes of Ohio or the Mississippi Valley, and supposedly
had no knowledge of who had built them; (b) they were thought to be too primitive
to have constructed anything on the scale of structures such as Monk’s Mound
at the Mississippian site of Cahokia in Illinois, which was over a hundred feet high
with a footprint close to that of the Great Pyramid at Giza; (c) “tablets” with “writing”
purportedly found in some of the mounds were interpreted as having an Old
World origin (suggestions for these pre-Columbian travelers ranged from wandering
Egyptians to disoriented Welshmen); and (d) the moundbuilders were obviously
much older than any contemporary Indian group, based on what later turned out
to be erroneous tree-ring dating techniques applied to some of the mounds.
There were some early challenges to the view that contemporary Indian cultures
could not have been associated with the moundbuilding cultures. Thomas
Jefferson is one of the best known of those early skeptics. He based his interpretation
on mounds he excavated on his own property rather than on speculative and
racist assumptions of the cultural sophistication of contemporary Indian groups.
Significantly, however, it was not until the end of the century, when Indian resistance
to colonial advances and appropriations was beginning to wane, that the
Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington hired an entomologist from Illinois
by the name of Cyrus Thomas to systematically investigate the origins of the
mounds. In his multivolume report submitted to the bureau in 1894, Thomas concluded
that the mounds were not as old as originally claimed; there was solid evidence
suggesting continuity between contemporary Indian burial practices and
those seen in the mounds; and the de Soto expedition in the seventeenth century
had observed and reported the construction and use of such mounds by tribes in
the southeast, many of which had been decimated by disease and warfare by the
time the first colonists arrived in the area.
Robert Silverberg, in his study of the Moundbuilder Myth, concluded that the
idea of a vanished race of Old World origin was politically motivated, in part because
it was “comforting to the conquerors” (1989:48). Why “comforting”? Kenneth
Feder argues more explicitly as follows:
Perhaps if the Indians were not the builders of the mounds and the bearers of a culture
that impressed even the rather ethnocentric European colonizers of America, it
made wiping out the presumably savage and primitive natives less troublesome. And,
if Europeans could further convince themselves that the Indians were very recent interlopers—in
fact, the very invaders who had savagely destroyed the gentle and civilized
Moundbuilders—so much the better. And if, finally, it could be shown that the
Moundbuilders were, in actuality, ancient European travelers to the Western Hemisphere,
the circle was complete. In destroying the Indian people, Europeans in the
18th and 19th centuries could rationalize that they were...merely reclaiming terri