american-holocaust

230 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTwas a matter of escalating degree, not (as some of these writers imply) awholesale change in consciousness. 96 For as we have seen at some lengthin the preceding pages, the Europeans' predisposition to racist enmity regardingthe Indians had long been both deeply embedded in Western thoughtand was intimately entwined with attitudes toward nature, sensuality, andthe body. That there were some Europeans who appreciated and evenidealized native cultural values-and some settlers who ran off to live withthe Indians because they found their lifeways preferable to their own-isundeniable. But these were rarities, and rarities with little influence, withina steadily rising floodtide of racist opinion to the contrary. 97What in fact was happening in those initial years of contact betweenthe British and America's native peoples was a classic case of self-fulfillingprophecy, though one with genocidal consequences. Beginning with a falseprejudgment of the Indians as somehow other than conventionally humanin European terms (whether describing them as living "after the mannerof the Golden Age" or as "wild beasts and unreasonable creatures"),everything the Indians did that marked them as incorrigibly non-Europeanand non-Christian-and therefore as permanently non-civilized in Britisheyes-enhanced their definitionally less-than-human status. Treating themaccording to this false definition naturally brought on a resentful responsefrom the Indians-one which only "proved" (albeit spuriously) that thedefinition had been valid from the start. In his famous study of this phenomenonRobert K. Merton-after quoting the sociological dictum that"if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences"­pointed out that "the specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuatesa reign of error." 98 In the early and subsequent years of British­Indian contact, however, it produced and perpetuated a reign of terrorbecause it was bound up with an English lust for power, land, and wealth,and because the specific characteristics that the English found problematicin the Indians were attributes that fit closely with ancient but persistentlyheld ideas about the anti-Christian hallmarks of infidels, witches, and wildmen.It was only to be expected, therefore, that when the witchcraft crisis atSalem broke out as the seventeenth century was ending, it would be blamedby New England's foremost clergyman on "the Indians, whose chiefSagamores are well known unto some our Captives, to have been horridSorcerers, and hellish Conjurers, and such as Conversed with Daemons." 99Indeed, as Richard Slotkin has shown, the fusion of the satanic and thenative in the minds of the English settlers by this time had become so selfevidentas to require no argument. Thus, when a young woman namedMercy Short became possessed by the Devil, she described the beast whohad visited her as "a wretch no taller than an ordinary Walking-Staff; heewas not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour; he wore ahigh-crowned Hat, with straight Hair; and had one Cloven-foot." Ob-