american-holocaust

NOTES 331White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the AmericanIndian," American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 917-53.97. One writer (Karen Ordahl Kupperman, in Settling With the Indians, op.cit.) makes much of the point that those Englishmen who were most likely to havefavorable things to say about the Indians were those who actually spent time withthem. While the observation is correct, the conclusion that she draws from it-thatamong those Englishmen who settled in America racism was a later seventeenthcenturydevelopment-is completely unfounded. For while it may well be that ahigher proportion of those who visited America became friendlier to the notion ofIndians as potential equals than were those who stayed in England (a common andpredictable phenomenon) in both cases the proportion holding positive views ofthe natives was infinitesimal. Through the early years of the seventeenth centurythe number of Englishmen who lived in North America never numbered more thanseveral hundred (as late as 1625 it still was less than 1500), while the populationof Britain, where the dominant ideology was being molded, was about 5,000,000.Thus, even accepting Kupperman's premise without question-that in the earlyyears of exploration and settlement, within the very small group of Englishmenwho actually lived in North America, there was a minority (that did not includethose who held important leadership positions) who had favorable impressions ofthe Indians-the observation best serves to provide a relative few exceptions whoprove the rule. And that in part explains, for example, the confused statement ofone of the first Jamestown settlers that the Indians "are naturally given to trechery,howbeit we could not finde it in our travel! up the river, but rather a most kindand loving people." [Anonymous (Gabriel Archer?), "A Brei£ discription of thePeople," in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter,1606-1609 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969), Volume One, pp. 103-104.]The realities of Indian society were forcing on this writer a befuddled reconsiderationof what he-and millions of other Englishmen-had been taught for nearlya century. But he was only one among multitudes, and the others were not havingsimilar second thoughts. On another small point, Kupperman claims (p. 40) thatthe British did not associate the Indians with the wild men of European culturaltradition (despite her own quoting of such comments as Robert Johnson's assertionin 1609 that the Indians were "wild and savage people, they live and lie up anddown in troupes like beards of Deare in a Forrest: they have no law but nature,their apparel! skinnes of beasts, but most goe naked") because, says Kupperman,"the Indian was depicted as being less hairy than Europeans," whereas the traditionalimage of the wild man was that "he was covered wirh a coat of hair." Again,the simple observation is correct, but not the conclusion drawn from it-for whatKupperman is doing here is insisting that informal sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryfolk knowledge meet the strict consistency criteria of the modern academic. Popularracist thought, however, invariably confounds such finicky maxims, as with theextreme and inconsistent anti-Semitic charge that Jews are both inferior sub-humanbeings (even "vermin" in certain versions) and enormously intelligent, powerful,and wily leaders of world-wide conspiracies. Clearly, the Indians' comparative lackof body hair was no impediment to British and other European commentatorsfour and five hundred years ago who regarded the New World's indigenous peopleas brutes in the manner of-but not necessarily identical with-the creaturesdescribed in their own classic literature. Nor should it be an impedi-