american-holocaust

BEFORE COLUMBUS 51rine corrals held as many as 1000 large sea turtles. This yielded a quantityof meat equal to that of 100 head of cattle, and a supply that was rapidlyreplenished: a fertile female turtle would lay about 500 eggs each season.Still, the Arawaks were careful not to disturb the natural balance of theseand other creatures; the evidence for this is that for millennia they sustainedin perpetuity their long-term supply of such natural foodstuffs. Itwas only after the coming of the Spanish-and, in particular, their releaseof dogs and pigs that turned feral and ran wild-that the wildlife ecologyof the islands found itself in serious trouble. 94In sum, as Caribbean expert Carl Sauer once put it, "the tropical idyllof the accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true" regardingthe Arawak. "The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings,were dextrous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. Theydesigned attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aestheticexpression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ballgames, dances, and music. They lived in peace and amity." 95IIIMuch the same thing that Sauer says about the Arawak can be said formany of the other peoples we have surveyed here, and for countless otherswe had neither the time nor the space to mention. Certainly not all ofthem, however. And again, this is what would be expected on any largebody of land containing such remarkable geographic and cultural diversity.Some of the native peoples of the Americas did indeed suffer fromwant, at least from time to time, and some lived hard and difficult lives.Some had little time or talent for great art or architecture, or for elaborategames or music or dance. Others lived in societies that, far from beingcharacterized by peace and amity, frequently were at odds with theirneighbors.There is no benefit to be gained from efforts to counter the anti-Indianpropaganda that dominates our textbooks with pro-Indian propaganda ofequally dubious veracity. For the very plain fact is that the many tens ofmillions of people who lived in the Americas prior to 1492 were humanneithersubhuman, nor superhuman-just human. Some of the social practicesof selected groups of them we would find abhorrent to our culturaltastes and attitudes at present, in the same way that we would find loathsomecertain social practices of earlier European and Asian cultures. Thus,for example, few of us today would countenance the practice of humansacrifice as a way of propitiating an angry god, as was done by a few ofthe highest urban cultures in Mesoamerica during the fifteenth- and earlysixteenth-century. However, neither would many of us support the grislytorture and killing of thousands of heretics or the burning of tens of thousandsof men and women as witches, in a similar effort to mollify a jealous