In such a world, reciprocity was the key to stability, to happiness, in the end to survival. Injuries had to be requited, insults repaid, losses recovered. Raids were launched, wars were fought, over the failure of reciprocal trade, and to capture prisoners who might replace deaths or abductions incurred in previous conflicts (“mourning wars”) and to restore lost dignity and pride. Body parts—severed heads or hands—of warriors who had fought improperly might be offered to victims’ families to maintain the stability of tribal relations. Village life and political alliances were based on reciprocity: the fear of supernatural retribution was in itself a form of social control. Productive land had to be left fallow to recover the nourishment of which it had been robbed; rich fishing grounds had to be vacated to prevent irreversible depletion; girls given in marriage had somehow to be replaced, by compensation to a woman’s family “for the loss of her valuable labor and child-bearing potential.”6
But reciprocity, the maintenance of equilibrium, the restoration of balance—among people, between people and their environment, and among the elemental forces of life—was a complex process, full of mysteries that people struggled to comprehend. When the world went wrong—when there were droughts, epidemics, unaccountable wars, frustrated hunts—familiar remedies could be resorted to: well-known rituals, sanctioned patterns of self-abasement and self-denial, symbolic gestures, cunning exhortations. But often the sources of disturbance, of the insults to the system, were hidden; only direct communication with the ultimate powers could help, and that was the work of experts: doctors of esoteric lore and divination, shamans, magi, sorcerers.
The shamans, authoritative cosmologists and custodians of the myths of creation, could make personal contact with the immanent powers, penetrate the mysteries of lost balances, identify forgotten violations of taboo or offenses that demanded apologies, and recommend the proper forms of recovery. They could even diagnose the ultimate causes of physical illnesses that defied herbal cures, and find remedies in magical chants, amulets, rattles, and sucking procedures that rid the body of the disbalancing, destructive spirit. For they, above all others, knew that physical nature was only part of the great universe whose ultimate forces were spiritual. So in these emergencies, the shamans, the powwows, the sorcerers and soothsayers transcended physicality—in trances, by hallucinogenic drugs, by hypnotic, mind-blinding incantations, perhaps in epileptic seizures—in order to penetrate the deeper recesses of being and connect with spiritual sources. They emerged from these encounters with mandates that could be strange, at times frightening, entailing everything from symbolic gestures and prayerful dances to warfare, torture, and cannibalism.7
But ordinary people too had an avenue of direct access to the controlling anima, though it was an erratic, at times perplexing route requiring imaginative interpretation—through dreams.
Centuries would pass before European civilization would match the Indians’ understanding of the importance of dreams. They were not seen as random, superficial ephemera that expired with the light of day, but as cold reality, profoundly meaningful experiences that had to be understood. The Hurons and Senecas, a Jesuit reported in i649, believed that, quite beyond one’s conscious wishes,
our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul, not through any knowledge, but by means of a certain blind transporting of the soul to certain objects; these transports might, in the language of philosophy, be called desideria innata, to distinguish them from the former, which are called desideria elicita. Now they believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but … if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry…[and] often it … revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.
Dreams were probes of ultimate realities, and anticipations of the future. Correctly understood they could guide one’s behavior into safe channels, prevent disasters to oneself or to one’s people, and ease anxieties that could not be consciously acknowledged.
Dreams as portents made demands. To ease one’s latent troubles, to satisfy one’s guiding spirit, or to anticipate some approaching disaster, a dream might clearly require one to do things that appeared bizarre but that were logical in the greater system of which the palpable world was only a part. A dream might oblige one to find sexual gratification with two married women; to sacrifice ten dogs; to burn down one’s cabin; even to cut off one’s finger with a sea shell, to fulfill symbolically a nightmare dream of torture. The worst nightmares were experienced by the young, groping apprehensively for maturity; by warriors, who knew that capture in warfare often ended in torture; and by the old, facing sickness and death—from all of whom society demanded fortitude and stoic endurance. A warrior who dreamed of being burned alive by his captors had his people singe him repeatedly with torches, but then, hoping that a symbol might substitute for his agonies and life, killed a dog, roasted it, and ate it in a public feast in the way sacrificed enemies might be eaten. Another, driven to accomplish a dream of captivity, had himself stripped naked, dragged through his own village, ridiculed and reviled, and tied up for execution; but then, having sung his death song, he stopped, hoping that this proximate enactment would be acceptable as suffering enough.
Sometimes, however, the true meanings and mandates of dreams were not obvious, but hidden, lying deep beneath manifest appearances. Expert analysts—the shamans—would be called in to penetrate the mysteries and prescribe the right courses of action. But not only the shamans: village elders, concerned for the fate of their people, might join in the search for a dream’s meaning. There were even rites by which a whole community might gather to probe the riddle of an individual’s mysterious dream, combining forces to discover its meaning and the correct, the relieving, course of action.8
Dreams could be deeply disturbing, upsetting the balance of life by their portents and the demands they made. But for people crowded and jostled by exigent spirits, stability—psychological as well as social—was in any case a fragile achievement. The psychological pressures, especially on men, could be intense. They were expected to be proud, courageous, resourceful, independent, defiant in the face of savage adversity, and at the same time devout in their reverence for the animating forces of the world and for their personal guardian spirits. Above all, they were hunters and warriors, and they were expected to excel as both. It was not merely courage that was required in hunting and warfare but reckless courage, heedless courage. Danger was not to be feared and evaded, but sought: it provided the ultimate tests of manhood. So their vivid war paint, whose color and design conveyed specific meanings—brilliant daubs of red for battles—was meant to startle the enemy, intimidate him, and weaken his confidence, but it also had the effect of heightening a warrior’s visibility and declaring his fearlessness and his disdain for danger.9
A man who failed conspicuously as a hunter—whose technical skills were inadequate, whose nerve gave way at a crucial moment, who lacked the stamina for month-long searches in snow and ice—would be shamed, publicly disgraced, his humiliation destructive of status and of economic, even marital, prosperity. Against such outcomes they were trained from early childhood. As boys they were carefully instructed in the skills and fortitude of hunters and warriors, and their courage was tested in puberty rites. In some regions these passages from childhood were vague in structure, mild and diffused, though they usually involved some form of ritual self-abasement to invoke one’s guardian spirit, whose presence would ever thereafter be represented in the pouch of charms one carried with one. In other regions, however, puberty rites were rigorous and severe. Nothing could be more demanding than the Powhatans’ huskanaw, a process required of adolescent sons of leading families that could last for several months and was calculated to be so physically devastating as to wipe out all memory of earlier life, with its emotional ties of dependence. Some did no
t survive the ordeal of beatings, starvation, drug-induced bouts of madness, confinement in narrow “sugar-loaf” cages, and the tortuous recovery through contrived setbacks. Among those who, at the end of it all, failed to show the expected marks of total transformation and were made to repeat the procedure, death was not uncommon. So Europeans who heard vaguely of the ordeal, but who never actually witnessed or understood the whole of it, concluded that the natives indulged in human sacrifices to the feared god of evil, punishment, and power, Okse.10
The Powhatans’ huskanaw initiated males into a crowded, delicately balanced, and perilous world, the stability of which might easily be upset and which might end in the devastation of military defeat. That ultimate threat was always there, even among such peaceful peoples as the horticulturists and fishing folk of New England. Among the Powhatans of the Virginian plain, battling furiously against or as allies of a would-be native overlord, and among the aggressive Iroquois and their Huron and Algonquian victims in upcountry New York and the eastern Great Lakes, warfare, with all its personal horrors, was commonplace. Raiding parties, seeking revenge, tribute, or restitution, devastated whole villages, pillaging stores of food, destroying crops and habitations, butchering the wounded, and carrying off the women, children, and defeated warriors. The women and children who survived were often adopted as replacements for the victors’ recently deceased kinfolk, but the captured warriors were brought home as trophies, along with severed hands, feet, and heads. Beaten continuously, the prisoners were often maimed—fingers chopped or bitten off to incapacitate them for further warfare, backs and shoulders slashed—then systematically tortured, by women gashing their bodies and tearing off strips of flesh, by children scorching the most sensitive parts of their immobilized bodies with red-hot coals—while judgment was passed on whether they would live as dependents, in effect as slaves, or die. If spared, their lives as slaves involved brutal humiliation, complete repudiation of their former lives, and changes of name. While they might eventually rise to prominence in their new society, they were seldom free of the stigma of subjection. If condemned, they would most likely be burned to death after disembowelment, some parts of their bodies having been eaten and their blood drunk in celebration by their captors. This was the ultimate test, for which warriors had fearfully prepared. But it was not so much death they feared as shameful death, a cringing, pitiful death in which one begged for life. Those who died properly were those who withstood the agony not only uncomplainingly but defiantly, mocking, singing, laughing at their torturers until the end.11
• • •
SOME, for certain stretches of time, lived placid lives, blessed with abundant sources of food, moving peacefully with the seasons for safety and ecological advantage, deeply familiar with the physical world as well as with the neighbors they were likely to encounter and with the crowded universe of animating spirits that surrounded them. They found enjoyment in ordinary village life, in games—ball games, stick games, field sports—above all in dance. And festivals of all sorts were frequent.12
But none of these people, however isolated and well established, were secure—not the Beothuks on the remote fringes of Newfoundland, nor the tribes on the outer banks of the Carolinas, nor the Lenapes on the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore, nor the Monongahelas in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. None were free from the threat of violence—the unpredictable and uncontrollable violence of the natural world, the unfathomable violence of inner lives that exploded so strangely in dreams, the violence of border wars that erupted repeatedly, year after year, and the psychological violence endemic in cultures that demanded heroic invincibility and endurance and that familiarized children with excruciating cruelty.
Deep strains of anxiety tinged their lives. As adults they were often taciturn—that was the style of responsible maturity—but far from the model of nerveless, marmoreal stolidity that would later become their popular image, they were commonly sensitive and edgy—“touchy and vindictive,” as the Powhatans are known to have been. So much could go wrong. They were fearful of possible shame, loss, and defeat. There was no end to the conflicts in their lives: at all levels “an injury demanded revenge, which was considered by the other side as an injury that demanded revenge in turn.” And their valor, or lack of it, was always on display. For who they were was what they did, as the succession of their names, which were often descriptive, made clear.13
A person was given a public name at birth and also commonly a private pet name; later he or she might acquire another name to mark the emergence from childhood or exceptional promise or an early achievement; still later a new public name might be bestowed for some distinguished exploit; and others might be added that in effect suggested roles one had successfully played. “Pocahontas,” the English discovered after the young woman converted to Christianity, was a childhood pet name; her people commonly called her Matoaka (playful), though her formal name was Amonute. These were agreeable names, appropriate for a paramount chief’s daughter; but one could also be given a rueful, even a shameful name, or one that was conspicuously lacking in distinction or dignity or honor, or worst of all, a name of derision, such as those imposed on captives by masters who spared their lives.14
SENSITIVELY ATTUNED TO both the physical world and the ruling spiritual forces, and familiar with a complex array of procedures by which to adjust these external elements to serve their personal needs, the Americans experienced life as a delicate balance, which had to be carefully maintained. But though they were psychologically and spiritually tense and calculating, their inner lives crowded by forces and spirits of intense meaning and great power, they played out their physical lives freely and loosely in immense territories whose spaciousness was as necessary as the intricacy of their religion.
2
The sector of North America that the English adventurers and settlers would come to know in the course of the seventeenth century stretched from North Carolina to Nova Scotia and west to the Appalachians and the eastern Great Lakes—a domain five and a half times the size of England. Much of this land was heavily wooded. Mixed deciduous and coniferous growths covered huge tracts, darkened whole mountain ranges with rich, dense foliage. But though in some places the forests crowded the coasts and lined the river banks, there were innumerable patches of grassy meadowland along the coasts, as well as riverside and lakeside clearings and open fields in the interior. Many of these bare stretches had developed naturally, but others were the results of deliberate burnings and small-scale efforts at brush removal and deforestation. On these open plots and in satellite encampments near them lived a population whose remote Asian ancestors had moved east from the Bering Strait to settle on the Atlantic slope ten or fifteen thousand years before.
How numerous they were on the eve of permanent English settlements we do not know. We can only guess, and there are wild discrepancies among even the best-informed guesses that have been made. It may be reasonable, though, to estimate that the total population of this northeastern woodland area was around 300,000, a density of approximately one person per square mile, but with highly uneven distributions.15 Large spaces were completely uninhabited, or so thinly peopled that one could travel for days without encountering a soul. But certain small regions were well populated. The ten towns and associated hamlets of the Iroquois people probably had a combined population of between 20,000 and 30,000, though these communities were scattered in a broad band stretching 150 miles west of the Hudson River to Lake Ontario; some of the Iroquois towns may have had populations of 2,000. It is likely that the settlements on the lower Hudson River basin, including northern New Jersey and Delaware, together had a population of just over 50,000—a density that approached eight people per square mile, roughly comparable to that of modern South Dakota. The population density of central Connecticut was probably about five per square mile; that of the Powhatan tribes on the coastal plain of Virginia—a population of over 14,000—approximately two per square mile, increasing to over three in th
e most populous region between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. There were no urban centers. Communities of 2,000, like those of a few of the Iroquois tribes, were extremely rare; most villages had no more than 200 or 300 inhabitants, and some communities, such as the Lenapes in the lower Delaware River valley, were simply bands of less than 50 related individuals, little more than extended families, loosely affiliated with other kinship groups nearby which together formed a distinctive cultural unit.16
The low ratio of people to land meant open space, freedom to move freely over large areas, which was vital to the Indians’ existence. No one was completely sedentary. Most villages were only seasonally occupied. Though practices differed from place to place, most people remained in their “home” villages only through the spring and summer months, and even then wandered out from time to time in small bands to coastal and riverside fishing areas located fifteen, sometimes twenty-five, even fifty miles away. The exact location of the habitations that comprised a village had little permanence. Small dwellings lightly built of arched or propped saplings covered with bark or hides could easily be moved or simply abandoned and replaced elsewhere. And villages were moved and abandoned, frequently—in New England on average every dozen years or so—because the fertility of the surrounding fields, planted with the staples of corn, beans, and squash, declined; or because firewood became scarce; or because enemy raids drove the villagers to more defensible ground; or because blights devastated the local vegetation.17
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 2
