An  Example of Triumphant Civilizationism and Multicultural Manifest Destiny

            Since I am considering the relation of knowledge and power to the invasion of the 'new world' by the Europeans, it might be useful to examine a specific book in order to give a concrete example of how today's ideological assumptions or systems of knowledge/power are used to explain away history. History is largely an exercise in mythology, and speaking about the past is often a way of justifying the regimes of the present.  So I will use a recent book as a primary text, in an effort to give an example of how current ideological concerns, in an unexceptional historical text, replicate and perpetuate the imperial myths that caused the Native holocaust 500 years ago.[1]

            Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism, (1986) and the earlier book of William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983) [2]explain the conquest as if it happened without people and was merely the result of scientifically impersonal and interacting ecologies.  In contrast to  Diamond, Crosby and Cronon,  there is the alternative view of  David Stannard, who traces the ideology of biological determinism back to the ideological racism of the 19th century, one stand of which led to the Nazis and another strand of which was invoked to justify the 19th century slaughter of Indians.[3]  Stannard notes that the biological racism of the 19th century and later the Nazis relied on "religious and philosophical structures of thought" whereas more recent forms of racism rely on "historical and environmental principles".[4] The use of environmental and scientific explanations for the conquest make use of the 'disinterestedness' of science to excuse atrocity. But actually science and the cant of 'Civilization' were both important ideological factors in the American holocaust.  Since current American civilization is the result of the very ideologies that generated the American holocaust, there is little effort to question the concepts of science, history and biological fatality which were key factors in the holocaust and key factors in the 'success' of Euro-American Empires.

            This is certainly the case with Cronon's thesis, which seeks to ignore, and implicitly deny,  the holocaust committed against the Native Americans by hiding behind ecological changes which are presented as benign and value neutral. Ecology and science are here being used to excuse and obscure an atrocity of enormous magnitude. There is unquestionably an aspect of Darwinian biologism  in Cronon's book. that sanctions cloaking racism behind biology. [5] This racism is apparent in Darwin, who believed that European civilization was superior, by reason of ,'natural selection' to other races and civilizations and it was merely a question of time before the other civilizations would be eliminated.[6]

             There is an ideological factor in Cronon's book, as there is in Darwin. He conflates ecology and economy. Throughout the book he defines "change" and "instability" as the norm, for instance when he complains of Henry David Thoreau, who he claims is guilty of defining historical change "as the aberration rather than as the norm".[7] The norm for Cronon is change or "instability", which echoes both a Darwinian, a Hegelian and a free Market ideology, all of which tend to glorify instability and dialectic as a means to profit, power and progress. The colonists, in Cronon's mythos, were supreme over the new world because, like the diseases they brought with them, they adapted the land to their purpose more aggressively than did the Indians. The Indians were "mobile" but their relation to nature was relatively "static", Cronon tells us. Whereas the Europeans wanted "fixity" yet sought instability in order to maximize their control of nature for power and profit. The Europeans had a more forceful notion of change and imposed a capitalist order on the Native land. For Cronon this is merely a natural process, and the extermination of the Indians merely an unfortunate by-product of  the European mentality. He tries to maintain that the Europeans and Indians "loved property differently"  and that the Indians "who loved property little were overwhelmed by a people who loved it much, [the Europeans]". [8] This statement, like most of the book, is full of prejudices and misunderstandings. The Indians had no concept of property in the European sense of the word. The European idea of property was an abstraction imposed upon land. The Indian idea of land, which is properly speaking ecological and concrete, not abstract, preserved what land and creatures that were upon it. Indians altered the land only in conjunction with ecological balances. Europeans destroyed and exploited, upsetting balance. There is little of love in the European attitude, and much in the Indians. Typical of many racist histories, as this one is, Cronon blames the victim, the Indians, for losing their land when they loved it little, when the opposite is true, they lost the land to those who saw land as a cold abstract quantity to be turned into profit and abstract wealth. The Europeans loved land like gold, but hated the land which the Indians saw as a mother, not an exploitable thing and a place of sin.

            What Cronon is really doing in this book is excusing and bypassing genocide. If one used  Cronon's arguments and applied them to the German invasion of Eastern Europe during World War II or the Stalinist purges in Siberia and the Ukraine, one could find similar ecological changes, alterations in population densities, eating patterns, availability of food, changes in forests and so forth. One could leave out the genocidal motives of the Nazis and Stalinists entirely and talk only of the "changes in the land". But no one would take such a book seriously, nor see it as anything else but an excuse for the German or Stalinist imperialism.  What is amazing about Cronon's book is that it is taken seriously, and this says a great deal about 'history', and 'historiography' and their function in sustaining dominant mythologies.  The deeper question this book raises is not, 'what is its historiographical significance', but rather what is our culture, that historians within in it can find positive significance in a book that seeks to excuse genocide? [9] If the book were written to excuse Hitler or Stalin's policy of land-rape and genocide, it would be called propaganda. But since it excuses American rape and genocide it is 'history' and accorded a niche in the historiographical Pantheon.

             Invoking the phraseology  of the social historians, such as Eugene Genovese and John Blassingame, who wanted to see the slaves and plantation owners as making a world together, Cronon imagines that Indians and colonists were changing the land together. [10] He writes. "By integrating New England ecosystems into an ultimately global economy, colonists and Indians together, began a dynamic and unstable process of ecological change". (pg.170) Here the project of the ecological and social historical model of history breaks down into absurdity. Cronon has the Indians participating in the process of their own destruction, hand in hand with whites, creating a new world for global capitalism. Native Americans would be deeply offended by such a pronouncement. I am deeply offended by it.  This is a clear example of multicultural manifest destiny:  Indians included in the creation of a new economic order: whites and Indians together working to make the world safe for corporate capitalism; hand in hand, Metacomet, Tenskatawa, John Winthrop and  Custer walking towards the glorious future of  the pluralistic Social Darwinists at Microsoft corporation. But satire aside,  Cronon forces on the Indians a pluralism that betokens their own demise and colonial assimilation. This not only does a deep disservice to the Indians, it makes a mockery of history. it is a version of colonial history not quite as ridiculous as Dinsey's cartoon of Pocahontas, but perhaps more dangerous, if for no other reason than that Cronon actually believes it and wants others to believe it.

            The absence of any believable Native Americans in Cronon's account is itself a witness against this racist book. The book claims in its subtitle to be about "Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England" but really the book is about current white, racist obsfuscations of the atrocities and hardships American colonists committed and still commit against Native people, both here on our reservations and in places like the Amazon and Papua, New Guinea. If this seems unnecessarily harsh, it is probably not harsh enough. I would go further and would accuse some historians such as Cronon and Crosby, who often seem more concerned with fitting their books into an historiographical lineage than they are with being fair to a people who have suffered their lands stolen, their children, husbands, wives and elderly murdered in cold blood, and in the case of some tribes, complete extermination and extinction. A book like Cronon's shames these people, their culture and their dead. Cronon is rewarded with a certain measure of historiographical fame and status for this book, but only because this book fits current attitudes about  Native Americans. But hardly anyone notices because Indians are more invisible to most Americans than Ralph Elison's Invisible Man. Indians are only noticed in movies that ultimately degrade them, or if they assimilate, in which case,  they cease to be Indian. A book like Cronon's is an example of 'multicultural manifest destiny', since it pretends to include Indians, yet at the same time, by this act of inclusion, seeks to enlist and align them in an ideology of ecological determinism that prolongs the ideology of Manifest Destiny that colonized, enslaved, removed, allotted, and terminated them.

            One further note about Cronon's book. The thesis depends upon proving that 'ecological' factors were primary in the period of colonial conquest. This in turn depends partially on asserting that Indians were killed by pathogens that did not exist in their pre-conquest environment.  If this aspect of Cronon's thesis cannot be sustained, a central part of the thesis fails. It cannot be sustained, at least as a primary factor. As Stannard points out, disease and military assault, conjoined with economic and environmental rape were interrelated aspects of the extermination process.[11] A Native American writer, Lenore Stiffarm, maintains that the view of conventional historians and anthropologists that disease in the New World was a "natural disaster" is probably false. She notes that "King Philips War [1675] appears to have been fought, in part, because Indians were convinced that colonials had deliberately spread disease among them". Sir Jeffery Amherst, a military commander, told his subordinate that "you will do well to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this exorable race". (1763) This policy was regularly followed, probably much more than anyone would have recorded. The death toll from deliberately spread disease, to give an example, of Mandan, Pegian, Bloods, Blackfeet, Hidatsa and many others, in 1836-40 period, appears to have been 100,000-200,000 caused by "the distribution of small pox infected blankets". Forced relocation also exacerbated disease, as did famine due to the deliberate elimination of animals, like deer and buffalo, that formed the core of some Indian diets. The forced internment in virtual concentration camps like the Bosgue Redondo, where the Navaho were herded like cattle and left undernourished and starving further contributed to the climate of disease.[12] Much the same pattern of military assault, starvation, destruction of animals eaten by Indians, crop destruction, famine, overwork and disease can be found in the colonies of Columbus, Cortez, Pizzaro and across both North and South America. But these are inconvenient facts, which bring into question the ideology of American largesse, manifest destiny and beneficence. Historians rarely write about it, but the white point of view is usually over-represented, as in Cronon. 

            One could conclude from this that there should be a 'white studies' program, whereby 'white history' is studied from the same relativistic point of view that African or Indian studies are currently subjected to. But this is unlikely. As Said observes,  the university has allowed multicultural subdivisions into history and other departments, "in order to some degree to neutralize them into by fixing them in the status of academic subspecialties".  The university becomes a structure that replicates actual imperial practice around the globe. 'Black studies', is allowed, so long as white studies dictates its structure, place, and ultimate meaning in a white world. African cultures are similarly allowed, so long as transnational corporations and American, British, French Japanese 'interests', are not seriously questioned.  The university is a microcosm of the world and reflects its injustices and strategies of knowledge and power.

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