in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women. The women tended the crops and took general.charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: “Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.” Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes and later, in the twentieth century, even more systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy. in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-care. All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their children: “And surely there is in all children...a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.” Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture: No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of authority in European societies—were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong... .He who stole another's food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed" by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself. So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature. John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.” Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But the evidence . from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an American specialist on Indian life, William Brandon, is overwhelmingly supportive of much of that “myth.” Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress is a portion of People’s History of the United States © Harper & Row. Howard Zinn is a Boston historian. Ricardo Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican-Jewish artist/organizer in the Twin Cities. He is president of the Northland Poster Collective and is active in the Alliance for Cultural Democracy. Connie Gilbert has managed her graphic design business since 1982, and has worked with clients such as American Public Radio, Dataserv, and the Community Design Center. ■/ .NS in , p v ' r T k r H H- H ! STM 1 w | i M TME ALOW WONDER LUMINOUS SWEtT W O iA A W ’.JE n v k it "A r THE TWIN CITIES’ BEST CARD INTERNATIONAL SELECTION JEWELRY AND MAGICAL ONE-OF-A AND KIND PIECES FOR GIFTED GLORIOUS HOLIDAYS. STORE” (THE TWIN CITIES READER AND MPLS./ST. PAUL MAGAZINE) WITH THE LARGEST AND MOST HOLIDAY CARDS AND PAPERS: 822-4144 3039 HENNEPIN AVENUE SOUTH 18 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1988
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