We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident

I once was a teaching assistant for a first year Peace Studies course at my my undergraduate university. This course adopted an interesting approach inviting four professors to lecture the class on different topics related to the study of war.

One professor chose to address the expansionist wars of the Americans against the First Nations peoples of the Great Plains, specifically the Lakota. His approach was very ironic and in fact he fooled some students (perhaps he was unfair to first years). He showed how politicians, pundits and academics, even today, still paint the Lakota as a warlike people despite abundant evidence to the contrary. They revolutionized warfare on the Great Plains, we are told, by combining horses and firearms. Wait a minute! Didn't the Spanish conquistadors do that almost 400 years earlier?

It's interesting to compare this treatment with modern Orientalism. Arabs are now the new Lakota. They are all violent, clannish, irrational we are told; look at Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Politicians, pundits and academics again ape these popular statements. All the while we miss the truth: one dimensional stereotypes fail to capture the variety and complexity of a given group. And once again we fail to recognize the negative attributes we ascribe to other nationalities in our own. No, Americans and Canadians are not violent like Iraqis we say as we ponder nuclear attacks on Iran.

Like the Lakota mastery of horses and firearms, the practice of scalping is deeply associated with First Nations. There is obviously some truth to this. However having read an interesting book the other day once again I was exposed to a new level of complexity in the truths we hold dear. William Fowler's, Empires at War is the story of the first truly world war. It encompasses the British conquest of North America and the expulsion of France and arguably the birth of Canada.

Throughout the book however there are constant references to scalping by both "Indians" and whites. So we have another complex case that undermines deep seated cultural stereotypes as with the Lakota. "Indians" and scalping are not necessarily as synonymous as we have supposed. American colonists by contrast were often paid to scalp Indians. One assumes this was done to ensure the 13 colonies were devoid of their native humanity. It's hard to drag a bunch of native corpses back from the wilderness to the magistrate to collect your reward, so scalps were a quick and easy proof of death. Even more shocking given the accepted association between "Indians" and scalping, during the American Revolution, Americans even scalped British soldiers and partisans.

As much as First Nations peoples are described as warlike, savages and violent, Americans are noble and proud. Their emblems and crests are emblazoned with the images of the bald eagle, the noblest member of North America's fauna. What could be more American? The truth of this image is more complex. Notice that these images are of an eagle binding many arrows in its talon (see above). What colonist would have traded his musket for a bow and arrow? The latter are the instruments of unsophisticated savages. The eagle should be holding many muskets. It doesn't because the Americans stole and continue to steal this seal from "Indians". The Iroquois Confederacy, one of the strongest native groups to encounter the early Americans, had this eagle as its crest. The bound arrows symbolized the tying together of six nations as one. The early Americans learned a lot from the complex polity of the Iroquois in building their United States out of many antagonistic and different colonies, though I doubt they'll give the Iroquois the credit they deserve.