ANYONE WHO READS VERY FAR in the voluminous literature of the American Indian is likely to be impressed by the variety of the peoples described and exemplified. When Columbus opened the New World to Europeans, it was inhabited by people who lived under the most widely differing conditions. Their number was not great; current estimates range as low as a million for the whole of North America in 1492. But every part of the New World was inhabited. People were living in the arctic wastes of Hudson’s Bay and in the tropical jungles of Central America, on the plains and in the mountains, in coastal swamps and desert basins.
Though we have given them all a single name, Indians, it is obvious that people existing under such divergent conditions must have displayed many different ways of life. You cannot behave the same way in Alaska and in Panama. New Mexico demands of humans something different from what New England does. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Indians in many different stages of what we commonly call civilization. Some tribes were farmers, others hunters. Some lived in stone houses, others in wigwams. Some wove cloth and made their clothes of it; others dressed in animal skins; and still others did not dress at all. Many of these differences were clearly the result of the natural environment: of the climate and the character of the land. It quickly becomes apparent, however, to anyone who looks closely at the Indians, that their variety is not simply a matter of adaptation to different habitats.
What are we to make, for example, of the bewildering number of Indian languages? Linguists today recognize 375. One would not suppose there were that many different habitats. It would appear that many Indians were unable to talk to their near neighbors. Actually, it seems that most of them did not want to. Even the Indians who spoke a single language were apt to be divided into a host of independent tribes, each one usually numbering no more than a few hundred individuals, who looked on all the others as undesirable aliens. In many places the tribes were in a state of open and continuous warfare.
Much of the variety displayed by the Indians might therefore be described as political in origin, a result of centuries of living in small, isolated units. This multiplicity of tribes, added to differences of habitat, will go a long way toward explaining Indian variety, but there is still another kind of difference, the source of much debate among anthropologists, and that is the tremendous variation in physical appearance and conformation. The Indians not only behaved differently and lived differently; they actually were different in the physical characteristics by which anthropologists have sought to differentiate the races of mankind.
I am aware that some anthropologists deny altogether the existence of different races among men, but there are many who occupy themselves with classifying people by shape of head, color of skin, length of jaw, and so on. When these scientists approach the American Indian, they find a greater variety of types than exists within the entire range of persons called white. It seems to be agreed that Columbus was not very far off in calling them all Indians, because they probably all came from Asia originally, by way of the Bering Strait, but the variety of physical types suggests that they did not all come at the same time or from the same place. Archaeological evidence suggests that they came in three surges, fifteen, ten, and five thousand years ago. The progenitors of some may have lived for a long period in the Far East. Others may have originated elsewhere and simply passed through Asia. The variety of languages and cultures, then, may be not merely the product of time and local circumstance operating on a single people. Instead, we may be dealing with people who from the beginning have differed widely.
In view of this overwhelming diversity, one may well ask whether it is at all profitable to speak, as I have proposed to do, of the American Indian. My first impression, after surveying the evidence was that there was no such thing as the American Indian and that one would do well to stop talking as though there were. But upon closer reading and further reflection, it appeared to me that the manifold peoples we call Indian did exhibit one remarkable characteristic in common: almost without exception they refused to be absorbed into the civilization offered them by the people who have appropriated the name American, the people who settled the eastern seaboard of the United States and from there pressed westward to the Pacific. For our purposes it will avoid confusion if we call these invaders the English Americans. The Indian refused to become an English American. The history of most other invasions during historic times shows invaders and invaded mingling together, the one absorbing the other, or the two joining to produce a composite civilization. The very Englishmen who became Americans were the product of many different mixtures that had resulted from the successive conquests of England by Anglo-Saxons, Romans, Danes, and Normans. The invasion of America had no such result; the Indian refused to mix. One might have supposed that among the many different tribes, some would have joined the invaders and others not, but this was not the case. The Indians were almost unanimous in preferring their own way of life to that of the new arrivals. And for the historian this is perhaps the most important single fact, the fact that justifies considering the Indian in the singular instead of the plural.
Of course, part of the Indian’s refusal to mingle must be blamed on the English American: it was a failure to absorb as well as a failure to be absorbed. The French in Canada, though they never really assimilated the Indians, came closer to it than the English Americans. The French lived with the Indians, married Indian women, taught them to say prayers, and were able to bring a fair number of Indians into a moderately French manner of living. The Spanish were still more successful, though perhaps because they were dealing with a different, and for the most part more technologically advanced, set of Indians. The Spaniards were able to devise colonial institutions that incorporated these Indians. Often, to be sure, they incorporated them as slaves, but slavery can be an effective, even though a crude and cruel, way of absorbing another people. Perhaps, then, the trouble lay with the American rather than the Indian. It will be worth examining briefly what kind of efforts the Americans made to absorb the people whose territories they invaded.
Absorption, if successful, would undoubtedly have meant, first of all, Christianization. The English Americans considered Christianity to be the most important single advantage of their civilization over the barbarism of the Indians. To convert an Indian into a Christian would be to convert him in the most important possible way, from a savage to a civilized man. To undertake this task was the announced purpose of many English settlers in coming to America, and there were a number who stood fast in their intentions after arriving here. The number was small, in comparison with those deployed by the Spanish and the French, but the measure of success achieved was even smaller. The French and Spanish enrolled hundreds of Indians in the Catholic Church for every one claimed by English Protestants.
The reason, according to the English, was that the French and Spanish missionaries were content to set the Indians to kneeling, kissing the cross, and reciting a few unintelligible prayers. English Protestantism, and especially the Puritan brand of it, demanded a higher standard of piety. The Indians must not only say the right words; they must know what they meant. This evidently proved an insuperable obstacle to the Puritan missionaries. It was either impossible to make the Indians understand Puritanism, or if you did get them to understand, to make them like it. A succession of notable men from John Eliot to Jonathan Edwards labored long and hard in the attempt but with pitifully small results.
It was not that the Indians were intolerant or bigoted. They were quite willing to listen to stories about the Englishman’s God, but they showed a surprising indifference to the rewards and punishments that He was said to dole out. Henry Timberlake, a lieutenant serving with British forces in the Carolinas during the French and Indian War, says of the Cherokees that in religious matters every one of them felt “at liberty to think for himself,” with the result that a great diversity of religious opinion existed among them. Timberlake tells of the efforts of a Reverend Mr. Martin to convert this tribe. Martin, he says, having preached “till both his audience and he were heartily tired, was told at last, that they knew very well, that, if they were good, they should go up; if bad, down; that he could tell no more; that he had long plagued them with what they no ways understood, and that they desired him to depart the country.” It was this attitude that led Benjamin Gale of Connecticut, at about the same time, to say that he would as soon undertake to convert a wolf as an Indian, unless the Indian were first civilized.
Gale, of course, was begging the question. Christianity was the major part of the civilization that had to be imparted to the Indian. But many Americans took the same view, that Christianization should not be attempted until the Indians became familiar with other aspects of civilized life. How, then, were they to gain this familiarity?
The method most commonly suggested in the colonial period was to send the Indian to college. By passing through the purifying rigors of Harvard, Yale, Brown, or Dartmouth, the uncouth Indian would begin to look and think like an Englishman. If even a few could be persuaded to undergo this experience, they might then go back home and set the fashion for their countrymen. One of the essential steps in this collegiate method was to get the Indians indoors. If you could put them inside a house and shut the windows, they might begin to act the way other people do who live inside and sleep on beds. This possibility seems to have captured the imagination of Englishmen in the mother country who wished to contribute to the ultimate salvation of lost Indian souls. At least we find that enterprising college presidents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were able to carry on successful money-raising campaigns in England in order to build dormitories for the prospective Indian students.
Unfortunately college education proved even less palatable to the Indian than Christianity. When it was possible to get an Indian boy to go to college, it would not be long before he cut his classes and lit out for the hills. Those who stayed behind seldom survived, and when they fell victims to collegiate food and overheated rooms, their parents showed an unreasonable disposition to blame the president. As a result, the buildings were quickly turned over to deserving English American boys, who could stand the strain of college life. The Indian stayed in the woods.
Another possible method of bringing civilization to the Indian was marriage. This was a mode in which, of course, the French excelled. A study of the relations between French and Indians in eastern Canada shows that the Indian girls became so eager for French husbands that they jilted the Indian boys in a wholesale manner and upset all the traditional patterns of tribal behavior. The English frequently told themselves to go and do likewise, but either they lacked the skill of the French in these matters, or else their hearts were not in it. The English government in 1719 went so far as to offer ten pounds and fifty acres of land in Nova Scotia to any Englishman who married an Indian girl or any English girl who married an Indian man. But few couples appeared to claim the reward.
When Englishmen traveled among the Indians on trading, or surveying, or hunting expeditions, they frequently accepted the hospitality of the Indians. And since the Indian notions of hospitality were generous, the guest was frequently provided with one of the comelier maidens of the tribe. Sometimes these lighthearted unions proved of more than passing duration, but if so the children of the couple usually grew up as Indians. John Lawson, himself a surveyor in North Carolina, tells us in his account of that province, that the Indians there regarded children as belonging to their mother, and therefore, he says, “it ever seems impossible for the Christians to get their Children (which they have by these Indian Women) away from them.” On the other hand, he says, “we often find, that English Men and other Europeans that have been accustomed to the Conversation of these Savage Women and their Way of Living, have been so allured with that careless sort of Life, as to be constant to their Indian Wife, and her Relations, so long as they lived, without ever desiring to return again amongst the English,…of which sort I have known several.” It seems altogether probable that marriage was an avenue along which English Americans went native more often than Indians became civilized.
The French married the Indians; the Spaniards enslaved them. If the English could not pursue the French method with enthusiasm, they were more assiduous in the Spanish one. Warfare has generally provided the justification for slavery. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the victorious party in a just war—and what war is not just in the eyes of the victor?—thought itself entitled to enslave its captured enemies. On this basis the settlers of America enslaved any Indians who made unsuccessful war against them. But the Indians were as unwilling to accept this blessing as any other the white man offered them. It was a fact that Indians did not make good slaves: they were too unruly. That fact did not prevent the English Americans from enslaving them. The Puritans of New England were as ready to do so as the planters of South Carolina. But neither in New England nor in South Carolina did people want to keep Indian slaves. Instead, they packed them aboard ships and sold them in the West Indies like so many wooden nutmegs. And lest this traffic should recoil upon themselves, the people of Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting the importation of Indian slaves, on the grounds that Indians were all “of a malicious, surley and revengeful spirit, rude and insolent in their behaviour, and very ungovernable.” Thus the enslaved Indians found no home among their captors, and slavery did not prove a successful means of introducing Indians into American civilization.
Christianity, education, marriage, and slavery—all were pressed upon the Indians, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. All except marriage they rejected, and in marriage they generally won the upper hand. In the end the only part of the white man’s civilization they would accept was its material goods. They knew at a glance that guns were better than spears or arrows, iron hatchets than stone tomahawks, cloth than fur. Each of these things they cheerfully appropriated and fetched beaver skins for the English Americans in order to purchase them. In so doing, they had to alter many of their traditional ways and devote themselves more and more to trapping beaver, less and less to their customary handicrafts, but they managed to subordinate the new products to their own ends. Guns and hatchets were useful weapons for defense against their enemies, perhaps including the men who sold them to them. Cloth was only a more manageable and uniform kind of fur. The Indians thus appropriated the materials of the English and used them in their own way. They were not lured into the white man’s civilization by them.
If, then, the English Americans did not exert themselves as much as they might have to assimilate the Indian, the fact remains that the Indians showed an extraordinary resistance to whatever efforts were made, an extraordinary refusal to accept the manners and methods of a people who were obviously more powerful than they. And we find this intransigence among Indians of every kind, among Westos and Creeks, Iroquois and Algonquians. Diverse as these different tribes may have been, they all possessed some quality that made white civilization unattractive to them.
One must, therefore, look beyond their apparent diversity and seek the common element or elements in their ways of life, the elements that led them to reject so firmly the opportunities of white civilization. If we read the early accounts with this purpose in mind, one fact immediately presents itself: the early observers were all struck by the unusual kind of government that the different tribes practiced. Europeans were accustomed to governments that claimed an absolute authority. Among the Indians absolute governments did develop in South and Central America and in a few parts of North America, but most of the tribes encountered by the English Americans lived in a state that might be described as orderly anarchy. Each tribe had its own customs, which exercised a powerful influence on the members, doubtless much more powerful than European observers realized, but the heads of the tribes, the chiefs or sachems, seem in most cases to have had no coercive authority. The Indians’ resistance to white civilization was not organized and directed from above by powerful rulers, for Indian rulers were not powerful, in fact were scarcely rulers at all.
James Adair, a trader who lived among the southern Indian tribes for many years in the eighteenth century, has left us an illuminating account of their government. There was no such thing among them, he says, as an emperor or a king. Their highest title signified simply a chief, and “the power of their chiefs,” according to Adair, “is an empty sound. They can only persuade or dissuade the people, either by the force of good-nature and clear reasoning, or colouring things, so as to suit their prevailing passions. It is reputed merit alone, that gives them any titles of distinction above the meanest of the people.”
Henry Timberlake, whose memoirs I have already quoted, was familiar only with the Cherokee Indians. Of them he says, “Their government, if I may call it government, which has neither laws or power to support it, is a mixed aristocracy and democracy, the chiefs being chose according to their merit in war, or policy at home.” Timberlake gives an interesting example of the helplessness of tribal government to control any member, even in matters of great importance. It seems that a number of British soldiers in the garrison at Fort Loudoun on the Tennessee River had taken up with some of the local Cherokee girls. Later, when the Cherokees besieged the fort (in the French and Indian War), the girls proceeded to bring food daily to their former lovers. The chief naturally forbade this breaking of the siege, but the girls, says Timberlake, “laughing at his threats, boldly told him, they would succour their husbands every day, and were sure, that, if he killed them [meaning the girls], their relations would make his death atone for theirs.”
The early cartographer Lewis Evans tells us, of the Indians in Pennsylvania, “that there is no such thing as coercive power in any Nation: nor does the government ever interfere between party and party; but let every one be judge and Executioner in his own Case.”
Even among the Iroquois, who appeared to have the most powerful government of all the eastern Indians, the authority of the chiefs rested only on public opinion. The New York savant Cadwallader Colden, in his history of the Five Indian Nations that made up the Iroquois, says, “Each Nation is an absolute Republick by its self, govern’d in all Publick Affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems or Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gain’d by and consists wholly in the Opinion the rest of the Nation have of their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force upon any of their People.”
If we turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth and from the Indians of the East to those of the Great Plains, we find the same observations. George Catlin, a Pennsylvania portrait painter, was so enthralled by the sight of a group of Indians who visited his studio in Philadelphia that he packed up his paints and brushes and headed for the Far West. There, on the banks of the Missouri and the Yellowstone and the Columbia, he lived for eight years among the Indians. That was in the 1830s when the only other white men on hand were a few fur traders and soldiers, before the slaughter of the buffalo drove the Indians off the plains. Catlin recorded his experience in hundreds of paintings and drawings and in a remarkable book.
He knew the Mandan and the Minataree and the Sioux and the Comanche and the Flatheads and dozens of other tribes, knew them intimately and described the peculiar customs and characteristics and physical appearance of each. But he observed that the governments of all the tribes were much the same, under the leadership of a chief. This chief, he observed, “has no control over the life or limbs, or liberty of his subjects, nor other power whatever, excepting that of influence which he gains by his virtues, and his exploits in war, and which induces his warriors and braves to follow him, as he leads them to battle—or to listen to him when he speaks and advises in council.”
In war as in peace, discipline imposed from above was at a minimum. Indian warfare was carried on mostly by small parties, among the eastern tribes seldom more than ten together. The leader of such a group had no more authority than the other members chose to allow him, and in the actual fighting it was every man for himself, each seeking to outdo the others in the fury of his attack. Indian warfare was not a pretty thing, no matter how one looks at it: no atrocity was too great for the Indian to commit against his opponent. Women and children were as fair game as men. But the object of war was as much to display the power and courage of the individual as it was to destroy the enemy.
The absence of coercive government, together with the horrendousness of Indian warfare, may suggest that Indian life was, as Hobbes would have maintained, nasty, brutish, and short. If we may believe the testimony of eyewitnesses, the opposite was true: the Indians who move through the pages of the early accounts display an extraordinary dignity and decorum. They appear very much indeed like the noble savages of fiction.
Nowhere is this more evident than in a body of literature composed by the Indians themselves, the Indian treaties. The Indians, of course, did not actually write the treaties, for they did not know how to write. Like other illiterate peoples, they relied heavily on their memories. And in order to establish so important an event as a treaty in the tribal consciousness, they did their peacemaking in an impressive ceremonial manner. The records of these ceremonies, taken down by white observers, were so beautiful, so moving, and withal so aesthetically satisfying, that colonial printers brought them out in pamphlet form for sale.
In the treaties we begin to get a glimpse of what contemporary writers meant when they said that the authority of the chiefs depended solely on merit and persuasive powers. The stature and eloquence of the Indian sachem at the council table speak strongly to us even at this distance in time and circumstance: a chief who relied solely on persuasion may not have been altogether helpless among men who valued dignity at a high rate. And if we look at the everyday life of the everyday Indian, we may see that it was not merely the chiefs who had dignity. For people to live together in the absence of coercive government, even in so small a unit as a tribe, it was necessary that everyone maintain a barrier of dignity around oneself and respect the same barrier in others. The English traveler John Lawson says of the southern Indians, “They never fight with one another unless drunk, nor do you ever hear any Scolding amongst them. They say the Europeans are always rangling and uneasy, and wonder they do not go out of this World, since they are so uneasy and discontented in it.” The famous frontiersman Robert Rogers, who knew only the northern Indians, says much the same of them: “if any quarrels happen, they never make use of oaths, or any indecent expressions, or call one another by hard names.” Indians were not long on conversation, and white guests used to find their silence quite unnerving at times. When they did speak, courtesy required that it be in a low voice. They spoke so low, in fact, that Europeans found it difficult to hear what they were saying, while the Indian was often obliged to ask white visitors if they supposed him to be deaf. No matter how angry he might be, an Indian never raised his voice.
Obviously not all Indians were faultless, even by their own standards, but when any one of them violated the customs or mores of his tribe, the treatment he received either from the chief or from the offended party was calculated to shame, rather than force, him into reform. In some tribes the most deadly weapon of authority seems to have been sarcasm. If a man was thought guilty of theft, for example, he might be commended before a large audience for his honesty. If he ran away from the enemy in battle, he would be praised for his courageous actions, each one of which would be related so as to bring out his cowardice. Adair says, “They introduce the minutest circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good naturedly and skilfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their shame by repeating the actions.”
The whole Indian mode of government was designed to emphasize the dignity of the individual. The same emphasis may be found elsewhere in Indian life. The Indian was so fond of his dignity and so proud of his ability to sustain it by strength of character alone, that he completely discounted the props by which the European supported his. The Indian lacked entirely the European’s respect for worldly goods. In Europe, and indeed in most of the world, the acquisition and possession of riches constitutes the ultimate basis for social esteem. We may think it better to be born rich than to become rich, but in our society wealth has seldom been thought a handicap. Among the Indians, on the other hand, there existed a deliberate indifference to wealth, an indifference that could sometimes be infuriating to the white man.
Consider, for example, the Puritans of Massachusetts, who in 1643 were trying to take under their protection a group of Narragansett Indians. The immediate object was a land grab, to get the Indians’ land away from Rhode Island, but Massachusetts felt obliged to conduct the transaction in such a way that the Indians would appear to be receiving a favor. Since Christianity was the greatest favor a white man could confer on a savage, the authorities of Massachusetts undertook to instruct the Indians in the Ten Commandments. There is no record of what was said about coveting neighbors’ lands, but Governor Winthrop noted in his journal the Indians’ response to the fourth commandment. Will you agree, the men of Massachusetts inquired, not to “do any unnecessary work on the Lord’s day”? To which the Indians replied, “It is a small thing for us to rest on that day, for we have not much to do any day, and therefore we will forbear on that day.”
By Puritan standards, the Indian was not only lazy; he was proud of his laziness. The settlers observed this fact at the beginning and never forgave him for it. But those observers who saw the Indian in his tribal life and made some attempt to understand him, knew that his unwillingness to labor for riches was something more than mere laziness. Rather, it was the result of a genuine scorn for the riches of this world, to which the Puritans themselves were constantly professing their own indifference. The Indian could afford to scorn riches and to shun the industry necessary to acquire them, because in his society it was the man that counted, not what he owned. The observers are surprisingly unanimous in their statements on this subject. Let me give you a few of them. Robert Rogers, speaking of the northern Indians: “Avarice, and a desire to accumulate…are unknown to them; they are neither prompted by ambition, nor actuated by the love of gold; and the distinctions of rich and poor, high and low, noble and ignoble, do not so far take place among them as to create the least uneasiness, or excite the resentment of any individual; the brave and deserving, let their families or circumstances be what they will, are sure to be esteemed and rewarded.” John Lawson, of the Indians of Carolina: “They are a People that set as great a Value upon themselves, as any sort of Men, in the World, upon which Account they find something Valuable in themselves above Riches. Thus, he that is a good Warriour is the proudest Creature living; and he that is an expert Hunter, is esteemed by the People and himself; yet all these are natural Vertues and Gifts, and not Riches, which are as often in the Possession of a Fool as a Wise-man.” James Adair: “Most of them blame us for using a provident care in domestic life, calling it a slavish temper: they say we are covetous, because we do not give our poor relations such a share of our possessions, as would keep them from want….”
Among the Indians, wealth was not merely a matter of indifference. It was, in fact, something to be avoided by anyone who prided himself on his merits. According to Cadwallader Colden, the chiefs of the Iroquois nations were generally poorer than the common people. For in order to attain their eminence they had to demonstrate their indifference to worldly goods by giving away all the presents and plunder they obtained from friends or enemies. “If,” says Colden, “they should once be suspected of Selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men and would consequently loose their authority.”
It may be that some of the observers I have quoted were idealizing the Indian. Perhaps you will think that they rationalized laziness into a virtue. Yet it was a laziness that Henry Thoreau also practiced: like the Indian, Thoreau was too busy being himself to spend his time in pursuit of wealth. And if my chroniclers idealized the Indian, they were idealizing something they had seen themselves. Most of them had lived among the Indians and knew what they were talking about. Indeed, the man who knew the Indians most intimately was the one who has given us the noblest savages of all. George Catlin found in the Indians of the Far West all the attributes that our earlier observers discovered in the eastern tribes. “I have watched,” says Catlin in the florid prose of his day,
the bold, intrepid step—the proud, yet dignified deportment of Nature’s man, in fearless freedom, with a soul unalloyed by mercenary lusts, too great to yield to laws or power except from God. As these independent fellows are all joint-tenants of the soil, they are all rich, and none of the steepings of comparative poverty can strangle their just claims to renown. Who (I would ask) can look without admiring, into a society where peace and harmony prevail—where virtue is cherished—where rights are protected, and wrongs are redressed—with no laws, but the laws of honour, which are the supreme laws of their land?
Here, as in the other remarks by other eyewitnesses about other Indians, we have a series of characteristics that most Indians of North America seem to have shared.
These common characteristics, I believe, indicate that Indian ways of life in North America, however diverse, all produced men who attached the highest possible value to the individual. Indeed, the diversity of Indian life was fostered and encouraged by this very exaltation of the individual. Men who valued individual freedom so highly would not create any large or effective political organization of their own, nor would they be content to live under one created by white men. They preferred their own small and ineffective organizations, preferred them because they were small and because they were ineffective. They were individualists, intransigent and incorrigible.
I do not mean that the Indian was possessed of some mysterious essence to which we can give the name “individualism.” I use the word merely to tie together the different aspects of Indian life that we have been examining. They all add up to a single quality, which has been given various names. The Massachusetts General Court, for example, as we have seen, called it “a malicious, surley, and revengeful spirit.” But the more positive epithet of “individualism” will also apply.
By whatever name we call it, and however it was produced, this quality was preeminent among the Indians of North America, and it may help us to understand not only why the Indian refused to join us but also why we have admired and hated him for his refusal. The Indian in his individualism displayed virtues to which Americans, and indeed all Christians, have traditionally paid homage. An indifference to the things of this world, a genuine respect for human dignity, a passionate attachment to human freedom—these are virtues we all revere. We should be flattered, I think, if someone said of us that “the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent; that no one…on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” But these words were not written about us or our ancestors. They were written about the Indians (by Robert Rogers) and published eleven years before the Declaration of Independence.
They fit the Indian better than they fit us. The Indian therefore is both a challenge and an affront to us. We see in him what we might be if we carried some of our avowed principles to their logical conclusions. And what we see is disturbing. For we do not wish to be like the Indian. We do not wish to see our nation disintegrate into a thousand petty republics; we do not wish to be so free that no superior authority will make us behave. Nor do we intend to abandon whatever riches we have laid up in this world. It may be as difficult for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but most of us would welcome a chance to make the attempt. And so we are irritated, annoyed, and even infuriated by men who exhibit our values better than we do.
I do not suggest a mode of accommodation. We do not in fact have room for such incorrigible individualists within our civilization. And yet that civilization will have been impoverished beyond repair if the time ever comes when we cannot admire the Indian in his diversity, his dignity, and his intransigence, more than he ever had reason to admire us.