Leland Donald
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
—John Dry den The Conquest of Grenada 1664
The Noble Savage is one of the key ideas of the European Enlightenment, important in the development of political theory and influential in shaping European perspectives towards the indigenous peoples they found inhabiting the many lands “discovered” during the Age of Exploration. In dialectical fashion, while ideas about the noble savage affected European attitudes toward the native inhabitants of North America, in their turn early travelers’, missionaries’ and settlers’ accounts of these native peoples influenced the development of the concept of the Noble Savage.1
A classic example of this process can be found in the works of Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan (1666-1715), whose travel books were popular around the turn of the eighteenth century. Between 1703 and 1760, for example, his New Voyages to North-America appeared in numerous French, English, Dutch, and German editions. Lahontan both reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and, as a much-traveled eyewitness, influenced European ideas about the New World and its inhabitants. Thus he vividly describes Indian life “Ere the base laws of servitude began”:
The Savages are utter Strangers to distinctions of Property, for what belongs to one is equally anothers . . . Money is in use with none of them but those that are Christians . . . The others will not touch or so much as look upon Silver, but give it the odious Name of the French Serpent. They’ll tell you that amongst us the People Murder, Plunder, Defame, and betray one another, for Money, that the Husbands make Merchandise of their Wives, and the Mothers of their Daughters, for the Lucre of that Metal. They think it unaccountable that one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. In short, they say, the name of savages which we bestow upon them would fit our selves better . . . ‘Tis vain to remonstrate to them how useful the Distinction of Property is for the support of a Society: They make a Jest of what’s to be said on that Head. In fine, they neither Quarrel nor Fight, nor Slander one another. They scoff at Arts and Sciences, and laugh at the difference of Degrees which is observ’d with us. They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade our selves in subjecting our selves to one Man who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will . . . Besides, they value themselves above any thing that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. (1905:420-1)2
Later in this book, Lahontan contrived a long dialogue between himself, pretending to defend European civilization, and a literary antithesis—a probably fictional Huron whom he named Adario. The following statement, Lahontan’s thoughts presented as coming from Adario’s mouth, continues the preceding themes:
We are resolv’d to have no Laws, for since the World was a World our ancestors liv’d happily without ‘em. In fine, as I intimated before, the Word Laws does not signify just and reasonable things as you use it, for the Rich make a Jest of ‘em, and ‘tis only the poor wretches that pay any regard to ‘em. But, pray, let’s look into these Laws, or reasonable things, as you call ‘em. For these Fifty Years, the Governors of Canada have still alleged that we are subject to the Laws of their great Captain. We content our selves in denying all manner of Dependance, excepting that upon the Great Spirit, as being born free and joint Brethren, who are all equally Masters: Whereas you are all Slaves to one Man ... In earnest, my dear Brother, I’m sorry for thee from the bottom of my soul. Take my advice, and turn Huron; for I see plainly a vast difference between thy Condition and mine. I am Master of my own body, I have the absolute disposal of my self, I do what I please, I am the first and the last of my Nation, I fear no Man, and I depend only upon the Great Spirit: Whereas thy Body, as well as thy Soul, are doom’d to a dependance upon thy great Captain; thy Vice-Roy disposes of thee; thou hast not the liberty of doing what thou hast a mind to . . . and thou dependest upon an infinity of Persons whose Places have rais’d ‘em above thee. Is it true, or not? . . . Ah! my dear Brother, thou seest plainly that I am in the right of it; and yet thou choosest rather to be a French slave than a free Huron. (1905:553-5)
Lahontan had spent some years traveling and living among the natives of northeastern North America, but clearly he was less interested in accurate description of the customs of those he met than in making invidious comparisons, in constructing a Noble Savage and using him as commentator on life in Europe. Others who traveled to North America tried to communicate what they witnessed but many wrote their accounts so as to use the native as foils, either to criticize or to justify conditions in Europe (as did most of the intellectuals who stayed at home rehashing the accounts of travelers).3
In this manner the image of a free, liberty loving Indian, unfettered by laws and enjoying a society unmarked by social, economic or political inequalities, became a favorite figure in European thought.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the foundations were being laid for what became twentieth-century social science, including anthropology. Authentic descriptions of Indian societies then began to have value in their own right. But these descriptions also served speculative social theory, by then mainly full blown reconstructions of “stages” of social evolution. Although by the nineteenth century there was an enormous amount of information on various native societies in explorers’, settlers’ and missionaries’ accounts, the first systematic descriptive study of an Indian group was not published until 1851, when Lewis Henry Morgan published League of the Iroquois, “the first scientific account of an Indian tribe.” Morgan had interviewed and observed the Iroquois of upper New York state and his book is based on this research, but echoes of the Noble Savage and the use of the nature of Indian society to criticize the contemporary scene are in his writing, combined with new scientific goals and interests. This can be clearly seen in the following passage from Morgan’s later, highly influential theoretical work, Ancient Society, published in 1877:
Property and office were the foundations upon which aristocracy planted itself.
Whether this principle shall live or die has been one of the great problems with which modern society has been engaged through the intervening periods. As a question between equal rights and unequal laws, between the rights of wealth, of rank and of official position, and the power of justice and intelligence, there can be little doubt of the ultimate result. Although several thousand years have passed away without the overthrow of privileged classes, excepting in the United States, their burdensome character upon society has been demonstrated.
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. (1964:466-67)
This passage is full of echoes of Lahontan and other Enlightenment writers. There is the criticism of property and its consequences, of authority, of aristocratic rule, and also a strong reprise of the Noble Savage in “the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.” Now, we would say clan instead of gentes, but here in Morgan’s evolutionary speculations are Lahontan’s liberty-loving Indian organized into fraternal groups, bands of brothers, and sisters (the Iroquois were matrilineal and Morgan well understood this). Like Lahontan, Morgan’s Noble Savage did not need kings, aristocrats, privilege or property to lead the good life. But now the image is based on a “scientific” account of Indian culture.
Morgan worked with many other Indian groups, although with none nearly so intensively as the Iroquois. Nonetheless, he viewed all Indians (and all others at “their level” of social evolution) through Iroquois-colored glasses. While Morgan’s Iroquois ethnography has been supplemented, but never surpassed, his particular scheme of social evolution is no longer accepted as valid. Because Morgan had many successors, the New York Iroquois have remained a dominant influence on the image of the American Indian, both scholarly and popular. Although recent popular images are dominated visually by the movie version of plains Indians—feather headdresses, horses and tepees—still the social characteristics of this popular image remain Morganian: fierce, proud, liberty loving warriors fighting for an independent, egalitarian way of life. The scholarly view takes into account far more detail, drawn from over a century of study that has ranged over the entire continent. Yet when scholars summarize, Morgan’s images of the Iroquois peek out from behind the curtain of generalizations. Many examples could be produced, all presenting the same general interpretations: in political terms, the indigenous societies of North America all lacked the state and were varieties of “tribal” societies. They tended to be egalitarian, lacking social or economic inequities, except for those based on age or gender.4
All the world’s societies probably had and have at least minimal inequality based on age and perhaps gender as well. Thus the status of the sexes and generations are certainly the most widespread bases for allocating resources, power, and prestige, especially so in those societies lacking the centralized political institutions known as the state. Moreover, there are (or were) societies which do not have inequalities other than those based on gender and age; and such societies (inside and outside native North America) are often labeled as egalitarian! Readers sensitive to age or gender discrimination may sense there is something a bit odd about this, but I will accept the convention here because I wish to concentrate on inequalities other than those involving sex or generation.
Even a casual reading of the world ethnographic record will reveal considerable variation among the planet’s societies (past and present) in what I shall call “structured social inequality.” In many instances members of a society recognize and accept that some of their fellows have greater advantages with respect to access to some or many of the things important to the local version of the good life. This advantage is usually based on some culturally constructed attribute of an individual or of some category to which such fortunate individuals belong. Especially where these groups of individuals contain all ages and both genders, and where superior status can be successfully transmitted from generation to generation, and especially if some of the advantages of the superior include better access to the resources necessary for life itself, then that society is not egalitarian.
My aim in this essay is not to show that there were no genuinely egalitarian societies—in the classic, conventional sense—in native North America. Surely there were. But there were also many that were not. Numerous indigenous societies were in fact highly stratified, containing groups and categories of people who were seriously disadvantaged when compared to others. Space limitations prevent a systematic region by region survey. A discussion of two culture areas where “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (and Sorority)” were absent except for the favored will have to do. After a discussion of these two areas—the Southeast and the Northwest Coast, plus one particularly important case from elsewhere—I will conclude by briefly considering why inequality among traditional native societies has been ignored or obscured and suggest why it is important not to disregard it.
In 1775 James Adair published The History of the American Indians, meaning the Indians he knew reasonably well, “those Nations adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia.” Based on at least thirty-four years of experience as trader with Indian communities of this region, Adair’s book is a major source for eighteenth-century Southeastern ethnography. This observant merchant was so struck by what he saw as the lack of hierarchy among southeastern Indians of his time that he dismissed older reports of class differentiation and political centralization among them. He went even farther than this, denying political hierarchy among all other American Indians—going so far as to deny the possible existence of the state among even the Aztecs of Mexico or the Inca of Peru. “The emperor [Montezuma],” concluded Adair,
who they [the Spanish] pretend bore such universal arbitrary sway, is raised by their pens, from the usual rank of a war chieftain, to his imperial greatness: But despotic power is death to their [Indian] ears, as it is destructive of their darling liberty . . . they have no name for a subject, but say, “the people.” In order to carry on the self-flattering warromance . . . [the Spanish] began the epocha of that great fictitious empire, in the time of the ambitious and formidable Montezuma, that their handful of heaven-favoured popish saints might have the more honour in destroying it: had they described it of a long continuance, they forsaw that the world would detect the fallacy, as soon as they learned the language of the pretended empire; correspondent to which, our own great Emperor Powhatan of Virginia, was [that way] soon dethroned . . . Our Indians urge with a great deal of vehemence, that as every one is promoted only by public virtue, and has his equals in civil and martial affairs, those Spanish books that have mentioned red emperors, and great empires in America, ought to be burnt in some of the remaining old years accursed fire. (1968:211)
Adair’s experiences, which convinced him that the Native inhabitants of the Southeast were classic examples of the egalitarian, liberty-loving Indian, and his hatred of his Spanish rivals and Catholics generally, were not unusual for his time. One more of the many similar characterizations of southeastern Indians must suffice:
The [Cherokee] are an odd Kind of People, as there is no law nor Subjection amongst them. They can’t be compelled to do any Thing nor oblige them to embrace any party except they Please. The very lowest of them thinks himself as great and as high as any of the Rest. . . everyone of them must be courted for their Friendship with some kind of Feeling and made much of” [Captain Raymond Demere, July 30, 1757, quoted in Gearing 1962:38-9].
Adair was almost certainly right that early explorers and settlers often spoke of Indian “kings” in situations where the European terminology and its implications were most inappropriate: Powhatan (of Pocahontas fame, see chapter 3) was not a “monarch” in the seventeenth-century European sense. But Adair was clearly wrong about the Inca and the Aztec, neither of whom he knew first-hand. Was he also wrong about at least some of the native peoples of the Southeast? Were some of their societies organized in ways that cannot reasonably be called egalitarian? We can answer both these questions with a fairly clear yes. And we can do so with two independent kinds of evidence: the first archaeological, the second historic.
Social inequality rarely leaves unambiguous evidence for the archaeologist to uncover. Yet we have considerable archaeological evidence from Southeastern sites to suggest that at various times and places some of the region’s prehistoric communities contained socially stratified populations. This evidence indicates that, long before Columbus, some communities were divided so that certain groups within them had greater access to wealth, resources, and marks of privilege than did others.
Some of the most useful evidence pointing to this conclusion can be found in burials. Not uncommonly in archaeological sites we discover that some individuals have had buried with them a fairly rich array of artifacts, often of the kind that can be reasonably interpreted as markers of power, wealth, or prestige, while other individuals have few or even no fancy artifacts in their graves. Though a deceased individual might be entitled to such marks of superiority because of unusual personal accomplishments marking a distinctive career, the rich funeral goods of others were present because they belonged to a social group which entitled them to such signs of superiority. If “rich” burials are found for all ages and both genders, while “poor” burials are also found across age and gender categories, this can be interpreted as evidence that posh graves are a hereditary right rather than an earned privilege. This is not the only interpretation of such finds, but where such differentiation in death is accompanied by other probable indicators of stratification, we have good grounds for ruling out an egalitarian society, even if we cannot be certain of just what kind of social inequalities were present.
Much of just this kind of evidence is present in the Southeast.5 Indeed, some archaeologists are convinced that structured social inequality characterized several Southeastern communities as early as the late Archaic period, as many as 3000 years ago (Muller 1983:383-84).6 One recent overview of Southeastern prehistory gives a picture of the waxing and waning of complex, inegalitarian societies in various parts of the region from the Archaic period until late prehistoric times, about 1500 A.D. (Muller 1983). Such evidence suggests there was probably a decline in social complexity and hence in inequality just before European intrusions into the region. So sixteenth century and later European observers like Adair would have seen less inequality than they would have had they arrived a century or two earlier. And European contact itself, both directly (conquest) and indirectly (disease), almost certainly contributed to a breakdown and a break up of larger native Southeastern polities. Thus even very early in the contact period, European observers were describing societies that were coping with and reacting to the damaging effects of culture contact.
In at least one Southeastern case both archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence exhibits social inequality: the Calusa of southern Florida. John Goggin and William Sturtevant (1964) assembled much evidence that points explicitly to stratification among these people. They summarize this evidence as follows:
[Calusa] society was stratified, with at least two classes (possibly hereditary) in addition to some slaves. Several individual statuses of high rank existed, which apparently had greater access than the rest of the population to at least some economic resources, which possessed sociopolitical authority, and which had distinctive ceremonial duties and privileges. (1964:208)7
Important here is the suggestion that the elite class had superior access to resources, for this is the classic marker of a stratified or nonegalitarian society (Fried 1967:186-87). Documentary sources suggest that other indigenous Southeastern societies were stratified, but I will mention only the best-known, most clear-cut example.
The Natchez, who lived along a short stretch of the lower Mississippi River, are known to us from descriptions and comments by nearby French settlers during the period 1700 to 1731. They were destroyed by the French about 1730, although a few survivors fled to the neighboring Chickasaw. French sources reveal an elaborate, even intricate system of social, religious, and political hierarchy. The ethnologist John Swanton used these sources to reconstruct a version of their social system which he first published in 1911. He described a system of two social “classes,” with the upper class being further divided into three ranked groups. Translating from the French, he labeled the three upper classes (in order of superiority) as “Suns,” “Nobles,” and “Honored People,” and the lower-class as “Stinkards.” Swanton’s reconstruction included a tangled set of marriage and status inheritance rules whose interpretation and reinterpretation has produced a steady stream of commentaries ever since.8
Whatever reconstruction of Natchez marriage and status inheritance rules one accepts, however, clearly they had at least two social classes. Members of these two strata experienced not only markedly different prestige and conditions of life (upper-class women, for example, had more extensive body tattooing than did lower-class women), but the upper-class also monopolized political power and almost certainly had superior access to economic resources. In addition, within the upper-class the ruling descent group (the Suns) enjoyed power and privileges considerably greater than that of other upper-class groups. Whatever the details, no one could call early eighteenth-century Natchez society egalitarian.
In summary, the archaeological evidence strongly suggests a long history of social stratification and privilege in southeastern societies and there is strong ethnohistoric evidence for at least two stratified societies at the time of contact (the Calusa and Natchez). Careful research would almost certainly produce evidence of more nonegalitarian societies in the prehistoric and early historic Southeast. The standard notion that Southeastern societies were generally egalitarian results from overlooking the possibility of variation, not paying sufficient attention to the Natchez and Calusa cases, not recognizing the destruction of traditional institutions throughout the Southeast quickly after European contact, and the widespread acceptance of the assumptions of the “egalitarian Indian” model.
At the opposite, northwestern corner of the continent we find many native societies on which no one could force-fit the Noble Savage image of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Northwest Coast culture area includes the Alaska panhandle, the coastal strip of British Columbia and Washington and, for some scholars, the sea coasts of Oregon and northern California as well. No one with even a modest familiarity with the peoples of this region could call them egalitarian. Competition for social position, prestige seeking, and striving for higher rank and honors are all perennial themes in ethnographic descriptions of Northwest Coast peoples. Despite many published descriptions of traditional Northwest Coast social life, knowledge of their deeply and intensively stratified communities has had little influence on the “the Indian’s” egalitarian image (sayings such as “low man on the totem pole” notwithstanding). Indeed, the popular stereotype of the egalitarian Indian may well have contributed to the curiously narrow view of inequality that anthropologists have taken when writing about Northwest Coast social systems.
Although there was (and is) variation between the societies of the Northwest Coast, in terms of inequality all followed a basic pattern. The typical community in the region had the following form: (1) Members of a named local community resided together during the winter;9 (2) the winter village consisted of several kinship groups, whose members lived together in one or more large wooden plank houses; and, (3) the community contained persons belonging to each of three (unequal) ranked strata that can be called Titleholders, Commoners, and Slaves.
Titleholders dominated their communities; they were the wealthy and successful who staged the famous potlatches.10 In many communities, in addition to being members of a distinct social strata, Titleholders were organized into a ranked hierarchy among themselves. Commoners, in contrast, were full members of the same extended kin groups as Titleholders but lacked titles and did not command the respect, prestige, or economic clout of their superiors. Slaves represented an even more extreme contrast of inequality: they were the property of either kin groups or individual Titleholders. Slaves were economically exploited and could be exchanged for other goods. They might be given away at ceremonies; and, in an ultimate display of power over powerlessness, slaves could be killed to enhance the prestige of a Titleholder or kin group. Slaves, in their origins, were prisoners of war. Being forcibly removed from their villages, their kin ties were ruptured by capture and they had no kinship rights in the communities where they were held in bondage.11
This view of Northwest Coast stratification is somewhat controversial. While all of the fuller ethnographic accounts mention slaves, they are treated as economically unimportant and are not usually taken into consideration in analyses of the culture area. It is also unusual to recognize a division of the “free” population into two strata. Most students of the region claim that there was a gradation of rank that included all non-slaves. In Helen Codere’s phrase there was “rank without class” on the Northwest Coast (1957).
I will deal briefly with the position of slaves and then turn to the question of divisions within the free population. Downplaying the economic importance of Northwest coast slaves is an old tradition that continues even today: “the slave, who had little or no economic value” (Hodge 1981:407). This doctrine began with Franz Boas, the dominant figure in American anthropology in the first half of this century, whose major ethnographic work was done on the Northwest Coast, especially among the southern Kwakiutl. Boas published several thousand pages of Kwakiutl ethnography. In his account of southern Kwakiutl social organization that Codere has declared “definitive,” Boas does not mention slavery at all (1966:37-67). Indeed, in the summary volume, Kwakiutl Ethnography, edited by Codere, there is no index entry for “slave” or “slavery.”
Boas’ most important (and virtually only) statement about southern Kwakiutl slavery appeared in his first major book about these people:
So far we have considered the clan as a unit. The individuals composing the clan do not form, however, a homogenous mass, but differ in rank. All the tribes of the Pacific Coast are divided into a nobility, common people, and slaves. The last of these may be left out of consideration, as they do not form part and parcel of the clan, but are captives made in war, or purchases, and may change ownership as any other piece of property. (1897:338)
The irony is that, while originating the pattern of ignoring or downplaying Northwest Coast slavery, Boas’s early statement is accurate—as far as it goes. If one wishes to analyze the internal composition of a kin group, slaves may indeed be “left out of consideration” for they are the property of—not members of—such free groups. But it is easy to demonstrate the economic importance of slaves for many of the area’s communities and to show that there were too many of them to ignore and still claim a thorough understanding of societies in the region.
The range of economic tasks performed by slaves was wide: they collected firewood, fetched water, gathered berries, fished, hunted, preserved food, prepared food, acted as domestic servants, paddled canoes, cared for their owner’s children, delivered messages, carried burdens, pulled snow sleds, ran errands and acted as servants on ceremonial occasions. This labor was important both for the contribution it made to production (in procuring and preserving food) and in freeing owners to pursue the more prestigious activities of Titleholders. In addition, slaves were economically important as items of value in the extensive trade networks found throughout the area. Finally, although quantitative data are poor, the numbers of slaves were not inconsequential: in some communities slaves probably made up at least 20 and at times, perhaps, up to 30 percent of the population.12
The traditional view, which essentially overlooks slavery as a significant institution in Northwest Coast societies, thus ignores one of the most critical things we should remember about them—that they practiced, in an important way, the institution that carries inequality in human affairs to its greatest extreme. One might as well write a history of the antebellum South omitting mention of slaves there on the grounds that they were not members of plantation-owning families.13
The following summary by Harold Driver represents the orthodox view of anthropologists about rank among non-slaves on the Northwest Coast:
In respect to differences in rank of freemen, all anthropologists agree that most freemen were carefully ranked from highest to lowest according to wealth and heredity. The two always went hand in hand because the most valuable kinds of property were inherited. Freemen were carefully scaled according to rank at potlatch feasts in four ways: they were seated, served, and given presents to take home in order of rank, and the value of the present was correlated with the order of rank . . . Because the same persons attended many potlatches every year, this carefully calibrated order of rank was confirmed publicly again and again. (1961:389)
Driver goes on to write that in all probability the ranking of individuals was fairly stable before contact times, with only occasional shifts in position by particularly lucky or unlucky individuals. After European contact, however, mobility in rank supposedly was greatly increased. One reason for such increased upward mobility was increased economic activities, which made it easier for individuals to accumulate wealth; and a second reason was drastic population decline (largely due to newly introduced diseases), which created relatively more openings for fewer competitors. Driver goes on to note that there is some controversy as to whether or not there are or are not “social classes” among those he calls “freemen.” He puts the controversy down to confusion about variation from village to village. Within some communities all freemen seem to have had some sort of title, within other communities there were clearly “nobles”—who held titles, and commoners—who did not (1961:389-90).
There are considerable difficulties with this conventional interpretation of Driver and others. In the first place, to my knowledge no one has ever attempted to demonstrate the actual existence of a rank order of all the non-slaves in a community in any concrete case except for Boas’ southern Kwakiutl. Many other communities are known to have had ranked titles associated with potlatching (among other things), and the assumption has been that these must have worked much like the southern Kwakiutl system. However, a careful reading of the ethnographic accounts of other Northwest Coast groups fails to reveal good evidence (often any evidence) for an overall Kwakiutl style rank order. And, as Driver acknowledges, there is good evidence for a two-part division of non-slaves in many Northwest Coast communities.
For example, Verne Ray noted that for almost all Northwest Coast groups there is a name in the indigenous language for the commoner group. Thirteen of seventeen of the groups represented on Drucker’s Culture Element Distribution List for the northern and central parts of the culture area have such a named class of commoners; and other ethnographic sources also indicate the near universal presence of commoners as a named social group (1956:165).14 In his short paper Ray made a vigorous case for the presence of distinct social classes on the Northwest Coast (1956).
Ray was promptly slapped down by the defenders of Boasian orthodoxy, by Robert Lowie, for instance, who had never researched anywhere in the culture area (1956), and by Helen Codere, who had worked mainly with Boas’ southern Kwakiutl materials. In contrast, most of Ray’s ethnographic studies were in the southern part of the culture area. Shortly after the Ray-Lowie-Codere exchange, Wayne Suttles examined the possibility of social classes among the Coast Salish, who live south of the Kwakiutl along the Gulf of Georgia and Puget Sound. He concluded that these peoples had distinct social classes. He did suggest, however, that the free “lower class” was quite small and relatively unimportant and he accepted Codere’s non-class view of the southern Kwakiutl as correct (1958). The rank without class view of Northwest Coast society in this fashion prevailed.
But Codere’s view of an integrated overall ranking of non-slave southern Kwakiutl and a lack of a two class division of non-slaves can also be challenged. Even Boas himself, in the quote above, described southern Kwakiutl society and the other societies of the Pacific Coast as “divided into a nobility, common people, and slaves.” Codere would dismiss this and other similar statements of Boas in favor of what she considers his later (1920) “definitive” view of the southern Kwakiutl as “classless.” For her the following paragraph represented Boas’ mature and final position on the subject:
It seems to me that the conditions among the Kwakiutl and the Nootka must have been quite similar insofar as a sharp line between the nobility and the common people did not exist. In one Kwakiutl tale, it is even stated that the youngest of five brothers “was not taken care of by his father and was like a slave or a dog”. (1940:361, cited in Codere 1957:482)
We should note that Boas’ comments concerned a dictated text, not a set of observations of the actual workings of Kwakiutl society. And if we examine the full narrative he cites (Boas 1921:1097), several interesting points emerge. In Kwakiutl society, according to their oral traditions, titles and other property were transmitted by the rule of primogeniture (the eldest inheriting first and most). And the youngest of the five brothers in this story was treated badly, not because he was the youngest, but because he was the fifth child. Only the first four of a Titleholder’s children could properly inherit titles and thus rank.15 The use of the number four here is a reminder of another important point often overlooked in discussions of southern Kwakiutl—rank had a sacred quality, it represented power (religious or spiritual as well as social and economic) and it did not devolve without limitations to a person’s heirs. A man had only so much of the stuff associated with rank that he could transmit to his offspring. When that was done (and the limit was four partitions) his other children could receive no sacred inheritance from him. Such unfortunate offspring were still a man’s children and were remained members of his kin group, but from a Titleholder’s perspective they were like dogs or slaves—this great was the distinction between Kwakiutl titleholder and commoner,16
Why does late nineteenth-century ethnographic data appear to support the notion that the southern Kwakiutl had rank without class? There are at least two reasons. First, as noted by Harold Driver and many others, immediately after contact there was a precipitant decline in the population of all Northwest Coast groups, including the Kwakiutl. Suddenly there were more titles than persons to fill them, so nearly all nonslaves could become Titleholders. Second, Boas’ interpretations were biased by the fact that he obtained his information largely from Title-holders and thereby reflected their views of Kwakiutl institutions (see Kroeber 1956:151).
In summary, traditional Northwest Coast societies were the antithesis of the egalitarianism that dominates the orthodox image of the native societies of North America. This is true in two specially important ways. First, these societies practiced slavery, not in a casual or minor way but as a major feature of their political and economic activities; and, second, the nonslave part of the population was divided into two major social strata, one of which—Titleholders—had numerous material, political, and spiritual advantages, which the the Commoners were denied.
East and north of the Northwest Coast’s inegalitarian societies lived groups of Athapaskan speaking peoples. At the time of first contact with Europeans these hunting-gathering populations of interior Alaska, the Yukon region, and northern British Columbia exemplified the features of egalitarian values and institutions thought to be distinctive of “band-level” peoples who forage for their subsistence.
In this interior region resources available for exploitation by hunting are scanty and dispersed, so the presence of small traditional societies here is not surprising. Both the Noble Savage image and anthropological theory about low productivity hunter gatherers predict egalitarian social systems for the area. Yet we now have good evidence that at least one cluster of societies in this region was far from egalitarian. Because of the careful ethnographic and ethnohistoric research of Dominique Le-gros we can now see that among the Tutchone in the southeast Yukon social inequality was significant and prominent.17
Legros’s reconstruction of Tutchone social life begins in the midnineteenth century. At that time, he notes, Tutchone society was “still free from any significant and direct Euroamerican economic, political, and cultural meddling” (1985:38). The Tutchone then had the simplest of subsistence technologies. This included traps and deadfalls used to take land mammals, and nets and weirs used to capture their most predictable and abundant resource, salmon. Such subsistence techniques supported a population of about 1,100 people, divided into some seventy localized “resource exploitation groups.” Obviously these seventy groups on average were small: a third consisted of a single nuclear family, and another third probably contained no more than two such. Fewer than a dozen of these groups were—by Tutchone standards—large, containing ten or so nuclear families.
Interestingly for foraging peoples, the Tutchone were matrilineal, and they were organized as strictly exogamous matrilineal moieties—socially defined halves named Raven and Wolf. Within each moiety the taboo on marriage, even on any potential sexual encounter, was strictly enforced. However, marriage and sexual relations were possible between Ravens and Wolves—members of opposite moieties—irrespective of generation or genetic closeness. For example, a Raven man could marry or engage in sex with his father’s mother or brother’s daughter because they were in the opposite moiety, therefore, by Tutchone reckoning, not closely related.
Though they were members of different moieties, Father/Daughter marriage and sex were not much favored, though Legros has recorded some cases of Father/Daughter marriages that were allowed to stand. The preferred form of marriage was with a bilateral cross-cousin.18 These technical details of Tutchone kinship and marriage must be emphasized because such forms of marriage are generally associated with simple, egalitarian societies (Lévi-Strauss 1969). Nonetheless, what Legros has shown is that not only was inequality important among the Tutchone, but that those who dominated others did so in part by successfully manipulating the culturally ideal practice of bilateral cross-cousin marriage!
Tutchone society was divided into three ranked strata: the “rich,” the “poor,” and the “slaves.” Rich families made up about 15 percent of the whole population. Rich families formed the core of the ten or so largest local resource exploitation groups; they controlled the best resource sites19; and they monopolized trade with the Tlingit of the Northwest Coast culture area to the south. Poor families comprised about 75 percent of the population. They were either attached to a rich leader’s group or lived in very small groups (one or two nuclear families) in the poorer resource areas. Legros calls the former the “dependent poor” and the latter the “autonomous poor.” Finally, slaves made up about 10 percent of the population. Not surprisingly, all slaves belonged to rich Tutchone.
The rich dominated and exploited both poor and slave. Although there was a little social mobility, rich status was largely inherited, so that the rich were able to pass their advantages on to their children. The lesson of this case is that even in conditions that seem ideal for the presence of the classic egalitarian Indian society, it is possible for marked inequalities to emerge. As Legros says:
The Tutchone case demonstrates that socioeconomic inequalities may be present among hunter-gatherers even in one of the harshest environments in the world. Tutchone population density was one of the lowest known anywhere, and its spatial distribution was characteristic of the simplest societies of hunters and gatherers. Their production techniques, their products, and the goods they exchanged had nothing exceptional. Yet, they were divided into socioeconomic strata. A few rich families monopolized the best extraction sites and access to extra-local trade, and defended their monopoly through the use of naked force. Moreover, these families used the resources they had appropriated to further exploit poor families, going so far as to make some poor individuals their slaves in the full sense of the word. (1985:62)
These examples and the discussion show that many traditional native American societies simply do not fit the conventional image of egalitarian tribal peoples, a representation that has long dominated both anthropology and popular thought about Indians. The contrary illustrations used come largely from two areas of the continent, but other cases from different regions could be used as well, as in the Upper Mississippi Valley and in the Northeastern Woodlands culture areas. However, there is no need to over-react and claim that equality existed in no Indian society. Certainly, many native American societies fit the egalitarian model. My conclusion is straightforward and broader. If we deliberately set aside the dominant stereotype and carefully examine historical and ethnographic facts about Indian societies on an explicit equality/ inequality scale, we find a great deal more variation in aboriginal North America than is usually recognized.
Why, then, has the Baron Lahontan’s egalitarian image of the Noble Savage persisted? Why has the evidence of inequality been ignored, overlooked or played down? There are at least three major sets of reasons. The first is the outcome of systematic methodological—especially an ahistorical and non-contextual—bias. The second represents the persistent influence of the Noble Savage tradition and its modern progeny. The third comes from a weak, underdeveloped theory of inequality. And these are now augmented by the recent rise of the native rights movements as a significant political force. These elements are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary they have often interacted with one another; but we can now look at each in turn.
The methodological and ahistorical bias was rampant in the time of the earliest proper ethnographers—of Lewis Henry Morgan’s mid-nine-teenth century generation—more so among the earliest keen observers of Indians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the time even the latter came on the scene as witnesses all native North American societies had experienced and were undergoing dramatic social and cultural change. There had been substantial declines in population, for instance, and native populations had been displaced from vital resource bases, reshuffled, and combined. Moreover, Euroamerican expansion and settlement had meant an end to their political-economic independence.
For the more complex, and the more stratified, native societies this usually meant devolution, a breakdown of older institutions into smaller units of living and production. One of the more important aspects of this devolution was a leveling of social, political, and economic differences. By Lahontan’s and James Adair’s times, the native peoples they knew first-hand had come to share a new political status; while by Morgan’s time they were sharing their poverty in common.20 Until recently most ethnographers have given little attention to available historical material when describing native cultures. Similarly, they have not taken into disciplined consideration the larger contemporary social and economic context in which their own research was conducted. Instead, they have assumed that what they found in the memories of living informants was a secure basis for describing “traditional society,” little influenced by past or present political and economic currents, or the informants’ own position in their communities. The effects of drastic social change and devolution as likely influences on their informants’ accounts and perspective were scarcely considered. However, as the interdisciplinary field of ethnohistory has developed and better use is made of the often rich historical record, many older views of aspects of native life have had to be revised. Faulty generalizations about the egalitarian Indian are obviously among these.
As we have seen, the durable Noble Savage image has remained a standard stereotype—a cliché that represents the eternal Indian. So powerful has this cliché been that many supposedly objective observers were overly prone to seeing egalitarian, liberty-loving Indians, free of the vices of property and class distinction where the opposite often was true. Morgan’s career exemplifies this. His early interest in native peopies was that of a devoted, practicing Indian hobbyist. Only later did he work out the beginnings of a scientific approach to studies of native cultures. And when he did his earlier assumptions carried over into his evolutionary model and his interpretations. So his studies of the New York Iroquois and his comparative researches reported in Ancient Society gave a seemingly “scientific” boost to the image of the Noble Savage.
Morgan, and a good many other scholars who followed in his tracks, never purged their thinking of the images fashioned by the Baron Lahontan and other Euroamericans born of the Enlightenment. For them the Indian remained a foil on which they impaled the faults of their own “civilization,” imperfections as defined by themselves, fitting the forms of alienation characteristic of their times. Just as Enlightenment thinkers were opponents of absolutist monarchies, Morgan was an American democrat opposed to aristocracy. Moreover, as Elisabeth Tooker points out in chapter 6, Morgan thought and wrote in an era when American intellectuals were determined to construct a history of their nation as separate from that of Europe as possible. Significantly, images of Indians untrammeled by restrictions on their liberty, by inequities in their societies, and by conflict in their relationships became part of that invented tradition. Though he lived in a different era, like Lahontan before him Morgan used distorted depictions of native American social and political forms to contrast the idyllic way of life of the Savage with the corrupt, degraded life of those who enjoyed the finest benefits of Civilization.21
In the century following Morgan’s pioneering studies, anthropological theorists have not displayed a strong interest in structured social inequality, particularly so among those societies once called “primitive,” that is, those classified as bands and tribes. Almost all treatments of political, social, and economic hierarchy have been limited to centralized states, which is to say those commonly classified as “civilized.” That states are divided like layer-cakes and shaped like pyramids with the icing of both power and wealth concentrated at the peak has become an anthropological truism.
Implicit in this assumption has been the belief that economic inequality and the state are invariably and inseparably linked. As ideal types opposite to the “the state” anthropologists have cast generalized portraits of “the tribe”: the state is stratified, the tribe egalitarian. That this conviction is an inheritance from the Enlightenment’s own Noble Savage tradition should be obvious. If centralized political authority and economic inequity are strongly linked, where hierarchies of power are absent we would not expect to find wide differences in access to and ownership of resources either. This unquestioned conventional view has predisposed anthropologists to expect no significant structured social inequalities in native American societies. Why not? Because in North America, at least during the historic era, we find exceedingly little political hierarchy and only weak political authority in any traditional society. In short, the state was probably absent in Native North America and even weak political authority of the chiefdom type was relatively rare. Thus the misleading logical leap: no native American societies could have been other than egalitarian.
Could the same factors with respect to the “state in native America” be operating as we found with respect to “inequality in native America”? This is an empirical question, an issue of careful definition and then factual inquiry. Interestingly enough, the answer is probably no. As we have seen, there is ample evidence of social stratification in some indigenous North American societies. But it is difficult to make a good case for centralized political institutions anywhere among historic native peoples there. Political authority seems to have been fairly weak everywhere on the continent.
To take but one example, the legitimate power of the so-called “chiefs” on the Northwest Coast was so weak and circumscribed that, as Drucker has argued, actors playing such roles had little authority over people outside their own kin group, even among non-kin within their own community. Even less so did their power reach beyond the local community (Drucker 1983). This is why I have preferred to label such roles Titleholders rather than “chiefs.” Both the ethnographic and ethnoh-istoric evidence support Drucker on this point, just as it does not confirm his conclusions with respect to social stratification. The hypothesis which defines a necessary universal link between the political state and economic stratification is wrong. The cultures of Native North America supply ample examples which falsify it.
Unfortunately, in anthropological studies of Indians this theory has been largely implicit and applied automatically, rather than being made explicit and tested. Rather than rethinking and revising the theory, anthropologists have generally ignored the data. This tendency has been strongly reinforced by the vitality of the Noble Savage image in Europe (see chapter 16), in Canada, and in the United States (see chapters 7, 10, and 17). Wherever the Indian is evoked today, a descendent of Lahontan’s Adario emerges as a powerful figure on the political and philosophical agendas of anyone concerned with modern problems about liberty, equality, and fraternity, just as he was a vital and useful image in the minds of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thinkers. And today, with native Americans achieving positions of much greater cultural and political influence than formerly, some of them are as apt to take and play the part of Noble Savages as are journalists, novelists, film-makers, and politicians to replay the image.
Whatever one’s political perspective, it is necessary to recognize the risks of false images, however old and popular, much less false consciousness based on false images, however old and popular. This is why recognition of inequality in some native American societies is important. This is as true for ordinary citizens interested in alternative models of social living as it is for academics, who need to get their theories and facts straight. Not only must we recognize what actually was true of traditional Indian societies in all their varieties, but we need to uncouple marked social and economic inequality from the peculiar institutions of the state, with its centralization of political power. There is an important practical as well as a theoretical lesson in the Tutchone case. Great economic and social inequality and the exploitation of human beings by other human beings can arise under the most unpromising political and environmental circumstances, with no Priest-King, Emperor or Czar, not even a popularly elected President or Prime Minister, or even a Bureaucrat present to take the blame.
1 When Dry den first coined the phrase “Noble Savage” in this epic, his reference was to the Moor, Almanzor’s opposition to the Spanish during the reconquest. However, the Noble Savage was soon found populating the Americas and other more remote, recently discovered parts of the world. For an introduction to the literature about images of the Indian in European thought, see Marshall and Williams 1982 and Dickason 1984. See also chapters 16 and 17.
2 Italics and capitalization in original.
3 So popular did this literary contrivance become and remain that it has been named “the Adario motif.” The Adario figure consists of an fictionalized Indian, preferably a wise old Indian, who declaims at length on the failings of Euroamericans. For a discussion of the Adario motif, see Adams 1976 and 1983:234-36. It has been suggested that Lahontan’s Adario was based on a real Huron leader named Kondiaronk. If this is the case, Kondiaronk’s known career is in sharp contrast to Lahontan’s philosophical Noble Savage. For a factual account see William Fenton’s article on Kondiaronk in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
4 See, for example, the address of a recent president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, who declared that, “The native societies of North America were small-scale units characterized by considerable internal equality, self-reliance, and individual consent as a prerequisite for the implementation of public policy” (Trigger 1986:255).
5 For late prehistoric times see the papers by Brown, Larson, and Peebles in Brown 1971.
6 The Archaic ended about 700 B.C.
7 The most recent discussion of the Calusa case, which combines a thorough review of the ethnohistorical data with recent archaeological research, is in essential agreement with Goggin and Sturtevant’s interpretation of the evidence for Calusa social inequality (see Marquardt 1988).
8 Swanton 1911; see White, Murdock and Scaglon 1971 for a good discussion of the technical problems involving Swanton’s interpretation; see Hudson 1976, especially pages 206-10, for a more accessible account of Natchez class organization.
9 At other seasons, winter village communities were usually dispersed, with members residing at various resource exploitation sites.
10 Ceremonial feasts at which much property was given away to other Title-holders, usually to validate a claim to a title or “name.”
11 For documentation of this summary see Donald 1983 and 1984, and sources cited therein.
12 See Donald 1983, Mitchell and Donald 1985 for details and documentation.
13 Ignoring the implications of the presence of slavery in societies otherwise interesting or admirable is rather common in Western culture. Standard views of the ancient Greeks as the founders of Western civilization, inventors of democracy and so on, is only one example. Greek “democracy” sprang up in a society dependent on slave labor (see Finley 1973).
14 Ray’s use of Drucker as a source to support the presence of a class division among non-slaves in the culture area is important because Drucker is one of the most important proponents of the “rank without class” position. Drucker’s 1939 essay contains his most detailed discussion of the topic, although his position did not change in later publications.
15 Four was a sacred number to the Kwakiutl, and most other native American groups.
16 While southern Kwakiutl descent groups (house groups) all contained both Titleholders and Commoners, in some other Northwest Coast societies (such as Haida or Tlingit) some households were exclusively Titleholder and others Commoner.
17 My account is based entirely on his work; see Legros 1982 and 1985.
18 From a woman’s perspective, a man who is simultaneously her father’s sister’s son and her mother’s brother’s son is a bilateral cross-cousin.
19 The salmon fishing stations, the sources of native copper, the best beaver hunting areas, and so on.
20 Historians commonly call such results of processes of sociopolitical devolution “the dependency syndrome” (see White 1983:xv-xix).
21 We should not jump to the conclusion that this contrast was all romantic nonsense or merely a result of an excess of political rhetoric. During the colonial and early national periods, many frontier folk were forcibly abducted by Indians and adopted into native societies. Not uncommonly, years later—when offered repatriation—some of these “White Savages” flatly refused, prefering to remain with their Indian families and communities (Axtell 1981). A similar process of ethnic mobility continues today but on a voluntary basis, with numerous formerly “Whites” and “Blacks” assuming “Indian” identities, as discussed in chapters 1, 3 and 14. Also see Clifton 1988: chapters 1, 2, 6, 8, and 12.
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