Professor Emeritus,Dept. of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas atAustin
ABSTRACT
Demonizing the Other
A terrorist becomesa demonized human being. What are the implications of such a definition?Demonization of an "other," whether an individual or a group, rules outthe common understandings which we share with those with whom we identify.Demonized humans are beyond normal human comprehension because they areoutside the boundaries of the human community. The rules governing militarycombat, therefore, no longer apply. Many examples of this can be found,but I will use, as a case in point, the narrativization of the Native Americans(American Indians) by the European settlers who colonized the North Americancontinent. From the early seventeenth until the mid nineteenth centuriesnarratives of captivity were of great popularity among Americans of Europeandescent. These published tales featured episodes of torture and tormentinflicted on settlers, frontiers people and pioneers, usually women andchildren, which reinforced the notion of the Indians as a savage populationthat must be brought under control at any cost. I shall discuss captivenarratives as a cultural construction which helped European settlers ignorethe rights and lives of Native Americans. What does this tell us aboutthe relationship between dominant powers and those who resist domination?What does it lend to our understanding of terrorism in the contemporaryworld? This will be the subject of our discussion.
Lecture for ISODARCOconference on Terror and Terrorism, February 9-16, 2003, Andalo, Italy.
ROOTS OF TERRORISM:DEMONIZATION OF "OTHERS" IN FRONTIER AMERICA
By Robert Fernea,Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
Creating an EvilOther and a Virtuous Self is an essential part of the development of violenceand terrorism. No matter who may be involved, the more absolute thebelief in "our" right and "their" wrong, the more meritorious otherwiseforbidden behavior becomes. Here I would like to use the colonialconflict between European settlers and Native Americans to demonstratethe process whereby the Other may be Demonized.
The process ofvilifying the American Indian began some 300 years ago - before the UnitedStates of America became a nation - and only recently, in a few films andbooks, has the persecution of the Native American been regarded with newsympathy for the Indians. Even when the America Indians were allbut eliminated, the image of the Indian remained that of the Savage transgressor,while the White man stayed blameless. This attitude was reflected in Americanpopular culture long after the number of Indians had dropped well beyondany possibility of successful armed resistance to White domination. Only in the last decade or so, has a serious second look at the conquestof America begun to reveal how relentlessly the Native Americans were victimized.By this time American Indians were only 1% of our population. Howdid this happen? How could we be so hypocritical, so self-deceived,and rationalize our violence for so long? Only by virtue of a symbolictransformation of identity was this possible, a transformation wherebythe American Indians were reduced to Savages and Barbarians.
It is importantto recognize that in North American the first conflicts between the EnglishPuritans and the Indians were localized and erratic. America wasnot a country; the Indians were not a state; no war took place betweenorganized nations. Indians had helped the English in the early years ofsettlement and there was much social interaction between the groups, bothpeaceful and conflicted. Finally, however, a decisive clash betweenIndians and settlers did occur in the King Phillip’s War, 1675-1677, whichhas been called the most deadly battle between colonists and Indians inthe early years of English settlement in North America. It was afterthis war that all American Indians for over three hundred years came tobe seen as evil Savages, sub-human, worthy of destruction in the eyes ofmost European settlers. This decisive, stigmatizing classification justifiedthe genocide which followed. In accepting the invitation to participatein this ISODARCO conference, I decided to examine King Philip’s War andits consequences in America history in the hope that it might offer a fruitfulbasis for general discussion of the origins and basis of terrorism andviolence.
Situations, attitudes,beliefs, even language similar to those in modern America today were presentin our Colonial past, thus important lessons may be inferred about ourcontemporary relations with the Arab world. In fact, I am lookingat this historic situation with the mind-set of a person who has been astudent of the Arab world most of my professional life. My constructionof our colonial history is through the prism of the present day situationin the Middle East. I am biased by the present, which inevitablyhelps organize my construction of our past. And it is to the presentI will finally turn.
Most European andAsian counties have experienced a period of national expansion and dominationof others, whether neighbors or colonies at a distance from the homeland. American experience as a British colony lasted for around two centuriesand ended in rebellion. This parallels the experience of many once-colonizednations around the world. However, the struggle for independence was coupledwith a determination to dominate what is now the North American homelandof the United States. For most of our history the struggle at theFrontier, the "unsettled West," was part of our national life despite (orbecause of) the fact that Native Americans, Indians, for several thousandyears had occupied that "unsettled West." Our domination of NativeAmericans and our occupation of the continent finally meant the near exterminationof these peoples. How did this proceed? How did the greatest democracyin the world develop at the same time that Native Americans were beingdriven from their lands and their ways of life forced to end? The answerclearly is that this was possible in large part by denying human equalityto these Others, by demonizing them and, at the same time, making heroesof the White American.
At the beginningof the 21st century the United States has completed its territorial expansionand has become an imperial force in other parts of the world, some timesdirectly (we have some form of military presence in around 30 countries)or indirectly, through globalizing American business and through world-widecultural expansion. For most American, cheaper labor costs have meant lowerprices for commodities. We thus have enjoyed a commodity-oriented, prosperity-by-default-economyalong with enormous gains in income and wealth for a small minority. Inthe 1990’s the majority of Americans were economically optimistic.
But suddenly, inthe course of this political and economic expansion, a traumatic eventhas occurred affecting all classes of American society. For the firsttime we have been attacked from the outside world. The two most giganticoffice towers in the country have been demolished; part of a well-knownskyline is gone. The center of our military establishment was damaged.Our civil airplanes were pirated and destroyed. Thus was a national trauma,a blow of great emotional and material consequence to New Yorkers.
For nearly allAmericans, the 11 September, 2001 assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagonwas a totally unexpected, outrageous experience. We may have known thatnot everyone in the world liked us, but we were amazed to discover thatsome other people in the world hate us, would and could - kill usin our own land, in fact. In fact, we have quickly learned to fearand hate them, whoever "Them" may be and whoever "Who" may include. "They"have been publicly damned by our President using Old Testament language;"They" are condemned, hunted everywhere, at home and abroad. TheAmerica public has been part of all this through constant coverage in ournewspapers and on TV. Security precautions make the existential presenceof unseen dangers felt at the airports and on our borders. Millions ofMuslims living in America are being forced to register. Arabs and Muslimsaround the world have become objects of our suspicions. Americans,still the majority, are ready for war against Iraq, part of the Other,waiting for our military to strike out and eliminate enemies, as we didin Afghanistan. We are afraid of what may happen in our homeland. But contrary to some current news commentators, this is not a new experiencein America.
In the early 1670’s, Puritans living in the New England colonies, the northern group of earlysettlements on the East coast of America, suffered from a traumatic experienceequal to 9/11 it was called King Philip’s War. Apparently friendlyrelations between the colonies and their Indian neighbors abruptly deterioratedand Puritan lives were lost in attacks which the English were ill-preparedto resist. Many European colonists’ lives were lost. NativeAmerican Indians suddenly were seen as Savages and Barbarians, terrorists,who would kill any European, anywhere, night or day, no matter what theirsex, age, class or even religion. What is the background to that traumaticwar? How did it develop?
In early 17th centuryNew England, many Indians had been converted to Christianity and this wasa process the Puritans thought would continue. Many of these Indians, likethe Wampanoag, part of the Algonquin language speakers group, were horticulturalistwho supplemented their corn cultivation with fishing long the Atlanticcoast. Conversion to Christianity did not seem to be the cause ofgeneral Indian resistance. Along the Western borders of the Puritancolonies, Indian "Prayer Towns" had emerged, where Christian Indians farmedand prayed in churches, like the Puritans. For educators like JohnEliot, this conversion and education of the Indians was a primary Puritanresponsibility, for the Indians were believed to be a lost Hebrew tribeand to convert them was to carry on Christ’s work. The Bible wastranslated into an Indian language and over 1000 copies published. Moneywas raised for a college at Harvard University, which would be set asidefor Native Americans. Many Indians attended church, wore Europeanclothes, and went to schools to learn English like Puritan children. For many people living at the time, a new society seemed to be in construction,shared by both Europeans and Native Americans.
However, with theso-called Great Migration of 1630, more Puritans arrived from England.They feared civil warfare there and persecution with the return of theCatholic Stuarts to the monarchy. The increased number of immigrants placedgreater pressure on the land resources within the Colony and this encouragedmore farmer families and fur trappers to move West, to live among theirIndian neighbors. Many new settlers had more Indian than European neighbors.Interactions between the Whites and the Indians were commonplace and widelyaccepted.
This peaceful co-habitationof the same land apparently suited many settlers and Indians very well. However, the Colonies’ religious leaders, like Increase Mather, first Presidentof Harvard University and later on a leader of the Salem Witchtrials, becamegreatly concerned. He preached that the movement of Puritans out into thehinterlands was resulting in a decline in church attendance, and this,he stated, was a disaster. Hellfire and damnation was a certaintyif religious education and guidance was not a constant factor for all membersof the community.
The Puritan Churchwas the major social institution of the New England colonial settlements. As the new migrants and some established settlers moved away from the Colonies,that move not only threatened the religious premises of civil life butalso undermined the authority of the religious leaders. In addition, NativeAmericans, innocent or evil, Christian or pagan, were considered to bepotentially ill-omened company since they were a distance from full humanity,a view set forth by Christopher Columbus in 1492. A mixture of Europeanswith Indians was viewed by some to be a sure way to dilute or lose Englishcivilization in the New World.
Therefore, we cansay that the growing concern in the English Colonies was stronglylinked to an increased need for land, but also to what the ruling hierarchysaw as a weakening of Church leadership and control as Puritans and Indianssettled together, away from central authority. Further, large numbersof Indians were dying from alien diseases brought over by the Europeans,and were thus less and less able to defend their own interests throughterritorial occupation and regular use of their land. A real contest forcontrol of natural resources, in this case land and all its uses, was developing.
At the same time,some Puritans began to argue about priorities. Was it not morallymore important to save Indian souls rather than seize Indian land? However,until King Philip’s war, 1675-1677, open hostility between the Englishand the Wampanoag, the Indians closest to the Puritan Colonies, was largelyavoided. This war proved to be the most devastating conflict between Indianand settler in Colonial history. Jill Lepore, who has recently publisheda history of that war, writes:
In every measurableway King Philip’s war was a harsher conflict than any Indian-English conflictthat preceded it. It took place on a grander scale; it lasted longer;the methods both sides employed were more severe; and the language theEnglish adopted to justify and document it was more dismissive of Indianculture Indian religious beliefs; Indian warfare; Indians’ use ofthe land; and, ultimately, Indian sovereignty than it had ever beenbefore. In some important ways King Philip’s War was a defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for Algonquian politicaland cultural autonomy was lost and when the English moved one giant stepcloser to the worldview that would create, a century and half later, theIndian removal policy adopted by Andrew Jackson.
What happened todestroy the peaceful English-Wampanoag relationship? What precipitatedthe two-year conflict, King Philip’s war of 1675-1676? Thereare conflicting opinions which emerge even at the time it happened, thoughthe views of the Indians involved are sadly missing. Despite the levelsof literacy among them, no record of the war written by an Indian is knownto exist. However, modern historical commentaries have revised the acceptedolder views, which entirely blamed the Indians and, in particular, madeone Indian the English called "Philip" the evil nemesis, the Evil one onwhom much of the blame was placed.
Philip was a sachem,or chief, among the Wampanoag Indians, who lived near the Puritan coloniesin what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In some earlier encounterswith hostile Indian groups, the Wampanoag had been allies of the Englishsettlers. The Wampanoag probably numbered about 12,000 until contactwith the English brought small pox and venereal and other diseases forwhich the Indians had no natural resistance. This resulted in a numberof epidemics, which devastated the Wampanoag population. By 1675, lessthan half of the Wampanoag were left alive. At the same time, the Englishpopulation had risen to between 40,000 and 50,000, and was about threetimes as large as their Indian neighbors. The combination of epidemicsand conflict with outher Indian tribes left vast tracts of Wampanoag landuninhabited and thus open for easy settlement by the English. Nevertheless,the Wampanoag did not agree their territory was empty, for in their viewit was common property, owned by their group as a whole. For theEnglish, property was fenced, defined and privately owned. This wasa major source of misunderstanding between the two groups.
By the time ofthe war, the Wampanoag were self-supporting horticulturalists, peaceableand in many ways well on the way to adapting to English styles of life.They enjoyed the goods supplied to them by the English; in fact, they werebecoming dependent on the white man for such items as iron kettles andcookware, iron traps, and firearms. However, as the number of English settlersincreased, the English were becoming more and more concerned about acquiringmore land. Sometimes, they fairly bought land from the Wampanoags,but sometimes they cheated the Indians, which created bad feelings. Todeal with this issue a 1670 Peace Treaty between the English and Massasoit,also a Sachem (or chief) of the Wampanoag Indians, was signed in 1670.The treaty declared that the Wampanoag would not "give, sell, or conveyany of their Lands, Territories, or Possessions whatsoever, to anyperson or persons, whomsoever, without the privity and consent of the Governmentof Plimouth".
On September 29,1671, the Wampanoag chief Philip, signed an another agreement with thePlymouth Colony, stating that he and his people were now subjects of theroyal British government and bound by the laws of the colony. He also agreedto follow the colonies guidance in affairs of war and in the disposal ofIndian land. This agreement, in effect, stripped the Wampanoag of all powerand made them dependent subjects of the Plymouth Colony. Judging from subsequentevents, Philip may well have signed this agreement under pressure, to gaintime, for Wampanoag land was rapidly being occupied and any ability todeal equitably with the Europeans was disappearing. All thatwas left to them was open resistance.
With support fromthe Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Narragansett tribes, Philip and the Wampanoagbegan to plan an uprising for the spring of 1676. But, before the Indiantribes were fully united and prepared, an incident occurred which threwoff their timetables and started the war a year early.
In January of 1675,the body of John Sassamon, a ‘praying Indian’ who had studied at Harvard,who was Philip’s English-speaking secretary and a friend to preacher-educatorJohn Eliot, was discovered under the ice covering the Assowampset Pond. For several days before, Sassamon had warned the Plymouth authorities ofa possible uprising by Philip and the Wampanoags. So the Wampanoag wereblamed, justly or otherwise, for killing a fellow tribesman who was a traitorto their interests.
Three Wampanoagmen were tried before a jury of both Englishman and Indians. The only problemwith this arrangement was that the Indian on the jury were not allowedto vote on the verdict. The defendants were found guilty and sentencedto be hung. The execution for the two eldest went smoothly, but when theyoungest was hung the rope broke. Unnerved, the young Indian claimed thatthe two who had been hung were guilty but that he was innocent. Undeterredby this, the English hung the Indian boy again, this time successfully.
When word of thetriple hanging reached the Wampanoags they became incensed. They felt thatthe trial had been unfair. Apparently the court had refused to hear a witnessfor the defense. King Philip, also disturbed by rumors that the Englishwere planning to arrest him, held a war council at Mount Hope. The Wampanoagwere behind their chief as were the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc. The Pennacookand the Abenaki were divided in loyalties, as were several other Indiangroups.
Then, in late Juneof 1675, a settler from Swansea village killed a Wampanoag in a disputeover cattle. The Wampanoag quickly struck back and on June 24, some ofthem attacked Swansea town, killing and scalping eight settlers. Otherclashes soon occurred. King Philip’s War had begun.
At this time, theEnglish military forces in New England consisted only of small militiain each town, whose training was based on formal English military practices.There were no security provisions; the settlements had no stockades, colonyhomes easily could be accessed, burned, and the inhabitants killed. This initial inability to counterattack, to know where the next strikewould be, to see loved ones of all ages killed and scalped, was terrifyingand certainly led to thinking that tied the Indians to Satanic supernaturalforces. Conflicts with Indians had occurred before, as thousands of PequotIndians had been killed in their own settlements some years before, butfighting was carried to the Indians, not the other way around. Bringingdanger home to the colonies was a qualitative shift in circumstances: theadvent of unforeseen terror. So it seems reasonable to argue thatat this point in American history Indians, all Indians, began to be regardedas the incarnations of Evil, savages, barbarians who in the eyes of increasingnumbers of Whites deserved to be routed and killed by any means possible.
The next step wasto construct the identity of the Evil Savage, and this was done by appropriatingconceptual artifacts which had already been employed by earlier settlersin the New World the Spanish. For years Puritan settlers hadreminded each other over and over again that they did not want to be likethe Catholic Spanish who had preceded them to America. The Spanish wereinhuman, unchristian Papists whose example should not be followed by PuritanProtestants. A work translated from the Spanish which appeared incolony publications of the time states:
"The Spanish havea perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World and the adjacentislands, who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferiorto the Spanish as children to adults, or women to men, for there existsbetween the two as great a difference as between savage and cruel racesand the most merciful, between the most intemperate and the moderate andtemperate and, I might even say, between apes and men....
(Juan Gines de Sepulvèda, The Second Democrates, 1547)
The English Protestants,unlike the wicked Spanish, felt it was their duty to make the Indians Christianslike themselves, and this meant they should be educated, like Europeans,not treated like apes! As stated earlier, a special college exclusivelyfor Indians already had been added to the new Harvard University. (Theynever attended it and the building became the home of the Harvard UniversityPress.) Many Indians had already become Christians. The so-called "prayingIndians" had established settlements with churches, which lay around theWestern boundaries of the Colonies’ territory. Many Christian Indianslived among the settlers in the Colonies. On the surface, things seemedpeaceful; America was apparently to become a home of Christian peoplesof common faith from many different origins. After all, the Puritanshad the Quakers, whom they distrusted and disliked, living among them. If they could live with Quakers, why not Christian Indians?
King Philip’s warseems to have brought these utopian ideas to an end. After the war,in 1685, a representative of James II of England was sent over to investigatethe war and report back to His Majesty. I quote part of his report:
"The governmentof the Massachusetts (to give it in their own words) do declare these arethe great evills for which God hath given the heathen commission to riseagainst them: The wofull breach of the 5th commandment, in contempt oftheir authority, which is a sin highly provoking to the Lord: For men wearinglong hair and perewigs made of women’s hair ; for women wearing bordersof hair and for cutting, curling and laying out the hair, and disguisingthemselves by following strange fashions in their apparell: For profanenessin the people not frequenting their (church) meetings, and others goingaway before the blessing be pronounced: For suffering the Quakers to liveamongst them and to set up their threshholds by Gods thresholds, contraryto their old lawes and resolutions."
One magistrateat the time said this conflict was the result of trying to make uncivilizedpeople into Christians too soon, before they were civilized. Butthe Puritan leaders argued that it was because of their own sins that thiscatastrophe has happened. "We have sinned, now we are being punished." So the paradigm which began to structure White and Indian relations tookform: the Indians were Savage servants of the Devil, the manifestationof Evil, but they were also present to punish the settlers if they allowedthemselves to slide away from the governance of the church and the directionof its leadership.
This view of White Indian relations became the basis for the first literary genre toemerge in colonial America, the "Captivity Narrative." Twenty orso of these literary accounts were published between 1682 and 1776, butmany went into several editions and printings. The first, most popularand influential of these captivity narratives went into eight editions. This memoir, called The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together, withthe Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivityand Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, was last republished in 1773.In her memoir, Mrs. Rowlandson tells us how sorely she was tried and howcomplete her penitence had become during her captivity.
According to Mrs.Rowlandson, to be taken by the Indians was a new opportunity for much neededrepentance. She makes clear that the reason she was spared the tomahawkand the bloody deaths she witnessed the rest of her family receive, wasso she could experience the fate of the damned in the hands of barbarians. That she had not been raped, that she was in fact fed and kindly treatedmost of time by her captors had nothing to do with their natures, "blackcreatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell,"…wildbeast of the forest"…ravenous wolves," she wrote. God alone had stoppedtheir bloody hands from acting, hands from which she was safely ransomedafter two years of (apparent) fear and trembling.
Thus, Mrs. Rowlandsoncontinued, by scourging God’s people, the Indians served Him. Nomatter how strong their Evil desires might have been, the hand of God reacheddown and kept these terrible creatures from raping and killing her. Inthis way Puritan hermeneutics provided a totalizing poetics for Mary Rowlandsonand her readers. The unfamiliar OTHER was reduced to an instrumentalityof Satan himself, in which They, the Indians, totally lacked rationality,morality, or agency. Rowlandson wrote of her fears and terrorsalong with colorful descriptions observations of Indian daily life andceremonies. Both her morality tale of redemption and her ethnographyfascinated America readers for more than a hundred years. They had thevirtue of a religious meditation combined with the excitement of a Europeanwoman’s brave encounter with the Evil Ones and her eventual salvation,for she was ransomed and safely returned home after two years captivity.
Books were a majorform of information and opinion at this time, equivalent to modern mediain their impact. The popular stories of captivity by Indians werean establishment-approved way of dealing with fears common among the settlers,fears of Indians on the one hand and of damnation on the other. Itwas essential that the need to kill Indians and drive them away from thesettlements be seen as a God-given necessity. Thus attitudes andbeliefs which together made the genocide of Native Americans a fact oflife became hegemonic in America well before we became a nation in 1776. The Other was given an identity, one of evil and unlimited perversity. "Getting rid of the Indian" whether by arms or incarceration became takenfor granted by the American public, a matter of common assumption.
King Philip’s Warwas a defining moment, shaping settlers attitudes toward the Native Americansfor years to come. It was also an early devastating experience forthe Indians, one of the first of many. The Wampanoags were totallydefeated, many of them scalped, burned at the stake, their heads put onpoles by the Puritans, their land lost, their villages scattered. Philip, the primary Evil One on whom the conflict was principally blamedwas killed, his wife sold into slavery and his ten year old son sentencedto death by the settlers, though this sentence was apparently never carriedout. Christian Indians were put in chains, sent to camps and isolated fromthe English, their number deliberately confused with surrendering and capturedpagan Indians. Selling the captured Indians to slave traders became a profitablePuritan option and thousands of Indians were shipped to Caribbean plantations. Removing Indians from the Puritan towns became paramount and even if Indianswere Christians it did not prevent them from being interned and sold. Racial segregation had begun.
The settlers neededmore land and Puritan religious beliefs provided the ideology accordingto which the Indians could be overcome and dominated. To kill pagans,to kill the Indian, was to kill something not yet fully human. Recognizingthem now for what they "really" always had been, i.e., Savages, relievedthe Puritans from any blame for taking their land and killing or displacingIndians. It also made heroes out of the People of the Frontier: those "intrepidsouls" who would push the power of the eastern seaboard Colonies furtherand further West into Indian territory. While there were atthis time, and later on, occasional colonial voices heard which questioned,if not the concept of Savage, then perhaps the way the American whiteswere treating them, the view of the Indian as the enemy of civilized societycontinued and was elaborated on in the centuries ahead.
In 1889, more than200 years after the King Philip’s war, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th presidentof the United States, in his monumental narrative, The Winning of the West,eulogized the "spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’swaste spaces." "No "period of race expansion" he said, had ever been "eitherso broad or so rapid" as in America. And none, it would seem, hadever been so just. The European settlers "moved into an uninhabited waste...theland is really owned by no one....The settler ousts no one from the land.The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil…The worldwould probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been forthe displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequenceof the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in theirhands the fate of the years."
In addition, Rooseveltargued that "the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages,though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fiercesettler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized man undera debt to him." To criticize the march of progress, in Roosevelt’sview, was "idle sentimentality." In a more succinct formulation,Roosevelt warned that "if we fail to act on the ‘superior people’ theory...,barbarism and savagery and squalid obstruction will prevail over most ofthe globe."
One must reflectthat a half century later Winston Churchill, in his defense of the Zionistconquest of Palestine echoed Roosevelt’s sentiments. Comparing the indigenouspopulation of Palestine to a dog in a manger, Churchill said:
"I do notagree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, eventhough he may have lain there for a very long time...I do not admit thata wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race,a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put itthat way, has come in and taken their place."
But I stray frommy subject. The concept of the Native American as savage, Evil, treacherous,never ceased to prevail in the American public mind. Here are a fewmore quotations from some national figures over the last centuries: Let us hear from Mark Twain in 1870:
"His heart (theRed man’s) is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilishinstincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one doeshim a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the rewardbe an arrow in the back. …The scum of the earth!
All history andhonest observation will show that the Red Man is a skulking coward anda windy braggart, who strikes without warning—usually from an ambush orunder cover of night, and nearly always bringing a force of about fiveor six to one against his enemy; kills helpless women and little children,and massacres the men in their beds; and then brags about it as long ashe lives, and his son and his grandson and great-grandson after him glorifyit among the ‘heroic deeds of their ancestors’."
The journalist HoraceGreeley wrote in 1860:
"I have learnedto appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for, thedislike, aversion, contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by theirneighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but littlefamiliarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince anyone thatthe poetic Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible tothe poet’s eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woodsand prairies is a being that does little credit to human nature—a slaveof appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animalpassion save by the more ravenous demands of another.
Even famed Harvardphysician and social commentator Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in 1855that Indians were nothing more than a half-filled outline of humanity"whose "extermination" was the necessary "solution of the problem of hisrelation to the white race." Describing native peoples as "a sketch inred crayons of a rudimental manhood," he added that it was only naturalfor the white man to "hate" the Indian and to "hunt him down like the wildbeasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and thecanvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image."
Many, many othersimilar statements could be provided from Americans whose other contributionsto the more noble parts of our national history cannot be doubted. But I do not believe this is necessary since the historic treatment ofAmerican Indians is all too well known. Anyone who has attended U.S.Western movies, especially older ones, has seen the, taken-for-grantednegative nature of America attitudes toward Indians. Only recently hasthe Indian ceased to be a perennial villain, partly because of recent lawsagainst publicly discriminating against so-called ethnic or racial groupsin the United States. Let us investigate for a moment the "mythologyof violence" as Richard Slotkin has called it, which has had such an enduringpersistence in American culture.
Richard Slotkin,in his idea of a "mythology of violence" that persists in American culture,makes many similar points about the Demonization of the Indian. The transformation of American Indians from Christians and potential Christiansinto Savages and sub-humans was accomplished in a variety of ways. First of all, a major villain, a prime Evil One was established as KingPhilip. Hatred for him was a unifying force among the Puritans andwas long remembered. Second, and of great importance was the powerof the religious leadership. This leadership was threatened by thedispersal of settlers into friendly Indian territory peaceful relationships,beyond the control of the Colony establishment with the churches and theSunday sermons. Finally, once the Indians became identifiedwith the ways of Satan and the works of the devil, as was portrayed inthe "captivity narrative" books, they had to be anathema for any good Christian. There was no hope for a final reconciliation, only for separation and divisionbetween the Good and the Bad.
However, the materialissue of competition for scarce resources was also of growing importance. For settlers, especially the new arrivals, who may not have shared allthe religious enthusiasm of the older English residents, had not left behindfears and poverty in Britain to find themselves without land in America,free land preferably. So cheating the Indians and killing the Indiansboth became means to both material and ideological ends. The greatdifferences between Indian groups were scarcely recognized. Different languages,different forms of livelihood, costumes, customs, ceremonies suchthings were only interesting to a few; for the majority considering Indians,the fact that they were, savage Red Men, was all one needed to know. Militaryfolklore from King Philip’s war to Custer’s Last Stand held that in battleagainst the Savage enemy, one side or the other must perish, whether bylimitless murder or by the degrading experience of capture and torture. Therefore, always save the last bullet for your own head, was the commonwisdom for those Whites who might be in conflict with Indians.
American Indiansalso became scapegoats for the morally troubling side of American expansion:the myth of Savage war became a basic ideological convention of a culturethat was itself increasingly devoted to the extermination or expropriationof the Indians and the kidnapping and enslavement of black Americans. And in addition, any class struggle, real or incipient, in White Americacould be projected onto the American savage so long as a frontier existed. "Go West Young Man, Go West," was a call to keep the landless poor fromwanting what the rich already had. If you want more, go West andget it. If killing Indians was part of this movement, then you evenhad a chance to become a hero.
Neither the slavetrade nor the subjugation/extermination of Others has been exclusivelyAnglo-American, of course. The mass genocides of the Twentieth Centurybelong to the histories of Europe, Asia, and Africa.. What is perhapsdistinctively American is not necessarily the amount or kinds of violencewe have actually experienced, but rather the mythic significance we haveattached to our history, the forms of symbolic violence we have imaginedor invented, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism. That is, once the Savagery and Evil nature of the Indian is commonly takenfor granted, becomes hegemonic, then the door is wide open for heroes andfor glorious undertakings, for Alamos and Custer’s Last Stands and allmanner of other ways in which the White man could reveal his God fearing,self-righteous nature, always, of course, in contrast to the depravityof the Indian, his sneak attacks and his tomahawk.
Of course, we mustnote the anti-hegemonic voices in America. One Indian, pure and natural,close to innocent, appeared in popular literature for peopleat home east of the Frontier. From Hiawatha in Longfellow’s epicpoem to Tonto on the radio as the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, a romantic incarnationof the Indian always existed which seemed to contradict their evil reputations. Even King Philip had a reincarnation in the play called "Metamora," whichdebuted in 1829. In this play, the masculinity of Metamora (his Indianname) was glorified and compared with the "effete" quality of Europeans;Metamora was a "true" American in both body and soul. For there was,after all the American/English opposition. America was an ex-Englishcolony. Even our Indians were better than the damn English! The viewwas condescending, however: even "good" Indians were naturally unequalto the American Whites who dominated them.
The frontier romancesof James Fennimore Cooper published between 1823 and 1850 codified andsystematized the representations of the Frontier and the Indian/White conflictthat had developed haphazardly after Philip’s war in the late 1600’s. From such diverse genres as the personal "captivity narrative," the history,the sermon, the newspaper item, the street ballad, the cheap paperbacks,Cooper created the ur-myth of the "noble savage" to account for the fundamentalideological and social oppositions dividing the society of 19th centuryAmerica. This paradigm of good and evil had enormous survival value. When I was a little boy we were still playing cowboys and Indians in myneighborhood; the cowboys always won in the end, there was no questionas to who were the bad guys. This is what we learned from our comic books,movies, and children’s tales.
American Indiansdid strike when they could and unsuccessfully defended their landas long as they were able. But they received little honor and noglory for this. As early as 1779 Chiksika, elder brother of Tecumseh,is reported to have said:
"When anIndian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder. When a whitearmy battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if theylose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indianflees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he findsthat white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off sucharmies, he is killed and the land it taken anyway. When an Indian is killedit is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and a sorrow in ourheart; when a white is killed, three or four other s step up to take hisplace and there is no end to it."
Romanticizing theIndian did not stop our government from driving Indians off their land,penning them into reservations, separating children from their parent ingovernment schools and white foster homes and generally impoverishing thefinally captive Red man. This seeming contradiction between Romantismand Demonization might be compared in some ways to the treatment of gypsiesin Europe at different times and places. Gypsies were people who couldbe admired for their songs and skills - at a distance, in operas or playsperhaps - but they were hardly to be tolerated as neighbors or cultivatedas friends. American Indians could be imaginarily reconstructed tosuit the fancies of American whites, but not admitted as equals in thecourse of daily life. Today, in bourgeois American society, it hasbecome quite chic to admit to having an Indian as a part of one’s ancestry but not too close, of course, and certainly not in the here and now,as kinspeople in a middle class white household.
What does thisprocess of Demonization tell us about American foreign policy, about Americanattitudes and outlooks? If we compare America foreign policy todaywith our domestic policy in the days of the Frontier, there is much which can cause concern, not the least of which is the way in whichthe potential conflict in the Middle East has been incarnated as a kindof holy war by George W. Bush. Evil and terrorism have become sofrequently used by Bush and his spokesmen that they have become commonalities. In public discourse, the Evil One is almost a synonym for Saddam Hussain.
But perhaps themost depressing is the way in which Saddam Hussain has taken on all thenegative qualities associated with the 9/11 attacks, since as far as anyonehas determined, neither he nor other Iraqis had anything to do with AlQaida. It doesn’t seem to matter. All evil is collected together,Saddam (who is present) is blamed, Bin Leiden (who is not present) hasslipped from media view and is rarely mentioned in our newspapers and TVprogram. This guilt by association and generalization seems an amazingpiece of stereotyping, but not, perhaps, when viewed in the context ofthe Demonization of the American Indians.
Worse than this,Arabs in general, and Muslims from around the world have found themselvesthe target of negative act and statements from the United States. Not only have there been occasional attacks against Muslim residents inthe States, Muslim who are not citizens are also the object of new governmentregulations designed to reveal and track their existence and, when possible,to expel them from the country. A whole segment of our population now feelsunder suspicion and subject to government investigation.
In an interviewon February 28, 2000, former president Bill Clinton remarked "Thebiggest problem in human society is fear and distrust and dehumanizationand violence against the Other. " The following year, in an addressat Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service, he made Others ofthe Indians:
"Bill Clinton, theformer president, said yesterday that terror has existed in America forhundreds of years and the nation is "paying a price today" for its pastof slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number ofnative Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or theirmineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human…Andwe are still paying a price today.
It is hopeful tohave a president who speaks like that after Theodore Roosevelt, but thestatement does not resolve the issues which I intended this paper to address. Are we in America not in the process of Demonization again? Is therenot a religious cast to the President’s vocabulary in talking about Iraq? Are we not seeing the Arabs and the Muslims as one large entity, one continuousOther, all of which we (can) blame, fear, distrust, hate or despise? Are the Arabs not becoming the new Indian, the new Savage?
Last year a bookwas published called Reel Bad Arabs; How Hollywood Vilifies a People ,by Jack Shaheen, a professor of Mass Communications at Southern IllinoisUniversity. Shaheen reviews 900 films, dating back to the silentfilm days, to see how Arabs are portrayed. The record is appalling. While portraying Native Americans, (or Blacks or Jews or other racial orethnic minorities) in a consistently negative light has ended, the Arabhas remained and developed as a favorite villain. In more than fiftyfilms, Arab women are humiliated, demonized and sometimes eroticized. Arabsheikhs are shown as stooges-in-sheets, slovenly, hook-nosed potentateswho are generally lecherous. As Edward Said wrote, "The pervertedsheikh can often be seen snarling at the captured Western hero and blondegirl…’My men are
going to kill youbut they like to amuse themselves before."
The Savage Indianhas disappeared from most film dramas; the villainous Arab has taken hisplace. Who did people first believe they saw leaving the bombingin Oklahoma City? Arabs. That it was a blond White Americanwas a great surprise to many. The Arab has become the new AmericanIndian, our villain of choice.
We in America havea righteousness that is part of our Frontier attitude, a predispositionto find Evil ones to blame for terror, and a penchant for seeing to seeourselves as innocents who must go to war against Satan’s minions. Terror comes from Others, Others who are unlike ourselves. We havetaken our country from Others, subhuman, unlike ourselves. We dependedfor decades on the enslavement of Others, African Americans, unlike ourselves,who could be forced to do our work. Now we can wage the War againstTerrorism on a world-wide basis. Not a war against other human beings,like ourselves. Rather against Evil ones, like Saddam Hussain andOthers, like him.