The original Indian lifeways (pre-Columbus) were more natural, satisfying, and sustainable
Benjamin Franklin:
“Our every attempt to civilize the Indians has failed. In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plentiful. They visit us frequently and see [what we call] the “advantages” that our culture and social organization procure us. They have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours. When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and participates even briefly with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.
“On the other hand, when white persons have been taken prisoner at a young age by the Indians, and lived a while among them, if we attempt to bring them back — and treat them with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English — yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. They can see how burdensome it is, and they take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard: The person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but upon realizing the care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-coat, with which he took his way again to the wilderness and the Indian community.”
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Whites took a cohort of Indian youth and accumulated funds to provide them with an advanced education with full living stipends. When the program was proposed a second time, the Indian elders had this to say:
“We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men while with you is expensive. We appreciate your intended generosity. We are convinced that you mean to do us good with your proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are wise must know that different peoples have different conceptions of things, and you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces. They were instructed in all your sciences, but when they came back to us they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or subdue an enemy. They were, therefore, neither fit for hunters, warriors, or counselors. Relative to our lifeways, they were totally good for nothing.”
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“Different peoples have different conceptions of things.”
Some might say: Well, it’s all relative and we should avoid judgments.
I think we can make judgments. By the seventeenth century European culture had succumbed to the civilizational trajectories toward mass society, class division, over-centralization, imperialism, and technological dependency. A few of the Indian tribes exhibited those problematic characteristics (Aztecs, Incas), but the vast majority, until the decimation from contact with European diseases, still lived according to what Gary Snyder called the “Old Ways”: embedded in nature, place, and community.
We need to be cognizant to avoid tendencies to romanticize their lifeways, no less misguided dispositions toward cultural appropriation. Having said that, my own judgment is that their lifeways were superior; more natural, satisfying, and sustainable. Under the ideology of “progress and development” our hard work for “advancement” has led us onto a path toward folly and ultimate ruination.
