1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [193]
The reason for the subtitle is that for the most part these revelations—the great antiquity, size, and sophistication of Indian societies—are new to the public. The question, implicit in the previous, is the cause of the gap. Why don’t intelligent non-specialists, the sort of people who know a bit about stem cells and read contemporary literature, already know something about how researchers think of the Americas before Columbus? Another way of putting the question would be to ask: Why isn’t this material already in high-school textbooks?
In the past one could have simply pointed to institutional racism. Today, though, when textbooks are routinely criticized for overemphasizing the stories of minorities and women, it seems hard to imagine that ethnocentrism accounts for the relative lack of attention paid to the indigenous world. To my mind, the culprit nowadays is more likely to be disciplinary boundaries. Except possibly for China and Japan, non-Western societies have generally been regarded as the province of anthropology and archaeology. As a result, the historians who write school textbooks have all too often waved their hands at the first fifteen or twenty thousand years of American history in an obligatory first chapter and then moved quickly into fields they find more congenial. Even today, a surprising number of historians remain unaware of the discoveries and methodologies of their colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, geography, and cultural studies. Similarly, many anthropologists know little of what has been called “ethnohistory.” While I was giving a presentation about this book at a large U.S. university, a man in the audience, identifying himself as an American historian, asked me how he could learn more about this material. I am not mocking him for asking—I was delighted that he wanted to know the answer. But at the same time I was amazed: He was in an audience full of professors and graduate students who could have answered his every question. Repeated incidents of this sort have convinced me that his lack of knowledge was not exceptional.
Change is occurring, but there is still no account, to cite but one example, of the conquest of Mexico that masters the evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl to portray the two sides in equal depth. The lack is amazing, given that the conquest is one of the most pivotal moments in recent history—it delivered the vast wealth of the Americas to Europe, and that newly acquired wealth played a principal role in Europe’s rise to dominance.
To be sure, a number of historians have worked to portray the indigenous side in post-contact history. (One U.S. example is Alan Gallay’s The Indian Slave Trade, a remarkable history of the pre-Revolutionary Southeast that appeared in 2003; another is Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground, a study of British-Haudenosaunee relations in the Revolutionary era, from 2006.) But even many of these writers have shied away from awarding Indians the status of full participants—by asking, for example, how native societies influenced the colonial societies that mingled with them.
This criticism applies primarily to historians of North America. South of the Rio Grande, the indigenous influence on colonial and post-colonial society has been celebrated for decades. (This celebration, which has been convenient for nationalistic reasons, has not always led to teaching Latin American children accurately about those native societies, or to treating contemporary indigenous people fairly.) The native imprint is obvious in the arts; the art and architecture produced by the synthesis of Indian and European styles in colonial Mesoamerica, the Clark University art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey argued in a 2005 monograph, is “one of humanity’s greatest and most pluralistic achievements.” But this synthesis is apparent in many other aspects of the culture, too,