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By Root 1804 0

history: “In North America, whites are the bearers of environmental original sin, because whites alone are recognized as laboring. But whites are thus also, by the same token, the only real bearers of history. This is why our flattery…of ‘simpler’ peoples is an act of such immense condescension. For in a modern world defined by change, whites are portrayed as the only beings who make a difference” (White 1995:175). The phrase “people without history” was popularized in an ironic sense in Wolf 1997.

“unproductive waste”: Bancroft 1834–76 [vol. 1]:3–4.

Kroeber on warfare and agriculture: Kroeber 1934:10–12 (all quotes).

Conrad on Indian dyspepsia: Conrad 1923:vi.

“pagans expecting”: Morison 1974:737.

“chief function”: Trevor-Roper 1965:9. To be fair, the baron was dismissing all indigenous peoples around the world, not singling out Indians.

Fitzgerald survey: Fitzgerald 1980:89–93 (“resolutely backward,” 90; “lazy,” 91; “few paragraphs,” 93). See also, Axtell 1992.

Views have continued to appear: Examples, listed alphabetically by author, include Bailey et al. 1983:9 (the “vast and virgin continent…was so sparsely populated by Indians that they could be eliminated or shouldered aside. Such a magnificent opportunity for a great democratic experiment would never come again”), quoted in Axtell 1992:203; Bailyn et al. 1977:34 (“But the Indians’ hold upon the land was light…. No where was more than one percent of the land available for horticulture actually under cultivation”; editions of this textbook appeared, essentially unaltered, into the 1990s); Berliner 2003 (“Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped…. There was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years”); Billard 1975:20 (“To a virgin continent where prairie grass waved tall as a man and vast forests perfumed the air for miles offshore came Spanish adventurer, French trapper, Dutch sailor, and doughty Englishman”); Fernández-Armesto 2001:154 (many Amazonian Indians’ lives were “unchanged for millennia” and the rainforest was “still a laboratory of specimen peoples apparently suspended by nature in a state of so-called underdevelopment”—the key word here being “suspended,” as in fixed in place, motionless); McKibben 1989:53 (Wilderness Society founder Robert Marshall concluding a currently unpopulated part of the United States was “as it existed outside human history”); Sale 1990:315–16 (“the land of North America was still by every account a lush and fertile wilderness…[which] gave off the aspect of an untouched world”); Shabecoff 1993:23 (Lewis and Clark traveling through land “unchanged by humans”); Shetler 1991:226 (“Pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance”).

“For thousands”: Current, Williams, and Brinkley 1987:1. Such statements are often due less to prejudice than to European and American historians’ continuing uncertainty about how to think about non-European and non-American societies. Thus on the next page Current et al. describe Indians both as establishing some of “the world’s most dazzling cultures” and “lack[ing] some of mankind’s most basic tools and technologies” (2)—the latter state assuming, ethnocentrically, that European technologies are “basic” whereas indigenous technologies are inessential. See Chaps. 2 and 3.

New perspectives and techniques: Crosby ed. 1994 (“faint smudges,” 7).

“replaced”: Vale 1998:231.

Growth of Bering Strait theory and fight over Chilean site: See Chap. 5.

Deloria index entries: Deloria 1995:284.

Invention of agriculture: See, e.g., Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2000.

Neolithic Revolution: I am simplifying here. Sumerian villages were growing wheat and barley by about 6000 B.C. Around 4000 B.C. the villages became hierarchically organized towns or cities. Early forms of writing