The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time

Preface

This book owes its ultimate genesis to four individuals. Franz Boas set me on the direction my professional life has taken, and Mary Haas, Charles Hockett, and Ben Rouse kept me steadfastly on that path over more than ¤fty years. Without their views of social phenomena, I am sure this book would never have been written. Though I did not have the pleasure of being taught by Papa Franz, as his students called him, over a number of years toward the end of his life I had the pleasure, as a child of ten or so, of encountering him at family Christmas gatherings. When he discovered that I was interested in other peoples, places, times, and languages, he told me that what I was interested in was called anthropology. He also told me that if I wanted to become an anthropologist, which I did, that I must learn everything about any people that I studied— their language, their customs, their history and distant past, what they did, and what they thought and talked about. Otherwise, he said, I wouldn’t really understand them, and I wouldn’t really be an anthropologist. I later learned, when I went on to college, that this holistic approach was the trademark of Franz Boas’s philosophy, and I followed his advice—something for which I have never been sorry. It’s that holistic approach, fostered as well by my college professors, that led through the years toward its expression in my work and in this particular book. I am equally indebted to the late Mary Haas, of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. At the age of sixteen, my interest in native American languages—I have Mississippi Choctaw forebears— led me to write Mary. This kind lady, who had been one of Boas’s students and who was the acknowledged dean of Southeastern Indian language studies , not only answered my letter but also sent me a copy of everything she had published on the topic, especially the Muskogean languages, of which ChocPreface taw is one, and she became my lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 1996. During a period of more than ¤fty years, Mary answered my every question, steering me in the right direction, and encouraging me to keep up my interest and work on the Southeastern peoples. Charles F. Hockett of the Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology at Cornell University—Chaz, as he liked to be called—was, like Mary, teacher, colleague, correspondent, and staunch friend from my teenage years until his death in 2000. Like Papa Franz and Mary, he, too, was an old-fashioned holistic thinker—F. S. C. Northrup of Yale once told me that he considered Chaz one of America’s foremost twentieth-century philosophers. Ben Rouse, of the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, trained me as an undergraduate student in the niceties of the methods of both archaeological ¤eldwork and analysis and prehistory. Like Mary and Chaz, his advice and helpfulness did not cease when I left Yale but have continued uninterrupted at any time I needed advice on things archaeological right up to the present. It is particularly the input of these four individuals, along with guidance from George Murdock, Ralph Linton, Marvin Opler, Leonard Bloom¤eld, George Trager, Henry Lee Smith, Jr., John Goggin, Chuck Fairbanks, and Bill Sears, my college professors, that ultimately prompted me to address the student-generated question “What would the New World be like today— politically, economically, and culturally—if Columbus and the Europeans had never found it, and how would American peoples interact with the world’s other societies?” As the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World grew near in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same kind of “what if” questions increasingly arose among scholars. At that time I was privileged to work with The Phileas Society of Detroit and Ft. Lauderdale in the preparation of a series of television lectures and discussions on Columbus, his voyages, and the impact of his discoveries on native America and on Europe. The erudition of the men and women who participated in this project heightened my feeling that the native American “what if” questions had to be addressed. The insights of my colleagues in that venture—Fred Ruffner, Robert Tolf, Consuelo Varela, Mike Gannon, Foster Provost, Kathy Deagan, and many others—are gratefully acknowledged. I am also indebted to Norman Thrower of the University of California at Los...