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

1. Men Out of Asia

Europeans and Early Americans In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Euro-Americans and their European confrères were preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages to the New World, a visitor from another world would be led to assume , on the basis of that jubilation and the interminable, often unresolvable, scholarly arguments, that these “Americas,” wherever they may have been, were new to the eyes of man 500 years ago, a virgin land open to the happy settler. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. The Americas already had a population in the many millions when Columbus set foot on Guanahan í, the island he renamed San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. The Southern Hemisphere’s largest civilized nation in territorial extent, the Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyu, was located in the Americas. The larger urban centers were ten times the size and population of the largest European cities: The metropolitan heartland of the Aztec Empire had in excess of 11 million souls, and the Inca Empire had a population of at least 12 million. Native American scholars and scientists were investigating and debating topics as abstract and complex as any ever discussed in European universities of the age (León-Portilla 1979). The New World was hardly a land of vacant¤elds and forests populated by a few ignorant savages eagerly awaiting the largesse of Christian Europe. The point is, of course, that while we must not give short shrift to the momentous occasion of October 12, 1492, which did indeed alter world history , it should be remembered that the Americas were not discovered in 1492. Discovery and settlement had come at least 12,000 and possibly as many as 1 Men Out of Asia 20,000 years earlier, and, for better or worse, credit goes not to Europeans or Africans but, rather, to Asians (Billard 1993). The year 1492 marks only an accidental European ¤nding of the New World—a very late one, and the second or perhaps third such European ¤nding at that. Why then the inordinate amount of attention to Mr. Columbus and his venture? Because, whether one views 1492 as an event to celebrate or an event to be despaired of, its impact was destined to be far more devastating than anything that had happened to the New World before or that has happened to it since. There is much still to unravel in the events of that fateful year and what came after. Our calendar, however, has no Discovery Day in the broader sense, only a Columbus Day—as though the Men Out of Asia had never arrived, had never created their own lifestyles viable enough to last some 120 centuries and more. The common Euro-American view inculcated in us all from childhood ignores the fact of Asian discovery. These men and women have been viewed in our particular mythology of history as at best the Noble Savage, with emphasis on the latter word. Little, if anything, is seen as lost in their physical and cultural demise. It’s as if the past really began just yesterday and began, at that, from a clean slate. To continue this gloomy mood a moment longer, it should be well noted and remembered in this context that New Explorers, anywhere and at any time, tend to frown on what they consider the “inferior” and “alien” lifestyles of the “natives” they encounter. History makes it clear that such colonialist adventurers always attempt to re-create in some detail their own home turf, no matter how bizarre or unsuitable to the new cultural and physical locale. The charming gabled Dutch buildings of Jakarta and Surabaya, lolling in Indonesia ’s humid clime, attractive leaded windows carefully sealing the interiors from the frigid winters of Holland which never arrive, provide one incredible example. The northeastern pillbox homes of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, marching row after narrow row, climatized with arti¤cial frozen air and set amidst uniformly manicured lawns planted with midwestern grasses, offer another. These are just the benign examples. The more insidious, directly lifethreatening ones—the Roman conquest, the Crusades, the Mongol Invasion, the Nazi Holocausts (the never-referred-to Gypsies as well as Europe’s Jewish peoples), Palestine, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Angola, Central America, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Wounded Knee—these genocidal bloodbaths need not even be invoked. One could, of course, go on forever, offending every settler 24 part i. in the beginning in all the earth’s “new” lands...