America in 1492
Edited by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.
477 pages, Knopf, $35
”America in 1492” is an engrossing tour of our Indian heritage unfortunately marred by lapses into the politically correct pieties that now pass for scholarship.
The book`s objective is to provide readers with an anthropological glimpse of the New World as it was just before the Europeans got here. For that purpose, the Newberry Library in Chicago, which houses a major center of native American studies, commissioned scholars to write chapters on the fascinating rainbow of cultures that stretched from Alaska to the tip of South America.
So it is more the pity that a few contributors took the opportunity to contribute, as well, to the epidemic of Columbus bashing unleashed by the upcoming 500th anniversary of his famous voyage.
In the introduction, the book`s editor, Alvin Josephy Jr. asks: ”If one sheds long-observed stereotypes and delusions-both, for instance, that there was nothing worthwhile in pre-Columbian America and that America was a Garden of Eden peopled by happy noble savages-what can be said of the reality?”
Sadly, some of those stereotypes and delusions reappear in an afterword by Vine Deloria Jr. So anxious is he to discredit Columbus, Deloria not only indicts the Italian navigator for moral turpitude but also asserts that Columbus wasn`t much of a discoverer either. Deloria seems to believe ”there were a multitude of ancient expeditions to this hemisphere by Celts, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and fugitive groups of early
Christians.” Most scholars, it should be noted, consign such notions to the same wastebasket in which the flat-Earth theory is filed.
Deloria also decries the subsequent evils of European occupation, such as enslavement of native populations, as if they were previously unknown in America. Yet other contributors report that before Columbus set sail, slavery was practiced by the northwest coast tribes, the Calusan tribes of Florida and the Aztecs, among others.
Some contributors to ”America in 1492” seem to subscribe to the currently popular idea that Western civilization is the source of the world`s evils. Yet such a naive conception of history is belied by the plan of the volume, which is heavily illustrated with wonderful drawings and sketches of Indian life made by early European visitors. (Some of those works are on exhibit at the Newberry Library through April 18.)
The volume`s designers could so illustrate ”America in 1492” because, in addition to their faults, the early explorers brought to the New World an advance unknown to other societies: perspective drawing, the geometry of which had just been worked out by artists of the Italian Renaissance, and which allowed more realistic depiction of three-dimensional objects.
The pity is that native American culture is fascinating enough in its own right and doesn`t need proping up with we-good-they-evil hypotheses. The variety of cultures pre-Columbian America sustained ran from city-states, similar to those of ancient Rome and Greece, in South and Central America, to hunting-and-fishing societies, like the Eskimos`, which survived in the most hostile environments.
Indeed, after working his way through ”America in 1492,” many a reader will join a Mayan sage in mouring the passing of his people`s civilization:
”Our heritage became a net made of holes,” the Indian wise man said,
”when our cries of grief rose up and our tears rained down.”
