Abstract
The cultural and political importance of the issue of Native American origins has been emphasized by the recent controversy over Kennewick Man. Kennewick Man is a skeleton that was first found by spectators at a powerboat race along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington in July 1996. Radiocarbon dating established that the bones are roughly 9,000 years old, making it a major archaeological discovery, since only thirty-two human remains that old have been found in North America, and this skeleton is among the most complete. A local anthropologist named James Chatters collected the bones and touched off a media sensation when he was quoted saying that features of the skull resembled “caucasoid” peoples more than modern Native Americans. Chatters later asked an artist friend to make a reconstruction of the flesh on Kennewick Man’s head. When photos of the bald clay model appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, many news stories repeated Chatters’s suggestion, that Kennewick Man resembled the actor Patrick Stewart.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
NOTES
My thanks to Gary Taylor and Phil Beidler, organizers of the conference in Tuscaloosa, and especially to Madonna Moss of the Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, for her help in revising this essay. Assistance such as hers makes this sort of inter-disciplinary work possible.
For a fine study of Kennewick Man and the controversy, see Roger Downey, Riddle of the Bones: Politics, Science, Race, and the Story of Kennewick Man (New York: Copernicus, 2000). Although the case has aroused extensive press coverage for more than five years, it is important to recognize that conflicts between Native peoples and archeologists need not be so contentious. The excavation of remains of similar age in Idaho and Southeast Alaska proceeded much more smoothly, with the cooperation of local Native peoples. See Terence E. Fifield, “Human Remains Found in Alaska Reported to be 9,730 Years Old,” Society for American Archaeology Bulletin, 14:5 at www.saa.org, and Susanne J. Miller et al., “The Buhl Burial: A Paleoindian Woman from Southern Idaho,” American Antiquity, 63:3 (1998): 437–456. The latter paper is my source for the figure of thirty-two similar finds.
While my critique aims to expose the racial character of research in this field, at least one anthropologist has attacked the gender bias in this insular field dominated by men: “Paleoindian studies stands out as particularly circumscribed within a closely interactive group of scholars contained by boundaries of specialized journals dedicated solely to Paleoindian research (for example, the Mammoth Trumpet).” Joan Gero, "The Social World of Prehistoric Facts: Gender and Power in Paleoindian Research,” Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique, ed. Hilary du Cros and Laurajane Smith (Canberra, Australia: Prehistory Press, 1993), 33.
See for example “Expert Panel Recasts Origin of Fossil Man in Northwest” by Timothy Egan, The New York Times October 16, 1999, which has photos of the skull and the reconstruction; “Find this man’s origins: Congress should approve scientific study” editorial, The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, November 23, 1997.
Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 39.
On this debate see Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale, ed. Pierre Berthiaume (Montreal: Les Presses Universitaires de Montreal, 1994), 116–135, and Richard Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère: His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987).
“[U]n pretexte a montrer beaucoup d’erudition, une connaissance des oeuvres classiques et du pedantisme.” John R. Carpenter, Histoire de la Littérature Française sur la Louisiane de 1673 à 1766 (Paris: Nizet, 1966), 261.
Joseph-François Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724); English edition: Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, trans. and ed. William Fenton and Elizabeth Moore (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974); on Acosta, see below.
Ridge, “The North American Indians, part 1,” The Hesperian, 8:1 (March 1862) qtd. in Scott Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 142.
Morton, Crania Americana: or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: To Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839); see also Paul Semonin, “‘Nature’s Nation’: Natural History as Nationalism in the New Republic,” Northwest Review, 30:2 (1992): 6–41.
Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 50–68. See also Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism, 143–146, who treats Morton much more kindly.
Qtd. in Robert Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 67.
See Dorothy Lippert, “In Front of the Mirror: Native Americans and Academic Archaeology” and other essays in Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground, ed. Nina Swidler et al. (Walnut Creek, C A: Altimira Press, 1997).
John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (Norman: University of OK Press, 1962).
Le Plongeon, Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (Paris, 1878). See Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 7–21; and Lawrence G. Desmond, “Augustus Le Plongeon: A Fall from Archaeological Grace,” in Assembling the Past: Studies in the Professionalization of Archeology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 81–90.
See David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 365.
James M. Chandler, “Immigrants from the Other Side,” Mammoth Trumpet, 17:1 (December 2001): 11–16; Thomas D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 68. For a rebuttal to this theory, promoted by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution, see Lawrence G. Straus, “Solutrean Settlement of North America? A review of reality,” American Antiquity, 65:2 (2000): 219–226.
Stephen C. Jett, “Diffusion versus Independent Development: The Bases of Controversy,” Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts, ed. Riley et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 5–53.
Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Historia generale de las Indias (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1941), II: 248–249; qtd. in Lee Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, Institute for Latin American Studies, 1967), 25.
On the Atlantis myth see Williams, Fantastic Archeology, 130–155, and Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents, both discuss some of the dozens of popular books on the subject. On Phoenician-Carthaginian migration, see Michael Frank Doran, “A Time Perspective for Study of the Trans-Atlantic Phoenician Problem,” M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon, 1971.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffleton, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 107.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 108.
Ibid., 107.
Luigi Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995),120–121. Related research using mitochondrial DNA has resulted in the theory of an “African Eve” origin of paleo-humans in Africa, some 150,000–200,000 years ago. See R. M. Cann, Stoneking and A. Wilson “Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution,” Nature, 325 (1987): 31–36.
Jose de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). English edn. Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Edward Grimston (1604, rpnt. Hakluyt Society, 1880), I: 60, 61.
Ibid., I: 72.
Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, 32.
Ibid., 126, 284.
Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas, 168–180. Dillehay is the principal investigator of the Monte Verde site in Chile, dated at more than 12,000 years ago. This finding on the west coast of South America would imply a much earlier presence of humans in North America, or possibly a trans-Pacific migration.
Acosta, History of the Indies, I: 67.
Diego Duran, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 4–5.
Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1645); Menasseh Ben Israel, The hope of Israel/Menasseh ben Israel; the English translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. Henry Méchoulan and Gerard Nahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Braude, Benjamin, “Les contes persans de Menasseh Ben Israël: Polémique, apologétique et dissimulation a Amsterdam au xviie siècle,” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 49 (1994): 1107–1138.
Jones, History of the Ojibway Indians (1861), rprt. Toronto: Canadiana House, 1973; qtd. in Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism, 132.
The ideological links between English colonialism in North American and in Ireland are numerous, and several scholars have studied similaries in the representations of the two peoples as “savages.” See for example Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976); and, for a much later period, Astrid Wind, “Irish Legislative Independence and the Politics of Staging American Indians in the 1790s,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 5:1 (April 2001), 1–16.
Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 20.
See Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1992), 184–188. Karen Kupperman’s paper in this volume is also relevant to the issue.
For a discussion of the Madoc myth, see Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 29–30; and Gywn Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (London: Methuen, 1979). For later claims, see Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 85.
Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–1550, rpnt. Madrid, 1959), I: 17–18; see also Brading, The First America, 36.
Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), xli; Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, chap. 9; Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, English edition Florentine Codex: The General History of the Things of New Spain (Santa Fe: School for American Research, 1951–55); Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 89–140.
See John Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian, O Brave New People: The European Invention of the Amerrican Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 31–43.
Brading, The First America, 173.
Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents, 61.
Moffitt and Sebastian, O Brave New People, 243,
Barton, Observations on some parts of Natural History, to which is prefixed an account of several remarkable vestiges of an ancient date, which have been discovered in different parts of North America (London: for the author, 1787).
On Grotius see Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians, 118–121; Charlevoix, Journal d’un Voyage, 121–130.
Le Page du Pratz, Antoine-Simon, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris: De Bure, Veuve Delaguette, et Lambert, 1758), III, 61–86. For an English translation, see my website at <http://www.darkwing.uoregon.edu/~gsayre/LPDP>. For the Le Maire manuscript, see Jean Delanglez, “M. Le Maire on Louisiana,” Mid-America, 19:2 (1937): 124–154.
See my “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand,” Early American Literature, 33:3 (Fall 1998): 225–249.
The politics of this dynamic are complicated by the existence of Native oral histories that provide some support for these scenarios. The Aztec legend of Aztlan, the Lenapes’ Walam Olum, and the migration of the Sauk from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi all bear witness to the dynamic movements of Native American populations. And given two or three thousand years, Native American cultures and populations could have changed so dramatically as to absorb and transform many groups of trans-oceanic migrants without leaving a trace. While much current interest in Atlantic history and diaspora as paradigms for the study of race is driven by work on the Black Atlantic, a Native American diasporic history may offer quite different paradigms rotating around the Pacific, and involving thousands rather than hundreds of years.
Interview with Augusto Cardich, “The Southern Route: not Beringia, but Tierra del Fuego,” Mammoth Trumpet, 16:2 (March 2001), 4–6. Also, there has been research into the diffusion of the sweet potato and certain squash species from South America to Polynesia or vice versa. See Man Across the Sea, 328–375.
Because evidence of human presence on Pacific islands dates back only 2000 or 3000 years at most, the anthropological consensus is strongly against Cardich’s theory. On the intellectual history of the immaturity and inferiority of the Americas, see Antonello Gerbi’s classic The Dispute of the New World, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).
Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), 74, 75–90.
Leon Pinelo, El Paradíso en el Nuevo Mundo (Lima, 1943); for a discussion of this work, see David A. Brading, The First America, 200–204.
Priest, American Antiquities and discoveries in the West: being an exhibition of the evidence that an ancient population of partially civilized nations differing entirely from those of the present Indians peopled America many centuries before its discovery by Columbus, and inquiries into their origins, with a copious description of many of their stupendous works, now in ruins, with conjectures concerning what may have become of them; compiled from travels, authentic sources, and the researches of antiquarian societies (Albany, NY: Hoffman and White, 1835), preface, n.p.
The Ainu have been discriminated against by ethnic Japanese, who nurture a myth of their own primal sovereignty over the islands in defiance of evidence of their ancient migration from mainland Asia. But my point here is that the changed residence of Native Americans should not alter how we trace their ancestry to Northeast Asia, if this is the conclusion supported by genetic and archeological evidence.
For one example of the debate over the value of oral histories of events thousands of years old, see Thomas, Skull Wars, 239–253; and Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1997), 161–209.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2005 Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sayre, G.M. (2005). Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples. In: Beidler, P.D., Taylor, G. (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980830_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980830_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-29597-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8083-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)