Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism by Jack D. Forbes

Author:Jack D. Forbes [Forbes, Jack D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

This is a passage written by a European who, clearly, does not imagine any Indians to be among his readers, least of all any Urubus. More significant, however, is the incredible cultural chauvinism which blinds Huxley to the realities of Portuguese (and British) behavior and leads him to ignore almost 450 years of European aggression against the Americans of that part of Brazil. Huxley imagines that he can deal with the Caapor-te, as of 1900-1951, as if they never had experienced centuries of slave-raiding, invasions by gold-seekers, invasions by rubber-cutters, and so on. If the Urubu (as he calls them, a name to which they object) were vindictive warriors in the 1920s, might that not be explained, in part, by their tragic history?

Huxley himself notes that, about five generations before, the Portuguese began pushing into the forest, forcing tribes to retreat into other nation’s territories. He says “The Urubus seem to have been caught in the middle of these movements, and lived in such fear of raids, both from other Indian tribes and from the advancing Brazilians, that they took to the woods . . .” In fact, the present Urubu tribe, he says, is descended from only two surviving Urubu men who stole women from a neighboring tribe.2

Incredible! So we find that these “savages” are, in fact, only a mixed remnant of hundreds of years of warfare, involving direct aggression by Europeans, and yet their character and their culture is forever defined as savage. But then Huxley also says such things as “sex among Indians always tends to become license”3; this kind of generalizing, it seems to me, reveals for us clearly the one-sided, anti-American character of this European’s writing.

The fact of the matter is that the American natives, along with other non-Europeans, have suffered from several centuries of defamatory writing. In some cases, perhaps, the European scholars merely write from ignorance or general prejudice. In other cases, however, we may suspect that they intended to do harm to the groups involved and that their biased assertions form a self-conscious part of the general offensive against non-Western peoples.

In 1885 Theodore Hittell in his History of California stated of the largely peaceful Native Americans of California,On account of their low grade in the scale of humanity, being with few exceptions as low as their neighbors in Lower California, and therefore almost as degraded as any human beings on the face of the earth . . . all were equally stupid and brutish . . . in general, they resembled mere omnivorous animals without government or laws . . . and [they were] almost constantly in a state of warfare and readiness to kill on the slightest provocation . . . There were amongst them few or no specimens of physical beauty, either of the women or of the men.4

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