The Darwinian Liberal Story of Humanity in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology

The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City

A Room Devoted to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Island City with Four Causeways Joining it to the Four Points of the Universe

While travelling in Mexico City recently, I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, which offers a magnificent display of the archaeological and ethnographic history of Mesoamerica.  The concept of Mesoamerica was developed in 1943 in an article written by Paul Kirchhoff, a German anthropologist who lived in Mexico--"Mesoamerica: Sus Limites Geograficos, Composicion Etnica y Caracteres Culturales," Acta Americana 1 (1943): 92-107.  He identified Mesoamerica as a cultural area of pre-Hispanic civilizations that extended from what is now central and southern Mexico to the Central American countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras and Costa Rica, in the time period between 2500 B.C. and 1521 A.D.  1521 was the year that Tenochtitlan, the city of the Mexica (the Aztecs), was conquered by the Spanish.  Tenochtitlan was located in the Central High Plateau of Mexica in the center of what is now Mexico City.

Mesoamerica included many peoples with different languages and ethnic traditions: the Olmecs, the Mayas, the Aztecs, the Nahuas, the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, and others.  Despite their many differences, they shared an agricultural way of life based on the cultivation of seeds and vegetables such as chia, maguey, cocoa, beans, squash, chili, and--most importantly--corn.  They also shared in the cultural development of calendars, pictographic writing systems, arts such as pottery, distinctive architecture, and some common religious beliefs.

The National Museum of Anthropology was opened in 1964 with the support of the Mexican government to present the cultural history of Mesoamerica as part of the national identity of Mexico.  The success of this enterprise is clear as one moves through the museum and sees the many groups of Mexican school children and adults as well as foreign tourists studying the exhibits and listening to lecturers.

What caught my attention was how the museum tells the story of Mesoamerica within the narrative framework of Darwinian liberalism.  It's Darwinian in the sense that everything is explained through the Darwinian science of the biological and cultural evolution of humanity.  It's liberal in the sense that it teaches a liberal morality of equal liberty and tolerance that respects the diversity and unity of the human species.  I have seen the same theme in other museums around the world--in Scotland, the island of Guernsey, and Ecuador.  I have written about this here, here, and here.

In these museums, one can see how the "Evolutionary Epic" or "Big History" has become the scientific replacement for religious origin stories in shaping the popular understanding of the place of human beings in the universe.  I have written about this here and here.  In the National Museum of Anthropology, one can see some of the religious stories of divine creation told by the Mesoamerican people.  For example, the Mayan text Popol Vuh described how the gods created human beings from a mixture of white and yellow corn.  Later, the Spanish conquerors brought with them Christian priests who taught the biblical creation story of how God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7).  But when one enters the first hall of the museum--"Introduction to Anthropology"--the first displays are about the natural evolution of the human species from primate ancestors, which includes this recreation of the fossil hominid named "Lucy"--Australopithecus afarensis:

And thus the visitors to this museum are taught by implication that the Darwinian story of human evolution by natural selection is a scientific truth, while the religious origin stories of the Mayans or the Christians are poetic myths.  A Darwinian anthropology can explain these myths as cultural products of religious imagination, while denying that they have any literal truth.

The Darwinian story of human evolution starts in Africa with the first human ancestors such as Lucy, it then traces the migration of human beings around the world.  The museum tells that story of global migration, including the crossing from Asia to North America, as depicted in this mural:

Iker Larrauri's Mural Depicting Ancestral Humans Crossing from Asia to America Around 50,000 Years Ago

The museum's explanation of this mural includes a quotation from Jose de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590).  Acosta was a Jesuit priest who had lived in the New World, and who wrote this book as a physical, biological, and cultural history of the New World, which included his speculation that the indigenous people of the Americas were descendants of human beings who had crossed over a land bridge between Asia and North America.  By the 20th century, this had become the generally accepted view of evolutionary anthropologists.  The Americas were initially settled by people from far northeast Asia crossing through Berlingia, the land bridge connecting to northwestern North America during the Pleistocene epoch.  Genomic analyses of ancient human remains from Late Pleistocene Alaska can show how indigenous Americans branched out from the initial founding population of Ancient Beringians (J. Victor Moreno, et al., "Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan Genome Reveals First Founding Population of Native Americans." Nature 553 (2018): 203-207.)

John Locke read Acosta's book and quoted from it in his Second Treatise of Government as an account of human beings in the state of nature--in the original human condition when human beings lived as hunter-gatherers.  "In the beginning," Locke declared, "all the world was America."  I have written about this here.

This shows the significance of the European discovery of the New World.  For the first time in human history, the entire Earth was bound together in a human network of global exchange and communication, which made possible a universal history of humanity.  Darwin's 5 year voyage on the Beagle around the world was part of this global exploration that made such a universal history possible.  

That universal history supported the modern anthropological concept of the unity and diversity of humanity that has been part of the liberal teaching of human equality, liberty, and tolerance.  The museum portrays this liberal teaching at the end of the first hall in a mural by Jorge Gonzalez Camarena:

Jorge Gonzalez Camarena's mural "Las Razas y las Culturas" ("Races and Cultures")

This mural celebrates the beautiful diversity of human races and cultures as products of Darwinian evolutionary history.  At the center of the mural is a female who apparently represents the future of humanity, as a species that is a mixture of all races and cultures.  Just below her is a child not yet born in a glowing womb.

On either side of this central female are 14 females symbolizing--from right to left--a sub-Saharan African, an Egyptian/North African, a Mayan/Mesoamerican, an indigenous South American, an indigenous North American, a Polynesian/Melanesian, a Japanese/East Asian, a Southeast Asian, a South Asian/Indian, an Arabian, a Hellenic/Mediterranean, an Iberian, and Celtic and Northern European peoples.

Beneath these women are artifacts symbolic of the great civilizations of history--including Neolithic megaliths, northern European castle walls, a Viking helmet, a Hellenic Doric column, a Hindu elephant sculpture, a Persian bull column, Assyrian Lamassu, a Roman Corinthian pillar, an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic tablet, a Chinese dragon, a Celtic horse, a Polynesian Moai, an Incan kancha stonework, and an African Yoruba mask.

At the bottom of the mural are symbols of the domesticated plants of the agricultural way of life, which supports urban civilized life.  These symbols include maize, wheat, barley, rice, cassava, potato, yams, taro, sugar beet, and sugar cane.

Finally, on the far right side of the mural--not easily seen in the reproduction above--are several skulls representing the evolutionary hominid ancestors of human beings--those who lived in the evolutionary state of nature.

Camarena's mural is unsatisfying, however, in so far as it suggests a utopian transformation of human nature that overcomes tribalism in a spiritual unification of humanity.  The viewer is left wondering how this could happen.

As one walks through the museum, one sees opposing themes of conflict and cooperation in Mesoamerican history.  On the one hand, one sees religious warfare and brutal violence--such as human sacrifice to please the gods--that gives supernatural legitimacy to ruling elites exploiting those they rule.  I have written about how moralistic religion in the early states promoted human sacrifice here.

On the other hand, one also sees evidence of long-distance trading networks and marketplaces where people from different societies are brought together through cooperative exchange.

Does this suggest that even if the human propensity to tribalism can never be fully overcome, a liberal social order can promote the expansion of cooperative peaceful exchange through trading relationships and open societies based on pluralism and toleration?

Gini Coefficients for Inequality in Locke's State of Nature and Lockean Liberal Orders

In various posts (here and here), I have argued that the Darwinian science of human evolutionary history largely confirms John Locke's view of the state of nature as the natural condition of equal liberty, while also confirming (here) that Lockean liberal social orders can approximate that equal liberty that human beings enjoyed in the state of nature.

Over the past 10 years, Darwinian social scientists have brought more precision to the empirical study of the evolutionary history of inequality by finding ways to calculate the Gini coefficients for inequality in human societies over the past 10,000 years; and this new research supports the Lockean liberal account of human history.

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of the distribution of income or wealth in a society that ranges from 0 (every individual or household has exactly the same amount) to 1 (one individual or household owns all of the income or wealth, and others have nothing).  (The Wikipedia article on the Gini coefficient is a good survey.)  Gini coefficients below 0.30 are considered indicators of extremely low inequality.  Gini numbers above 0.50 are indicators of extremely high inequality.  So, for example, if the richest 20% have 80% of all income, that would count as an income Gini coefficient of 0.60.  That's the income Gini number for Haiti, which is one of the highest in the world.  The number for the U.S.A is in the middle--0.40.  The lowest numbers are usually for the Nordic social democracies--such as Denmark, Norway, and Finland--which are around 0.24.

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues (2009) have calculated Gini coefficients for 21 historical and contemporary small-scale populations based on ethnographic data.  Timothy Kohler and his colleagues (2017) have calculated Gini coefficients for 63 archaeological sites based on archaeological data.

The 21 societies studied by Borgerhoff Mulder and her coauthors included hunter-gatherer, horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural societies.  They calculated the intergenerational transfer of three kinds of wealth--material (such as household goods, land, and livestock), embodied (such as strength, knowledge, and skills), and relational (such as the individual's position in social networks). They found that material wealth was more easily transmitted across generations, as compared with embodied or relational wealth.  And therefore there was more inequality in pastoral and agricultural societies where material wealth (such as livestock and land) was important, as opposed to foraging and horticultural societies, where material wealth was less important, and consequently there was less inequality.

They estimated Gini coefficients for wealth at 0.25 for hunter-gatherers, 0.27 for horticuluralists, 0.42 for herders, and 0.48 for farmers.  Hunter-gatherers typically have a strong egalitarian ethos, and they found that indeed their level of inequality is much lower than for other societies.  But, still, hunter-gatherers have never achieved absolute equality.  They found that among the foraging societies they examined, a child born into a family in the top 10% of wealth is 3-5 times as likely on average to remain at the top than is a child born into a family in the bottom 10%.

Locke recognized this because while he saw the American Indians in the state of nature as showing relative equality compared with other societies, he also saw that all human societies will have some inequality due to individual differences in age, birth, talents, social networks, and luck, which will make some individuals more highly ranked than others.  So, for example, among hunter-gatherers, some individuals would inevitably distinguish themselves as skillful hunters or as leaders of their groups.  Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues confirmed this, and concluded that those Marxist anthropologists who wanted to find "primitive communism" in foraging societies were mistaken (Smith et al. 2010, 31).

Nevertheless, the reputation of hunter-gatherers for being egalitarian is warranted when they are compared with herding and farming societies that have much higher Gini numbers.  And yet, among modern nation-states, those that have Lockean liberal social orders have lower inequality.  The United States has a slightly lower Gini number than the small-scale herding and farming societies.  And the Nordic capitalist welfare states have Gini numbers about the same as the foraging societies.  (I have written about the Nordic social democracies as liberal regimes here.)  This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

There are, however, some difficulties in the research of Borgerhoff et al. that have been pointed out by critics.  First, their sample of foraging societies does not include those high-density sedentary coastal foragers with Chiefdoms--such as the Northwest Coast Indians, the Chumash, and the Calusa--who were known to have hereditary nobility and even slavery.

The second difficulty is that their ethnographic sample of foraging societies includes those like the Ache of Paraguay and the Hadza of Tanzania whose foraging life has been altered by contact with modern herding and farming societies.  For that reason, it might not be clear that these foraging societies are really representative of our original evolutionary ancestors (Caldararo 2011; Kelly 2010).  One can respond to this difficulty by pointing out that the Ache and the Hadza have not been completely assimilated into modern societies, and that ethnographers have been able to compile a record of their history before contact (Smith et al. 2011; Hill and Hurtado 1996; Marlowe 2010).  While it is true that people like the Ache and the Hadza are not "living fossils" who have been "frozen in time," it is also true that they at least resemble the societies of our ancient foraging ancestors.

Instead of relying on ethnographic studies of inequality in historical and contemporary populations, Kohler and his colleagues (2017) have gathered archaeological evidence from a sample of 63 sites or groups of sites on four continents dating from around 11,000 to about 2,000 years ago.  For their evidence of inequality, they use house size as a proxy for household wealth.  Measuring the relative sizes of houses as distributed over an archaeological site, they can measure the inequality manifested in the relative wealth of households with large houses versus households with smaller houses (Kohler and Smith 2018).

                             An excavated house at the El Palmillo archaeological site, Mexico

As expected, they found that hunter-gatherers had the lowest Gini coefficients (median = 0.17), the horticulturalists had higher numbers (median = 0.27), and farmers had the highest (median = 0.35).  They were surprised, however, to see that the wealth inequality tended to be higher in the Eurasian sites than in North America and Mesoamerica.  To explain this, they suggested that Eurasia had a greater availability of large mammals that could become domesticated draft animals that could be used for increasing agricultural production and extending the area of land in cultivation, which could have created greater concentrations of wealth in those who controlled this production.

Another possible explanation is that their sample of sites in the New World is slanted towards more egalitarian societies.  For example, they did not include any sites in South America, which could have included the Incan empire centered in Peru, which was probably one of the most unequal agrarian societies, in which llamas and alpacas were domesticated.

And while their Mesoamerican sample included the Mayan city of Tikal with a remarkably high Gini number of 0.62, it also included some cities with surprisingly low Gini numbers, such as Teotihuacan with a Gini of 0.12--lower even than that for the hunter-gatherers!  The archeology of Teotihuacan (AD 400-500) is hard to interpret.  It shows signs of autocratic rule--with its grand avenue and pyramids--but it also shows some signs of broad sharing of power--with a grid of roads, no very large royal palace, and many medium-sized houses.  Thus, pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica seems to exhibit two very different strategies for structuring power--either concentrating and centralizing power in the hands of a few kings and nobles or allowing for a collective holding of power by many individuals, including commoners (Blanton et al. 1996).

Until recent decades, it was common for archaeologists and anthropologists studying ancient Mesoamerica to assume that the prevailing model was the autocratic centralization of power, which ignored the fact that there was evidence in at least some archaeological sites for wide dispersal of power, and perhaps even in some cities something like republican or democratic rule.

I thought about this a few years ago when I was touring the ruins of Tikal, which show a palace facing onto a plaza with pyramids on the side.  It's easy to see the evidence of an hierarchical society ruled by kings, priests, and nobles exploiting the commoners.  Tikal reached the peak of its power in 200-900 AD as the capital of a conquest state.  But believing that human beings have an evolved disposition for freedom and resistance to dominance, I had to wonder whether there was any sign of free societies in Mesoamerica.

                                 Tikal the Capital of a State that Conquered Tributary Regions

I was intrigued, therefore, to learn about Tlaxcallan, which has been identified by some archaeologists as an ancient republic in Mesoamerica.  When Hernan Cortes first landed on the coast of Mexico in 1519, he heard about the powerful Aztec Empire under the rule of Moctezuma.  Marching his soldiers toward Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Empire, located where Mexico City is today, Cortes met resistance from some of the indigenous peoples, particularly the Tlaxcaltecas.  He learned that Tlaxcallan was a small polity not far from Tenochtitlan that had successfully resisted the attempts of the Aztecs to conquer them.  He finally persuaded the Tlaxcaltecas to become his allies in his campaign to defeat the Aztecs.  By 1521, the Aztecs were defeated, and Cortes claimed their Empire for Spain.  In his letters to Charles V, the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, Cortes described the people of Mexico, and he identified the Tlaxcaltecas as a freedom-loving people:

"They had tried with all their forces both by day and by night to avoid being subject to anyone, for this province never had been, nor had they ever had an over-all ruler.  For they had lived in freedom and independence from time immemorial and had always defended themselves against the great power of Mutezuma and against his ancestors, who had subjugated all those lands but had never been able to reduce them to servitude, although they were surrounded on all sides" (Cortes 2001, 66).

He described their government as

"almost like that of the states of Venice or Genoa or Pisa, for they have no overlord.  There are many chiefs, all of whom reside in this city, and the country towns contain peasants who are vassals of these lords and each of whom holds his land independently; some have more than others, and for their wars they join together, and together they plan and direct them" (Cortes 2001, 68).

He also described their market-based economy with a marketplace where over 30,000 people come to buy and sell.

In recent years, archaeologists studying the archaeological sites of Tlaxcallan have seen evidence confirming Cortes's comparison of Tlaxcallan with the Renaissance Italian republics (Fargher et al. 2010a; Fargher et al. 2010b; Wade 2017). In contrast to the political structure of the Aztec Empire--with kingship vested in members of the nobility--the archaeologists have found signs in Tlaxcallan of government by a council with members recruited from the ranks of commoners.  The socioeconomic egalitarianism of the city is manifested in the urban layout of scattered public plazas next to modest houses rather than royal palaces.  The distribution of standardized apartment buildings for common citizens and the fact that the art does not depict individual leaders or dynasties suggest that power was widely shared, and so inequality was low.

I have written about my recent visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (here).  One weakness in that museum's presentation of Mesoamerican history is that it displays the power of Moctezuma's autocratic rule over the Aztec Empire while remaining silent about Tlaxcallan's republican freedom and its denial of imperial rule, which expresses the evolved natural desire to be free from oppressive dominance.

Human nature was originally shaped in the hunter-gatherer state of nature that was a condition of equal liberty.  Consequently, we can expect that social orders that approach that original condition of equality and liberty will arise throughout human history.


REFERENCES

Blanton, Richard E., et al. 1996. "A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization." Current Anthropology 37: 1-14.

Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique, et al. 2009. "Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies." Science 326: 682-688.

Caldaro, Niccolo. 2011. "On the Use of Contemporary 'Hunters and Gatherers' as Models for Prehistoric Patterns of Wealth Distribution." Current Anthropology 52: 265.

Cortes, Hernan. 2001. Letters from Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Fargher, Lane F., Richard Blanton, and Verenice Heredia Espinoza. 2010a. "Egalitarian Ideology and Political Power in Prehispanic Central Mexico: The Case of Tlaxcallan." Latin American Antiquity 21: 227-251.

Fargher, Lane F., et al. 2010b. "Tlaxcallan: The Archaeology of an Ancient Republic in the New World." Antiquity 84: 1-15.

Hill, Kim, and A. Magdalena Hurtado. 1996. Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kelly, Robert L. 2010. "A Good Start." Current Anthropology 51: 109-110.

Kohler, Timothy A., et al. 2017. "Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica." Nature 551: 619-622.

Kohler, Timothy A., and Michael E. Smith. 2018. Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences.  Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Marlow, Frank W. 2010. The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010a. "Reply." Current Anthropology 51: 119-126.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010b. "Production Systems, Inheritance, and Inequality in Premodern Societies." Current Anthropology 51: 85-94.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010c. "Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers." Current Anthropology 51: 19-34.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2011. "Wealth Inequality in Foraging, Horticultural, Pastoral, and Agricultural Populations: A Reply to Caldaro." Current Anthropology 52; 579-580.

Wade, Lizzie. 2017. "Unearthing Democracy's Roots." Science 355: 1114-1118.

The Darwinian Evolution of Indigenous Americans Through Genetic and Cultural Hybridization: Refuting the "American Genocide" Argument

Ever since the early 1990s, scholars of "post-colonial theory" or "settler colonialism" have asserted that beginning with Columbus landing in the New World, European settlers have been responsible for a deliberate and systematic campaign to kill the indigenous people of the Americas, which constitutes "American Genocide" or "American Holocaust" (Stannard 1992; Whitt and Clarke 2019).  The European settlers did this so that they could steal the land that had previously belonged to the Amerindians.  

As a consequence of this, you can now go to the website of the "Native Land Digital" and see how all the land that once belonged to the indigenous peoples of America is now claimed by European settlers.  You can also see how European settler colonialists stole the indigenous lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.  (The identification of the Jews in Israel as settler colonialists explains the pro-Palestinian attacks on Israel.)  If you live somewhere in these parts of the world, you can type in your street address at the Native Land Digital and identify the indigenous tribes who owned the land that you have stolen.

Previously, I have written about how Charles Darwin on his trip on the Beagle saw the brutal consequences of European attacks on indigenous peoples in South America, New Zealand, and Australia:

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children."

Darwin seemed to see this as a vicious expression of the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia.  Others have explained this as showing the natural desire for ethnic identity as rooted in our evolved human nature:  when people favor their ethnic or racial community over others, they are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.  We have evolved to like those who look like us, because groups of people that look similar share more genes with one another than other groups.  This has been part of the reasoning from the Alt-Right supporters of Donald Trump's program for mass deportations of illegal immigrants and closing the borders to the immigration of non-European people into the United States.

I have argued that while there is a natural desire for social membership, with symbolic cues for membership in a society, there is no evidence that this must be expressed as a natural desire for ethnic or racial identity in an ethnically and racially homogeneous society.  Human beings are happy to live in multiethnic and multiracial liberal societies.  

One can see this even in Trump's MAGA movement.  Far from promoting the ethnic identity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, Trump has actively solicited and won the support of many Black males, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and Catholics.  And in 2024, the most pro-Trump racial demographic was American Indians!  65% of American Indian voters voted for Trump as compared with 57% of whites for Trump.

So, 533 years after Columbus landed in the New World, there are still many descendants of the Indigenous Americans alive today.  Significantly, many if not most of them are genetic and cultural hybrids--genetic and cultural mixtures of Indigenous, European, and Black people.  This illustrates the Darwinian evolution of hybridization.  (This Darwinian hybridization includes the interbreeding of the Neanderthal and human species as recently as 45,000 years ago [Curry 2024; Gibbons 2024].)  This fact by itself refutes the claim that European settler colonialism in the Americas has been responsible for an "American Genocide."

In his book Not Stolen; The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, Jeff Fynn-Paul presents this as the demographic argument against the claim of genocide in the Americas.  Scholars disagree about the population of the Indigenous people in the New World in 1491.  But they agree that the two largest population centers were in areas of the great Aztec and Inca civilizations--central Mexico and greater Peru.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on "Ethnic Groups in Latin America," you will see that in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites; in Peru (with a population of 34 million), 32% are mestizos, 45% Amerindians, and 12% whites; in Ecuador (with a population of 18 million), 41% are mestizos, 39% are Amerindians, and 10% whites.  When Columbus landed in the New World, 50% of the total population of Indigenous Americans was in the Aztec region, and 25% in the Inca region.  So, as we should expect, the great majority of the people in these two regions today are either pure Indigenous Americans or mestizos (mixtures of Indigneous and European people).

So, with as many as 150 million mestizos and Amerindians living where their Indigenous ancestors lived five hundred years ago in the Aztec and Inca regions, it's hard to see the "genocide" of one hundred million Amerindians killed by Europeans as claimed by Stannard and others.

In Canada, only about 5% of the population are Indigenous people; and in the United States, only a little over 1% are Indigenous.  But that's not surprising considering that in 1491, probably less than 12% of the total Indigenous population of the Americas was in what is now Canada and the U.S.  In these two areas, the low population of the Indigenous people has been overwhelmed by the large population of European immigrants.

What is most striking in all of this is the interracial mixing.  This is depicted in this painting.

                                                     A Casta Painting by Luis de Mena, 1750

Casta is Spanish for "caste" or "race."  In the early 18th century, "casta paintings" were popular in Mexico as studies of a mixed-race society (Deans-Smith 2005).  If you click on and enlarge the image above, you can see that the "Virgin of Guadalupe" (the Virgin Mary) stands over all the mixed-race couples as a vulvic symbol of the Mother of All.  Left of the Virgin Mary is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where this image of the Virgin Mary is enshrined.

The first couple is a well-dressed European woman standing next to her Indian husband wearing a loin cloth and carrying a bow.  The child is painted to resemble his father.  We also see a European man coupled with a well-dressed African woman, alongside their mixed-race child.  This is what I mean by genetic and cultural hybridization.

Here the cultural hybridization is depicted by the mixture of clothing styles.  But another example of cultural hybridization is in the traditions of holidays.  In Mexico, for instance, the Day of the Dead is a vestige of Aztec religion, and it is celebrated on the evenings of November 1 and 2, which coincides with All Soul's Day in the Catholic calendar.  So, this holiday fuses Catholic and Indigenous religious practices.

I have previously written about another image of racial and cultural hybridization in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which appears in the Museum as part of the Darwinian evolutionary story of multiethnic and multiracial humanity in Mexico.  The idealized female body in the middle represents the racial and cultural hybridization of the human species:

But even if this shows the genetic and cultural survival of Indigenous people in the New World, it is true that probably over 90% of the original Amerindian population died from the infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans--such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid.  But this was not intended by the Europeans, and so it does not count as "genocide," which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group."  Of course, the word "genocide" was first used in 1944-1945 as a term for what German Nazi leaders did in trying to exterminate Jews and other disfavored groups.  There is no evidence that the Europeans had any such deliberate and systematic policy for murdering Indigenous Americans.

We are left with Fynn-Paul's conclusion that "the Americas today are simply teeming with the descendants of the Indigenous people who were alive in 1491," and therefore "Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people of the New World" (41-42).

REFERENCES

Curry, Andrew. 2024. "Study Reveals Kinship Among First Modern Humans in Europe." Science 386: 1207.

Deans-Smith, Susan. 2005. "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain." Colonial Latin American Review 14: 169-204.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. 2023. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. New York: Bombardier Books.

Gibbons, Ann. 2024. "Neanderthals and Moderns Mingled Early and Often." Science 384: 132-133.

Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whitt, Laurelyn, and Alan W. Clarke. 2019. North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The North American Indian Declaration of Independence: A Darwinian Lockean Liberal Perspective

FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES

The Declaration of Independence seems to be hypocritical in its handling of the American Indians.  While it appeals to the "self-evident" principles of government by the consent of the governed to justify the right of the American colonies to become "Free and Independent States," it refuses to consider the possibility that the American Indians have the same right to be free and independent from European or American imperial rule.  

In the Declaration, one of the grievances against the King is that he "has excited insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."  

The Declaration is silent about the claim of the American Indians that their warfare on the British colonists was in defense of their self-governing sovereignty over their ancestral territory that was being invaded by colonial settlers who were stealing land that belonged to the Indians.

In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War (a theater of the Seven Years War) with a victory for the British over the French.  American Indians had fought on both sides of the conflict.  In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the King divided the lands in North America taken from the French.  This created an "Indian Reserve" west of the Appalachian Mountains, prohibiting the British colonists from settling there.  But many colonial settlers and land speculators refused to accept this, which was one of the grievances against the King that led to the American Revolution.

                   Map of North America Established by the Treaty of Paris and the Proclamation of 1763

In 1783, another Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution with a victory for the Americans.  Although American Indians had fought on both sides of the Revolution, they were not represented in the diplomatic negotiations over the Treaty, and they were shocked when they learned that the Treaty carved up the North American continent with no territory for the Indian Nations.  What had been set aside in 1763 as Indian Territory west of the Appalachians was given to the new American Empire.

But while the United States claimed all of the Trans-Appalachian West east of the Mississippi, most of that territory was actually controlled by Native American Nations.  Moreover, almost all of the continent west of the Mississippi was controlled by Indians.  In 1783, North America was still, as Pekka Hamalainen has argued, predominantly an "indigenous continent," just as it had been for thousands of years.

                            Map of North America Established by the Treaty of Paris of 1783

In 1783, Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), a Mohawk chief, became the founding leader of the Northwestern Indian Confederacy (1783-1795), which brought together Indian nations in the central Mississippi Valley and the Ohio Country to stop the United States from stealing Native land.  The member nations--Shawnees, Illinis, Miamis, Lenapes (Delaware), Potawatomis, Wyandots (Huron), Odawas, Ojibwes (Chippewa), Piankashaws, and Wabash--agreed that no nation could sell its land without the consent of the others.  They called themselves the "United Indian Nations."  This was the largest pan-Indian resistance movement in the history of North America.

They fought the U.S. in the Northwest Indian War (1785-1795)--the first of the American Indian Wars fought with the U.S. Army.  They won some remarkable victories--most notably in 1791, they drove U.S. soldiers under the command of General Arthur St. Clair, the federal governor of the Northwest Territory, into a retreat and killed over 97% of the soldiers, making it one of the worst defeats of the U.S. Army.  But in 1794, the Indians were badly defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.  And in 1795, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville that ended the war and also ended the Indian Confederacy.

In 1794, Brant met with Henry Knox, the U.S. Secretary of War.  Speaking for the American Indians, Brant told him: "We are of the same opinion with the people of the United States; you consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.  This country was given to us by the Great Spirit" (Ablasky 2019: 591).

Here Brant was echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence: "That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."  And he was claiming that the Native Indian Nations had the same right to be recognized "as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations."

Actually, Brant was invoking an international legal principle of equal Native nationhood that had been accepted as federal policy in the presidential administration of George Washington.  Secretary of War Henry Knox had told Washington shortly after his inauguration: "Independent nations and tribes of Indians ought to be considered as foreign nations."  Washington's Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson advised him "that the Indians had the full, undivided and independent sovereignty as long as they chose to keep it and that this might be forever" ("Notes on Cabinet Opinions," February 26, 1793).  

The phrase "Free and Independent States" was a reference to the law of nations, particularly as stated in Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations (1758).  Vattel repeatedly identified sovereign nations as "free and independent" (68, 71, 74, 77, 84-85, 214, 265).  This must be so because "nations being composed of men naturally free and independent, and who, before the establishment of civil societies, lived together in the state of nature,--nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature."

As I have argued previously, this follows John Locke's account of how people naturally free and independent in the state of nature can establish civil societies that become sovereign nations that are free and independent in the international arena, which is itself a state of nature because there is no world government over all nations.

According to Vattel, a nation is "free and independent" as long as it is self-governing:

"Every nation that governs itself, under what form soever, without dependence on any foreign power, is a sovereign state.  Its rights are naturally the same as those of any other state.  Such are the moral persons who live together in a natural society, subject to the law of nations.  To give a nation a right to make an immediate figure in this grand society, it is sufficient that it be really sovereign and independent, that is, that it govern itself by its own authority and laws" (83).

By this standard, as Brant and other Indian leaders indicated, the self-governing Native American polities of North America could claim the rights of sovereign statehood equal to the United States.  Locke also saw this because he recognized that the Indians in America were divided into self-governing "nations" or "peoples"--"little Independent Societies" (FT, 144, 153, ST, 41, 102, 105, 107-108).  Consequently, the European imperial powers had no authority over the Indians: "Those who have the Supream Power of making Laws in England, France or Holland, are to an Indian, but like the rest of the World, Men without Authority" (ST, 9).

THE AGRICULTURALIST ARGUMENT

And yet, both Vattel and Locke sometimes seemed to suggest that being a self-governing nation is not enough to make that nation a "free and independent state."  Those people in America who "live only by hunting, fishing, and wild fruits," Vattel observed, cannot rightly object when nations that live by cultivating the land appropriate some of the land of the Indians that they have left uncultivated, because the agricultural development of the land supports a much larger human population than would be possible if the hunter-gatherer Indians were allowed to claim all the land for themselves (128-131, 213-217).

Similarly, in his chapter on "Property" in the Second Treatise, Locke recognized that the hunter-gatherer Indians could claim property in the deer that they had hunted and killed or the acorns and apples that they had gathered, because they had mixed their labor with those natural resources and thus appropriated them to themselves (ST, 26-31).  But he also saw that once human beings engaged in agriculture, then they needed to claim property not just in the wild plants they had gathered or the wild animals they had hunted, but in the land that could be rendered productive through agriculture.  "As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property" (ST, 32).  

In appropriating such land for farming, they were obeying the command of God in Genesis 1:28 after He had created human beings in His image: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."  The English colonists in America used this as Biblical sanction for their taking land from the Indians (Seed 1995: 16-40).  Since the Indians lived by hunting and gathering and were not engaged in agriculture, they had no right to exclude the colonists from appropriating land for farming and thus rendering productive what the Indians had left as the "uncultivated wast of America" (ST, 37).

It has been common for "post-colonial" theorists to cite this as evidence that Locke justified colonial settlers in their oppression of indigenous people and that this shows inherent contradiction in early liberalism--claiming to defend liberty against tyranny but denying the liberty of indigenous people facing colonialist oppression (Tully 1993).

But there are at least four lines of Lockean argument that support American Indian claims for national freedom and independence (Goldie 2015).  The first argument is that many of the American Indians engaged in agriculture: they grew corn, beans, and squash (Hamalainen 2022: 12-13).  And Locke knew this because in his writing about the American colonies, he recognized the importance of "Indian corn" for the colonial settlers (Kammen 1966: 154).  So, if ownership of land depends on cultivation, these agrarian Indians had good claims on their land.

On the other hand, if the Lockean claim on land ownership depends on laboring upon the land, then one can make a good argument that Indian hunting, gathering, and grazing over a certain territory is a rightful claim of territory: occupying the land is a form of labor.  In 1725, John Bulkley insisted that by Locke's standard, the Indians had no claim on their lands because they had not engaged in agricultural cultivation (Bulkley 1725).  But in 1781, Samuel Wharton offered a different interpretation of Locke: "the very act of occupancy alone, being a degree of bodily labour, is from a principle of natural justice, without any consent or compact, sufficient of itself to gain a title."  He also appealed to the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence as justifying the equal rights of the Indian Nations (Wharton 1781: 15-16, 24-25).

A third Lockean argument for the claims of the American Indians is that Locke saw that most of the Indians were no longer in a state of nature, governed by natural property rights, but rather, as indicated above, they were living as Indian Nations with established governments, and "in Governments the Laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions" (ST, 50).  The Europeans recognized the nationhood of the Indians by dealing with them through treaties, which are international agreements between sovereign nations.  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized American Indian nationhood and its territorial claims: "It is just and reasonable . . . that the several nations or tribes of Indians . . . should not be molested or disturbed in the possession of such parts of our dominions and territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to them."

The fourth Lockean argument for the independence of the American Indian nations is the most fundamental:  the same Lockean reasoning for the American colonists revolting against British imperial rule--the reasoning in the Declaration of Independence--can be used by the American Indians to revolt against American imperial rule.

AMERICAN WARS OF INDEPENDENCE

The Declaration of Independence is what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  So, for example, a twenty-dollar bill has monetary value as long as we recognize that a twenty-dollar bill (X) counts as currency (Y) in the monetary system of the United States (C).  Similarly, the American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Address).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.  When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

Similarly, just as the American patriots had formed a confederacy of the "United States" to fight a war of independence from the British Empire, the American Indians formed the Northwest Confederacy of the "United Indian Nations" to fight a war of independence from the newly emerging American Empire in 1783.  That phase of the war came to an end with their defeat in the battle at Fallen Timbers in 1794, which forced them to sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which opened two-thirds of the Ohio Country to American settlement.

Although Brant had insisted that American Indian Independence was granted to them by the Great Spirit, it seemed that the God of Armies had not favored the Northwest Indian Confederacy.

THE GREAT SPIRIT'S CHOSEN PEOPLES FIGHT HOLY WARS OF INDEPENDENCE

Brant's appeal to the Great Spirit as supporting American Indian resistance to European and American colonialism expressed a religious cosmology of Indian resistance that had arisen in the 18th century among some Indian prophetic mystics.  This continued in the 19th century as new Indian prophets had supernatural visions of the Creator or the Great Spirit promising His providential care for the American Indians in their holy war for independence from the white colonial imperialists.  This series of Indian prophets included Neolin (the Delaware Prophet), Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet), and Kenekuk (the Kickapoo Prophet) (Cave 1999; Mohammedi 2002).

One of the persistent themes in this prophetic teaching was that while God had created all human beings, He had created them to live in separate groups in different parts of the world.  Roger Williams heard this from the Narragansett Indians early in the 17th century: "although they do not deny that Englishman's God made English men and the Heavens and Earth where the English come from.  Yet, they also believe their Gods made them and the Heaven and the Earth where they live" (Williams 2019: 108).  Later prophets reported mystical visions of the Great Spirit who taught them that He had created Indians, Negroes, and whites separately, and favored the Indians and the Negroes.

Sometime around 1762, Neolin had a vision of ascending into Heaven and seeing the Master of Light, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.  (This resembles the mystical vision of Saint Paul who ascended into Heaven.)  The Master of Light condemned the Indians for being corrupted by the vices of the white people.  He declared that to regain His favor, the Indians would have to expel the Europeans from the Indian lands.  He told Neolin: "As to those who come to trouble your lands, --drive them out, make war upon them.  I do not love them at all; they know me not, and are my enemies. Send them back to the lands which I have created and let them stay there."  Later, Neolin reported this vision to his people and promised them that "the Great Spirit will give success to our arms.  He will give us strength to conquer our enemies" (Cave 1999: 273).

In 1763, the Odawa (Ottawa) war leader Pontiac brought together many of the Indian tribes in the lower Great Lakes region to form a confederacy to fight against the British and to expel them from their lands.  Pontiac was a shrewd military leader.  As many as eight small British forts were captured, and three major forts--Fort Pitt, Fort Detroit, and Fort Niagara--were put to siege but not captured.

Although the Indians did not defeat the British, they did fight to a military stalemate that was ended by a treaty in 1766.  Pontiac's War was the first pan-tribal confederacy of Indians fighting the first of a series of wars of independence.  The Northwest Indian War was the second of those wars.

The third of those Indian wars of independence was also sparked by an Indian prophet.  Beginning in 1805, the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa fell into an ecstatic trance in which he saw the Master of Life in Heaven.  He began preaching sermons about a new religion that combined elements of Christianity with the traditional Shawnee religion.  He taught his people that they needed to return to traditional Shawnee ways, to reject the corrupt practices of the white people, and to fight against the American settlers who were stealing their land.  He attracted a large group of followers who gathered in western Ohio near Greenville.  He was criticized by some Indian leaders who thought it was foolish to challenge the white settlers with violent resistance, and that it was more prudent to compromise with them and seek some peaceful accommodation with them.  Tenskwatawa charged these rivals to his leadership with being witches who should be punished (Mohammedi 2002).

                                                   George Catlin's Portrait of Tenskwatawa

In 1806, General William Henry Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory, and he was disturbed by the reports of Tenskwatawa's accusing some Indians in Indiana of practicing witchcraft and ordering that they be tortured and executed.  Harrison denounced this as barbarous.  He also told the Indians that they should test the power of this "notorious imposter."  On April 18, he wrote a letter to them that was published in newspapers advising them: "If he is really a prophet, ask him to cause the sun to stand still--the moon to alter its course--the rivers to cease to flow--or the dead to rise from their graves.  If he does these things, you may then believe that he has been sent from God."  

This was a big mistake because he had forgotten that astronomers had predicted a total eclipse of the sun that would pass over the lower Great Lakes area on June 16, 1806.  Tenskwatawa had heard about this from the scientists who were setting up observation stations across Indiana and Illinois.  So, after Harrison's letter had been published, Tenskwatawa said that the Great Spirit was angry at Harrison; and that as a sign of His anger, on June 16, He would hide the Sun at noon in His hand, and the day would turn dark.  This miracle confirmed that he was a true prophet.

In 1809, Harrison began to push the Indians into signing a treaty for selling some of their lands that could be opened to white settlers.  Some Indian leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne that ceded some extensive lands north of Vincennes along the Wabash River.  

Tecumseh, a Shawnee political leader and brother of Tenskwatawa, denounced the treaty.  Like Brant, 25 years earlier, Tecumseh argued that the Indians should form an intertribal confederacy that would refuse to sell any lands unless all the tribes agreed and that would go to war to defend their lands.  He also invoked his brother's religious visions in claiming that the Great Spirit would give His divine sanction to their war.  Tecumseh traveled widely as he spoke to different tribes trying to persuade them to join the confederacy.  Many Indians moved to Prophetstown, north of what is now Lafayette, Indiana, where Tenskwatawa has established a city for his followers.

On November 7, 1811, Harrison led an army to Prophetstown that fought Tenskwatawa's warriors, defeated them, and burned the city.  This became known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, named after the Tippecanoe River.

Tecumseh continued to build his confederacy with the support of British allies.  In the War of 1812, he led his Indians in fighting in Canada on the side of the British.  Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of Thames in Canada in 1813.

All of these wars of Indian independence, as led by people like Pontiac, Brant, and Tecumseh, were inspired by the religious belief that the Great Spirit would give the Indians victory in war, and thus they were what Locke had called an Appeal to Heaven.  But the failure of the Indians to win these wars suggested to some Indians that either the Great Spirit was not on their side, or that the Indian prophets in their mystical visions had misunderstood the true message of the Great Spirit.  The Kickapoo Prophet Kenekuk then had his own vision of the Great Spirit, who advised that the Indians should take a stance of peaceful coexistence with American culture and nonviolent resistance to American imperialism, which would allow them to preserve their tribal cultural traditions.  

The life of American Indian tribes today shows the success of this strategy for the cultural evolution of American Indian life through adaptation to American liberal pluralism so that the Indian tribes have survived and even thrived.

KENEKUK AND THE VERMILLION KICKAPOOS

                                                        George Catlin's Portrait of Kenekuk

The Kickapoos are an Algonquin-language indigenous tribe originating in the lower Great Lakes region, particularly along the southern Wabash River near what is today Terre Haute, Indiana.  The Vermillion Kickapoos are a distinct band of Kickapoos who by the early 19th century were living along the Vermillion River in eastern Illinois.

Kenekuk was a Vermillion Kickapoo who as a young man was a hard-drinking ne'er-do-well who was thrown out of his band after he killed his uncle in a drunken rage.  After a time of wandering among frontier settlements, begging for food and shelter, he was finally taken in by a charitable Catholic priest who instructed him in Christianity and the ways of the white people.  Kenekuk then decided that he must atone for his past sins, swear off drinking, and preach the word of God to the Kickapoos.  He was welcomed back into his Kickapoo band.  And by 1816, he had emerged as a leading chief (Herring 1985; 1988).

Kenekuk became a charismatic preacher who claimed to have received from the Great Spirit a religion that combined elements of Catholic Christianity and traditional Kickapoo religious beliefs.  His followers believed in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.  They worshipped Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints.  But they also practiced traditional Indian singing and dancing in their ceremonies.

To maintain the stable order of the community, Kenekuk taught them that they must abstain from all alcohol because drunkards would be punished in Hell.  Their sobriety saved them from the ravages of alcoholism that had ruined so many Indian tribes.

He also taught them that they should be hard-working farmers.  Unlike other Indian tribes, the Kickapoo men gave up hunting, gathering, and the warrior's ethos, so that they could devote themselves to farming, along with the women.

Having seen that the violent anti-Americanism of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had been disastrous for the Indians, Kenekuk taught his followers to practice peaceful coexistence with the white frontier settlers.  They should love their neighbors as themselves and turn the other cheek in response to attacks.  But he also taught them to stand up for their rights to religious liberty, to their tribal lands held in common, and to the survival of their Kickapoo Indian culture.

Although Kenekuk's Kickapoos were resolute in defending their eastern Illinois homeland, in obedience to the Great Spirit's command that they should never sell tribal lands, in 1832 they were forced by pressure from President Jackson's Indian Removal Bill and the public reaction to the Black Hawk War of 1832 to sign the Treaty of Castor Hill that ceded all Indian claims to Illinois lands, which compelled them to move west of the Mississippi.

In 1833 they settled on the west bank of the Missouri River a few miles north of Fort Leavenworth.  They reestablished their customary way of life in the new land, with promises in the treaty that the federal government would provide money, food, and farming tools.  They soon became some of the most prosperous Indian farmers in America.

Many Protestant and Catholic missionaries came to their land in the attempt to convert them into orthodox Christians.  But their devotion to the Prophet and his distinctive syncretic religion could not be broken.

Kenekuk died in 1852 from smallpox.  But even after his death, the Kickapoo abstinence from drinking and other vices, their agricultural work ethic, and their religious unity created a social solidarity in preserving their tribal culture against white encroachments on their lands.

While most of the Indian tribes in Kansas were forced to move out to make way for white settlers, the small Kickapoo reservation remains today as one of only three Indian reservations in the state.

INDIGENOUS IMPERIALISM

So far, I have written about the American Indian fight for independence and resistance to conquest as if it were a binary struggle between Indians and settlers.  But that is not true.  Indigenous tribes fighting for their independence were fighting as much against other tribes as they were against colonial powers.  And tribes allied with other tribes to fight against yet other tribes.  Some tribes committed genocide against their neighboring tribes.  Tribes conquering other tribes often enslaved those they had subjugated.  Moreover, there is plenty of archaeological and ethnographic evidence that intertribal warfare, conquest, and enslavement pervaded the history of the North American Indians long before the arrival of Europeans (Chacon and Mendoza 2007).

And while we commonly think of the Indians as fighting against European or American imperialism, much of the Indian fight against imperialism was against the indigenous imperialism of other Indian tribes.  Consider, for example, the indigenous empires established by the Powhatans, the Iroquois, the Lakotas, and the Comanches.

In 1607, when the English colonists landed in Virginia and established Jamestown, they were surrounded by the Powhatan people, who were under the rule of the Powhatan Empire (Hamalainen 2022: 59-69).  The Powhatans were ruled by Wahunsenacawh, the paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy with the title of mamanatowick, which suggested manito--his "spiritual power."  He was quioccosuk, a "god on Earth," ruling by divine right over his empire.  He had subjugated several rival nations, who were forced to pay tribute to him--providing soldiers and over eighty percent of their possessions.  He ruled over more than thirty towns and twenty thousand people.  He had as many as a hundred wives.  His ten-year-old daughter was known to the English as Pocahontas.  Captain John Smith observed that "the form of their Commonwealth is a Monarchical government, one as Emperor rules over many Kings or Governors."  The will of the chief ruler "is a law and must be obeyed: not only as a King, but as half a God they esteem him.  His inferior Kings whom they call Werowances, are tied to rule by customs, and have power of life and death at their command."

At about this same time, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were beginning to expand by conquest in the eastern Great Lakes region to become the dominant imperial power in the Eastern Woodlands by the middle of the seventeenth century (Hamalainen 2022: 97-141).  Previously, I have written about how the Huron were devastated by Iroquois attacks, which forced the Hurons who survived to abandon their native territory, which was taken over by the Iroquois.  At least a dozen Indian nations were forced by Iroquois expansion to abandon their ancient homelands and retreat into the western Great Lakes region along the southern shore of Lake Superior and the western shore of Lake Michigan.  This was the first large-scale westward expansion of a conquering people in early American history.

                                                         Expansion of the Iroquois Empire

The largest westward expansion of Indians west of the Mississippi was by the Lakota people, who eventually transformed themselves into one of the most powerful empires in North American history (Hamalainen 2019; 2022: 400-408).  The Lakotas are one of three subcultures of the Sioux, along with the Eastern Dakota and Western Dakota.  They might have originated in the Great Lakes region.  They migrated west along the Missouri River Valley until the first Lakota explorers arrived in Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, in 1776.  They identified Paha Sapa as their spiritual birthplace.  It also provided the natural resources they needed, such as pastureland for their horses and bison herds for their hunting.  But several Indian nations believed that the Great Spirit had given the Black Hills to them.  And so the Lakotas had to form an alliance with the Cheyennes and Arapahos to push the Crows, Kiowas, and Shoshones out of the Black Hills.  Later, they expelled the Pawnees, Omahas, and Otoes from the river valleys of the central plains.  According to the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), the Platte River was the southern border of Lakota territory.

                                                         Lakota Sioux Treaty Lands

And yet the Lakotas claimed a two-hundred-mile southward extension of their territory to the Arkansas River by the right of conquest.  The Oglala leader Black Hawk explained: "These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians."  This proved that the Great Spirit was on the side of the Lakota Empire.

To the south of the Lakotas, there was another indigenous empire--the Comanches.

                                                                  The Comanche Empire

The Comanches expanded their empire by attacking the Spanish, Mexican, and white settlers and also other Indian tribes such as the Lipan Apaches.  Eventually, what the Spanish called Comancheria encompassed forty thousand Comanches living on a quarter million miles of land, making it the largest indigenous territory in North America.  In 1846 and 1847, the Comanches even sent thousands of soldiers deep into Mexico--attacking the city of Queretaro, only 135 miles north of Mexico City (Hamalainen 2008; 2022: 409-29).

THE EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY OF POWER

As Pekka Hamalainen has observed, Darwinian science allows us to explain the evolutionary ecology of Lakota and Comanche power that came from harnessing the stored energy from the Sun in horses, bison, domesticated plants, and human slave labor (Hamalainen 2022: 12-15, 249-58, 421-23).  (I have pursued a similar line of thought in writing about the Big History of photosynthesis and the cosmic evolution of complexity as measured by energy rate density.)

The modern domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a subspecies of the wild horse (Equus ferus).  The wild horse evolved over 45 million years ago.  Humans began domesticating horses around 4,000 BCE.  There were horses in North America until around 10,000 years ago, when they went extinct there.  They were reintroduced into North America by the European colonists.  When they arrived in the North American West early in the eighteenth century through a trade chain from Spanish New Mexico, the Native Americans in the west entered a new technological age.

Previously, the Indians had domesticated the dog.  But the domesticated horse was a bigger and stronger dog and a better energy converter.  Horses transformed the Sun's energy stored through photosynthesis in the biomass of the continental grasslands into immediately available muscle power, which the Indians could harness for hunting bison and waging war on their enemies.

The grasses on the North American Great Plains coevolved with large grazers like the bison.  And the bison were good at converting the energy stored in the grasses into an animal body that was a source of meat, bones, and hides for Indian hunters.  As they became more dependent on the bison meat as a source of protein, the hunters reduced their gathering of plants.  They developed trade relations with Indian farmers so that they could trade bison meat and hides for corn (maize), squash, and beans, which the farmers had genetically modified through domestication.

In this dependence on domesticated horses, the Lakota and Comanche empires belong to the deep history--over 2,000 years--of how warhorses became essential to the building and sustaining of great empires--from the Persian Empire of Cyrus to the Mongol Empires of Genghis Khan and Timur (Chaffetz 2024).

Many Indian tribes--including the Lakota and Comanche--also used Indian slaves as like domesticated animals, which was another way of harnessing the energy of the Sun stored in the muscle power of the slaves that could be put to useful work.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS IN A LOCKEAN LIBERAL SOCIETY

By the 1880s, the U.S. Army had defeated the American Indian warriors.  This was beneficial for the Indians insofar as it ended the intertribal warfare and indigenous imperial conquest that had run through thousands of years of Indian history in North America.  But this benefit brought with it the cost of surrendering the Indians to American imperial conquest, and this subjugation made them vulnerable to violence and oppression.  Over the past 50 years, some historians have even spoken of the Americans as committing "genocide" against the Indians, so that Native American life was essentially extinguished --perhaps finally, as Dee Brown argued (in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)--with the U.S. Cavalry's 1890 massacre of more than 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee.

But recently, some scholars of American Indian history--including American Indian scholars like David Treuer (in his Heartbeat of Wounded Knee)--have complained that this story of the "dead Indian" denies or demeans the vibrant life of American Indians in America today.  The story of American Indian genocide is refuted by the simple fact of the stunning demographic growth and diversity of American Indian lives today.  As many as 5 million Americans identify themselves as American Indians today, which probably exceeds the population of Indians in North America in 1800.  Over the past 50 years, the average income of American Indians has been rising, and the poverty rate has dropped.  Indian-owned businesses have been growing.  The number of college-educated Indians has increased.  The youthful reservation population has been growing.  But most Indians live in urban areas.  Many move back and forth between a reservation and the city.  Indians are actively engaged in preserving Indian cultural traditions, including American Indian religious practices and beliefs.  In the 135 years since Wounded Knee, the Indians have not only survived, but they have even lived flourishing lives

As Treuer indicates, there are two reasons for this.  The first is that while the Indians' violent resistance to conquest was defeated in battle by the U.S. Army, their nonviolent resistance to oppressive subjugation has succeeded in securing their rights as American citizens to life and liberty.  This illustrates what I have argued about the importance of Lockean nonviolent resistance to oppression, which explains what John Adams meant when he said that America's Revolution of Independence was achieved "in the minds of the people" in the resistance movement from 1660 to 1775, long before any blood was shed at Lexington.

The second reason why American Indians have been able to live good lives as Indians in America is that a Lockean pluralist society allows for a culturally diverse social order in which one can live as both an American and an Indian.

Treuer conveys both of these points in this passage:

While Wounded Knee was the last major armed conflict between Indian tribes and the U.S. government, there have been many battles since 1890: battles fought by Indian parents to keep their children, and by the children far away at boarding schools to remember and keep their families and, by extension, their tribes, close to their hearts; battles of Indian leaders to defeat allotment and other destructive legislation; battles of activists to make good on the promises their leaders couldn't or wouldn't honor; battles of millions of present-day Indians to be Indian and modern at the same time.  We are, in a sense, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those hundreds who survived Wounded Knee and who did what was necessary to survive, at first, and then--bit by bit--to thrive (453).

When he speaks of the battle of Indians "to be Indian and modern at the same time," what he calls "modern" is what I call--in my convoluted professorial language--Lockean liberal symbolic niche construction, which is based on Adam Smith's principle of "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice."  

In other words, American Indians have discovered that they can be citizens in America's bourgeois pluralist society while preserving their Indian tribal identity.  This shows the evolution of Indigenous peoples through cultural adaptation so that they can live and live well as American Indians.

In 1877, the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph surrendered to General Nelson Miles in northern Montana.  Two years later, Chief Joseph gave a speech in Washington, D.C., which was directed to the government and to the general American public.  Treuer quotes the entire speech, which includes this passage:

I know that my race must change.  We can not hold our own with the white men as we are.  We only ask an even chance to live as other men live.  We ask to be recognized as men.  We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men.  If the Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law.  If the white man breaks the law, punish him also.

Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

That's the American Indian's Declaration of Independence. 

 

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