Cahokia may have begun as a collective effort of people who understood themselves as a single kin community, but over time it transformed into an elite-run state. The triggering factor was the colossal building projects that absorbed inordinate amounts of labor.Monks Mound alone consisted of twenty-two million cubic feet of soil, all of it transported in baskets carried by humans to the construction site. Completing that gargantuan project may have taken 370,000 days of labor in total, and although it was the largest, it was but one of some two hundred mounds that would eventually dot the cityscape.
This seems rather like the awe-inspiring tales of labor that produced pyramids at Giza. ("Eat, drink, and be merry," a poet said. "Tomorrow we build the pyramids." "Fack," came a response.) I had no idea that such amazing projects, that rival the best and brightest of the Army Corps of Engineers, was happening in ol' proto-America. Then one day Cahokia pulled an Ozymandias and disappeared:
"Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."
(Bonus: A National Geographic podcast speculates on what happened to Cahokians. It's fascinating.)
Hämäläinen switches to Europe and its hungers in a chapter titled, Blind Conquests. But before he does he paints a lingering picture of the kinship relationships that dominated Indigenous America. It's a set-up strategy for the coming chapter. It's worth quoting from in length:
Kinship was the crucial adhesive that kept people and nations linked together. It would be a mistake to see this adaptation as some kind of a failure or aberration of civilization, as European newcomers almost invariably did. North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world a communal ethos available to everyone who was capable of proper thoughts and deeds and willing to share their possessions.
Sounds good, or someone was smoking the peace pipe too long, methinks. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Back in Europe it was anything but kinship; in fact, it was about kingship. The author does a good job bringing in climate as a force that must be reckoned with, even back then; the melts, the freezes, from good agro switching to good bison-hunting; migration patterns. "As Rome shrank back into the small city-state it had once been, the gaping power vacuum it left behind was filled by hundreds of small fiefdoms. Europe languished as an atomistic world until the tenth century, when the climate began to warm up," writes Hämäläinen. Out of this pointillist power palette, he continues, "Ruthless warlords built private armies of heavily armed horsemen and staked out vast personal fiefdoms. Land was controlled by the few, and local peasants were reduced to serfs, agricultural laborers bound to a lord's estate. In return, they received the protection of lords and their knights against Vikings, Muslims, and local thugs." This sounds a bit like the Indigenous Continent he's previously described.
Hämäläinen provides a very brief sketch of the rise of a modernizing Europe, its new city building:
Cities were the great economic engines of the incipient nation-states in western Europe, bustling with business, innovations, unprecedented wealth, and soaring ambitions. By the late fifteenth century, France and England possessed the means and organizational capacity for overseas expansion.
This seems a quick run up, needing more pithy anecdotes. You've read Candide and this ain't the bustle and depravity that Voltaire fluffed Leibniz's pillow in. In any case, Hämäläinen settles for having France and England at each other's throats, while Spain sees Christendom duke it out with Islam. Then, after successes against Islam, Spain began to want to expand its might and influence, and beat the sh*t out of an unsuspecting Canaries, and, our Finnish writer tells us, "The lessons in cruelty and brutality that they learned in the Canaries would serve Spanish adventurers well in the 'New World' that was about to appear to them." And before you know it, 1492 is here, and Columbus has been introduced, and here he is in Jamaica in search of gold and finding only hospitable Tanos. Hämäläinen writes,
They welcomed the exhausted Spanish with gifts and food, hoping to turn the strangers into kin, but they lived in seemingly modest villages that contained none of the treasures gold, silver, spices, silk that Columbus and his party sought. Appalled, Columbus enslaved the Tanos.
And it was on. Conquests galore. The search for El Dorado. Jesuits out of Taxi Driver climbing waterfalls in search of missionary positions; De Niro goes from slave hunter in The Mission to his next film as pimp hunter. Wasn't Jodie Foster something in her debut? (Only Ned Beatty had more charisma in a debut ("squeal like a pig" -- isn't that something?)) Soon we have references to obscure inner workings of scrounging power -- Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Ind'gens who only want to get you lost. ("Unlike Central and South America, North America was a poor target for Spain's ready-to-rule colonialism. Native misinformation thwarted one expedition after another.") And de Soto. Hernando. And Ponce de Leon's unhappy ending after searching with all his heart for the Fountain of Youth -- "Puerto Rico's sugar, gold, and Indian slaves had made Ponce de León stupendously rich," scripts the Finn, but then in Florida, some comeuppance: Ponce is struck with a Calusa arrow and dies, and with him, the dream of eternal life -- until CRISPR came along in a new Conquistador series soon streaming on HBO. Then the conquers and the chancre-Urs are teeming everywhere, in a voracious vision of violence and greed not abated until Custer lost his nutsack at Little Big Horn (get it?) and the rubbernecking Hekawes laughed at the joke. Shucking the corn. The tale can at times seem to lose its direction, but not in an unpleasant way.
It was about at this point that I decided to take a break from my very enjoyable reading; I'd neglected Native American history since the 60s, when a resurgence of white man's burden brought many of us back to a more grounded approach to reality and the whole earth catalog of our commonweal. For some reason, I wanted to remember the corn Hollywood had shucked in the childhood days, rugged, if drunken men and their horses fending off frontier fiercos, be they white or be they red. I decided to pick films that might depict some of the cultural intersections of the continent's contestations as loosely described by Hämäläinen's broad "pointillist" narrative.
I watched The Comancheros with John Wayne and Stuart "Monsewer" Whitman and pondered why Whitman was being described as a "handsome young man" that all the swans commended. The title role referred to rogue whites hoodlums -- proto-mafia?-- who worked with the Comanches to undermine a fledgling empire. Meh. Then I gave a look-see to The War Wagon, with Wayne and Kirk Douglas, a sheriff turned alkie over love's demising ways, and helps Wayne steal a wagon full of some "evil banker's" gold. No Ind'gens though. Then there was El Dorado. I thought that for sure I'll hit paydirt here. El Dorado, the famed city of gold, that the Conquistadors were always seeking in their quests in the New World. Oh, wait a minute, it was Robert Mitchum who turned alkie over love. Love is the only el dorado in this flick, and half of it is unrequited. But there's a lot of drinkin' over it.
Then I topped it all off by watching two classic Indian-exploitation ads: Mazola (you call it corn, we call it maize); and, the Native American who weeps to see how mighty whitey has trashed a once civilized world (the "Indian" turns out to be an Italian actor -- maybe, I'm thinking, it's the part Don Corleone secures for his godson Johnny Fontane, after the thoroughbred horse's head fiasco. That's a crude stereotype and I beat myself up over it.)
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