This is by far the most enlightening, interesting, and fun to read non-fiction book I've read in the past half-year. Possibly more, but I can't remember what I read last year. Anyway, as you might guess from the title, the subject is pre-Columbian America and its indigenous inhabitants. This is a subject that when presented in book form, Indians must approach with caution. So many claims have been made about Indian history that it's really hard to "sort the wheat from the chaff." Not only that, subjects you would think would be relatively benign spiral out of control because of the politico-social implications they have. Take as an example the question of when the Americas were first populated. It's just a date, right? Some say 12,000 yrs, some say 22,000 or more, and at least one person claims 200,000.
Why would it matter, you ask? Well, consider the situation with Kennewick Man. This skeleton surfaced a few years agao and the crux of the problem is that a scientist started claiming this was a non-Indian skeleton. He dates back about 9,000 years, so that would be problematic with our current understanding of the population of the Americas. Basically what it boils down to is that some white people want to believe that the Americas were settled by white people either before paleo-Indians came along or around the same time. This could be taken as justification for assuaging white guilt over driving the original American people almost to extinction. It would possibly be used as an argument that Indians themselves were merely later settlers who also displaced an indigenous people. It's kind of in the mold of two wrongs make a right, but you can never safely accuse people of making sense.
In the book, Mann covers this controversy in about the same level of detail I just did, but he also talks about plenty of other situations like this. Don't get me wrong; Mann's book is neither a blanket defense of Indian people nor a justification of European settlers' behavior. I really admire him for calling it like he sees it, which, as far as I can tell, is much more even-handed than most modern scholars. Part of the problem with so many "defenders" of native people is that they're defending their own idealized version of our people. In this version, Indians learned how to shape themselves and their lifestyles to the environment. Harmony with the environment and all that. This view is sort of a latter-day response to the earlier European and American historians who wrote simply repulsive things about how Indians were less than human and so didn't deserve to be treated with any justice, or about how ignorant and savage they were. The problem with both of these views is that it strips the Indian subjects of their humanity and their ability to make choices and decide their own fate. Either we were ignorant savages full of evil, or we were dumb beasts, innocent of any higher thought.
Mann boldly strides a path outside these criterion, presenting the history of Indians in the Americas as another saga of the human race, on par with that in Mesopotamia or Asia or Europe. That alone is worth reading the book for, but you also have to read the book to understand the sweeping changes that have taken place in Indian studies over the past decade and a little more.
Did you know that when the first European settlers came over they found lands wherever they went that were teeming with human life? As the first English settlers would describe it, there were literally farms lining every foot of the sides of the rivers that led to the Atlantic. Indians lived in towns and on farms full of people. The same was found by the Spanish in South America. So also in MesoAmerica. Tenochtitlan had hundreds of thousands of citizens! Yet this is not the image most people got in their high school textbooks. Today, the romanticized view of Indians that Europeans formed after most of the Indians were dead is the most persistent one. The great empty forests of New England were not always so dark and empty. People had originally cultivated those forests for further food sources aside from the crops they grew or the fish they caught. They were wide and open.
I can't even tell you all the things that you probably don't know if you haven't been reading modern scholarship on the subject. One thing that I do want to tell you about and that you must especially read this book for is the perceived vs. true biological history of the Amazon forest. For the longest time, we've all been told that the Amazon is a pristine forest still existing in its original condition and that it has always been inhabited by small groups of hunter-gatherers who have lived this way since time immemorial. The truth however, according to the modern scholarship that Mann discusses, may be that the Amazon forest is a largely man-made artifact. Those trees that are such an abundant source of food for both humans and animals were cultivated precisely for that purpose. If that doesn't blow you away, you must not yet be thinking of the implications. As Mann also discusses, the first account of a Spanish eyewitness traveling by boat down the Amazon speaks of the river being lined on both banks by great farms and villages crowded with people and boats swarming the river. These new researches indicate that several hundred thousand people (at least) could have lived along the banks of the river. Imagine it.
Unfortunately, if I write any more I'm just going to start writing a condensed and much worse version of the book. I must close though, with a thought that Mann writes. To paraphrase, he discusses how in his daughter's history textbook, a total of nine pages is dedicated to Indians. He thinks that Indians are worth more than nine pages.
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