It’s often said that history is written by the victors. Where Native American history is concerned, it was not until the late 1960’s, when I was a young grad student in history, that Native American studies, and looking at history from the perspective of Native Americans, began to take off.
It’s true that early on, American intellectuals(and in the United States, intellectuals were not held in high regard, as was the case in Europe, because, frankly, America was a series of frontier experiences, and intellectuals really brought no practical skills to the frontier. One reason, to this day, Americans often tend to look down on Ivory Tower intellectuals) interpreted any evidence for things they could not fathom as having been produced by “savages” as being instead the work of civilizations from elsewhere. One example of this was early interpretations of the Dighton Rock petroglyph site in Massachusetts:
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469634401/the-place-of-stone/
https://davidkrueger.org/2018/05/19/review-of-the-place-of-stone-dighton-rock-and-the-erasure-of-americas-indigenous-past/
(Edit: sorry these links are not clickable. For some reason, beginning today, I cannot post hyperlinks to TNet, and only to TNet. Bummer!)
Leaving aside the possibility that Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real left a “Kilroy was here” message on the rock in 1511, even as late as the 1920’s, when Brown University psychologist Edmund Delabarre researched and published his study of this rock, and other petroglyphs in New England, he concluded Native Americans could not have left marks on rocks before seeing white settlers communicate with writing!
In other words, there is indeed a very long history of attributing Native American accomplishments to others and the so-called Mound Builder Myth, that the mounds were built by Old World civilizations, had a long history before modern archaeology eradicated it. Both it, and all the oddball interpretations of Dighton Rock were examples of ethnocentrism.
Here, IMHO, is the truth: there are always many histories, not just those written by the victors. Imagine the history that must underly Cahokia. We now know that people came from all over to this great complex. What must have been the compelling world view, what must have been the great underlying spiritual beliefs and unifying myths that compelled people to do this? We have so completely lost the history and compelling belief systems that infused such a development. It represents another complete history, having nothing to do with the history of the United States that is at the heart of the history of this continent that we learn and know.
The same can be said of the many cities and towns of the ancient ancestral Puebloans. There were relations between them and the great civilizations of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Myths like that of the plummed serpent found both among the Ancestral Puebloan and Mesoamerican. That is a history, a history that was lived, and yet, for the most part, is now lost to us.
But, just as real, just as much a part of human experience as our own history, the history of the European conquest of the Americas and the story of the United States.
History is written by the victors. But there are many histories left unspoken when we focus only on those. Places like Cahokia, places like Chaco Canyon, serve as surviving material reminders of those missing and long forgotten histories.
What must it have been like to visit Cahokia at its height? What must it have been like to be at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, at its height, and a trader in tropical macaws stopped by plying his wares from a great city far to the south in Mexico. A whole civilization, a whole myth shaping world view largely lost to us. Just ruins dotting a desert landscape now, but an echo of a history largely unknown to we, the victors and rulers now.
