Indians - To Fight or Stay Home

In California, linguistic evidence bespeaks a much more stable, long history of peoples staying put than is the case elsewhere on the continent (except maybe the pueblo cultures and the coastal Pacific Northwest), and certainly than is the case in most of Eurasia.

Consider the four or five major divisions of the so-called “Penutian” language family, which together occupied the great majority of “our” California (Wintu, Maidu, Yokuts, Miwok, and Costanoan or Ohlonean). Except for the last two groups which clearly share a common linguistic ancestry, all of these language groups have been linked into a single putative family on the evidence of a small handful of presumably-cognate words. By comparison, consider our own Indo-European language family, whose major groups (e.g., Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, etc.) share scores if not hundreds of cognate words. However you look at it, each of the California language groups have evolved in relative isolation from each other for a very long time, several thousands of years at the very least, and presumably occupying more or less the same territories that they did when the Europeans showed up.

Now consider the relatively tiny home-territories each of these mini-families occupied—and the four or five named above had by far the largest territories of all of the 50(?) or so such linguistic groups in California—and compare the gigantic size of the territory occupied by our own linguistic group, i.e., most of Eurasia until recently, and now the entire world. Clearly we have a lot to learn when it comes to staying put. Compared to the natives of the eastern half of the continent also, the Californianas were champion stay-at-homes. The entire eastern half of the continent plus all of Canada was divided up among only a relative handful of linguistic groups (Algonkian, Athapascan, Siouan, Iraquoian, Muskogean, and a few small groups). 

As is the case with us Indo-Europeans, these wide distributions reflect a much more restless culture than that of the native Californians; in fact, great shifts in populations among nearly all the eastern Indians have been documented even over the past several hundred years, admittedly most of these migrations forced either directly or indirectly by the incursions of the Europeans, but by no means all of them. The Great Plains in particular became an ever-shifting and ever-contested welter of overlapping territories.

Not surprisingly, there is also a direct correlation with such dynamic movements of population (expansions, pioneering, migrations, etc.) and warfare. Here again there is a direct relationship between the total size of territory occupied by a given linguistic group and its proclivity for war and conquest. Once again it is our own Indo-European language family—and above all its Germanic (and possibly Latin?) sub-group(s)—that leads the pack worldwide. On the North American continent, the linguistic groups occupying the largest territories and the most warlike have been the Algonkian, Athapascan, Uto-Aztekan, Iriquoian? and (more recently) Siouan language groups.

Again, at or near the bottom of the line in both total territory occupied and in belligerence are our own peace-loving, stay-at-home Californians.

So, rather than seek out as teachers, guess which Indian groups we Europeans respected the least and beat up on and bullied the most? Even now it is the fighters—the Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, that our own warrior culture admires, and makes movies about, while the Californians are still ignored if no longer despised.

Note: Another indicator of long stability. Unlike the unstable, mixed-ethnic, more-or-less artificial modern nation-states like Yugoslavia, China, India, most African nations, and even many European ones, which are composed of impossibly complicated if unacknowledged ethnic gerrymanders, the original native “nations” of California had long-established boundaries enclosing linguistically and culturally uniform populations.

Consider Bosnia, with villages of Muslims next to villages of Croats or Serbs, or single villages with ethnic neighborhoods, all so thoroughly peppered throughout the country that it is impossible to gerrymander the boundaries.

Note also: Only the Spanish missions created the kind of chaotic mixed-culture societies so common in Europe and its colonies but so foreign to native California . . . and thereby effectively destroyed all the distinct cultures and native “nations” it touched.

And the direct connection between wars and great territorial shifts in population, contractions, expansions, general scrambling and chaos, etc. is obvious enough. Professor Eugen Weber of UCLA puts it as clearly as anyone*:  

Wars are great mix-masters. They displace masses of combatants and civilians and blen them into unexpected mixtures. The 2nd World War was the greatest mix-master of them all. Never before had so many millions been shifted around. Never before had so many been uprooted. Never was mobility so much a part of life, nor stability so rare as in the wake of the second “Thirty Years War” from 1914 to 1945.”

In fact the world wars were only part of a continuum of accelerating mix-mastering in the turbulent history of “Western Civilization.” We look back nostalgically to a [i.e., European] pre-war period of relative stability (i.e., relatively less instability), but you needn’t look very deep to see that the kind of real stability enjoyed by our native Californian predecessors has been unknown to the rest of us probably since the time when we too lived as neolithic hunter-gatherers.

[Interject a bit of “historic law”? regarding Indians of Eastern U.S. and Mesoamerica, who were at the early-agricultural to imperial stages of history, and it is they, not the pacific gatherers of California—and those of S. Africa—who have gotten warlike and grabby.]

But this is not all to say that we are doomed to an ever more chaotic life as more-or-less perpetual lost refugees, being swept along on the violent, chaotic tides of history and economics and politics.

In fact, part of my idea of real progress is exactly the opposite, i.e., that we find ways of becoming more rather than less rooted, secure, stable, more rather than less “native” to a place we can know and love.

Need a chapter on the relationships between:

Rootedness/ “Native”-ness/Staying Put and “Stewardship” or “Sustainable Land Use” or Sustainable Land-Ethic” and Peacefulness vs./ditto vs.Warlike-ness/Wars/Belligerence and Ethnicity? or simply stage(s) of “Historical Evolution” or simply Environment (intrinsically rich, generous vs. poor/stingy)

The basic assumption is that the bad or good “environmental record” of a person or a people is directly related to his/its degree/history of rootedness (or the opposite). Good “stewardship” is proportioned to staying put. Or in other words:

The mere fact that a people has sustained itself successfully on a certain limited territory for X generations without environmental degradation or loss of population is proof that those people have worked out a more-or-less perfect relationship with their physical and biological environment—presuming such is possible. Possible maybe, but rare if the record is any indication. Or more accurately, rare once the historical stage of agriculture has been reached. . . . [or better] Once agriculture has been invented, starting its usual cascade of side-effects like big towns, money, hoarding, political/social hierarchies, absolute rulers, armies, wars, land-clearing, overpopulation, irrigation, etc.