Mutual Perceptions

Mutual Perceptions In the eighteenth century, western Europeans defined ‘civilised’ people in terms of literacy, an organised religion and urbanism. To them, the natives of America appeared ‘uncivilised’. To some, like the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, such people were to be admired, as they were untouched by the corruptions of ‘civilisation’. A popular term was ‘the noble savage’.

Some lines in a poem by the English poet William Wordsworth indicate another perspective. Neither he nor Rousseau had met a native American, but Wordsworth described them as living ‘amid wilds/Where fancy hath small liberty to grace/The affections, to exalt them or refine’, meaning that people living close to nature had only limited powers of imagination and emotion! It is interesting to note that another writer, Washington Irving, much younger than Wordsworth and who had actually met native people, described them quite differently. ‘The Indians I have had an opportunity of seeing in real life are quite different from those described in poetry… Taciturn they are, it is true, when in company with white men, whose goodwill they distrust and whose language they do not understand; but the white man is equally taciturn under like circumstances.

When the Indians are among themselves, they are great mimics, and entertain themselves excessively at the expense of the whites… who have supposed them impressed with profound respect for their grandeur and dignity… The white men (as I have witnessed) are prone to treat the poor Indians as little better than animals’. To the natives, the goods they exchanged with the Europeans were gifts , given in friendship. For the Europeans, dreaming of becoming rich, the fish and furs were commodities, which they would sell for a profit in Europe. The prices of the goods they sold varied from year to year, depending on the supply.

The natives could not understand this – they had no sense of the ‘market’ in faraway Europe. They were puzzled by the fact that the European traders sometimes gave them a lot of things in exchange for their goods, sometimes very little. They were also saddened by the greed of the Europeans*. In their impatience to get furs, they had slaughtered hundreds of beavers, and the natives were very uneasy, fearing that the animals would take revenge on them for this destruction.

Following the first Europeans, who were traders, were those who came to ‘settle’ in America. From the seventeenth century, there were groups of Europeans who were being persecuted because they were of a different sect of Christianity (Protestants living in predominantly Catholic countries, or Catholics in countries where Protestantism was the official religion). Many of them left Europe and went to America to begin a new life. As long as there was vacant Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA, and a contemporary of Wordsworth, spoke of the natives in words that would lead to a public outcry today: ‘This unfortunate race which we have been taking so much pains to civilise… have justified extermination’.

*Many folk tales of the natives mocked Europeans and described them as greedy and deceitful, but because these were told as imaginary stories, it was only much later that the Europeans understood the references. land, this was not a problem, but gradually the Europeans moved further inland, near native villages. They used their iron tools to cut down forests to lay out farms. Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at forests – natives identified tracks invisible to the Europeans.

Europeans imagined the forests cut down and replaced by cornfields. Jefferson’s ‘dream’ was a country populated by Europeans with small farms. The natives, who grew crops for their own needs, not for sale and profit, and thought it wrong to ‘own’ the land, could not understand this. In Jefferson’s view, this made them ‘uncivilised’.