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Where the Wild Things Are: The Demonization of Native Americans by the Puritans Jessalyn Smith
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umans need to feel in control of themselves and the world around them. Though a fear of the unknown and unpredictable may have been necessary to the survival of early humans, eventually the same survival tactic that defined interactions between humans and their environment began to make its way into social interactions. Many species are inherently violent but the instinct to compete for mates and resources cannot account for all of the human death at human hands. Humans are the most violent of species. According to research lead by Dr José María Gómez, the average amount of deaths cause by the same species is about 0.3% in the animal kingdom. But in human history, the same-species murder rate has reached 10% in the Mesolithic and Medieval ages, over 15% during a period from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago, and then more than 25% around the time Columbus arrived in the New World. These enormous increases in deaths seem to be clustered around events involving the interaction of different peoples, providing good reason to believe that these high rates in human-on human killing has some basis in social and political interactions, not just in territorial struggles (Johnston). With social and political interactions between societies often comes discrepancies concerning culture; it seems that where humans lack understanding, fear forms alongside violence. For humans, borders between territories is much more than just a claim to resources: colonial violence cannot be explained only as a conflict over land. When the Puritans landed in America in 1620, they were met by the native people of what would eventually become New England. Despite some effort in the beginning, relations between the colonists and the Native Americans were tense. The reason for the uneasy relationship between the two groups of people was the fear that the Puritans had of the natives. This fear came from the Puritans’ inability to control or identify with them. The alien quality of many of the Native American practices were demonized. Beginning with simple differences in culture, Native Americans were seen as distinctly different from the colonists. Because the Native people had a civilization that differed from that of the European settlers, the colonists determined that the Native Americans lacked civilization, they were savages who roamed in the wilderness. In an account of an encounter with a group of Native Americans in Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, “[The Native Americans] had their eyes in their North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Figure 1. Depictions of Blemmyes, engraving in a 1603 German edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Discovery of Guiana,” 1595. From the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.” This outlandish depiction of these people made it easy for them to be viewed more like beasts than as people (Gaudio). This separation of Native Americans from their humanity became morally convenient when it would eventually be determined that they needed to be controlled in ways that one does not control another human. The Puritans felt it was their duty to bring God to the Native Americans. They believed that America was a land overrun by Satan and that God had placed them there to reclaim that land for Him. In “The Wonders of the Invisible World” Cotton Mather writes, The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.
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ike the demons who occupied this new land, the Native Americans were there to challenge the Puritans; however, the natives were ultimately to be converted by them. By spreading their religion and settling the wilderness, the Puritans believed that they were taking that land back from the devil. Diseases that the Europeans introduced and that natives had no immunity to were wiping out large populations of Native Americans. The Puritans took this as God
