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Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

David E. Stannard
David E. Stannard
Affiliation:
David E. Stannard is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822, U.S.A.
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Extract

American history has come a long way in the past quarter century. It was, after all, 1965 when Samuel Eliot Morison published his enormously successful and widely praised Oxford History of the American People – an 1,100-page work that relegated the women's suffrage amendment of the Constitution to half a sentence in a chapter entitled “Bootlegging and Other Sports,” and intimated that most blacks were pleased and contented as slaves. And this was an avant-garde position for Morison, commonly regarded as the preeminent American historian of his time: in earlier versions of the same text he had referred to blacks collectively as “Sambo,” as “childlike, improvident, humorous, prevaricating, and superstitious” creatures; when confined to slavery, he had stated flatly, blacks were “adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , December 1991 , pp. 381 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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19 None of the major islands or island groups – from the Marquesas to the Mangarevas and Easter Island (Rapanui) – contained fewer than 100 people per square mile at the time of Western contact. On the Marquesas, see Dening, Greg, Islands and Beaches – Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1980), 239Google Scholar. (Dening reports a Marquesan population of about 90,000 at the time of Western contact. The Marquesas contain 492 square miles, for a population density of about 183 persons per square mile). On the Mangarevas and Rapanui, see Kirch, Patrick Vinton, Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19.Google Scholar

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22 Dobyns, , “Estimating Aboriginal American Population,” 412–14Google Scholar; see also McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 215Google Scholar. In fact, in areas such as Hawai'i, where most of the population was concentrated in low-lying coastal areas, the conventional pattern of depopulation was even higher than 95 percent – often reaching 98 to 99 percent in less than a century. See, for example, Borah, Woodrow and Cook, Sherburne F., “Conquest and Population: A Demographic Approach to Mexican History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 113 (1969), 181Google Scholar; and their discussion in “The Historical Demography of Interior Tribes of Columbia in the Studies of Juan Friede and German Colmenares,” in Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), I, xiii, 411–29.Google Scholar

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26 See microbiologist Bushnell, O. A.'s “Hygiene and Sanitation Among the Ancient Hawaiians,” Haivai'i Historical Review, 2 (1966).Google Scholar

27 Although no precise numbers are available on the number of kauwā in Hawai'i prior to Western contact, one well placed nineteenth century Hawaiian chronicler – who, as a Christian convert, generally went out of his way to echo the Western criticisms of pre–1778 Hawai'i as a land of despotism – claimed they totaled “a thousand or more.” Beckwith, Martha (ed.), Kepelimo's Traditions of Hawai'i (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1932), 142Google Scholar. This, the only numerical estimate on record, would mean the kauwā represented less than one half of one percent of the population, even if Robert Schmitt's low total population estimate is accepted. According to the US Census, in 1790 the total population of the American South was 1,961,174 of whom 657,327–33·5 percent – were slaves.

28 Stokes, John F. G., “Dune Sepulture, Battle Mortality, and Kamehameha's Alleged Defeat on Kaua'i,” Hawaiian Historical Society Report, 45 (1936), 36Google Scholar. See also the discussion in Schmitt, Robert, “Catastrophic Mortality in Hawai'i” Hawaiian journal of History, 3 (1969), 66–67Google Scholar; and his passing comment in “Famine Mortality in Hawai'i,” The journal of Pacific History, 5 (1970), 110.Google Scholar

29 Lisiansky, Urey, Voyage Round the World, 1803–1806 (London: Longmans, 1814), 120Google Scholar; von Kotzebue, Otto, A Voyage of Discovery Into the South Sea…1815–1818 (London: Longmans, 1821), III, 248Google Scholar. This is not to say that there was in fact no difference between sacrifice/consecration and execution, nor that sacrifice, in the popular sense, was wholly nonexistent – either in Hawai'i or Europe. Execution for witchcraft, for example, certainly was a form of propitiatory sacrifice. As for criminal execution, it is worth noting that among the “humanitarian” advances of eighteenth century English law were the substitution, in certain cases, of medical dissection for gibbeting as postmortem punishment, as well as the replacement of public disembowelment while the victim was still alive with disembowelment after he/she had been hanged. It wasn't until the 1830s that execution for “sacrilege” was prohibited in England – and in all such things England was far ahead of most of the rest of Europe. Interesting and suggestive discussions of these matters can be found in Jacoby, Susan, Wild justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), esp. 132–39Google Scholar; and Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 30–51Google Scholar. On Hawai'i, see Valeri, Valerio, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hamai'i (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar; on the difference between sacrifice and execution see esp. 356, note 38.

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35 I am grateful to native Hawaiian historian Lilikalā Kame'eleihiwa, of the University of Hawai'i's Center for Hawaiian Studies, for translation help here and elsewhere.

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59 Schmitt, , Missionary Censuses of Hawai'i, 5.Google Scholar

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61 While it is evident that the life-endangering effects of pregnancy and childbirth are limited to women, it is less well known that women are up to five times more likely than men to contract syphilis from sex with a syphilis-infected partner. Moreover, not only is smallpox more dangerous to women than to men, it is much more dangerous to pregnant women than to non-pregnant women; typically, during smallpox epidemics, more than three times as many pregnant women than non-pregnant women (40 percent, compared with 12 percent) die. On these and related matters, see J. A. and McFalls, M. H., Disease and Fertility (New York: Academic Press, 1984), esp. 310–24 and 532–34.Google Scholar

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65 The quotation from one of Agassiz's letters is taken from Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 48Google Scholar. In addition to Gould's discussion, one of the best treatments of Agassiz and scientific racism in nineteenth century America remains Stanton, William's The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar. The Hall citation comes from Hall, G. Stanley, Adolescence (New York: Appleton and Company, 1904), II, 648–51, 657–62.Google Scholar

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75 Goody, , Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1, 146–47Google Scholar. I must emphasize here, at least in passing, that there are deep and fundamental differences between the Western world of the historian/anthropologist and the various worlds of the non-Western peoples they study. But these differences are far more subtle and complex than those suggested by the classic “Great Dichotomy” – and they do not partake of the easy superior/inferior polarization that concept carries with it.

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