Rethinking the myth of 'pays du sauvage'
Times Colonist (Victoria)
Mon 27 Oct 2008
Page: A6
Section: Comment
Byline: Iain Hunter
Column: Iain Hunter
Source: Special to Times Colonist

It seems strange that when the nation is recognizing the truth of some of the things that went on in residential schools and seeking reconciliation with those scarred by them, Canada's representative on the International Olympic Committee should call their forebears savages.

Of course Dick Pound should have thought where his mouth was going before he sent it off the starting block. But it should be obvious that he wasn't trying to give offence to First Nations and would like people to recognize that it was a false start, and let him try again.

Pound's point appears to have been that people who think Beijing should never have been awarded the 2008 Games because of China's record of human rights abuses should consider history. Four hundred years ago, he declared, there were barely 10,000 Canadians of European descent in this "pays du sauvage" - he was speaking in French - while China's civilization goes back 5,000 years.

I don't want to scoff at firecrackers and chopsticks or quibble with the numbers, but to point out that what makes, or made, a people civilized as opposed to savage is no longer as clear-cut as Pound might assume.

Perhaps considering this would help the reconciliation sought today with our First Nations.

I'm indebted to the Vancouver Province for steering me toward an article in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago about savages and civilizations. The author, Charles C. Mann, reports work by anthropologists and archeologists who have concluded that this continent was far from a pays du sauvage occupied by primitives who huddled in isolated clusters after crossing the Bering Strait ice bridge about 12,000 years ago.

The "new" view is that far more -- nearly 100 times more -- people inhabited the Americas than the 1.15 million traditionally believed to have been here when Columbus arrived, and that they had arrived far earlier.

Until the European waves washed ashore, some were living in cities, the largest of which was probably the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. It was larger than Paris in 1519 when Cortez first saw it, with streets where sewage didn't flow, unlike those in Europe where "gardez loo!" was a warning not to be ignored.

Some scientists have found evidence that parts of the Amazon jungle were "cultivated landscapes" with mounds of soil capable of regeneration, and that if the inhabitants didn't grow crops, they managed "orchards" of fruit, nuts and palm.

Successive explorers' accounts of North America indicate that not all the "forest primeval" was untamed, but cleared to make hunting game easier. The forests filled in, according to one theory, only when the native populations declined.

The decline, of course, was caused mainly by the smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles that Europeans and their animals brought to the New World and to which aboriginals were not immune. Neither, being close-knit societies, did they have any conception of quarantine. Those who subscribe to the large population theory believe that as many as 95 per cent of native inhabitants between Alaska and Mexico died within the first 130 years of contact with Europeans.

When the first Europeans robbed and pillaged native settlements put there by "God's good providence," subjected natives to slavery, or, like De Soto, slaughtered them in pursuit of gold, it's no wonder the survivors became the nomadic hunters of literary legend.

The old school snorts that political correctness is driving the new thinking about the first inhabitants of America. It notes that there is little archeological evidence to support it.

Environmentalists are horrified by any suggestion that the wilderness they strive to protect can have been tamed and might be so again.

Nobody seems to recall the impression of these savages that civilized Europeans were weak, dishonest, untrustworthy, sex-mad, ugly, dirty and stank.

In 1840, a historian described the First Nations of this continent as "feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection." U.S. high-school textbooks 20 years ago were teaching still that European settlers came to a land "empty of mankind and its wonders."

Federal cabinet minister James Richardson was pilloried in the 1970s for musing about northern aboriginals dragging their possessions across the snow on "two sticks" until white people civilized them.

Is that all they did, though?