Chapter 2.
American Exceptionalism Under the Microscope
Before Europeans settled in what was later named the United States of America, the pre-Clovis people had lived on the land for about 6,000 years. These non-Europeans crossed the Bering Straits connecting Siberia in Russia to present-day Alaska. Nearly 80 percent of Indigenous people today contain genetic traces of the original settlers, the real discoverers of America, making them truly Native Americans. Over time, they separated into as many as 160 different tribes, each with its own language, customs, and rich cultural traditions. Today, more than half of all US states are named after these tribes.
Like the European settlers who followed, Native Americans did what was needed to survive, leveraging human traits like curiosity and tribalism. Curiosity drove them to experiment with herbs as medicines and wild plants as foods. Tribalism enabled them to kill large mammals for nutrition, clothing, and shelter, and to keep families safe and preserve their culture. Violence was a part of life, resulting in sporadic conflicts with other tribes.
In popular entertainment forms like movies and television shows, Native Americans are often typecast as either savages or simple, peaceful people, grossly understating the complexity of their lives. Stereotypical images of Native Americans propounded these characterizations, evident most palpably in the logos of sports teams named for different tribes. These offensive impressions marginalized Native Americans as “lesser people,” while rendering their true history and attainments invisible to the greater public. Fortunately, there has been a recent wave of name changes in sports, including the Washington football team, the Commanders, which used to be called a slur for Indigenous people.
Prior to the arrival of the first settlers, the land was theirs, but only in terms of its bounty, beauty, and spiritual sustenance. Little did they realize, until more Europeans arrived and established settlements and colonies along the Atlantic coast, that this land was a veritable gold mine, one the entire world would soon exploit.
Countries took turns searching for their pot of gold. Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English explorers mounted expeditions to claim a share of the untold riches. Among them was the Italian seafarer Christopher Columbus, who sailed three ships to what he thought was the Indies, an old world, yet was credited with discovering a “New World.” We now know that previous explorers like Leif Erikson had already “discovered” America, making Columbus not just a misguided explorer but a late one, as well. He died in 1506, still believing he had settled in Asia.
Columbus anchored first in the Bahamas, or Guanahani, as the native Taino people called the island. He described the Tainos in his journals as strong, kind, generous, and fine featured. Columbus subsequently sailed to what are today known as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and continued to praise the kindness of the local inhabitants. “They brought us all they had in this world, knowing what I wanted, and they did it so generously and willingly that it was wonderful,” he wrote.21
These depictions by Columbus were important in advertising throughout Europe the bountiful riches and subservient natives of the Americas, ultimately impelling a cavalcade of subsequent seafarers to conquer the Western Hemisphere, one tribe after another. Not just the weapons of battle killed off much of the Indigenous population; diseases like smallpox also wielded a sharp sword.
Columbus was anything but a kind benefactor, despite the comforting passages in his journal. After writing that there were few better people than the Tainos, he kidnapped ten of them to train as interpreters for the return trip to Spain. He subsequently saile
