Jared Diamond’s explanation of geographical luck as a central cause of the technological progress in Eurasian society that culminated in guns and steel (with germ immunity being the byproduct of domesticated animals, which are the primary carriers of epidemic disease) essentially assumes that violent conquest is inevitable. Implicit in his argument is the suggestion that had the native peoples of North America possessed sufficient technology, they would have inaugurated a bloody colonial history that differed from North American history mainly in setting.
For instance, he writes of the Aboriginal Australians in Guns, Germs, and Steel that “the society that they created was not a literature, food-producing industrial democracy,” and that “the reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment” (321). Later, he maintains the same about Africa’s past: “In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suits of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (401). If you have the weapons, then, you’re going to use them, according to Diamond’s reasoning.
I’m not so sure. Technology is not created in a moral vacuum; as cultural studies has shown us, science is always driven by its cultural context and reflects the interests of those in power. A friend quipped to me once that if another life form landed on Earth and tried to determine the most prevalent health disorder afflicting the human race, he would conclude that it was erectile dysfunction. In other words, the existence of Viagra is a reflection of the proliferation of white men within science, particularly in roles like that of a research director, who gets to decide which questions an experiment is designed to answer and which questions it is not. If Helen Longino, in Science as Social Knowledge, is correct in arguing that value-free science is impossible to achieve, and that science instead contains either contextual values (those derived from the cultural milieu) or constitutive values (principles of the scientific method), then it is certainly NOT inevitable that 1) guns are a high priority in all cultures with technology and 2) that guns would necessarily be used to create a colonial empire.
Culture decides how technology is used, and so the stories that define a culture ought to tell us something about whether or not that group would wish to colonize others in a violent manner. Genesis 1-3 is the most important source of cultural assumptions in Europe, and from the outset it contains imagery that foreshadows the conquest of North America. Not only does Genesis introduce us to a vengeful God who banishes his children from Paradise, leaving their descendents with the notion that paradise always exists somewhere else, one of its creation chronologies places humanity at the top of the ecological and environmental food chain. The Mayan and Aztec empires were relatively anomalous among North American tribes, though some suggest that the Iroquois Confederacy of the Five Nations and Powhatan’s growing empire in the Virginia territory could have led to civilizations rivaling other dynasties. In contrast, tribes like the Blackfeet and Lakota preserve stories that represent their rootedness in the place they inhabit. Their home is the geographical center of the world, and no other place is thought to be better. The Sky Country or the Sand Hills may resemble the Judeo-Christian Eden, but there is no attempt in the indigenous literature to create Sky Country on earth, and there is no desire evident in these narratives to reach the Sand Hills before death would take the individual there. The effect is much different from the Genesis narrative, and based on these examples it seems safe to say that those tribes whose stories reverence the place they inhabit would have had no measurable incentive to venture across the ocean in search of the “green breast” of a new world, as Fitzgerald puts it.
Violence is another matter. Had the Huron or the Iroquois gained guns and steel, they would have likely used it for bloody ends, given their brutal torture of war prisoners and occasional practice of cannibalism. The war songs of the Blackfeet, Crow, Lakota, and Ojibwe show that violence was a central part of their culture and that military conflict with unfamiliar societies may have been inevitable in the hypothetical arrival of North American tribes on the shores of Europe.
But the oral literature does not suggest that Indians were possessed with a sense of urgency about acquiring more land or transforming that land into the Edenic paradise that the Puritans believed they were sent into the wilderness to create. If geography had allowed the native tribes to progress more rapidly than Europe, there would almost certainly have been a flowering of printed literature, if the survival of the oral tradition is any indication. The extinction of the buffalo, however, would not have been predetermined by human nature, and the wholesale slaughter of the Spanish, French, and English would not have commenced with the same insistence on spiritual superiority and the need to conquer a continent on behalf of the Sun Chief.
Perhaps more importantly, Iroquois or Narragansett explorers would not have been driven by the lingering sense of displacement from paradise that the Genesis narrative invites. Had the natives of North America ventured across the Atlantic, in other words, they would not have been looking for a new home, which suggests that their origin stories might have engendered a different history.
