My life in books

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles Mann

If you're my age, and white, and went to school in North America, and watched all those Westerns (movies and TV) set in the American west, then you probably grew up with a very specific image of the way things were before the "coming of the white man." Except for small bands of Indians roaming across the plains, or living in huts or tents in the woods, the continent was wide open, virgin territory (ah, the sexualisation of colonialism, ain't it grand) ripe and waiting for some truly civilised people to come and exert the Biblical promise of dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

Hopefully, everyone today knows that all of that is just so much racist, imperialist bullshit.

As Mann commented in an interview in Indian Country Today:

Indians are constantly presented as timeless essences, people who have never changed in thousands of years. But that is to say that they have no history - the only people on Earth who don't change their surroundings or interact with others. And they only enter history when Europeans come into the picture. In social-science jargon, Indians are depicted as lacking agency. Agency includes both doing the right thing and going off in a direction you later wish you hadn't. You could sum up my approach as trying to write a history in which I made sure the Indians had agency.

This book gives a clear indication of the vast scope of human history, civilisation, culture, cultivation, technological advancement and managment (and sometimes mismanagment) of the natural environment that was really how it was among the nations of the Americas before the European imperialist project landed on them with a plague of smallpox, and it is a most effective antidote to the racist myths of my youth.