The Meeting of Civilizations that wasn't

 

This is the absolute top interpretation of the "Rondeau des Indes Galantes" by Jean-Philippe Rameau. This version is by Clement Cogitore, Opera de Paris (h/t Luisella Chiavenuto).  

In 1723, Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote the music for an Opera titled "Les Indes Galantes" (The Romantic Indies) that took as inspiration the non-European world. A section of the Opera takes place in the world of Native Americans. It tells a romantic and improbable story, that of the native princess Zima, who is contended by three young men, a native named Adario, the Spaniard Don Alvar, and the Frenchman Damon. Eventually, she decides for Adario and the couple takes refuge in the "pleasant forest" where "Greatness never comes with its false enticements" 

Naive as you like, it is still a precious relic from an age in which Europeans had been encountering the Native Americans on a more or less even foot. An age in which Europeans thought that they could learn something from the American culture. An age in which it was legitimate for a European to marry a native. The French may have been especially affected by Native cultures and it is said that the ideals of the French revolution, freedom, equality, fraternity, were inspired by Native American cultures.

Not long afterward, it was all gone. A little more than a century after Rameau's opera, there came the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans under the "Indian Removal" laws. It was the "Trail of Tears" that removed the American Indians of the "Five Civilized Tribes" from their homelands and pushed them to the Western side of the Mississippi, to survive the best they could, if they could. Over the following century, the natives were gradually exterminated, their culture was destroyed, their forests razed to the ground. 

You may be interested in some data about this extermination, taken from the manuscript of a book that I am planning to publish one day or another. 

___________________________________________________________________

Paradoxically, just because the conquest of Mexico was so fast and so brutal, the Europeans found it useful to maintain at least some local social and economic structures. It doesn’t mean that the Native population was not exterminated by a combination of starvation, slavery, overexploitation, and violence. But that took time and, in the process, there was a chance for the two populations to intermingle and share genes and cultural memes. In genetic terms, the modern population of Mexico is highly mixed. The “Mestizos,” people of mixed Native and European ancestry, form some 60%-90% of the total population (the exact number depends on the criteria used to define them). It is reported that, on the average, their genes are nearly 80% native, the rest being “Iberian” (that is, Spanish). From a cultural viewpoint, the Mesoamerican heritage is still alive and several Native languages, such as the Guaraní in Paraguay or the Nahuatl in Mexico, are still spoken by a sufficient number of speakers that their survival is not at risk. It is said that the Mexican revolutionary leader, Emiliano Zapata (1879- 1919), was of Indio origin and that he could speak Nahuatl.

A similar story holds for South America. The Europeans defeated the Inca Empire, but maintained some of its structures, and the two populations had the time to intermingle. The retreat of the Natives involved fights and several extermination episodes, but sometimes the Natives offered a successful resistance. In 1598, at the battle of Curalaba in Southern Chile (that the Spanish call the “Disaster of Curalaba”) the Mapuches, one of the Andean populations, managed to defeat the Spanish and force them to abandon seven of their cities (Destrucción de las siete ciudades). The last phase of the fight in South America was a defeat for the Natives, with the “Conquest of the Desert” in the 1870s, carried out by the Argentine army over the Patagonian Desert. Which was not exactly a desert, since it was inhabited by the Mapuche. It was a full-fledged ethnical cleansing campaign that led to the extermination and removal of the Indios, leaving space for the European settlers to move there. Yet, as an indication of the fierce resistance of the Mapuche, at least one world of their language became part of the Argentinian vocabulary. It was “Malón,” from “maleu,” meaning “to inflict damage to the enemy.” In its modern usage, the term indicates a plunder raid of the Indios.

Although modern Argentinians see themselves as of European descent, they mostly are of mixed blood. Genetic studies have shown that the average ancestry of the Argentinians is no more than 65% Iberian, but the rest is from Native populations, plus a small percentage (around 4%) of Africans. A similar result holds for Chile, with an even larger (almost 50%) percentage of Native ancestry. The Brazilians are a little more European than both Argentinians and Chileans, but only marginally so, with an average of about 70% of European genes. It is probably the result of a recent immigration trend from Europe. Other South-American countries have similar admixtures.

That doesn’t mean that the mixing of the European and the Native genes always took place in a friendly manner. It is perfectly possible that male European settlers enslaved or raped Native women, but also the reverse is possible, as described, for instance, in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Historia del Guerrero y la cautiva" (1949). The genetic analysis cannot tell us much about that, although some data indicate that the mixing occurred mostly between European males and Native females. In any case, it happened.

The case of North America is completely different. The average fraction of Native American genes in the DNA of US citizens of European descent is nearly zero, less than 0.2%. Mixed marriages just didn’t take place, except in the early times, when Pocahontas (1596-1617) married a British colonist. In later times, intermarriage was not just uncommon in North America, it was prohibited by law. “Anti-miscegenation laws” that made intermarriage a felony existed in the US until the 1960s.

For a period, the Native confederacies successfully opposed the European invasion. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the technological differences between the Indians and the Europeans were not large. The Natives soon learned how to use muskets and deployed them against the Europeans, sometimes with great success. A nearly forgotten case is that of the “Battle of the Wabash”, or the “Battle of Wabash River” in present-day Ohio. It was fought in 1791 by the US army against a coalition of Native American tribes. The Indians used a combination of muskets and bows to inflict about a thousand casualties on a force of some 1500 men of the US army. In terms of relative casualties, it was probably the worst defeat ever suffered by the US army. The 18th century may have been the last opportunity for the Natives to become independent states on an equal footing with the US. But, with the 19th century, things changed for the worse for them. 

Despite the victory at the Wabash River, the subsequent battles were all defeats for the Indians. Eventually, the balance of power tilted decisively in favor of the Whites. It was during this period that several US states also enacted anti-miscegenation laws, forbidding mixed marriages between Whites and Natives. In 1830, the US congress enacted the “Indian Removal Act,” the forced removal of all the natives residing East of the Mississippi River, to settle on the other side. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees and other tribes were forced to march Westward. It became known as the "Trail of Tears." We don’t know how many died on the trail, at least several thousand. Then, we don’t know how the Natives fared on the new lands, having arrived there with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. That was the end of all attempts at statehood for the Indians of North America.

After having pushed Natives West of the Mississippi, the Europeans had not much more to do than mopping up the remaining resistance. By the mid-19th century, the superiority of the Whites’ armies had become overwhelming. They had cannons and sometimes even used Gatling machine guns. But there was little need for very sophisticated weaponry: at the Battle of Four Lakes, near modern-day Spokane, Washington, in 1858, the Natives were annihilated by the US army using only simple, single-shot Springfield rifles. The last hurrah for the Indians was the battle of Little Big Horn, in 1876, when a group of Lakota Indians defeated and exterminated a detachment of the US Army led by General Custer. But the mopping continued, and it even accelerated. The massacre of the Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee (1890) was the last action of some relevance of the Indian wars. By the end of the 19th century, all the Natives of North America had been either killed or forced into reservations.

There remains to explain how the extermination of the North American natives left no chance for the exterminated to intermarry with the exterminators. That was an exceptional event in history. From the times of the Trojan war, it was traditional that the males of the defeated population were killed or enslaved, but that the women were spared and taken as slaves or concubines. For instance, Cassandra, King Priam’s “most beautiful daughter,” was taken as a concubine by Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaeans. Bad as it was, this ancient way to deal with the defeated left them at least a chance for a form of survival. Their genes would leave a trace with the winners’ descendants.

Homer’s description of the Trojan war is, of course, fictional, but history agrees with his tale. Think of the replacement of the Neanderthals by the Sapiens in Europe. If you are European, today, you probably carry about 2% of Neanderthal genes in your DNA. It means that some of your remote ancestors were Neanderthals! But that’s more than modern US citizens of European descent carry in terms of Native genes. To understand how violent, even ferocious, the relations between Whites and Indians in North America were, we can look at the story reported by Jeremiah Curtin (1835 – 1906) in his “Creation Myths of Primitive America” (1898). In the book we read of an event that took place in 1864 in California (as reported in “Ishi, the Last Yahi” 1981 (55)) :

A few miles north of Millville lived a Yana girl named Eliza, industrious and much liked by those who knew her. She was working for a farmer at the time. The party stopped before this house and three of the men entered it. “Eliza, come out”, said one of them, “we are going to kill you.” She begged for her life. To the spokesman, who had worked for her employer some time before, she said; “Don’t kill me; when you were here I cooked for you, I washed for you, I was kind to you; I never asked pay of you; don’t kill me now.” Her prayers were vain, they took Eliza, with her aunt and her uncle, a short distance from the house and shot the three. My informant counted eleven bullets in Eliza’s breast. After this murder, the party took a drink and started, but the leader in killing Eliza said “I don’t think that the little squaw is dead yet.” He turned back, smashed in her skull with his musket.

Not that there were no cases of wanton killings in ancient history, but this is truly extreme. Note that the killers were most likely drunk (they “took a drink,” probably it was not the first one). But did Agamemnon spare Cassandra just because, at the time of the Trojan war, whiskey had not been invented? The ferocity of the behavior of European Americans against the Natives has no parallel in history.

What is left, today, is little more than fragments of a disappeared world and the beautiful music of Rameau's "Les Indes Galantes" that tells us something of a meeting of civilizations that could have been, but never was.  

_____________________________________________________________________

Other versions of the Rondeau des Indes Galantes: 

This splendid version is by Les Arts Florissants with Magali Léger and Laurent Naouri. 

Another fabulous interpretation by Les Arts Flourissants

The one below will literally blow you away, although it was made by one of those bloodthirsty Russian barbarians. 

And just another powerful and heartfelt version with Sandrine Piau, Lisandro Abadie, again by les Arts Florissants

This is a sort of comic-book version. But consider it carefully: it is very pleasant and extremely well done. An early version by Les Arts Florissants

Here are the words, in French. Zima is the native princess and Adario is her lover. 

Zima, Adario en duo Forêt paisibles, Jamais un vain désir ne trouble ici nos coeurs. S'ils sont sensibles, Fortune, ce n'est pas au prix de tes faveurs. Choeur des sauvages Forêt paisibles, Jamais un vain désir ne trouble ici nos coeurs. S'ils sont sensibles, Fortune, ce n'est pas au prix de tes faveurs. Zima, Adario Dans nos retraites, Grandeur, ne viens jamais offrir de tes faux attraits ! Ciel, tu les as faites pour l'innoncence et pour la paix. Jouissons dans nos asiles, Jouissons des biens tranquilles ! Ah ! Peut-on être heureux, Quand on forme d'autres voeux ?

The Secret of Holobionts

 

"Braiding Sweetgrass" is a wonderful book, the kind that's best digested a few pages at a time. (h/t Erik Assadourian). In it, the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, happily moves back and forth from the uses of her Native American ancestors and her knowledge as biologist. She never uses the concept of "holobiont," but the book teems of holobionts on almost every page.

 

I am about halfway through it, and the book remains full of surprises. Here is what I read this morning, while drinking my coffee. It is about how the ancient Native Americans had found a way to optimize their plots of land by planting together three different seeds: corn, beans, and squash, poetically referred to as the "Three Sisters." Kimmerer goes on describing the details of exquisitely intricate ways in which these three species collaborate with each other, maximizing the supplying of nutrients to all three. She says.

 

"It’s tempting to imagine that these three are deliberate in working together, and perhaps they are. But the beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies."

 

And that's the true secret of holobionts.