Copyright 1997, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
The woman sings a little song. It rhythmically traces and re-traces the same words, spoken over and over, with small variations of tone and color. It is a good luck song and she hopes that it will do them well in their day's project. They are going to pick watercress and, possibly, gooseberries. But it may be too early for the berries.
When the hill is close enough that they can see its surface clearly, they turn away from the creekside and head directly toward it. They cross the first small hill and mount the second, larger one. From this height they can look back into the broad valley below them and follow the course of the creek by the willows and occasional alders growing alongside. At a point toward where the sun sets, the creek collides with a flat rise of land and snakes alongside of it. There, on the far side of the flat, is their home. It is a small number of thatched dome houses, gathered in a circle with some central towers standing on stilts, used to store acorns throughout the year.
Both turn and aim their path down in back of the ridge, where they snake their way through taller trees --- a few oaks, more alders, and now some sycamores. The young woman purposely avoids looking up into the oaks. To even think of checking the acorn crop, at this time of year, would be a very great mistake and, besides, these trees did not belong to her family anyway. They are headed down to the brook that runs through this small canyon; they could already hear its flow. As they draw near, they can see grass, ferns, and some wildflowers that have survived the summer because of their spot deep in the shade and irrigated by this brook.
She has spotted some very nice watercress lying on the inside banks of the brook, but she does not rush to select leaves. Instead, they sit down beside the brook and listen for a while. Eventually, she speaks. It is a prayer, spoken very earnestly, as though she is speaking it to the person next to her; but it is a prayer to the brook and to the plants that she will select. Her speech, somewhat long, asks their permission to be taken by her and thanks them for that permission and expresses her regret that this spot will never be quite the same again. It is her way, and it was her mother's way before her. And this brook has been a friend and a companion to them throughout. The young man helps her pick the watercress and also selects some large fern branches which he lays out on the ground. When they are finished, she lays the watercress out on the fern branches and rolls them up. The whole roll is swished through the cool brook water and then carefully placed in a carrying net that she has brought with them. It is a good net, made of yucca fibers that her father spun into thread by rolling them against his thigh.
Leaving the cool interior of the little canyon, the two prepare for a longer and more taxing hike up into the higher hills that form the first wall to the mountains themselves; for it is here that they will find the gooseberries if any have ripened yet. They move slowly toward an overhanging boulder of strange shape and considerable size. The young man sings a short hunting song, as they approach it, for this is the spirit of mountain lion, frozen in his tracks where he once tried to leap on Grandfather Coyote. A good relationship with this powerful place will do the young hunter well and he will grow as fortunate as old Coyote.
Overhead and a good distance toward where the sun sets, a condor is circling and gliding, with its huge black wings outstretched. The young man wishes that he could find just one of those feathers and give it to his father, who is the ritualist in the village group. His father has never had a condor feather, though they had seen them a long time back when they traveled very far to the ocean and passed an important celebration at the central place, puvunga. Not only would his father feel proud to possess such a thing, but it would have important power and perhaps protect all their family in the years to come.
Late in the day, the young man and woman return to their village, walking down the long sloping hillside and again past the little brook and, then, out over and across the chaparral. They have not found gooseberries this time, but they are not disappointed. It was just not the time; the berries will come. They watch rabbits dart across their path, ahead, and enjoy the golden color of the late-afternoon light against the sages. The woman has added a few stalks of Yerba Santa to her carrying net, slung over her shoulder; these will be used in a strong tea to cure her sore throat. She also has found some White Sage that she will dry. It will give her sleeping area a wonderful smell through the next weeks; but when it has dried completely, she and her mother will ignite it in the fire, place the smouldering leaves in a sacred abalone shell, and allow the smoke to penetrate the night while they dance to welcome the child growing now inside her. Her husband's father will officiate and the firelight will help their messages of welcome travel into the eternal heavens. It would be wonderful if a powerful condor feather can be found beforehand.
What is a world view? What I mean is the picture of the world that a person lives in, the description of the world that a person would give if questioned about it and, in that sense, the description of the world that a person would give his or her children to help guide their development. This sounds simple to us because we believe ourselves to inhabit just one physical world and we believe that it is the physical properties of that single world that determine everything. The scientific framework of Euro-American life has prepared us for this. Scientific objectivity demands that we all agree on a single world picture. Science describes "the real world." Unfortunately, this objective, scientific view of the physical world clouds our view of the subjective, personal world that each of us actually moves through in daily activity. That world is primarily a social world which is situated within a natural locality. That world is different for each of us, highly relativised by one's particular place in the whole of human habitation.
While the scientific world view encourages us to think of a single unified natural and physical universe, it closes our eyes to the incredible detail and diversity of our personal and collective histories and situations on earth. As important as the scientific point of view has become, it still remains far more important that every person and every society constructs a localized picture of its own world and adheres to it. It is mostly historians and anthropologists who witness these worlds, not physical scientists. Historians watch the changes in views of single cultures; while anthropologists compare the differences in views between cultures. Both have a keen awareness of the fact that world views change and differ, from time-to-time and from society-to-society.
The importance of a world view lies in its role as the framework of our lives; we live in relation to the way we think the world requires. We are "worldly creatures." Sigmund Freud captured this idea in his psychoanalytic theory of human development by asserting that the human ego develops according to a Reality Principle. That is, we find our sense of identity by finding a boundary line between "I" and "World;" and that is what we call reality. Whether we are taking what we believe belongs to us or rebelling against forces that threaten us or preparing the way for later actions, we are always responding to the world as we see and imagine it. It is a world that includes many facets --- geography, animals, plants, tribes, races, spirits, etc. It is a world that is tied together by physical and social relationships and expectations. It will respond to our actions in specific ways according to its rules and regularities. Hence, we must act accordingly with wisdom about this world, if we are going to live harmoniously within it.
A world view is both personal and social. Every individual creates his or her personal world view through experience and personal growth. But the social relations of people within a community drive personal world views together into a common, collective form; it is only in this way that the community can provide a stable basis for individual behavior. Consequently, one of the most important tasks of parenting is always the task of interpreting the collective world view and communicating it to the children. Society is rejuvenated through the child's development, always expressing a tension between the formation of individuality and conformation to the community.
Reckoning with world views is the most crucial step in all ethnography, ethnohistory, and ethnology. We cannot understand another culture unless we understand their world view; and in order to achieve this, we must free ourselves from our own habitual, culturally conditioned world-view judgments. Indigenous people are not "primitives;" they are "the other," those people of the world who act astonishingly different from us because, in fact, they are acting in quite different worlds from us.
Since all people live within their own world views, the only meaningful question is how they fashion their lives within their worlds. The human adventure is one of creating life-within-world; it is the quality of this relationship that matters. It is pointless to say that a global and technologically saturated world is better (more "civilized" or more "advanced") than a localized and technologically simple world unless we can actually point to significant ways in which the relative quality of life is superior in the former. In attempting this comparison, indeed, we must avoid the impulse to praise individual objects of technology without evaluating the whole context of life. At issue is the quality of life as a whole and not, for example, the wonders of possessing cellular telephones. The problem is that we rashly assume the superiority of the quality of life in our own communities without really understanding what life might be like in other communities. A true comparison requires genuine knowledge of both cultures being compared and especially as life lived in relation to the whole, not just in relation to particular objects. The purpose of this study is to provide a first step in understanding the indigenous world and, hence, the quality of life enjoyed by Native Californians.
Unfortunately, we have no real access to indigenous people speaking to us prior to the "historical period," that is, before the presence of European conquerors and immigrant settlers had substantially and permanently altered their world. Needless to say, as the physical world inhabited by these people changed, their world views changed too. Much of the material that we are able to access comes from diaries, reflections, letters, and speeches, written by indigenous people within this historical framework, most of which naturally took on the form of "opposition" to Europeans, their culture, and the deterioration of the indigenous physical environment. When we read these materials of opposition and resistance, we can only infer facts about the indigenous person's prehistoric world view, though these observations are largely sustained by the ethnographic researches of the last century.
The world view of indigenous Californians was distinguished by at least six characteristics that I shall discuss in detail here. I will identify these characteristics through the adjectives: local, natural, ancestral, spiritual, tolerant, and cooperative. Each of these characteristics presents a significant area of divergence from the prevailing world views of the Europeans and their American offspring of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The weight of differences explains, in large measure, the complete impossibility of Europeans or Americans understanding indigenous people or vice versa; nor was either capable of behaving appropriately in the other's world. In the table, therefore, I have also included names of characteristics that seem most opposite, or contrasting, in relation to each.
Six Characteristics of Native American World Views
| Characteristic | Amplification | European Contrast |
| Local | Life is centered around a locality which may be quite small. It may include only one's own village and one or two others. One may never know more than twenty to one hundred people. | Global |
| Natural | The world is abundantly populated with plants and animals and is dominated by natural features and natural processes. Humans are in balance with this world and only a modest part of it. Indeed, humans accept other animals as equals in the natural realm. | Human Built |
| Ancestral | Life is a pathway along which the People are gathered from the deep past, through the present, and into the future. | Existential |
| Spiritual | The world is activated by spirit power and, since everything in the world is active, everything shares in this power. Human life can only be regulated and protected by understanding spirit power. | Materialistic |
| Tolerant | Individuality and eccentricity are tolerated. Every individual person makes his/her own way along the pathway of the People. The essence of life is in finding one's correct way and no one can tell us what that is. | Conformist |
| Cooperative | Human society is inherently a cooperative extended family. One can be at home in the world only by becoming a cooperative member of this family. | Competitive |
The Locality
The first distinctive feature of all indigenous world views is the way the physical dimension of their world is limited to a locality. This locality was not only well defined for an individual, but it was almost always the traditional locality of that person's ancestors. While some individuals journeyed distances elsewhere, usually for specific reasons of trading or collecting rare resources, the majority of people lived lives that were contentedly woven into the fabric of the traditional locality. They saw no need to pass beyond the boundaries of their world as it was. Its dimensions depended only on factors such as sustaining resources, the occurrence of natural barriers or landmarks, and the mythic traditions that established home and place, not on personal whim. Mythic materials reinforced the locality in its position as permanent home for the people; and while they lacked any European sense of ownership, their sense of home was very strong.
One consequence of strong localization is the fact that most indigenous people never experienced the gathering of large numbers of their own kind. On a day-to-day basis, most people knew only their village, and most villages were quite small, perhaps 15-25, though exceptional villages numbering into the hundreds occasionally grew up, where resources allowed. Only in unusual situations, when tribal gatherings or great celebrations occurred, did indigenous people experience anything like a crowd. Euro-American population density became overwhelming to Indians. In California, the population was approximately 300,000 in 1769, though it dropped substantially by 1848. In the next twenty years, while Indian population fell to less than 30,000, the Euro-American population rose to over 700,000. By the turn of the century, there were even more.
Needless to say, Europeans who had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to establish homesteads in the New World were no longer living under a world view that was local. Explorations of the global world, beginning in the 15th Century, had, by the 18th Century, established mobility as the corresponding attribute of the European world view. This tendency toward mobility was enormously enhanced by the growing concept of the frontier, in America, and it became thoroughly entrenched in the American world view as settlers made their way westward across North America.
To the Euro-American mind of the 19th and 20th Centuries, the localism of indigenous people merely reflected the primitive level of their transportation technology. However, we should not impulsively believe that technology determines world view, for the opposite case can be made. Change in technology often, if not usually, comes as a response to changing our world views, with the consequent impact on values and goals. Technology is how we set to work to achieve something that we have newly conceived as a value to us. So while one could try to argue, for instance, that the Southern Yokuts defined their world in terms of the locality of the lower San Joaquin Valley because they lacked the technology of, e.g., horsemanship, one could equally argue that the Yokuts did not seek to modify their state of technology by advancing new means of transportation since they saw no value in extending their world or gaining more access to travel.
The world view that American culture of the 1990s has reached is global and it is the result of a process of social development that began in Europe long ago. Yet, even through the centuries of seamanship and exploration, the European's world view did not change as profoundly as it did beginning in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, with the Industrial Revolution and its corresponding appeal to movement off of the land and into urban centers. To reach globalism, Europeans had to defeat localism and everything that went with it. Europeans who reached North America in the 18th and 19th Centuries were already mobilized and had come to think of their world as an expanse of territories filled with economic opportunity. The image of the world community that we find today in the United Nations, in "police actions," and in "global corporations," is the latest facet of our mobilized world view.
Globalism presents a stark contrast to the localism of most indigenous people. For the Yurok people of California's northwestern coast, for instance, the name for the Klamath River literally meant "the river that runs through the middle of the world;" the river was central to everything in their lives. Globalism inherently presents the possibility of movement and emigration that was largely unknown, and uninteresting, to indigenous people of North America. We can hear this indifference to movement in Nancy Wood's poetic version of the wisdom of Taos Pueblo elders reflecting on what is wrong with white people.
"There are no dark times.
There are only people with
sawdust in their eyes.
No wonder they look at
the great rolling land and see
only doors and windows.
No wonder they look at
the tall mountains and see
only a way to make them tame.
No wonder they look at
the endless sky and see
only a journey to the moon.
.....
Do you know what is wrong with white people?
They have no roots.
They are always trying to plant themselves and yet
They blow away in the wind because
They are born with wheels."
(Wood, 1974; 60-61)
The white man was astonishing to the Indian because he truly came from outside of the Indian's view of reality. And how was this apparent? By the way the white man behaved. Behavior is, if not determined by, at least consistent with a society's world view. As a result of the centuries of exploration, European minds were filled with tales of exotic places and exotic peoples, and the expanded physical world invited bolder attempts at mobility. Conquest and colonization were natural consequences of a European world view that conceived of an expanding physical world awaiting their stewardship.
The Natural World
The second characteristic feature in the world view of indigenous people is undoubtedly the way that it encompassed and embraced nature. In fact, there was no real distinction between human and natural. Humans, other animals, and plants were all more-or-less co-equal residents of the world. The overall system was a complex balance of dynamic factors; indigenous people were well aware of the fact that this balance of inhabitants was fragile. Just as population centers rarely expanded beyond the dimensions of small villages, human works rarely expanded beyond the modest needs of those villages. All in all, indigenous people kept a low profile in the natural world so it was easy to understand that world as a sphere of activity in which many plants and animals participated and, in particular, in which humans were only one factor. Plants and other animals proliferated; any human individual had more contact with them than with other humans, except for immediate family members. Indigenous people accepted other animals as equals within this natural world and this is reflected in all of their narratives. Creation myths of Californians frequently involved prior creation of animals and the existence of intelligent animals as "the first people" who set the way for later, contemporary people, or withdrew into their current forms upon the arrival of the present people.
While agriculture and animal husbandry had developed in many parts of the world by the 18th Century, including the New World, Native Californians remained almost entirely dependent on the natural abundance of their diverse ecological niches for their survival. Rather than changing this natural world, they developed an intimate and detailed knowledge of it. Hence, the essential educational mission in raising children was passing on the extensive knowledge of plants and animals required to survive in their locality. The native viewed this world as home in the deepest sense --- that is, not merely the place where they lived but the place where everything lived. No presumption of human superiority was made; the presumption was one of co-dependence and essential equality. Clearly, Native Americans understood their need to utilize plants and animals for their own survival and well being; but they took plants and animals for their use with sensitivity. They were, after all, destroying other living parts of the natural realm; and these parts were owed respect, perhaps even apology. Plants and animals "allowed" themselves to be used as part of the natural balance and overall processes of life.
The relationship to land was an especially important part of this naturalism. All of life exists on-the-land; life on-the-land is co-equal and balanced. If the dome of sky which embraces all symbolized the Great Spirit, or father of all, surely the earth which brings everything forth symbolized the mother of all. Nothing in this realm belonged to anyone, or anything, more than to anyone else. The concept of owning land, or of laying claim to land, was inappropriate and unknown. Equally well, the concept of "resource" was foreign to indigenous people. Nothing stands present simply as an object to be exploited; if something is used, it is used within an overall scheme of balance and cooperation.
Perhaps nothing stood the Anglo-European and the indigenous person further apart than these concepts of land and exploitable resources. The Anglo-European of the late Eighteenth Century was proceeding beyond feudalism and toward capitalism and, within this transformation of world view and world-organization, there was a radically different conception of land. Land could be owned, divided into parcels, surveyed, recorded in clerk's offices, bought, sold, and possessed. It was a natural part of European vision to declare ownership of the "New World" in the name of conquerors and kings; and that simple act prepared the land for the inevitable unfolding of parcels, records, and sales. The indigenous people of this world had no conception of what Europeans meant and, as the two peoples came together, this difference in world view caused endless misunderstandings and tragedies.
Moreover, Anglo-European immigrants had thousands of years of agriculture and animal husbandry behind them, and they quickly went to work importing their domestic animals and domestic plants. To most of them, the natural world was a threat to industry rather than an abundant provider. It had to be pushed back and tamed. The Europeans carried their world along with them wherever they went; this included seeds, livestock, tools, and home furnishings. Forests had to be cleared; land had to be plowed; and fences had to be built. In short, the European attitude was to build their own world and ignore the natural one. Far from being a home, for the Euro-American, the natural world was a hostile force. At best this world was a storehouse of natural resources --- potential fields of crops, timber, and mineral reserves --- and at worst it was a threat to life and limb.
The Path of Life
The third feature of the indigenous person's world view was it's focus on the continual generation of humankind as viewed through a timeless extended family. Life is a great pathway along which the people are gathered from the deep past, through the present, and into the future. There is a perceived unity between ancestors, living people, and those who will come in the future. Not only are natives held to the wisdom of their own living elders but they are all bound by some sense of duty to the path of their people, past and future. Each individual feels a part of a great movement, and behavior must be consistent with that movement. The same pathway is true for the individual as it is for the people.
Without any written language, all knowledge was vested in oral communication. Development of individual intelligence and survival of culture were completely dependent on giving attention to older members of society. Thus, age, knowledge, and wisdom, were connected without question. Young boys learned practical knowledge of the natural world by accompanying older men on hunts; young girls learned practical knowledge by accompanying older women in gathering and other household practices. Everyone joined in when stories were told by elders. Some of the young were taken aside and led into an extensive lifelong "curriculum" in which they mastered the crucial stories, tribal histories, and moral lessons of the culture. Whenever the society was presented with perplexing decisions, the need for assembling the elders was clear; and while the authority of elders to make decisions for the group varied from society-to-society, their wisdom and the importance of hearing them was rarely doubted.
In contrast to this central position of generation, the tension within Christian societies is focused on the fate of the existential individual. The central Christian concepts of sin and salvation are lived out as individuals and the authority of judgment is on a single non-human deity. If there is a human pathway in the Christian world, it is best characterized in Dante's Divine Comedy, a tangled path of individual trial leading up to a desperate division of the way, marked by a wretched junk heap of damned souls on one side and a heavenly realm of grace on the other. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the expansion of Capitalism and developments of the Industrial Revolution drew increasing numbers of Europeans away from their extended families and created the new model of the nuclear family --- parents and their children set adrift from both past and future. In its urbanization, the nuclear family even lost its stabilizing tie to the land and relocated its survival within an individual's ability to sell his labor, in the new industrial economic system.
European individualists characterized Native views and beliefs as "ancestor worship." Europeans failed to understand the richness of social relationships and the depth of contextuality provided by these ideas. In return, Native Americans saw Europeans as rash, reckless, and lonely characters, who wasted everything and never provided for the future.
Spirit Power
The fourth feature of the indigenous person's world was its spiritual dimension. Native Californians understood their world as thoroughly populated by spirits. Everything in the world was animated by spirit power. In fact, virtually nothing was unaffected by spirit power; and since power was understood as descending from the creation of the world, it was always seen as weaker in one's contemporary timeframe.
It was assumed that spirits could come-and-go in the forms of men or animals, as they pleased. One should always be cautious in approaching an animal, especially certain kinds, like bears, that frequently carried powerful spirits. It was assumed that some people had greater spiritual power than others; and a person who experienced great power, if he or she accepted this calling, could do many things to enhance and develop it. These people, called shamans, were crucial to a community's well being, protecting the community in various ways and healing individuals when illness struck.
This spiritual dimension of the native's world was by no means a trivial fancy; it provided a rich set of concepts that invested native knowledge of their world with cause-and-effect explanations. These explanations could be developed and elaborated indefinitely, but their real importance was in directing activities constructively toward the positive achievement of goals. The sense of spirituality bound an otherwise confusing and incomprehensible world together into a close set of relationships that were intelligible and that could be manipulated. Granted, manipulation was not always successful, but that was actually less of a problem than the absence of any conceptual system would have been. One may note here that it has only been within the last two centuries that Europeans have attempted life in a nihilistic world view that completely denied the spiritual dimension and that the resulting "existential crisis" has evidenced largely negative changes in European culture. It is not clear that humans can live well without a spiritual dimension, even though modern European skepticism and cynicism have substantially undercut that dimension, today.
In sharp contrast to this spiritual dimension of the indigenous world, the world view of Europeans was predominantly materialistic. I do not mean by this quite the same thing as "acquisitive materialism" which comes from affluence and over indulgence; I mean that, even for Christians, the spiritual realm was profoundly limited to a Christian god and heavenly host. For the European immigrant to the New World, physical things were objectively material and were never considered spiritual or animated. Hence, nothing in their path required reverence, and the European foresaw no particular repercussions from plowing a field or cutting down a tree. Indeed, de-animating the world was a crucial passage in the European's long development toward fashioning a global, Capitalistic world in which humans shape and exploit their environment. This apparently reckless treatment of the world was never understood by Native Americans.
Toleration Yet another characteristic of the indigenous person's world that stands out enough to be emphasized is a high level of toleration of individualism. While one is always part of the great path of the people, one must also find one's own and very personal way along that path. No one can define another's path; it is up to that person to discover it. This begins with Native American traditions of initiation but it does not end there. In a drugged state, or under extreme stress of exposure, one may be lucky enough to discover an animal guide, and this guide will aid one throughout life to find his or her path. Whether or not a guide has been identified, however, the indigenous person uses prayer, meditation, and other means to determine his or her own particular way.
It may seem ironic and almost self-contradictory to claim a respect for individualism in communities that were so thoroughly integrated, but it is a feature of their world that is not far below the surface. In marked contrast, while we pride ourselves on individualism, it takes little effort to discover extremely powerful bonds of conformity below the surface in Euro-American life. We tend to assume that there are well known patterns of "the good life," and that one must follow rules and norms to achieve these. Euro-Americans are not inclined toward inwardly searching meditation, and Christian prayer tends to request gifts of guidance, or revelations, rather than opening oneself to the inner work of transformation or enlightenment.
Perhaps it was the necessity of self-reliance that made this respect for individualism necessary. The Native American stood out in the world as an individual, saw far fewer people in that world than we do, and survived by-and-large through his or her own acquisition of knowledge and skill as well as adaptation to the environment. Briefly put, there was no "safety net" in this world --- no paramedic van or dialable 911 facility. Were we in this position, we would feel exposed and vulnerable. For the native world view, it was the norm; hence, the native felt at home, even comfortable, with occasional periods of complete isolation. Strength like that had to come from within by individual acquisition, and that meant that aspects of individuality would have to be tolerated, in fact, admired. Promotion of this kind of individualism was necessary for survival.
Without doubt, the western frontier engendered all kinds of individualism among European and American immigrants. But the character of this phenomenon seems completely different; it was more like the fraying of a culture's fabric along its outermost edges. These individuals were looked upon as eccentrics and outlaws, rarely as heros. The ultimate destiny of western towns was to be cleaned up by respectable, cultured people, bringing morality, law, and order, and a respectable vision of how civilized people should live.
Cooperative Society Finally, but by no means least in importance, the indigenous person's social world was cooperative. It was a world in which sharing and cooperation were automatic and reliably counted upon. One's whole village was like an extended family; in many cases it actually was an extended family.
This did not mean that an individual in native society could fail to become self-reliant. Far from it, the community depended upon each member's knowledge, skills, and self-reliance so that their cooperative activity could promote the common good. The community's survival depended on their collective skills, cooperative efforts, and equitable sharing. Children not only learned these skills by following along and imitating, but they also learned important lessons about sharing the products of their efforts. Many people had strict rules about the consumption of game; for instance, the hunter himself might be prohibited from eating an animal that he had killed. In this way, it assured that killing was for the good of the community and not to be taken lightly. In regions with scarce resources, native communities were often bound together in customs and rituals of great complexity that guaranteed timely and cooperative harvesting as well as adequate re-distribution of foods and resources within communities. But this was no mere system of rules; rather, it was a natural tendency in the way their social worlds were constructed and always continued to exist.
Europeans were often surprised by the Indians' immediate sense of hospitality. Welcomes were extended; food was brought forward in quantity; and help was enlisted for any projects. Euro-American visitors drew different reactions only later, after substantial abuse of Indian hospitality. In sharp contrast to the cooperative world of indigenous people, Euro-Americans have long lived in very competitive societies. Our own skill-development is fashioned and used in competition. And, if competition means that another person will go hungry, then we are persuaded to accept that as a normal consequence of their lesser abilities or poorer fortune and we even justify it as "deserved" in some sense. Puritans clearly connected their individual productivity and prosperity with the divine mysteries of grace.
Having spoken of home in other parts of this discussion, it seems appropriate to observe that the cooperative system tends to reinforce a sense of home in the local world of the indigenous people; while the American of today lacks a sense of being-at-home, in a world of competition where one always feels under attack by comparison with the skills and ambitions of others. If one can't do the very best job, by some standard, then one should get out and let someone else take one's place! Perhaps more than any other factor, this emphasis on competition separates today's American urban dweller from our own agrarian, rural ancestors who, more like Native Americans, were both enormously self-reliant and, at the same time, inherently cooperative and mutually supportive.
In concluding, one can only observe that Native Americans and Europeans could not have possessed more diametrically opposite world views and resulting systems of rational behavior. Indeed, what seemed rational to one often seemed insane to the other. In many instances, they simply never allowed themselves enough experience with the other to come to any understanding or accommodation. For the European, who was already used to making way for his own conception of a humanly designed, civilized world, the Native Americans were often just another feature of a natural world that was raw formed, hostile, and in need of development or elimination. The more morally conscious Anglo-Europeans were ready to offer Natives a try at the rudiments of civilization --- new clothing, new religious beliefs, and new survival tools --- but even their patience was limited and they were too inept at understanding the enormity of clashing points of view to understand why their Native pupils were so remarkably unable to make the transformation within the brief periods usually allowed.
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