Book review: 1491

Some books provide you with exactly what you want to know, and have the added advantage of being factual.

I remember, growing up, that I was proud of my Cherokee Indian heritage. I read all the books I could read on the history of the Trail of Tears, and spent a good deal of time, like any other blonde kid, gnashing my teeth over the injustice of the white man. (Yep, that one-eighth bloodline goes a long way.)

In college, I knew an art student in the dorm who was also one-eighth Cherokee (like half the population of the United States). Hew was also proud of his indian lineage. "I take more pride in my Cherokee past than in my other heritage."

He was so proud as to make his own artwork and write his own protest poem about the Trail of Tears.

The poem was nothing memorabe. The artwork? Consisted of the angry, vengeful faces -- of three Apache.

Yes, his heritage was important to him, but he hadn't spent two minutes researching Cherokee, otherwise he would have known the men of the tribe wore turbans, not freakin' headbands.

Then came "Dancing with Wolves." Sheesh.

The thought has been forming in my head for a while about what the American Indian is today for most people: A shallow stereotype of a victim. A hippie with a bow, arrow, and magical powers to listen to what the earth is saying. ("White people are bad," says the earth. "Bad!")

And that image sucks. For starters, it's plain wrong. And secondly, it doesn't give American Indians their due as full participants in humanity.

If Indians are human, they will act as humans: Establish societies, make rules, exploit their environment, ponder the universe, etc.

And so I stumbled onto 1491 at the Hasting's in Stephenville.

It's a great book for amateur history buffs, written by a guy with no political aim other than to offer up what current research into early American history says. And it says some things completely different from what we learned growing up.

For one thing, the American Indian population wasn't a few roving bands with a few large tribes. It was more likely in the millions and on par with Europe.

What thinned their population is easily one of the greatest ecological disasters in history.

Some of the other revelations in the book hit close to home.

Doing a story about brush control in Abilene (wow), the guy I was interviewing noted that, before the area was settled by whites, the terrain was covered by grasslands. No mesquite, no brush in general.

I was curious enough to ask why, and was told that the plants migrated in from south Texas with cattle.

I didn't think to ask the next logical question. Why didn't it migrate in before with the buffalo? Deer? Bunnies on fire?

The answer is that Indians really liked to burn land. This kept the trees and brush back and the grass thick. This in turn kept the grass-eating animals they liked to hunt well-fed.

This type of cultivation wasn't done on a small scale either: think in terms of the entire Texas hill country. Or the entire U.S. great plains.

And I'll stop with the details there.

It's a good read, and pretty much a must for anyone who takes his American history seriously.