Native Americans Were Clean People

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about how pre-contact Native American cities were clean, which corresponds to chapter 1 of my book.

When they came to North America, Europeans thought of themselves as the clean, bright representatives of godly society. But the facts do not bear this up.

European cities were mired in sewage, which flowed freely in the streets. Europeans threw their garbage into the street, and let free-roaming pigs process it. Meanwhile, Native American cities (some of them, like Cahokia, quite large) were clean. If they were dirty, they would have bred diseases, of which there is no evidence.

There is eyewitness evidence that Native American cities were clean. William Bartram, a botanist, visited Cherokee territory about 1776. He observed the Cherokee green corn festival. (Green corn is what we usually call sweet corn, eaten without being dried and ground.) The Cherokees would sweep any garbage out of the streets, then burn all their old possessions (which might have had fleas in them). Then they would all run to the river to bathe. These were clean people, unlike the Europeans who conquered them.

When Europeans captured Natives and took them to display to kings and queens, the Natives had to endure weeks in filthy European ships. The first thing they did when the ship docked in Europe was to run to the nearest river to take a bath.

The “dirty savage” image of Native Americans was wrong not only because they were not savages—they had cities and farms and trade networks—but they were also not dirty.