The Thinking, Walking Biped, part two. Joe Amato on foot

As explained in the previous essay, walking has been perhaps the single most important evolutionary innovation for the human body and the human mind. Is it too much to attribute the evolution of human intelligence to walking? In the essays that follow, I will describe and analyze numerous examples of people who, throughout human history, have done their best work and their best thinking while walking on foot, even when other means of transportation were available. And sometimes not.

As the late Joe Amato explains in his book On Foot, for most of human history walking has been the only available, or reasonably available, option for going from one place to another. Until quite recently, roads between human towns—everywhere in the world—were scarcely better than trails, hardly suitable for wagons or even horses, unless conditions were perfect. As I explain in Forgotten Landscapes, Native Americans built a civilization on trails that connected cities and large villages. Amato makes it sound as if even the much-praised Roman roads were not too good for most of their length. It is a miserable story of humans trying and often failing to travel to new locations.

As soon as other conveyances became available, Amato explains, they instantly created a hierarchy—those who could ride a horse or in a carriage had higher status than miserable pedestrians, and so it remains even today. In America, if you are on foot, people in cars think something must be wrong with you. This attitude is not as prevalent in France, where I now live.

But even in modern warfare—that is, before the age of missiles and drones—most of the movement was on foot. Chevaliers rode on horses, some soldiers rode in tanks, but most of them have been and are infantrymen.

But also throughout history, people have chosen to walk, sometimes very long distances, on foot even when it makes no logical sense to do so. The immediate example everyone thinks of is pilgrimages. Pilgrims considered it sinful to do their pilgrimage some other way, although rich pilgrims often figured out a way to justify it.

When I first met Joe, he was walking. He was my colleague at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, where I worked until 1998. In 1993, he had just published a book about a pyramid scheme that took place right in Marshall. It involved getting farmers to plant Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), a kind of sunflower with a big starchy root. The roots could be used to produce biofuels. This is all very well, but the corporation that promoted it made all its profits off of getting farmers to sign up for it. Joe called his book The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. I was the new botanist at the university, and Joe wanted me to speak at the book launch.

I think Joe appreciated nature walks very much, but that is not what he was doing that day. He was walking around and around in the interconnected hallways of the university. In Minnesota, the winter wind on ice can blow you down. The university system decided to build Southwest State to be a campus where you could go anywhere without stepping outside. It was an intentional magnet for all the disabled students in the state university system. Joe wouldn’t let even major heart surgery stop him: he had just had major heart surgery when I met him. He lived another forty years. He was an offbeat genius and very amiable.

Connections? Real and Imagined

James Burke’s Connections  and its many spinoffs were very popular on British television and American educational channels a couple of decades ago. They were certainly entertaining and thought-provoking in the way they drew connections between events of past centuries and things that have happened in the modern world. The implication is of cause and effect. But is this an illusion?

 

To quote Wikipedia: “Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g., profit, curiosity, religion) with no concept of the final, modern result to which the actions of either them or their contemporaries would lead. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.”

To this point, Burke’s view can hardly be questioned. One cannot presume or even imagine that people in past centuries could predict the consequences of their discoveries.

Wikipedia continues, “To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.”

To me, the key point is seemingly unconnected. Many of the purported connections are not real—not just that there is no direct, but not even any indirect, connection. The purported connections were most likely neither functional nor phylogenetic. That is, they were not processes that worked the same way, nor was one descended from the other the way amphibians were the descendants of fish. It may just be a similarity of form that Burke noticed, and nobody else could see until Burke, with his inimitable style, reified them. I had the intuition, when I watched the series (which my intelligent daughter loved), that it was all imaginary. And perhaps, I now realize, I might have been right.

Burke’s contribution was in getting his viewers excited and to use their imaginations; to ask, “I wonder if…” But this is not the end of investigation; it is merely the beginning. Not less important for it, of course.

Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

How History Can Liberate Us

I read a most unusual book, Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian who is on the Cambridge faculty. It has been a widely-read book in the English speaking world. Many of the author’s assertions are not completely credible, but there was one insight that drew my attention right away. As an historian, the author naturally asked himself and his readers, of what value is history? Why study it, why write about it? Many of you have personal interests in history, perhaps because of where you live or your family history. This is why I write about Cherokee history. But why should anyone be interested in history in general, or other peoples’ histories?

Harari’s answer is simple and powerful. There are many problems of oppression and injustice in the world today. The only way to solve these problems is for us to re-imagine the future, a future in which we will have put these problems behind us. I live in France, and I can see Germany from my window. But not once have I had the slightest fear that a new crop of Nazis will coming marching or sailing over the Rhine. That was what happened eighty years ago, but Europe re-imagined its future, a future without aggression and war. It worked.

And the first step to re-imagining the future is to retell our history. Harari said on page 69, “Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”

And this is what I am doing in my book, now in press and due out in July 2025, Forgotten Landscapes. I will tell you a lot more about it as its publication draws closer.

One major problem in America, often overlooked, is the continued oppression of Native Americans. And one major reason for it is that American culture, in general, dismisses Native American tribes as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. This image makes Native American progress sound totally hopeless.

And this image emerges from an historical mythology. One of the dominant, foundational myths of American culture is that Europeans came across the Atlantic and found a continent that was sparsely inhabited by savage hunter-gatherers who hunted deer and gathered nuts and berries, running through the forest and leaving scarcely a footprint behind them. Europeans then took the land, pushing Natives out of the way, but in the end the land was better off for it, even for the Natives. God blessed the Europeans, and the Natives too, by the Manifest Destiny of the United States.

This version of American history is totally and verifiably wrong. Some books (for example, by Dee Brown and Angie Debo) have tried to correct this false image, mostly from the historical viewpoint. My book will also retell the story of Native American history, and tell it accurately, this time including scientific as well as historical information.

North America was not sparsely populated by Natives. It was densely populated. A civilization that was as highly developed as any in Europe or Asia had just collapsed when Columbus came, but the economy of that civilization lived on, in a network of large, healthy villages connected by strong trade networks. These large villages were healthier than the cities of Europe. European soldiers would not have been able to conquer America had it not been for their diseases, which wiped out ninety percent of the Native population. Europeans also conquered Africa and Asia. But today Asia is mostly Asian, and Africa mostly black, while America is mostly white. And the reason for this is epidemic diseases.

Nor were Natives hunter-gatherers who lived on in unaltered wilderness. Natives transformed the entire landscape by the controlled use of fire, burning whole forests and prairies. They controlled animal populations by hunting. They relied upon agriculture, including by means of irrigation and orchards.

I am not the first to write about this, but other books have been lost in the scholarly literature. They include Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart and America’s Ancient Forests by Thomas M. Bonnicksen. My book will be, as far as I am aware, the first time this story about Native transformation of the American landscape has been told for a popular audience.

I provide documentation for all of these things. In this book, I have retold Native American history and got it correct this time. This will be my contribution to a popular rethinking of Native Americans and their ongoing oppression today.

It is equally incorrect to depict Native Americans as having lived in perfect harmony with their environments, something about which numerous books have been published. Natives changed their environments and sometimes degraded them. But the myth of the eco-friendly tribesmen is not a dangerous myth, unlike the primitive-savage myth that dominates American thinking and keeps Native tribes in ongoing repression, poverty, and obscurity.

I hope that my book will have an impact similar to that of Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which revealed how, even in the twentieth century when most white Americans assumed the Indian Wars were over, members of the Osage tribe were murdered so that whites could get their oil rights. Although I cannot hope that Martin Scorsese will make a movie from my book.

Race and History, as if You Needed Another Example: Jackson Barnett, part one

If there is one thing that conservatives are proud of in America, it is that rich people can do whatever they want with their money, so long as it is not criminal, and then maybe even if it is. But this rule did not apply to people of color. In particular, Native Americans were regarded by the white governments (federal, state, and county levels) as being childishly imbecilic and unable to decide what to do with their own money.

When the federal government sent the Five Tribes (including my tribe, the Cherokees) to what became Indian Territory and later Oklahoma, they guaranteed by treaty that the land belonged to the tribes. For example, a large part of what is now northeastern Oklahoma belonged to the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokees, like the other Five Tribes, considered that they owned the land as a tribe, not as individual landowners. The white authorities did not like this. It was too communist. They decided they would force the Natives to become capitalists. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and later the Curtis Act of 1898, the Five Tribes were required to have their tribal land divided into individual allotments for each tribal citizen, including minors. This may not sound unreasonable in itself, but it was a solution in search of a problem. So why did the white federal government do it?

They did it for two reasons. First, when they divided up the land into allotments, of which my grandfather Edd Hicks got acreage in section 26N township 17E, the total acreage of the allotments did not add up to the tribal territory. That is, there was land left over—which the government could sell. Second, the government could then control what each tribal citizen did with their land. There were restrictions.

For Natives with one-sixteenth or less blood quantum, there were no restrictions. Edd was about one-quarter, but he registered as one-sixteenth so that he would have no restrictions. For Natives with one-half or more blood quantum, they were restricted from selling the allotment or anything pertaining to it, which would include mineral (oil) rights. Their allotments had to be managed by guardians, as if the Natives were children who did not know how to take care of themselves.

Guardianship, as you might expect, was considered necessary for minor orphans. They really did not know how to manage their land. Guardians were supposed to take care of the land until the orphans grew up, then let them have it. The guardians could charge a reasonable service fee for the work. The national average for guardianship was 3 percent of the value of the property. In Oklahoma, it was on the average of 20 percent and in some cases 80 percent. Meanwhile, the orphans in many cases received no money at all from the sale of oil from their land. The guardians who practiced this method were known as grafters, and in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century this was a term of pride. Sixty thousand Native minors in Oklahoma owned $129 million in property. Some of the guardians had 200 to 300 wards. Two Creek children had land that was worth $250,000. They lived—and died—in an orphanage that was mysteriously dynamited. Then the guardian handled their probate. Guess who got the money.

The crusading reformer Kate Barnard, who ran the Department of Corrections and Charities, and who was one of the few honest people in the Oklahoma government, found out about it during her routine inspection of the living conditions of orphans. She found some Creek Indian children living in a tree, drinking from a stream, and living on handouts. She vividly described having to take scissors and cut out matted filth from their hair. These kids were millionaires, but they didn’t know it because their guardian, who had sixty other wards, did not tell them. He just kept the oil money. Kate spent the last part of her life trying to bring the grafters to justice. While she had been popular for her crusades to improve conditions in orphanages and prisons, she met with hatred from Oklahoma and county governments when she tried to rescue the Native orphans from grafters. This broke her health and she died without having finished her work. You can read all about it in the wonderful new biography by Connie Cronley (A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard).

In other cases, oil executives hired people to kidnap the minors and take them someplace where no one would recognize them. It was not, as far as I have heard, violent kidnapping. According to Cronley’s book, one of the oil executives who did this was Thomas Gilcrease, best known as the benefactor of the museum that bears his name in Tulsa. It is hard to, even today, think of any name more revered in Tulsa even by progressives than that of Thomas Gilcrease. But he hired someone to take a rich Creek orphan to England and get him to sign his oil rights to Gilcrease. More about Gilcrease in a later essay.

But it was not long before the federal, state, and local governments figured out that all they had to do was declare adult Natives to be mentally incapacitated in order to appoint guardians for them, who would decide what to do with the land. This was fairly easy to do, since state and county officials all believed that all Natives, even adults who were successfully running their farms, were mentally incapacitated. If Edd, who was smart enough to be on school boards and could raise any crop and any kind of livestock, would have been deemed incompetent if his land had oil on it.

This is the plot of the 1949 movie Tulsa (“the lusty, brawling saga of a city of adventure”), starring Susan Hayward, Robert Preston, and Chill Wills. Jim Redbird, the rightful Muskogee owner of oil land, played by Pedro Armendáriz, was declared mentally incompetent by a judge. When he looked at the oil extraction and cracking on his land, for which he was receiving no money, and which spilled flammable pollution all over the ground, he touched a cigar to the hydrocarbons and burned up the oil rigs. This is one of the few early movies that shows Natives fighting back against white oppression. Perhaps oblivious to the fact that this movie was showing white Oklahomans engaging in criminal acts, Tulsans welcomed Hayward and Preston to their city and celebrated the opening of the movie. Tulsa grew as “the miracle city” directly because of the discovery of oil, and almost all of its early twentieth century philanthropists were oil men. To what extent the most famous of them might have profited from illegal acquisitions from the Muskogee Creek tribe, and to what extent the artistic culture of Tulsa is still dependent on that money (aside from Gilcrease), is something that few people, if anybody, knows anymore.

And this is exactly what happened to a Creek Native named Jackson Barnett. The reason this essay is on this blog is that racism has no scientific basis. See part two, to be posted soon.