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Dark Vanishings
Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930
Patrick Brantlinger
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Dark Vanishings
Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930
Patrick Brantlinger
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About This Book
Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history.Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction discourse was ironically applied to "the great white race" in various apocalyptic formulations. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the world, by the 1930s the stereotypic idea of "fatal impact" began to unravel, as did also various more general forms of race-based thinking and of social Darwinism.
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1. Introduction
Aboriginal Matters
“When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.” So writes Darwin in the section on “the extinction of races” in The Descent of Man (190). His account is one of many: from the late 1700s on, an enormous literature has been devoted to the “doom” of “primitive races” caused by “fatal impact” with white, Western civilization. While Dark Vanishings includes evidence about populations of indigenous peoples around the world and about the tragic histories of their decimations, its primary focus is on the assumptions and theories that arose to explain those decimations.
Extinction discourse is a specific branch of the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism — a “discursive formation,” to use Foucauldian terminology. Like Orientalism and other versions of racism, it does not respect the boundaries of disciplines or the cultural hierarchies of high and low; instead, it is found wherever and whenever Europeans and white Americans encountered indigenous peoples. A remarkable feature of extinction discourse is its uniformity across other ideological fault lines: whatever their disagreements, humanitarians, missionaries, scientists, government officials, explorers, colonists, soldiers, journalists, novelists, and poets were in basic agreement about the inevitable disappearance of some or all primitive races. This massive and rarely questioned consensus made extinction discourse extremely potent, working inexorably toward the very outcome it often opposed.
Understood and sometimes celebrated as necessary for social progress, the demise of “savagery” throughout the world also inspired mourning; in many versions, celebration and mourning are fused. The fusion expresses a sentimental racism, evident, for example, in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, characteristic of the literatures of the new and emerging nation-states in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and also of much writing about the South Pacific. In all these places, as well as in Latin America and some parts of Asia, the advent of Europeans meant steep declines in indigenous populations. One of the main causes for these declines was not mysterious: violence, warfare, genocide. The other main cause, disease, though just as evident, was somewhat mysterious, because its deadly operations were not yet well understood. In many accounts, a third cause took precedence over violence and disease. Often viewed as the main or even sole cause, this third factor was savage customs: nomadism, warfare, superstition, infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism. Savagery, in short, was frequently treated as self-extinguishing. The fantasy of auto-genocide or racial suicide is an extreme version of blaming the victim, which throughout the last three centuries has helped to rationalize or occlude the genocidal aspects of European conquest and colonization.
Any combination of savage customs could imply a temporal limit — the primitive past and passing versus the civilized present and future — beyond which those trapped in such customs could not progress. Natural historians and “race scientists” from Carl von Linnaeus and Georges Buffon through Darwin down to World War II hierarchized the races, with the white, European, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon race at the pinnacle of progress and civilization, and the “dark races” ranged beneath it in various degrees of inferiority. The temporal hierarchy or limit — assigning primitive races to a futureless past — reinforced the vertical, spatial hierarchy. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian writes of the “denial of coevalness” to those identified as primitive or savage.1 The term “Stone Age” applied to modern Australians or Bushmen is an obvious example: the illusion that certain peoples, races, or cultures are unable to speak the present and future tenses of history is implicit in the words primitive and savage, which mean archaic, belated, even dead to the present or the modern.
Shadowing the romantic stereotype of the Noble Savage is its ghostly twin, the self-exterminating savage. It is no exaggeration to include this Gothic stereotype among the causes — and not just effects — of the global decimation of many indigenous peoples.2 The belief that savagery was vanishing of its own accord from the world of progress and light mitigated guilt and sometimes excused or even encouraged violence toward those deemed savage. Even when savagery was not identified as causing its own extinction, it was frequently held that some races could not be civilized and were thus doomed to fall by the wayside no matter what customs they practiced. And “doomed,” of course, means inevitable: no amount of humanitarian sentiment or scientific expertise, even when supported by the correct political will, could come to the rescue. The most ardent humanitarianism — that of the British Aborigines Protection Society, for example — could speak only of preventing future violence and of saving by civilizing the sad remnants of the dying races.
The pervasive concept of race reinforced assumptions of biological necessity while lending a supposedly scientific legitimacy to Western ideas about non-Western peoples. Race also homogenized the great diversity of peoples — into the uncivilized stages of savagery and barbarism but also into the stereotypic molds of separate, radically unequal types of mankind.3 Thus, for example, the Incas and the Iroquois, the Hopis and the Kwakiutls constituted one “red race” with one ultimate destiny. Through its unifications of widely divergent cultures and societies, racial theory and its subset, extinction discourse, downplayed or ignored the possibility that there might be many degrees, levels, or types of progress toward (or degeneration away from) civilization — or, more radically yet, that there were diverse cultures and civilizations pursuing different but equally legitimate histories.
In art, literature, journalism, science, and governmental rhetoric, extinction discourse often takes the form of proleptic elegy, sentimentally or mournfully expressing, even in its most humane versions, the confidence of self-fulfilling prophecy, according to which new, white colonies and nations arise as savagery and wilderness recede. Proleptic elegy is thus simultaneously funereal and epic’s corollary — like epic, a nation-founding genre. Thus, in the American context, several of Philip Freneau’s poems from the 1780s illustrate the general pattern. According to the last lines of “The Indian Burial Ground” (1788), with the Indian “hunter” now a “shade,”
long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.
(356)
And Freneau’s “The Dying Indian: Tomo-Chequi” (1784) is a good example of that staple of early American literature, the Indian death song:
I too must be a fleeting ghost! — no more —
None, none but shadows to those mansions go;
I leave my woods, I leave the Huron shore,
For emptier groves below!
(329)
In Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere, many other nineteenth-century writers adopted the form of the lament of the dying, often last aboriginal.4
Everywhere the future-perfect mode of proleptic elegy mourns the lost object before it is completely lost. The work of cultural, national mourning occurs not because the aboriginals are already extinct but because they will sooner or later become extinct. If, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the identities of both individuals and nation-states are founded on lacks, then the nation-founding discourse of proleptic elegy is founded on the lack of a lack or, in other words, on a wished-for lack that is instead an all-too-real obstacle to identification.5 Rather than absences, primitive races such as the Australian “black-fellows” were and remain presences disturbing the process of national unification and identification.
Whatever else it may have been, extinction discourse was performative in the sense that it acted on the world as well as described it. Thus, for instance, in the United States it served as the ideological basis for the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and, more generally, for official “Indian policy” down to World War II. On the other side of the planet, it underwrote the intense scientific scrutiny of the final Tasmanians and the distressing but convenient myth of their total extinction by 1876. It spurred home governments, responsive to the opinion that a stronger imperial and military presence would protect indigenous peoples, to support colonizing projects, as in New Zealand and South Africa, they might otherwise have opposed. It inspired missionary efforts to save at least the souls of the last members of perishing races. From the 1860s on, it lent support to social Darwinism and its offshoot, the eugenics movement. Extinction discourse has been a mainstay of the literature, art, advertising, and cinema of the new nations spawned by European imperialism from the eighteenth century on. And it has served as a primary motivation for the funereal but very modern science of anthropology in its attempt to learn as much as possible about primitive societies and cultures before they vanish forever.
From the start, anthropology has been a science of mourning. Its “disappearing object is,” writes James Clifford, “a rhetorical construct legitimating a representational practice: ‘salvage’ ethnography …. The other is lost, in disintegrating time and space, but saved in the text” (“Allegory,” 112). In other words, this is a salvation in the words and museums of Western science, not in deed. “The modern anthropologist,” Clifford declares, “lamenting the passing of human diversity, collects and values its survivals” — and, for survivals, one might as well substitute ghosts (Predicament, 244). So, too, writing of the “imperialist nostalgia” that informs anthropology as well as much recent popular culture, Renato Rosaldo characterizes his science as “mourning for what one has destroyed” (69). Although such “nostalgia” or “mourning” is frequently an ideological ruse, assuaging guilt for the destruction wrought by empire and its driving force — capitalist, industrial modernization — Rosaldo points out that “anthropologists have often used the notion of the ‘vanishing savage’ to criticize the destructive intrusions of imperialism” (82).6
The main focus of Dark Vanishings is on sites within the British Empire and North America, but extinction discourse has been influential in the contexts of other modern empires and nation-states. Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies (1552) shows that there were versions of the discourse — in his case, a humanitarian and religious one — long before the 1800s. But extinction discourse in British and North American contexts reached its crescendo between the early 1800s and World War I. Taking 1880 and 1939 as the starting and end points for his study of the Australian version of extinction discourse, Russell McGregor notes that “the former date marks not the beginnings of the doomed race theory but its consolidation, by the evolutionary science of the late nineteenth century.” However, World War II and the reaction against fascism and Nazism led to widespread questioning of race-based theories. By the 1940s, McGregor writes, “the inevitability of extinction” of the Australian aboriginals “was as much contested as conceded,” and the “doomed race theory was it-self heading toward extinction” (x–xii).
Between the early 1800s and the 1930s the belief that most or all primitive races were doomed, rarely contested even by would-be saviors of indigenous peoples, became a mantra for the advocates of British imperial expansion and American manifest destiny. It is, for instance, virtually an axiom in The Colonies of England (1849), by the parliamentary radical J. A. Roebuck:
I say, that for the mass, the sum of human enjoyment to be derived from this globe which God has given to us, it is requisite for us to pass over the original tribes that we find existing in the separate lands which we colonize…. When the European comes in contact with any other type of man, that other type disappears…. Let us not shade our eyes, and pretend not to see this result. (138)
It is also a key theme in more conservative paeans to “Anglo-Saxondom” and the British Empire, including Charles Wentworth Dilke’s Greater Britain (1868) and James Anthony Froude’s Oceana (1886). For Dilke, a necessary result of “the grandeur of our race” and the salutary spread of “Saxondom” around the globe is the disappearance of the Australian, Tasmanian, New Zealand, and North American aboriginals (1:vii–viii). In Canada and the United States “the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive” (1:125). In New Zealand, the Maori “numbered 200,000” in 1840, but “they number 20,000” thirty years later (1:126).7 Because of their faculty for imitation, Africans fare better than the “conservative” and rigid “American savage” (1:128); it is more difficult for Dilke to explain the vanishing of the Maori, both because he believes them to be more flexible than “the Red Indians” and because, in his view, they have not been subjected to genocide as have the Tasmanian and Australian aboriginals.
For his part, Froude contemplates with apparent equanimity a future in which the entire planet has been tamed and Anglo-Saxonized:
It is with the wild races of human beings as with wild animals, and birds, and trees, and plants. Those only will survive who can domesticate themselves into servants of the modem forms of social development. The lion and the leopard, the eagle and the hawk, every creature of earth or air, which is wildly free, dies off or disappears; the sheep, the ox, the horse, the ass accepts his bondage and thrives and multiplies. So it is with man. The negro submits to the conditions, becomes useful, and rises to a higher level. The Red Indian and the Maori pine away as in a cage, sink first into apathy and moral degradation, and then vanish. (300)
Froude expresses an astounding faith in “social development” or progress, according to which slavery improves “the negro.” What cannot be tamed will have to “vanish.” The telos of “social development” is the total subjugation of nature, entailing the disappearance of wilderness and all wild creatures, including “wildly free” human beings.
Partly by refusing to elegize the vanishing tribes and wilderness, the colonial surveys by Roebuck, Froude, and Dilke sing the praises of the all-conquering Anglo-Saxon race in epic mode. In 1872 the Reverend John George Wood published a different sort of survey, his “comprehensive” Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World. Perhaps more reliably than works that aim to be original, popular surveys like Wood’s express widely held assumptions and beliefs about race, culture, and progress.8 In any event, Wood expresses an elegiac urgency about his project, one shared by many other experts and observers: because “the uncivilized races” are rapidly disappearing, ethnology becomes a salvage enterprise, just as Clifford declares it to be, aiming to record as much information as possible about doomed peoples and cultures. “For many reasons we cannot but regret that entire races of men,” writes Wood, “possessing many fine qualities, should be thus passing away; but it is impossible not to perceive that they are but following the order of the world, the lower race preparing a home for the higher” (790). Here nature itself (“the order of the world,” whether divine or Darwinian) has ordained a course of events whereby the blameless progress of civilization can occur only through the vanishing of “the lower race.”
Like Froude and countless others, Wood compares “savages” to wild animals. About the Australian aboriginals, Wood says “they occupied precisely the same relative position toward the human race as do the lion, tiger, and leopard toward the lower animals, and suffered in consequence from the same law of extincti...