Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

It may seem uncharitable in me to oppose and condemn missionary enterprises in savage communities; but I do so under the full conviction that as usually conducted they fail, and are bound to fail, in the most excellent aim they have in view. To succeed, they should be combined with a broad secular education, with a full recognition of the real impulses of modern life, and an effort to inculcate sound principles rather than respect for ceremonies and dogmas, about which the Christian sects themselves are never in unison. The native religious and moral codes should be studied, and all that is good in them—generally there is a great deal of good—should be retained; right actions should be based on respect for law, on the inherent sense of justice, on natural affection, and not merely on ecclesiastical edicts. Above all, independence of thought should be encouraged, the principles of religious and political freedom should be held up as superior to those of subjection, and the convert should be instructed that attachment to any particular creed is in no wise requisite to enjoy the best results of civilization.

It may be objected that doctrines such as these would leave the missionary as such little to teach. I reply that these doctrines are true, and are those necessary to the reception of civilization, and if they are omitted or obscured, the missionary is not an apostle of light, but of darkness, and that his efforts will prove unsuccessful in the future, as they have in the past.

The consideration of this problem of civilization leads us to cast a glance at the future and to ponder on

The Destiny of Races.

We are well aware that many a family, many a tribe, many a linguistic stock, has perished off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of its existence. Of others we know but the “naked nominations.” May not whole races have followed the same fatal course? Nay, more, may not some of the existing races be likewise doomed, as the mature tree, to fall and disappear?

It was the opinion of the learned Broca that certain osseous remains in Europe point to a race once there entirely unlike any other, modern or ancient.[203] The gloomy precedent is established, therefore, and we have to reflect if it applies to any now living varieties of our species.

Beginning at home, we may first inquire concerning the American race. The question, Are the Indians dying out? was investigated some years ago by learned authorities at Washington, who announced the cheerful result that, contrary to the universal opinion, the red man is not decreasing at all, but increasing in numbers![204]

I have studied these pleasing statements with care, and regret that I do not reach the same satisfactory conclusions. The writers in question take no account of the signs of a dense ancient population in the Ohio valley, in Michigan, in Florida, in the Pueblo region; they take for granted that the estimates of all the early voyagers and travelers were gross exaggerations; they pay no attention to the historic fact that the natives of the Atlantic coast suffered severely from epidemic diseases before the English established their first settlements, diseases probably disseminated from the Spanish colonies in Florida or Mexico; finally, they commit the fatal ethnographic error of confounding under the name “Indians” both the pure and the mixed members of the race.

This last oversight vitiates all the argument. No one is prepared to say that some faint strain of native American blood may not be perpetuated indefinitely. But this is not the survival of the race or of the “Indians,” any more than the Normans survive to-day in England.

My own studies convince me that the American race is and has long been disappearing, both actually, tribe by tribe, and relatively, by admixture with the whites. In our own area there were many tribes once of considerable numbers, who have become wholly extinct. The Timucuas of Florida, the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Monacans of Virginia, the Mohegans of New York, the Boethucs of Newfoundland, have no living representatives. The whole of the inhabitants of the Bahamas and Greater Antilles were hurried to destruction in a couple of generations after the discovery by Columbus. The list would be long were I to recapitulate the dead languages known by name or by a few sentences in some old missionary book, to the student of American linguistics.