From King Phillip’s War to the Mayan Apocalypse: Native American and Western Visions of End Times Michael E. Harkin The rather arbitrary date of 2012 has been selected as the latest candidate for the end of the world. Less compelling, perhaps, than 2000, with its plausible threat of technological catastrophe, a useful reminder of the utter dependence of any society on its technological base. And yet 2012 makes a reasonable candidate for a transformative moment. Just as the “long nineteenth century” can be said to have survived until its spectacular destruction in August 1914, so the twentieth century, late in starting, may well find itself running aground a dozen or so years into the new century. My reading of apocalypse is thus clearly not of the boiling lake variety, but rather as an “epitomizing event,” to borrow Ray Fogelson’s key concept: not a passage from Being into Nothingness, but a transition between differently organized lifeworlds, characterized by a differing ethos and politics. My colleague Matthew Restall, along with his wife Amara Solari, has written a clever book debunking the idea of the Maya Apocalypse and, more broadly, the attribution of apocalyptic and millenarian thought to Native Americans, rather than to its proper source, chiliastic strains of Christian thought (Restall and Solari 2011). As a scholar who has spent many hours in the Vatican archives, I respect his deep knowledge of the strains of thought that led to millenarian visions and to institutions such as the (always unexpected) Spanish Inquisition (including its local version in Maya country). Clearly, there are several sources of this error: a confusion between Maya and Aztecs (who did engage in millenarian prophecy), exaggerated notions of a Mayan “collapse,” and, as I shall be examining below, a cultural structure of the longue duree that projected millennial ideologies on indigenous people. And yet, I feel that debunking, while perfectly satisfactory in the realm of positive sciences, is less well suited to the human sciences. We live in a Heisenbergian, Schrodingeresque world in which the cat is, arguably, always both alive and dead (depending upon what we mean by “alive,” “dead,” and “cat”). In this case, we can be persuaded by Restall’s and Solari’s evidence that apocalyptic themes were current in late-Medieval Europe and were employed consciously and strategically by Franciscans and other religious orders to convert Mayas and other populations in Mexico. My argument here is that over and above the realpolitik of the situation, although it is always mindful of the political nature of apocalyptic ideology. Rather, the cultural space of the other has throughout the history of contact between Europeans and indigenous people in the Americas been a space of apocalyptic ideation. The annihilation of self and other, in turn or simultaneously, has been part of the practice and symbolism of the post-Columbian world. I am reminded of a decade-old feud in which I played some small part: Shepard Krech’s debunking of the “myth of the ecological Indian” (1999). The pattern was very similar: non-scholar outsiders (and many of the same types as in the Maya case, notably “New Agers”) attribute a strong version of some ideology to an entire category of people, creating a patronizing, if generally benign, caricature of these people. The careful scholar responds to this by pointing out that Native Americans (meaning north of Mexico in this case) did not universally hold with the sort of Muirian nature worship ascribed to them; that, like most human cultures did

at times despoil their own environment; and, that creating a cartoon version of their culture did them no service, but instead denied their past agency and undermined their ability to exercise agency in the present. So far, so good. But the response to Krech’s critique was far from positive, and was particularly bilious from within the Native American community. It turns out that they, too, had some emotional investment in a partly mythical version of their own cultures. Were these cultures always and forever ecologically perfect? No, but neither did they view the environment and its living inhabitants as simply resources. The notion of the sacred was a very important linchpin in both the pragmatic and symbolic relation between humans and non-human species. Prayers and offerings were given to animal and fish spirits, to ensure that they would return, almost universally across North America. By the same token, the idea of world endings is a familiar theme in North American mythico-religious thought. This idea is not unconnected with the ecological conception of humans as one species among many, emplaced within webs of interdependency. If humans are not the ultimate reason for the universe’s existence, then their disappearance or transmutation in the future, much as they had appeared at some point in the past, is significant, but does not betoken the annihilation that is implicit in Western versions. We will tease this out further in a moment. But it is important to recognize that many groups such as the Hopi have cosmologies that produce at one point the possibility for human existence and, at another, the collapse of that possibility. Moreover, as is common among many groups especially in the Southwest and in South America, the appearance of Whites plays a crucial role in the fulfilling of end-times prophecies. In a precisely converse manner, the appearance and, then, seeming disappearance of Native Americans triggers an apocalyptic strain in European thought. For the Euroamerican conqueror or colonist, the continued existence of the Indian (whether imagined in terms of physical survival or persistence of culture) was incompatible with the presence of a patently superior settler civilization. The inevitable disappearance of the Indian could be emplotted as either comedy, as the New England Puritans viewed the seemingly providential clearing out of territory and conversion of tribes, or tragedy, as in The Last of the Mohicans or the romantic poetry produced by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian official in charge of Indian affairs, who oversaw the 1922 potlatch prosecution, and who himself acquired pieces for his personal collection of Northwest Coast artifacts. It is, in any case, a theme that runs throughout the five centuries of post-Columbian history. Moreover, while apocalyptic ideation is more highly developed in European culture, it resonated with indigenous cultural imaginaries; these become especially relevant as Native people face the apocalyptic aspects of the European invasion. The appearance of a previously unknown and densely inhabited hemisphere presented to the European of the 16th century and later a profound challenge to their worldview, much as contact with an alien civilization would in our day. Just as Hollywood has imagined such contact with extraterrestrials in apocalyptic terms, so the denizens of a Catholic Europe, itself soon to break apart, would view the New World. It is important here to examine what we mean by “apocalypse.” The Greek ἀποκάλυψις means “revelation” or “lifting the veil.” That knowledge that was

previously available only through highly esoteric or symbolic mediations becomes plain for all to see. Thus, the “revelation” of millions of Native people living in the Americas replaces esoteric hints in the Bible of the lost tribe of Israel or Classical sources on monstrous races. The apocalypse is thus firstly an epistemological revolution. A naturalistic ethnography replaces the language of Plinean Races by the end of the 16th century (Harkin 2011). It is, secondly, a political revolution. The themes expressed in the art and discourse of the apocalypse are, as Restall and Solari assert, violent. More than this, they are specifically components of a grotesque aesthetic. It is not death per se that is depicted, but various bodily processes, of both destruction and continuance. Thus, dismemberment and violent death are depicted, as is excessive eating and even sexuality. The two may be combined, as in Durer’s Hellmouth, in which the damned are being devoured. As Bakhtin suggested, such grotesque themes have a specific political valence: reminding us of the impermanence of life, even for the grand, and the processual interdependent nature of social life, evoking pity and empathy (Harkin 1996). This aesthetic existed as a permanent theme of Catholic art, as in mementi mori, and tomb carvings, but was particularly potent in combination with apocalyptic discourse, as in the preaching of the 15th century mystic and revolutionary, Girolamo Savonarola. Images of violent destruction combine with ideals of a new cosmic order in which the “true” version of Christianity is established on earth. This provides a template for historical change in the West that has persisted to this day: a dreamed-of perfection of society achieved through the use of violence and terror. Such an understanding of history is consistent with a civilization that has based successive historical manifestations upon the ruins of its own past (e.g., the agrarian societies of Europe and the Americas) and those of its economic and cultural rivals, such as the Native Americans. Apocalyptic thinking was thus an early export to the New World. As Restall and Solari discuss, the Franciscans brought a highly apocalyptic Christianity with them, and even a version of the Inquisition, which constituted the technology of apocalypse, providing a useful illustration of the grotesque themes of bodily destruction. In a different cultural mode, the Protestant colonialists of North America brought with them their own notion of a world remade according to divine plan. The “shining city on a hill” of the Pilgrims’ imagination was clearly not consistent with the continued existence of Native American civilization. Thus a theological version of terra nullius was the lens through which Native cultures were viewed. In the English version of colonialism, unlike its Spanish counterpart, Native people were, as individuals, undoubtedly fully human and capable of Christianity and civilization, but as autonomous and parallel ways of life, they were not viable. Even the most relatively advanced Native groups were seen as incompatible with civilization. Thus, the Algonkian village of Secotan in what is now eastern North Carolina, which had been held up as exemplary by John White and Thomas Hariot in their 1585 description was not immune from a devastating bombardment shortly thereafter (Harkin 2011). In New England, the Indian in the wilderness represented both an obstacle to the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, and an existential threat, both a standin for Satan, and a political and military foe to be reckoned with. The Indian could,

famously, be “noble,” but in this very nobility was doomed; in the opposite manifestation as “savage,” the Indian dooms white Christian civilization. It would not be until the late 19th century that this paradox was succinctly expressed by Major Richard Henry Pratt, headmaster of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, when he said his goal was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The continued existence of a distinctive American Indian way of life—culture, language, race, even dress—was in a fundamental way untenable. Again, it was either a question of the inevitable dying out of such an anachronistic lifeway, or the destruction of civilization itself at the hands of such “savages.” King Philip’s War, in 1675, was not the first military conflict between English and Indians—as noted above, these began at the site of the first, doomed English colony in North America—but it represented the largest scale conflict in history, even greater than the Indian Wars of the post-Civil War era. It has been estimated that in proportion to the European population in North America at the time, it was greater than any other military conflagration to take place in North America, including the Civil War. It was a true clash of civilizations. Metacom (aka King Philip) knew the Puritan colonists intimately; his father Massasoit had been an ally of theirs. It was precisely his familiarity with English Puritan culture that led to his becoming its implacable foe. He understood the apocalyptic strain of their thought and adapted it to what he perceived to be the needs of his own culture. Indeed, while the Puritans were generally well-disposed toward the “praying Indians,” the peace was bought dearly. As Metacom realized, the price for peace and alliance with the colonists was a full-fledged surrender of political sovereignty and cultural identity: a self-inflicted ethnocide (Mandell 2010:35). This deterioration of Native autonomy must be seen against the backdrop of devastating depopulation a generation earlier. A smallpox epidemic in 1633 had wiped out much of the native population. This was seen explicitly in apocalyptic terms; the disease was interpreted as evidence of the power of the Christian God. Deathbed conversions were common, with the sentiment that one’s children would become Christian and English, frequently heard: “But now I must die…yet my Child shall live with the English, and learne to know their God when I am dead” (Lepore 1998:28). Indeed, these conversions became a central feature of triumphalist Puritan pamphleteering in the 1640s, and indeed a staple of all subsequent missionary propaganda through at least the nineteenth century (ibid.; Harkin 1994). That is, a version of the apocalypse as envisioned by the Franciscans—in which the old Indian way of life is devoured in the maw of hell, giving way to a reordering of the world along Christian, European lines—informs missionary practice in North America for the subsequent four centuries. A second, important strain of apocalypse similarly arose in the context of King Philip’s War: a detailed rendering of acts of violence and cruelty perpetrated by the “savage.” This, too, becomes a structure of the longue duree in North American culture. Descriptions of acts such as “Massacres, Murthers, Savage Crueltyes, cowardize, ungrateful and perfidious dealings of Blood-thirsty Barbarians” were part of collective response of the colonists to the trauma of the war (Lepore 1998:67). Their cataloguing in careful, one could say, loving detail draws directly on the apocalyptic strain of description of tribulations. It is worth keeping in mind that

the existence of the English colonies in New England was at stake in this conflict, so the rhetorical emphasis on acts of violence reflected the existential threat posed by the Indian warriors. Although this existential threat on a large scale would disappear by the conclusion of the French and Indian War, it remained part of the American psyche. Certainly, small frontier settlements in the West were vulnerable to attack into the late-nineteenth century. Moreover, as Susan Faludi (2007) argues, this insecurity of English colonial civilization on the northern and western frontiers established a sense of dread and horror that has been reactivated during times of crisis in American history, most recently during the post-9/11 “war on terror,” itself a concept imbued with apocalyptic themes. Metacom himself probably agreed with this interpretation of the conflict that bears his name. Of course, history is written by the winner, and, as Jill Lepore cogently argues, the great enterprise of textual production in post-war New England was a carrying out of war by other means. In particular, it set out the conflict between Native and English as absolute, as zero-sum, removing any possible middle ground, such as the villages of “praying Indians.” After that, the only strategies left for Indians to survive was to hide and assimilate. Metacom clearly felt that this was the direction in which things were heading, and so was justified in launching what he believed to be a war of annihilation. We do not hear Metacom’s voice on this matter. The great Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa did, however, give voice to an apocalyptic ideology over a century later. Appealing to dispossessed Indians of various tribes in the early nineteenth century, they represented both a political-military resistance to white encroachment in the Old Northwest, as well as a religious and ideological resistance. Tenskwatawa preached a return to a purely native life of the past, untainted by European ideas and objects (much as his contemporary, the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake did). Additionally, he believed, following the Lenape prophets, Scattamek and Neolin, that European civilization was hopelessly corrupt and doomed to destruction in an apocalyptic event. The decadent white settlements clinging to the East Coast would be destroyed, while the Indians would restore their pure (although by now inevitably hybridized and multi-tribal) culture. This theme carries through to the Red Stick Movement in the Southeast (ignited by, among other things, apocalyptic musings following the catastrophic New Madrid earthquake of 1811), which similarly sought a purified, nativistic lifeway and the destruction of European settlements (Martin 1991). Moving West, and to the mid-to-late nineteenth century, several versions of the Ghost Dance arise. Jack Wilson (Wovoka), a Paiute Indian who had been adopted by Mormons, was its chief prophet (Hittman 1997). Aware of the Mormon apocalyptic tradition, which itself arose in the context of the early-nineteenth century “burned over district” of upstate New York, the crucible of many such religious visions (including that of Handsome Lake), Wilson also practiced a distinctly Native American tradition of visions and prophecy. This included a vision of the disappearance of the white man, possibly by a reversal of the trains, which had brought them to the West in such numbers, a return to life of the Indian dead and Indian customs, and the reign of God on earth. As it spread to the Plains, the apocalyptic vision merged with militancy; the famous “ghost shirts” of the Sioux

(themselves derived from Mormon ceremonial garb) were imagined to have the power to shield the wearer from bullets. This militancy ignited the fears of the local white settlers, leading to military intervention and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. From the Indian standpoint, visions of apocalypse in the Ghost Dance and other religious movements were Janus-faced. On the one hand, they reflected a past in which populations had been decimated, mainly by disease, and central elements of culture had been lost. All of these movements discussed came in the wake of great loss, much as did the late medieval apocalyptic ideology in Europe. In this sense, apocalypse was a realistic, if highly symbolic, representation of historical fact. At the same time, the ritualized performances in the Ghost Dance could have a psychological function as catharsis and abreaction. Thus, some versions, such as the Warm House cult, dramatically represented the destruction of culture by the successive violation of taboos (Harkin 2004). The second viewpoint—towards the future—is more familiar. This imagined future is at once impossibly terrifying and blissfully perfect, usually depending on one’s identity as member of a favored group or otherwise. Despite early hopes of an easy assimilation of Native American and EuroAmerican culture—a theme which runs throughout American history, although often submerged—the reality of relations between these two groups both gave rise to and deployed apocalyptic ideology. As Europeans imagined providentiallyopened lands to the west on which to build God’s kingdom on earth, American Indians saw the existential threat posed by the intentional and unintentional consequences of that invasion. Each group imagined itself most fully realized in the negative space of the other’s annihilation. References Faludi, Susan 2007 The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Harkin, Michael E., 1994 Contested Bodies: Affliction and Power in Heiltsuk History and Culture. American Ethnologist 20(4):586-605. 1996 Carnival and Authority: Heiltsuk Schemata of Power in Ritual Discourse. Ethos 24(2):281-313. 2004 Revitalization as Catharsis: The Warm House Cult of Western Oregon. In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and The Pacific Islands, pp. 143-161. University of Nebraska Press. 2011 John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke. Histories of Anthropology 7:21645. Hittman, Michael 1997 Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Krech, Shepard 1999 The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lepore, Jill 1998 The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf. Mandell, Daniel 2010 King Philip's War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martin, Joel W. 1991 Sacred Revolt: the Muskogees' Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press. Restall, Matthew and Amara Solari 2011 2012 and the End of the World : the Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers .