The interstate highway, or the great Indian trade path?
The arrogance of modernism often induces us to believe we have skills and knowledge far beyond that of our forebears.
We like to believe we are so much smarter and more accomplished than those who went before us, this arrogance of modernism is as dangerous as it is untrue. It not only makes it difficult for us to benefit from the wisdom of our ancestors, but it also prevents us from learning from their mistakes.
The examples of this are many and varied. For our example today, we will use the Interstate Highway. When it was first proposed during the Eisenhower administration, the Interstate Highway system was both hailed as a visionary plan and condemned as some nefarious government plot.
The truth is that it was neither. It was just another really good idea borrowed from us, the Indigenous Peoples and communities of this land.
Allow me to explain.
Long before that Italian bandit got himself lost in the Caribbean Sea trying to find his way to India, the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas had long ago evolved a trading network which would have challenged the legendary Silk Road in both density and complexity.
Beginning with the domestication of maize, or “Indian corn,” around nine or ten thousand years ago, the Indigenous communities of the Americas started their journey toward the material trade and intellectual interaction that is the hallmark of advanced civilizations.
Long before Aristarchus discovered that the earth revolved around the sun, the trade and cultural networks of the Americas stretched from the isthmus of Panama to the very shores of the Great Lakes. The perception that the “New World” was a savage land devoid of civilization owes itself to the need of colonial robber barons to justify their genocidal greed. It has no basis in fact.
By the time Columbus dragged his stinking carcass onto the shores of the Taino islands, the trade routes of the eastern seaboard looked surprisingly similar to the way they look today.
The Taino traded as far north as the Cherokee; we know this from recent discoveries of artifacts in the old Cherokee country. The Shinnecock people, renowned for their wampum, traded as far south as the ports of what is now Florida, where many mercantile tribes made fantastic fortunes through trade and commerce. These trade networks reached to the smallest and most remote of small towns.
Much as every town today has a Dollar General, so every Indian town had its local trader. As the study of the archeology of the Americas becomes more in depth and sheds some the prejudice borne of the doctrine of colonial supremacy, the non-native population will come to know what we have always known, the degree to which Native cultures influenced each other, and the degree to which they influenced colonial society. Today’s interstate highway system follows, in many places, the exact routes of old Indian trading paths. In other places, these highways follow those paths with some minor modification. Some good examples of this are Interstates 40, 85 and 95. The evolution of these trading paths into major highways is not as great a leap as it might seem at first glance.
Consider for a moment the twin objectives of colonial society, conquest and trade. In other words, whenever colonials were not trying to kill Indians, they were seeking to trade with them. To further the trade objective colonials hired Indian guides who led them along the ancient trading paths. As time went on, these paths were expanded to handle the increase in trade because they were the best routes from one point to another in any given region.
As the population, and with it trade, grew from one period to another these ancient trading paths became modern highways, and in many cases the modern highways became Interstate Highways, all based on ancient Indian trade paths.
So, one might say that today’s American highway system is another great idea brought to you by the American Indian.