Frankendesign

Manifest Destiny's Lessons for Globalization
Via an excerpt from Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, New Brunswick, N.J., 1992

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In the East, as throughout aboriginal America, the tribes had always carried on extensive trade among themselves. But with the coming of the Europeans, trading took on a new and sinister velocity, for the new party to the bargaining had no relationship whatever to the lands other than what could be realized economically from them. To them the lands were satanic rather than sacred, and the traders and their employees could tolerate the wilderness only in the hope that eventually they could make enough money to leave it behind and return to civilization and live like humans. So they would grimly push out into the woods beyond the farthest reach of civilization—but not so far that they could not be supplied with trade goods. Here they would establish a post and make it known that they stood ready to supply the needs of the resident tribes in return for pelts taken in trapping and hunting.

But in order for such a scheme to work, the Indian hunters, trappers, and dressers had to be made to want the imported items that the trader had to offer. Here again we encounter the clash between history and myth, with the whites, driven to enormous technological ingenuity, producing a vast array of seductive items for peoples of the globe whose spiritual contentments had kept their own technologies at comparatively simple levels. Regarding this phenomenon, enacted everywhere whites invaded the wilderness, we know now that there had been no people on earth capable of resisting this seduction, for none has been able to see the hidden and devious byways that lead inevitably from the consumption of the new luxuries to the destruction of the myths that give life its meaning. From the acceptance of guns, powder, shot, flints, metal traps, woolen blankets, capes, and metal cookware to deportation, the reservation, and cultural extermination is an unforeseeable way. All that is known is all that can be: and this is that these new luxuries make daily living easier, and myths or no, all humans have wanted some relief, some margin against the beloved lands. None have known how much margin would be too much.

Only here and there, the inspired ones, the crazed and dangerous, the visionary prophets, have been capable of divining the dead end of such trade, and this is why they have always been targets of white hatred--and often the ignorant scorn of their own people. In the East the message of the Delaware Prophet, the Shawnee Profit, and Tecumseh were all attempts to turn the people away from trading and back to their aboriginal ways. They were too late, for not only had the tribes become dependent on the trade items that had supplanted their traditional crafts, but many of the people had become psychologically dependent as well through the calculated introduction of alcohol into the trade.
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