Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian

Abstract

In recent years, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1996) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005) have come to represent the widely read and discussed secular narratives of human social and cultural evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Disguised as an attack on racial determinism, Guns suggests that colonization and conquest were largely ‘accidents’ of history and that modern collapses can be avoided by careful study of Indigenous environmental mismanagement. Much of Diamond’s data is drawn from archaeological literature largely written in isolation from Native American descendent communities. The universalizing discourses advanced by processual studies can provide powerful counter-arguments to these claims when rearticulated with more recent Native American historical narratives. This essay responds to Diamond’s works, questions their veracity and assumptions and suggests that narratives such as Diamond’s are the most potent instruments of conquest.