America Has a Humanities Tradition. Do We Have the Ears to Hear It?
We know what the humanities are supposed to look like.
Walk into a Western Humanities classroom and you may find yourself beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo. You may stand before Raphael’s School of Athens, read Homer and Shakespeare, walk through a Gothic cathedral, listen to Mozart, argue with Plato, or watch Claude Monet dissolve a landscape into light and color. Move into Eastern Humanities and another enormous world opens: Chinese painting and poetry, Indian architecture and literature, Buddhism, Hindu traditions, Confucian thought, Japanese theater and art, calligraphy, temples, sculpture and centuries of philosophy.
We study these things because civilization is more than a list of wars and rulers. We want to know what people believed, what they built, what they considered beautiful, how they understood death, how they governed themselves, how they remembered their ancestors and how they explained their place in the universe.
Then we come home to America, and something strange happens.
Where is American Humanities?
Not simply American history. Not another march from Columbus to the Revolution, the Civil War and the twentieth century. Where is the serious study of the civilizations of the Americas through their architecture, art, literature, engineering, philosophy, religion, political thought, trade, ceremony and systems of historical memory?
The material is certainly here.
You can begin beneath the streets of Phoenix.
Long before Phoenix became a modern desert metropolis, the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples engineered an immense irrigation landscape in the Salt and Gila river valleys. Archaeologists have identified hundreds of miles of prehistoric canals. Some were enormous, and maintaining them required sustained cooperation among communities. The canal systems supported agriculture and substantial populations in an environment where water determined whether civilization could exist at all. Centuries later, settlers developing Phoenix encountered those old canals, and portions of the modern irrigation landscape followed the ancient system.
Think about what is contained in that one story.
There is engineering. There is agriculture. There is water management. There is mathematics. There is social organization. There is architecture. There is trade. There is the political problem of persuading communities to build and maintain infrastructure upon which everyone depends.
If Roman aqueducts belong in Western Humanities, why wouldn’t the canals beneath Phoenix belong in American Humanities?
Now travel east.
Long before St. Louis existed, a great city rose beside the Mississippi. Today we call it Cahokia. At its height, its population reached roughly 20,000, clustered around an enormous central plaza and monumental earthen mounds. Its largest surviving monument, Monks Mound, still dominates the landscape. Cahokia was not an isolated curiosity. It emerged within the much larger Mississippian world that connected communities across great portions of eastern North America.
Again, don’t merely memorize the date.
Ask the humanities questions.
Who organized the labor? What did these monumental spaces mean? What ceremonies occurred there? What did people believe about political authority, death and the cosmos? What did their art communicate? What relationships connected the city to distant communities? Why did thousands of people choose to live there, and what eventually happened to that world?
Those are exactly the kinds of questions we ask about Rome, Athens and the cities of medieval Europe.
Then follow the objects.
Around two thousand years ago, communities associated with what archaeologists call the Hopewell tradition gathered extraordinary materials in the Ohio Valley. Copper arrived from the Lake Superior region. Mica came from the Appalachian Mountains. Marine shells came from the Gulf of Mexico. Obsidian traveled from the Yellowstone region. Scientific analysis can identify some of these geological sources, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct connections across extraordinary distances.
Even here, however, the story becomes more interesting when we resist forcing an Old World model onto it. Archaeologists continue to ask whether particular materials moved through trade, gifting, pilgrimage, direct travel or combinations of those mechanisms. In the case of Hopewell obsidian, its unusual concentration in Ohio and scarcity along the intervening route has led researchers to consider direct long-distance journeys rather than simple village-to-village exchange.
Suddenly the map changes.
North America is no longer a collection of isolated dots. Materials, people and ideas are moving. Rivers become highways. Objects carry information. A piece of copper found hundreds of miles from its geological origin becomes evidence of human relationships that disappeared long before anyone could write them into a modern history book.
And metal itself presents another fascinating American question.
Native peoples around the Great Lakes developed sophisticated traditions of working naturally occurring copper. Farther south, metallurgy developed to extraordinary levels in the Andes, including deliberate copper alloys. Metallurgical knowledge later appeared in western Mexico, where metalworkers produced copper-alloy objects including bells and tools. Yet bronze never swept across North America and reorganized societies in the manner familiar from the Eurasian Bronze Age.
Why?
That is a far more interesting question than simply declaring one civilization technologically “advanced” and another “primitive.” Technology spreads when geography, resources, economics, cultural values and practical advantages allow it to spread. Sometimes a society already possesses technologies well suited to what it needs. Sometimes a material is valued for ceremony or status rather than for replacing everyday tools. The history of technology is also the history of human choices.
And now we are unmistakably doing humanities.
We can study architecture in the Americas just as seriously as we study the Parthenon. We can examine Maya cities and writing, the monumental landscapes of Cahokia, Pueblo architecture, Chaco Canyon, the engineering of the Andes and the irrigation systems of the Southwest. We can study pottery, textiles, sculpture, beadwork, painting, metalwork and monumental earthworks as art rather than merely as archaeological specimens.
We can study literature even when literature was not originally written in a European alphabet.
Oral traditions can carry histories, poetry, philosophy, humor, law, genealogy and explanations of the universe across generations. Visual systems can preserve memory. Among several Plains peoples, winter counts recorded years through memorable events represented pictorially, with knowledgeable keepers preserving the fuller stories associated with those images.
And then there is ceremony.
In June 1876, thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne were gathered in the northern Plains. During a Sun Dance, Sitting Bull fasted, went without water and underwent ritual sacrifice. According to the account preserved by the National Park Service, he experienced a vision in which soldiers on horseback fell upside down into the camp, their hats tumbling from their heads as they fell. A voice told him that the soldiers were being given to his people because “they have no ears.”
Days later came the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
In a conventional American history course, the obvious destination is Custer’s defeat.
But humanities allows us to stop before racing to the battle.
What was a Sun Dance? What did a vision mean within Sitting Bull’s cultural and spiritual world? Why would a story like this be remembered? What does the image of men falling upside down communicate? What could it mean to describe someone as having no ears?
Those questions take us inside another way human beings created meaning.
And the phrase carries an uncomfortable resonance far beyond 1876.
They have no ears.
For generations, Native peoples preserved histories, ceremonies, stories, political traditions, artistic traditions and knowledge of the landscapes in which they lived. Archaeology has since uncovered cities, trade connections, engineered landscapes and monumental structures that force us continually to reconsider simplistic descriptions of the Americas before European colonization.
The evidence was not always absent.
Sometimes the audience simply did not know how to hear it.
That is why American Humanities should not be imagined as a replacement for Western Humanities or Eastern Humanities. Homer does not need to disappear. Michelangelo does not need to come off the wall. Confucius does not need to leave the classroom. Monet’s water lilies can remain exactly where they are.
The intellectual world should become larger, not smaller.
An American Humanities course could ask the same fundamental questions we already ask of other great cultural traditions. What did people create? What did they believe? How did they organize society? What did they consider beautiful? How did they preserve memory? How did they communicate across distance? How did they understand nature, death, government, spirituality and the universe? How did ideas and technologies travel from one society to another?
And because the Americas contain hundreds of distinct peoples and civilizations across two continents, there would never be a single “American answer” to those questions. Maya civilization is not Lakota civilization. Cahokia is not Chaco Canyon. The societies of the Andes are not the societies of the Great Lakes. Their differences are precisely what make the comparison intellectually valuable.
Imagine the classroom.
One week students are standing conceptually beside an ancient canal beneath Phoenix, trying to understand how communities organized enough labor to move a river across a desert. Another week they are following Lake Superior copper and Gulf Coast shells across a continental network. Then they are walking through Cahokia, studying a Maya inscription, examining a winter count, considering the geometry of an earthwork, listening to an oral narrative, interpreting a piece of pottery, or confronting Sitting Bull’s vision before Little Bighorn.
That is not a footnote to American history.
That is humanities.
We already accept that Western civilization deserves to be understood through its greatest paintings, buildings, literature, philosophy and ideas. We accept that the civilizations of Asia deserve the same intellectual attention.
The civilizations of the Americas left us cities, monuments, engineering works, art, trade networks, political systems, ceremonies, stories and ways of remembering the past.
America has a humanities tradition.
It has been here all along.
The question Sitting Bull inadvertently leaves us is much harder:
Do we have the ears to hear it?
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