Cultural Perspectives
By Tim Hazell, Dec 22, 2006

Thoreau and the American Indian

“The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as heaven is.”

—Henry David Thoreau 

A renowned American poet, philosopher, naturalist, essayist and educator, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was descended from French Huguenots (Protestants) who fled to America to escape persecution in Catholic France.

Famous for his “Walden Experiment”—the two years he spent in the Concord woods—the visionary’s body of work and voice in literature is distinctive, one of the most original in American thought. Thoreau’s sojourn by Walden Pond honed his ardent pacifism and reverence for living things, later to have a profound influence on luminaries such as Walt Whitman and Mahatma Ghandi. He had an abounding faith in our ability to transcend materialism and the enslavement of the senses. These convictions were to spread through his work and irrevocably alter 19th- and 20th-century thought. 

As a champion of human dignity and opponent of slavery, the author and activist was a man whose interests and commitments distanced the mores and sociopolitical contexts of his time. Thoreau built his cabin at the northwest end of Walden Pond in 1845, a one-room structure that measured 10 by 15 feet, and published the book that was the result of his studies, meditations and agrarian labor in 1854. He had this to say about his accomplishments in the wilderness: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success in uncommon hours.”

Thoreau studied the American Indian and native traditions, as well as the minimalist precision of native languages, which shaped his prose, poetry and social critique. His contemporaries were involved in Romanticism and the Transcendentalist movement, an experimental philosophy and belief system seeking to articulate history as a process based on four archetypal ideas: sensationism, idealism, skepticism and mysticism. Transcendentalists sought to understand and document the formative processes of life experience. 

Thoreau was attuned to a “higher” level of existence while simultaneously aligning with nature as an “unretouched man,” living by magic and his wits. His articulation of the principals of civil disobedience—namely, passive resistance—had a major effect on bringing an end to imperialism in the first half of the 20th century and later became one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. This excerpt from Walden is as relevant and anti-status-quo today as it was when Thoreau penned it in 1849:

Most of the luxuries, and many 
of the so-called comforts of 
life, are not only indispensable, 
but positive hindrances to the 
elevation of mankind. 
Cultivate poverty like a garden 
herb, like sage. Do not trouble 
yourself much to get new 
things, whether clothes or 
friends. Turn the old; return to 
them. Things do not change; 
we change. The very simplici
ty and nakedness of man’s life 
in the primitive ages imply this 
advantage, at least, that they 
left him still but a sojourner in 
nature. To be awake is to be 
alive. 



Throughout his life, Thoreau maintained a deep and abiding interest in native cultures of the Americas, as well as those of Polynesia, Greenland, South America and Africa. There was real urgency in his mission to uncover indigenous “roots,” when oral histories were becoming extinct as quickly as tribes and Indian confederacies themselves. His observations were put down in his “Indian Notebooks,” burgeoning into a massive compilation of 11 volumes. 

Indian languages and customs are laced with mythology. Thoreau saw these as pure, subjective histories relating to the individual, possessing universal truths that transcended facts. Nature for the Indian was the embodiment of the myth of simple perfection. Closeness to nature implied living on the edge of mythic intensity, a kind of heroic monumentality. The seer strived to bring these primal elements, more profound than knowledge gained from information, into his own life and work. This passage encapsulates his idealism and prophetic sense of the Indians’ doom as recurrent waves of settlement and industrialization pushed nations and nature-based theocracies to the edge of a precipice:

The time will come but too 
soon, we fear, when the history 
of the Indians will be the history 
of a people of which no living 
specimen shall exist upon the 
earth—too soon will the places 
that now know them know them 
never again. Their council fires 
will have gone out upon the 
green hills of the South. Their 
canoes shall plough no more the 
bosom of the Northern Lakes. 
Even the prairies and mountains 
of the far West will cease to be 
their refuge from the rushing 
march of civilization.


According to Huron tradition, one of the first native Christmas carols was written by a Jesuit missionary priest, Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, around 1640–41. The Hurons were particularly devoted to Christmas and built a small chapel of fir trees and bark in honor of the manger at Bethlehem. The original words were written in French and Huronian. Here is the first verse:


Chrétiens, prenez courage,
Jésus Sauveur est né!
Du malin les ouvrages
A jamais sont ruinés.
Quand il chante mervielle,
A ces troublants 
Ne prêtez plus l’orielle
Jésus est né, In excelsis gloria! 

Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx or at his website, www.tim-hazell.com