Native Americans of North America

I

Introduction

Native Americans of North America, indigenous peoples of North America. Native Americans had lived throughout the continent for thousands of years before Europeans began exploring the “New World” in the 15th century.

Most scientists agree that the human history of North America began when the ancient ancestors of modern Native Americans made their way across a land bridge that once spanned the Bering Sea and connected northeastern Asia to North America. Scientists believe these people first migrated to the Americas more than 10,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age (see First Americans). However, some Native Americans believe their ancestors originated in the Americas, citing gaps in the archaeological record and oral accounts of their origins that have been passed down through generations.

Native Americans excelled at using natural resources and adapting to the climates and terrains in which they lived. Over thousands of years distinct culture areas developed across North America. In the Northeast, for example, Native Americans used wood from the forests to build houses, canoes, and tools. Dense populations in the Pacific Northwest exploited the abundance of sea mammals and fish along the Pacific Coast. In the deserts of the Southwest, Native Americans grew corn and built multilevel, apartment-style dwellings from adobe, a sun-dried brick. In the Arctic, inhabitants adapted remarkably well to the harsh environment, becoming accomplished fishers and hunters.

Among the several hundred Native American groups that settled across North America, there existed, and still exist, many different ways of life and world views. Each group had distinctive social and political systems, clothing styles, shelters, foods, art forms, musical styles, languages, educational practices, and spiritual and philosophical beliefs. Nevertheless, Native American cultures share certain traits that are common to many indigenous peoples around the world, including strong ties to the land on which they live.

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When European explorers and settlers began to arrive in the Americas in the 15th century, Native Americans found themselves faced with a new set of challenges. Some Native Americans learned to coexist with Europeans, setting up trade networks and adopting European technologies. Many more faced generations of upheaval and disruption as Europeans, and later Americans and Canadians, took Native American lands and tried to destroy their ways of life. During the 20th century, however, Native American populations and cultures experienced a resurgence. Today, Native Americans are working to reassert more control over their governments, economies, and cultures.

The indigenous peoples of North America are known by many terms. Most tribal peoples prefer to be identified by their tribal affiliation, such as Hopi, Onondaga, Mohawk, or Cherokee. The most common collective terms are Native American or American Indian. For many years, Indian was the most prevalent term. When Christopher Columbus and other European explorers arrived in the Americas, they thought they were in Asia, which the Spanish referred to as “the Indies.” They called the native peoples indios, as in the people of the Indies, later translated to Indian. However, some scholars believe the Europeans were not calling native peoples indios, but rather In Dios, meaning “Of God.”

The term Native American became popular in the United States in the 1960s, although some people believe it is too broad because it can refer to anyone born in the Americas, including Hawaiians and descendants of immigrants. In Canada, aboriginal people is a commonly used collective term. It refers to Indians, Métis (people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), and Inuit. In the 1970s many Indians in Canada began calling their bands First Nations. When referring to the original inhabitants of the United States, this article uses Native Americans, American Indians, Indians, and native peoples interchangeably. When referring to the original inhabitants of Canada, the article generally uses aboriginal peoples, indigenous peoples, and native peoples.

This article divides its discussion of Native Americans into four main parts. The Culture Areas section examines Native American ways of life in ten different geographic regions. Traditional Way of Life looks at specific aspects of Native American life, such as food, clothing, and music. The History section describes the history of Native Americans in North America from the earliest times to the present day. Native Americans Today discusses contemporary life for indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada.

For a discussion of the indigenous peoples of Middle and South America, see Native Americans of Middle and South America. Other major articles on Native Americans in North America include Indian Treaties in Canada, First Americans, Native American Architecture, Native American Art, Native American Languages, Native American Literature, Native American Policy, and Native American Religions.

II

Population: Past and Present

A

Early Population

Scholars vary greatly in their estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived in 1492. Estimates range from 40 million to 90 million for all of the Americas, and from 2 million to 18 million for the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico. These figures are hypothetical; exact population figures are impossible to ascertain. Furthermore, the date of Columbus’s arrival was not necessarily the peak of the Native American population. Civilizations had risen and fallen before that time—the Hopewell culture, for example, flourished from 200 bc to ad 400 in eastern North America. Some anthropologists believe the peak occurred around ad 1200.

The number of distinct Native American groups or cultures that existed at the time of European contact is more difficult to estimate. Scholars do not estimate the number of tribes that existed at the time because few Native American peoples had the level of political organization associated with true tribes. For many native peoples, especially those who lived in areas with sparse resources, the family was the largest unit, while others were organized into bands. Some tribes did exist, but it is impossible to estimate their number, for smaller groups were constantly merging into new, larger groups, or in some cases, disappearing. Europeans applied the term nation to people with a common language and customs and a name for themselves, and by 1700, they were aware of some 50 or 60 distinct Indian “nations” east of the Mississippi River. The Spaniards found some 50 Indian nations in the West, including the Pueblo, Athapaskan-speaking peoples, Comanche, and Piman- and Yuman-speaking peoples. In the Southeast and East, many Indians tried to meet the European invasion by creating confederacies or by increasing their reliance on existing confederacies of smaller groups.

B

Decline

European settlement of the Americas drastically reduced the Native American population. The European conquest was primarily a biological one. Explorers and colonists brought a wide range of deadly communicable diseases directly from crowded European cities. These diseases spread quickly among Native Americans, who had no immunity to them. Transmitted through trade goods or a single infected person, measles, smallpox, and other diseases annihilated entire communities even before they had seen a single European. From the 16th century to the early 20th century, 93 epidemics and pandemics (very widespread epidemics) of European diseases decimated the native population. To cite only one example, in the American Southwest, the Pueblo population fell by 90 to 95 percent between 1775 and 1850. In addition to smallpox and measles, explorers and colonists brought a host of other diseases: bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, pleurisy, mumps, diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough, malaria, yellow fever, and various sexually transmitted infections.

Despite the undisputed devastation wreaked on Indian populations after European contact, native populations showed enormous regional variability in their response to disease exposure. Some peoples survived and, in some cases, even returned to their pre-contact population level. Others disappeared swiftly and completely. Today, as scholars explore the magnitude of the Native American population decline, they are finding that the issues are much more complex than was previously assumed. Archaeological evidence indicates that illness was increasing in the Native American population in many regions before the arrival of Columbus, probably in response to problems of population density, diet, and sanitation.

Although the introduction of new diseases was the main cause of the rapid decline of indigenous populations, other reasons were genocidal warfare, massive relocations and removals of Native Americans from their homelands, and the destruction of traditional ways of life. With white encroachment on their land, Native Americans no longer had access to their traditional hunting, gathering, and farming areas. Their subsistence patterns broke down, leading to malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease. Relocation to new areas, often among hostile Indian tribes that were already living there, meant that people demoralized by their circumstances had to establish new subsistence patterns as well as come to terms with their forced dependency. By 1900, these factors, along with increased mortality and decreased fertility, had reduced the Native American population to its low point of only about 250,000 people in the United States and about 100,000 in Canada.

C

Recovery

During the 20th century, Native Americans experienced a remarkable population recovery because of decreased mortality rates, including declining disease rates. Intermarriage with nonnative peoples and changing fertility patterns have kept Native American birthrates higher than birthrates for the total North American population. Another factor in the increase is that more people in the United States are identifying themselves as Native American on their census forms. By one estimate, as much as 60 percent of the population increase of American Indians from 1970 to 1980 was due to these changing identifications.

In the United States, 2.48 million people identified themselves as American Indian in the 2000 census, up from 1.8 million in 1990. More than 300 American Indian tribes are recognized by the U.S. federal government. In Canada, there are about 600 bands of Indians. At the 1996 census, about 805,000 people—including Indians, Métis, and Inuit—identified themselves as aboriginals. For more information on current population trends in the United States and Canada, see the Native Americans Today section of this article.

Trudy Griffin-Pierce contributed the Population: Past and Present section of this article.

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