Native Americans of North America

M

8

Work in Other Materials

Leather was used extensively for clothing, tipis, shields, containers, quivers, cradleboard covers, food vessels, sheaths, and ritual paraphernalia. In many areas, leather clothing was often decorated with porcupine quills dyed with mineral or vegetable-derived colors and used in combination with undyed quills to create dazzling patterns. After Europeans introduced manufactured glass beads, beadwork replaced quillwork. (However, the number of quill workers increased dramatically in the 20th century.) Native Americans in eastern North America were inspired by embroidery designs of the French, and they substituted silk threads for their previous designs of quills and moose hair.

The bark of the white birch tree provided a versatile material for the Algonquians of the western Great Lakes area. They used birchbark to construct maneuverable canoes, durable wigwams, cooking pots, dishes, needle cases, winnowing trays, and leak-proof containers for maple syrup and water. Ojibwa women also created birchbark cutouts as patterns for beadwork designs on moccasins. Men used birchbark to make pictographic scrolls that recorded the imagery, songs, and teachings of the sacred Medewiwin, or Grand Medicine Society.

Other materials, such as bone, horn, antlers, tusks, seashells, and feathers, were also used to make tools, weapons, and ornaments. The Yurok and Hupa of California carved and decorated distinctive spoons made of elk antlers, while the Tlingit of the Northwest Coast carved bowls of mountain sheep horn that they shaped like animals or birds. The Iroquois and Algonquians of the Northeast were known for their wampum, white and purple beads made from whelk and quahog shells. The Hohokam, a prehistoric people in southern Arizona, used acid to etch designs into shells. Most groups used feathers for ceremonial dress and objects. The Pomo of California also used feathers from quails and woodpeckers to adorn their spectacular ceremonial baskets.

Trudy Griffin-Pierce contributed the Traditional Way of Life section of this article.

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VI

History

The history of native North America begins with native peoples and their stories of origin, often called creation stories. These stories are part of a Native American oral tradition that predates European contact and extends back for countless generations. Creation and origin stories tell of how the world was made and how particular groups of people came into being. They tell of how animals, humans, and the natural world were created, and they offer important instructions and lessons for living. Passed down from generation to generation, these stories express the collective wisdom of particular Native American peoples. They are also often very funny and provide wonderful forms of entertainment, particularly during summer evenings and winter months when families exchange stories and help educate young people in the ways of their ancestors.

All Native American traditions are specific to particular peoples and places. In the Southwest, the creation story of the Navajo (Diné), tells of how people emerged into this world from several lower worlds where different beings existed with First Man and First Woman. Gradually moving through these different worlds, First Man and First Woman emerged into the beautiful lands of the Navajo, known as Dinétah.

Among the Iroquois of the Northeast, stories record when a league of peace between various Iroquois nations formed. The Iroquois peoples once lived in a time of terrible war. Nations fought and killed each other, and relatives constantly attempted to avenge the death of their family members. After the death of his family, one Onondaga chief, Hiawatha, became so stricken with grief that he wandered lost in the forests until he met a foreign and powerful man. This man, often simply known as the Peacemaker, helped Hiawatha mourn his lost family and eased his pain through rituals and words of condolence. Together, Hiawatha and the Peacemaker visited all the Iroquois nations and united them based on these new principles of peace, not war. These seeds of peace grew over time and helped build the Iroquois Confederacy. Today, the confederacy is one of the oldest political bodies in North America, centuries older than the governments of Canada or the United States.

Other native groups have less specific origin stories. Among many groups in the West, powerful trickster characters, such as Coyote and Raven, have mystical powers that helped create and order the universe. These tricksters teach lessons through their own mistakes. Shoshone peoples in California and Nevada, for example, have creation stories in which Coyote and Raven possess human characteristics, particularly human limitations such as greed and lust. The mishaps of Coyote and Raven often lead to unforeseen and hilarious outcomes, including the creation of the natural world. One Shoshone tale tells of how Raven stole and then populated the world with pine nuts, one of the Shoshone’s most important and sacred foods.

Such creation stories are central to native communities. They help give meaning to the world and explain the place of native peoples within it. In addition to creation stories, Native Americans rely on other oral traditions to pass down their histories and worldviews. Understanding oral traditions is central to understanding Native American history, but it also presents unique challenges. Because oral traditions often went undocumented or were hidden from nonnative peoples, historians have often assumed that Indians did not have history, that they were timeless peoples who did not keep documents or records of their pasts.

Historians have made many mistakes about Native American history, and only recently have many of those errors been corrected. Historians, for example, once believed that Indians were minor or unimportant actors in American and Canadian history. They generally saw Indians as either obstacles in the making of North American history or as quaint, romantic relics of a bygone era. Both views are racist and limiting. Native Americans remain central actors in North American history, and their histories, like all histories, reveal the widest array of human attributes. By studying Native American history, we can more clearly see the making of Canadian and American history as well as the many complicated ways that diverse Native Americans have skillfully negotiated centuries of often terrible changes.

A

Early Cultures in North America

Scholars hotly debate when and how the first peoples—the ancestors of today’s Native Americans—arrived in the Americas. What is clear, however, is that Native Americans have lived in North America for countless generations and thousands and thousands of years. Such extended, deep connections to the land strongly link Native Americans to the American landscape. Most Native Americans insist that their ties to the land extend beyond the reach of memory and that nonnative peoples should recognize and respect such ties.

Native Americans are part of the larger history of human evolution, but scholars are not entirely sure how they fit into the chronology. According to archaeologists, the first peoples migrated to the Americas via a land bridge that connected North America and Asia during the last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago. Estimates vary widely for precisely when these peoples arrived. Some claim that they arrived before 15,000 years ago while others believe that they arrived tens of thousands of years earlier. Although such claims are inconclusive, archaeologists have found evidence of habitation throughout the Americas that dates back many thousands of years. Some Native Americans dispute the theory that the first Americans migrated from Asia. They argue that Native Americans originated in the Americas, pointing to their creation stories as evidence. For more information about the populating of the Americas, see First Americans.

Most archaeologists believe that the first Native Americans—often known as Paleo-Indians to non-Indian scholars—were hunter-gatherers who developed technologies and practices suited to hunting and fishing. These peoples used flint-chipped spear and arrow points to catch big and small game, and fishing nets and weirs (fences or enclosures set in waterways) to harvest fish. In using these and other devices, these early societies left behind material traces of their cultures. Their tools, food waste, and even at times buried ancestors provide clues about the nature of their lives.

At Folsom, New Mexico, archaeologists in 1926 and 1927 excavated one of the most important archaeological sites in North America, containing bison bones and stone spearpoints dating from about 11,000 years ago. Similar spearpoints, often known as Folsom points, were found in other places in North America, revealing that early Native Americans traded technologies across great distances. In 1933 at Clovis, New Mexico, archaeologists found further and older evidence of the prevalence of Indian hunting and trading. The stone spearpoints found at this site, known as Clovis points, were made by people who appeared in North America about 11,500 years ago. Clovis points have been found throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico, suggesting that early Native American populations were linked in trade thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

Archaeologists believe that these early peoples refined their methods for hunting North America’s big game animals. Hunting mammoths, mastodons, and bison on foot, these early Americans developed stronger and more reliable spearpoints for killing large animals. In fact, archaeologists have experimented with these early weapons and have concluded that when used properly these projectiles could bring down today’s African elephants—the largest land mammals in the world.

Following large herds, Native American groups on the Great Plains also increasingly used other hunting techniques. At Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada, archaeologists believe they have unearthed the largest and oldest buffalo drive site in North America, dating back more than 5,500 years. Indian hunters killed buffalo by confining them on top of the surrounding cliffs and then frightening them and driving them over the edge. Such skillful hunting methods conserved human energy and allowed for large group interactions, particularly during the processing of such large animals. These buffalo kills also increased trade links in the Great Plains through the exchange of buffalo meat.

Additional archaeological sites have revealed examples of other social and economic practices from these distant eras. In the Great Basin, in caves around the Lahontan Basin in Nevada, archaeologists have uncovered one of the oldest mummified skeleton burials in the world. Estimated at more than 9,000 years old, the site reveals that Native Americans honored and respected their dead and were deeply concerned about the condition and treatment of their bodies after death. As with Clovis points, however, such remains provide only faint glimpses into the material conditions of these earlier eras. Scholars can only speculate as to the social or cultural meanings of such practices.

Along the Pacific Coast, archaeologists have found evidence that Native Americans from Alaska to California developed economies centered on fishing more than 7,000 years ago. Using nets, fishing ladders, weirs, boats, hooks, and spears, Native Americans annually harvested massive quantities of salmon, their staple food. After waiting for the salmon to return from the ocean to spawn, Native American fishermen and their families gathered annually and collected millions of pounds of this prized resource. At The Dalles, Oregon, and its surrounding areas along the Columbia River Gorge, archaeologists have uncovered an enormous number of fish bones. As Indian traditions still recount, this prime fishing location remained central to Northwest peoples for thousands of years. Native American fishing declined at The Dalles only in the late 1930s, when the U.S. government built dams that flooded critical areas along the river.

Besides hunting, gathering, and fishing, early Native Americans also constructed towns, built irrigation systems, and harvested crops. Throughout the eastern United States, Native Americans built communities that were home to thousands of people. The Adena culture of the Ohio River Valley maintained large villages as well as earthen burial mounds that honored their ancestors. Declining around ad 200, Adena communities were later replaced by the Hopewell culture, which flourished from 200 bc to ad 400 in the same area.

Along the Mississippi River, people of the Mississippian culture designed what is believed to have been the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. At Cahokia, outside modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, Mississippian peoples built large earthen burial and temple mounds and harvested thousands of acres of crops, particularly the “three sisters,” as maize (corn), beans, and squash came to be known. Nestled near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Cahokia may have been inhabited by as many as 20,000 people at its peak between 1100 and 1200, although some estimates are nearly twice that number. It is believed that the Mississippian culture declined after the early 16th century.

North America before European contact was a diverse and interconnected world. Native peoples inhabited almost every corner of the continent. They lived in intimate familiarity with their environments, with different economies, beliefs, and practices. Far from being a “virgin land” or “wilderness,” as Europeans often believed, native North America was a vibrant, dynamic world of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures. Scholars estimate that between 2 million and 18 million people inhabited North America north of present-day Mexico at the time of European contact. An estimated 40 million to 90 million Native Americans lived throughout the Americas. These numbers, however, quickly declined as a result of European diseases and warfare against Native Americans.

B

First Contact with Europeans, 1500s

Although isolated Scandinavian explorers and traders established short-lived settlements in Greenland and eastern Canada around ad 1000, European advances into the Western Hemisphere did not fully begin until the late 1400s when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain in search of a westward route to Asia. Before that time, North America remained almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world’s population. Such isolation proved to be the primary factor in Europe’s successful advance into the Americas. Lacking immunities to common European diseases, Native Americans were susceptible to influenza, chicken pox, smallpox, measles, and other diseases. The results were devasting for Native American communities throughout the Americas.

B

1

European Diseases

Beginning in 1492, Columbus’s voyages to the New World, as Europeans soon called the Americas, initiated the first waves of epidemics for Native Americans. The Taíno (also known as the Island Arawak) and the Island Carib of the Caribbean were the first Native Americans to be nearly exterminated by European contact.

As Spanish conquistadores (conquerors) explored the Americas, Native American communities suffered. In the American Southeast, many large, densely populated Indian villages soon disintegrated following Spanish contact. Their concentrated communities and the humid, temperate climates created ripe and deadly conditions for disease. Scholars estimate that nearly 90 percent of some pre-contact Southeastern populations were gone by 1600. Similar population declines occurred throughout the Northeast, along the St. Lawrence River, and in the mid-Atlantic and coastal regions. In the arid Southwest, Spanish diseases were not as traumatic as elsewhere. But, generally, as Europeans encountered native populations, death and disease ensued.