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Native
American Voices
Introduction:
Part I
Native
Americans as Dynamic Agents of Change
Most of the history that we acquire comes not from history textbooks
or classroom lectures but from images that we receive from movies,
television, childhood stories, and folklore. Together, these images
exert a powerful influence upon the way we think about the past.
Some of these images are true; other are false. But much of what
we think we know about the past consists of unexamined mythic
images.
No
aspect of our past has been more thoroughly shaped by popular
mythology than the history of Native Americans. Quite unconsciously,
Americans have picked up a complex set of mythic images. For example,
many assume that pre-Columbian North America was a sparsely populated
virgin land; in fact, the area north of Mexico probably had seven
to twelve million inhabitants. Also, when many Americans think
of early Indians, they conceive of hunters on horseback. This
image is misleading in two important respects: first, many Native
Americans were farmers; and second, horses had been extinct in
the New World for 10,000 years before Europeans arrived.
One
of history's most important tasks is to identify myths and misconceptions
and correct them. No where is this more important than in the
study of the Indian peoples of North America. Until remarkably
recently, the history of Native Americans largely reflected the
perspective, perceptions, and prejudices of European Americans.
Even today, however, many of the distortions of an earlier Eurocentric
history persist. Many textbooks still begin their treatment of
American history with the European "discovery" of the
New World--largely ignoring the first Americans, who crossed into
the New World from Asia and established rich and diverse cultures
in America centuries before Columbus's arrival. Although few textbooks
today use the word "primitive" to describe pre-contact
Native Americans, many still convey the impression that North
American Indians consisted simply of small migratory bands that
subsisted through hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants.
As we shall see, this view is incorrect; in fact, Native American
societies were rich, diverse, and sophisticated.
The most dangerous misconception about Native American history,
however, is the easiest to slip into. It is to think of Native
Americans as a vanishing people, who were fated for extinction
and were the passive victims of an acquisitive, land-hungry white
population.
The
view of Native Americans as passive victims is a gross distortion
of historical reality. Far from being passive, Native Americans
were active agents who responded to threats to their culture through
physical resistance and cultural adaptation. And far from disappearing,
Native Americans today have a growing population that retains
rich cultural traditions.
Throughout
their history, Native Americans have been dynamic agents of change.
Food discovered and domesticated by Native Americans would transform
the diet of Europe and Asia. Native Americans also made many crucial--though
often neglected--contributions to modern medicine, art, architecture,
and ecology.
During the thousands of years preceding European contact, the
Native American people developed inventive and creative cultures.
They cultivated plants for food, dyes, medicines, and textiles;
domesticated animals; established extensive patterns of trade;
built cities; produced monumental architecture; developed intricate
systems of religious beliefs; and constructed a wide variety of
systems of social and political organization ranging from kin-based
bands and tribes to city-states and confederations. Native Americans
not only adapted to diverse and demanding environments, they also
reshaped the natural environments to meet their needs. And after
the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans struggled
intently to preserve the essentials of their diverse cultures
while adapting to radically changing conditions.
During
the past quarter century, the history of Native Americans has
been totally rewritten, profoundly reshaping our understanding
of our collective past. In order to recapture the perspective
of Native Americans, scholars, many of Indian ancestry, have tapped
new sources of evidence, including oral traditions, material remains,
and legal records; they have drawn upon the methods and insights
of anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, and linguistics; and
in the process, they have reinvigorated the discipline of history
by incorporating previously neglected perspectives and points
of view. This book's introduction summarizes the findings of this
impressive body of scholarship, which has dramatically altered
earlier ways of thinking about the Indian peoples of North America.
For
more than half a century, the history of Native Americans largely
took the form of tragedy. Indian history, from this viewpoint,
was simply the story of declining population, lost homelands,
cultural dislocation, and persistent poverty and inequality. There
is, however, another side to Native American history, a much more
positive story that is missing from accounts that treat Indian
history merely as an on-going tragedy. This is a story of cultural
persistence and survival. The key themes of Native American history
are continuity, resistance, resilience, and adaptability in the
face of extraordinary challenges and dislocations. This book tells
that remarkable story through the voices of Native Americans themselves.
Origins
In 1908, after the Folsom Flood of August 27th, an African-American
cowboy named George McJunkin made a discovery that profoundly
altered our understanding
of the first Americans in North America. While hunting for lost
cattle along the edge of a gully near Folsom, New Mexico,
he spotted
some bleached bones. Those bones, it turned out, were the ribs
of a species of bison that had been extinct for 10,000 years.
Mixed in with the bones were human-made stone spearheads.
The
spearheads offered the first unambiguous proof that ancestors
of today's Indians lived in the New World thousands of years
earlier
than most early twentieth century authorities believed--before
the end of the last ice age.
(Read
more about George McJunkin's discovery)
Although
the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas in the late fifteenth
century called it the "New World," it was a land that
had been inhabited for more than 20,000 years. An enormous diversity
of societies flourished, each with its own distinctive language,
cultural patterns, and history. No written records record these
histories. To reconstruct this story, it is necessary to turn
to fragile archaeological artifacts that record past human behavior.
From snippets of baskets, fragments of pottery, food remains,
discarded tools, and oral traditions, anthropologists, archeologists,
and historians have pieced together information about these peoples'
social organization, technology, and diet, including how these
have changed over time. This is a remarkable story, which underscores
the ability of the First Americans to adapt to--and reshape--extraordinarily
diverse environments, create their own rich and sophisticated
cultures independent of outside influences, and establish elaborate
trading networks and sophisticated religious systems.
When
and how the ancestors of today's Indians arrived in the New World
remains one of the most controversial issues in archaeology. Many
sixteenth-century Europeans believed that the Indians were descendants
of the Biblical "Lost Tribes of Israel" or the mythical
lost continent of Atlantis. In 1590, a Spanish Jesuit missionary,
Jose de Acosta, came closer to the truth when he suggested that
small groups of "hunters driven from their homelands by starvation
or some other hardships" had travelled to America from Asia.
Most
scholars believe that America's first pioneers crossed into North
America in the general area of the Bering Strait--which now separates
Siberia and Alaska. Although the dates when the ancestors of today's
Native Americans migrated remain disputed, existing evidence suggests
that the first migrants arrived between 25,000 and 70,000 years
ago. The earth's climate at that time was very different from
today's. The earliestAmericans entered the New World during one
of the earth's periodic ice ages, when vast amounts of water froze
into glaciers. As a result, the depth of the oceans dropped, exposing
a "land bridge" between Siberia and Alaska. Twice, such
a land bridge appeared--between 28,000 and about 26,000 years
ago, and between 20,000 and 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In fact,
the term "land bridge" is a misnomer; a vast expanse
of marsh-filled land, a thousand miles wide, stretched between
Siberia and Alaska. This land mass, now known as Beringia, allowed
hunters from northeastern Asia to follow the migratory paths of
animals that were their source of food into the more southernly
parts of Alaska.
Supporting
the notion that the first Americans came from Northeast Asia is
the evidence of physical anthropology. Native Americans and northeast
Asian people share certain common physical traits: straight black
hair; dark brown eyes; wide cheekbones; and "shovel incisors"
(concave inner surfaces of the upper front teeth).
Physical
and linguistic evidence suggests that the migration into the Americas
did not take place all at once. Many scholars believe that it
took place in three distinct waves, with the Inuit (Eskimos) and
the natives of the Aleutian Islands arriving more recently than
the people who would inhabit the Pacific northwest coast or other
portions of North and South America.
The
original settlers of North America were a remarkably adaptable
people, capable of surviving in subfreezing temperatures in the
tundra. In a climate much harsher than today's, they were able
to build fires, construct heavily insulated housing, and make
warm clothes out of hides and furs.
Despite
a lack of wheeled vehicles and riding animals, the first Americans
spread quickly across North and South America. This momentous
movement of people was propelled by population pressure, since
hunters and gatherers required a great deal of territory to support
themselves. Archaeological findings suggest that these people
moved along three routes: eastward, across Canada's northern coast;
southward, along the Pacific Coast, as well as across the eastern
Rocky Mountains, with some groups peeling off toward the eastern
seaboard, the Ohio Valley, and the Mississippi Valley.
Prehistoric
Patterns of Change
Near Kit Carson, Colorado, archaeologists made an astonishing
discovery. There, they found stone spearheads alongside the bones
of extinct long-horned bison--evidence of a huge bison hunt around
8200 B.C. During this hunt, Native Americans drove some 200 bison
into a gully before killing the animals. To butcher and carry
away the 60,000 pounds of meat must have required at least 150
Indians working closely together.
At
Bat Cave in southwestern New Mexico archaeologists made another
important find. There, they found evidence that around 3000 B.C.
Indians had learned to domesticate corn, the first grown north
of Mexico. It was a primitive form of corn, with stalks barely
an inch long and no husk to protect the kernels. Still, it was
a sign that these people were no longer wholly dependent on wild
food sources; they were now able to supplement their diet by cultivating
crops.
It
is from discoveries like these that archaeologists reconstruct
the prehistory of North America's Indians. They have found that
the earliest New World pioneers hunted large mammals--bison, caribou,
oxen, and mammoths--with stone tipped spears and spear and dart
throwers, known as atlatls. Between 6000 and 12,000 years ago,
however, many large animal species became extinct. Archaeologists
do not agree why these animals died out. Some argue that it was
the result of overkilling; others attribute it to climatic changes:
rising temperatures, the drying up of many lakes, and the loss
of many early forms of vegetation. As a result, the ancestors
of today's Indians had to dramatically alter their way of life.
As
the larger mammals died out and the Indian population grew, many
Indian peoples turned to foraging, gathering plant foods, fishing,
and hunting smaller animals. To hunt small game, these people
developed new kinds of weapons, including spears with barbed points,
the bow and arrow, and nets and hooks for fishing. This era, known
as the Archaic period, offers many examples of these peoples'
increasing technological sophistication, evident in the proliferation
of such objects as awls, axes, boats, cloth, darts, millstones,
and woven baskets.
Following the Archaic period comes the Formative period, when
some foragers began to domesticate wild seeds. By 3000 B.C., some
groups of Southwestern Indians had already begun to grow corn.
The rise of agriculture allowed these people to form permanent
settlements.
The
Cultures of Prehistoric America
Across from present-day St. Louis stands an earthen mound one
hundred feet high and covering fifteen acres, bigger at its base
than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. This mysterious mound is one
of literally thousands that early Native Americans built in the
Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, the Great Lakes region, and
along the Gulf Coast. Before the 1890s, many authorities refused
to believe that Indians could have created these mounds since
they lacked horses, oxen, or wheeled vehicles; they thought that
the Vikings or the Lost Tribes of Israel or some long vanished
civilization constructed them. We now know that they were built
by Native Americans to serve as burial places and as platforms
for temples and the residences of chiefs and priests.
Many
of these New World monuments are truly immense. One Ohio mound
resembles a huge snake and measures a quarter of a mile long.
A Georgia mound has a figure of an eagle across its top. The mounds
provide clues to the rich and diverse cultures that Native Americans
created during the more than 20,000 years before Europeans reached
the New World.
Earthen
mounds are not the only magnificent monuments that the Indians
produced. On the face of a sandstone cliff in present-day Mesa
Verde, Colorado, is a spectacular stone and adobe structure that
once housed over four hundred people in two hundred rooms. Located
a hundred feet above a nearby plateau, the structure is accessible
only by climbing wooden ladders and using toe holds cut in the
sandstone. In southern Colorado and Utah, northwestern New Mexico,
and northern Arizona, hundreds of similar communal dwellings are
located in shallow caves or under cliff overhangs.
The
first Europeans to arrive in the Americas in the late fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries were an arrogant, ethnocentric people
who drew a sharp contrast between their societies' technological
accomplishments and those of the New World Indians. And while
it is true that the Indian peoples had no steel or iron tools,
wheeled vehicles, large sailing vessels, keystone arches or domes,
digital numbers, coined money, alphabet system of writing, or
gunpowder, this does at all mean that they did not create thriving
and inventive societies. For one thing, the Indians were the first
people to cultivate some of the world's most important agricultural
crops: chocolate, corn, long-staple cotton, peanuts, pineapples,
potatoes, rubber, quinine, tobacco, and vanilla. In addition,
the New World Indians built cities as big as any in Europe, established
forms of government as varied as Europe's, and created some of
the world's greatest art and architecture--including temples,
pyramids, statues, and canals.
While
many Americans are aware of the impressive cultures that thrived
in Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala before Columbus's arrival--the
Toltec, the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca--far fewer are familiar
with the magnificent ancient cultures to be found north of Mexico.
In fact, from the Alaska tundra to the dense evergreen forests
of the Pacific Northwest, from the arid deserts of the Southwest
to the rich river valleys of the Southeast and the eastern woodlands,
prehistoric Native Americans established complex cultures, ingeniously
adapted to diverse conditions.
The first Americans had to adapt their ways of life to vastly
different environments. Before 2000 B.C., the ancestors of the
Inuit and the Aleuts arrived on the coast and frozen tundra of
western Alaska, where they adapted ingeniously to arctic conditions.
Since few plants grew in the harsh arctic climate, the Inuit relied
on hunting and fishing. They drew much of their food from the
sea, hunting seals, whales, and other marine mammals. The game
they hunted not only provided food, but also protection from the
extreme cold. The Inuit wore layers of caribou-skinned clothing
and constructed heavily insulated pit houses, dug into the ground
and covered with furs and animal skins. The Inuit built sleds
for transportation and spread out across the coast. These people
were organized in a large number of small bands, which shared
certain common cultural patterns while remaining largely autonomous.
Along
the Northwest Pacific Coast--an area of dense forests, teeming
with caribou, deer, elk and moose, and rivers, rich with sea life--the
ancestors of the Haidas, Kwakiutls, and Tlingits developed a distinctive
culture oriented toward the water. The mild climate and the abundant
marine life--salmon, sturgeon, halibut, herring, shellfish, and
sea mammals--meant that these peoples could produce food with
very little work. Such abundance freed these people to create
some of the world's most impressive art forms as well as an elaborate
ceremonial life. The people of the Northwest Pacific Coast constructed
large, gabled-roof plank houses; carved family and clan emblems
on totem poles; made elaborately carved wooden masks, grave markers,
and utensils; and constructed great sea-going canoes, some more
than sixty feet long. The region's abundant resources also produced
a highly stratified society, where a few wealthy families controlled
each village. Individuals announced their high social status at
a feast called a potlatch. During this ritual, which could last
for several days, a host demonstrated his wealth by distributing
food and gifts to his guests.
It
was in the arid Southwest that some of the earliest farming societies
developed. The predecessors of the Pueblo and Navajo Indians were
able to flourish in a desert environment by developing complex
irrigation systems for farming and by developing structures suitable
for vast temperature changes.
Shifts
in climate appear to have played an important role in encouraging
the development of agriculture in the Southwest. Between three
and five thousand years ago, the amount of rainfall in this region
increased, encouraging many people to migrate to the area, including
some from Mexico already familiar with raising corn, squash, and
beans. These people raised crops casually, supplementing a diet
that depended largely on hunting and foraging. Around 3000 years
ago, however, the climate grew drier, killing off many of the
region's wild game and vegetation. A people known as the Mogollon,
who lived in permanent villages along the rivers of eastern Arizona
and western New Mexico, responded to this change by devoting increased
energy to farming, raising beans, squash, and corn. The versatility
of the Mogollon is also apparent in the housing they constructed.
To cope with the desert extremes of heat and cold, they built
pit houses--structures burrowed two or three feet into the ground
and covered with woven reeds and plaster made out of mud.
In
central Arizona, the Hohokam, a group that had migrated from Mexico,
constructed elaborate irrigation systems in order to transform
the desert into farm land. They dug wells, built ponds and dams
to collect rainwater, and created hundreds of miles of canals
and ditches to channel water to their crops. The Hohokam combined
farming with trade, which involved luxury goods such as precious
stones, ornamental sea shells, and copper bells.
The
ancestral Puebloans also used dams and irrigation canals to water their crops.
Between A.D. 1000 and 1300, the ancestral Puebloans culture spread across
much of northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southern Colorado,
and southern Utah, establishing more than twenty-five thousand
separate communities spread over sixty thousand square miles connected
by a remarkable system of roads. The ancestral Puebloans are best known today
for their magnificent cliff dwellings--multi-roomed dwellings
built atop mesas or along steep cliffs. By 1300, however, the
ancestral Puebloans abandoned these cliff dwellings and moved to the south
and east, apparently in response to incursions from hostile Indians
and a severe drought that threatened their food supply. The ancestral Puebloans
are the ancestors of the modern day Pueblo Indians.
The
arrival of a new people into the Southwest, the Athabascans, created
an important challenge to the ancestral Puebloans way of life. About A.D.
1000, bands of Athabascans, the ancestors of the Navajos and the
Apaches, began to migrate to the Southwest from what is now Alaska
and Canada. Formidable hunters and raiders, the Athabascans possessed
the bow and arrow, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
raided ancestral Puebloans farming communities, and by 1500 had taken over
the western desert. They lived in settlements consisting of "forked
stick" homes, made by piling logs against three poles joined
together at their tops, then covering the outside with mud. Later
they fashioned hogans, earthen domes with log frames.
Along
the lakes and rivers of the Midwest and the Southeast, prehistoric
Americans established complex communities based on flourishing
trade and agriculture. One of the earliest farming and trading
towns arose approximately 1400 B.C., on the banks of the lower
Mississippi River near present-day Vicksburg, Mississippi. Known
as Poverty Point, the town showed many signs of Mexican influence,
including a cone-shaped burial mound and two large bird-shaped
mounds, and other huge earthworks. Networks of trade apparently
connected Poverty Point with settlements along the Mississippi,
Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers. Thus, thousands of years
before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans were already
engaged in extensive trade of flint, copper, and other goods.
Around 700 B.C., other groups of people, known as the Adena, began
to build large mounds and earthworks in southern Ohio. The Adena
lived in small villages and supported themselves by hunting, fishing,
gathering wild plants, modest farming, and some trading. The Adena
built mounds as burial places. The bodies of village leaders and
other high ranking people were placed in log tombs before being
covered with earth.
From
about 100 B.C., a new mound-building culture flourished in the
Midwest, known as the Hopewell. These people developed thousands
of villages extending across what is now Ohio, Indiana, Michigan,
Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. The Hopewell supported
themselves by hunting, fishing, and gathering, and also cultivated
a variety of crops, including corn. The Hopewell developed an
extensive trading network, obtaining shells and shark teeth from
Florida, pipestone from Minnesota, volcanic glass from Wyoming,
and silver from Ontario.
The Hopewell created stratified societies, and buried their leaders
in earthen mounds, filled with art works made of materials imported
from areas more than a thousand miles away. The Hopewell built
many more mounds than the Adena. A colder climate appears to have
contributed to the decline of the Hopewell beginning around A.D.
450.
After
A.D. 750 another mound-building culture, known as the Mississippians,
emerged in the Mississippi valley and the Gulf Coast. By cultivating
an improved variety of corn, and using flint hoes instead of digging
sticks, these people greatly increased agricultural productivity,
permitting them to build some of the largest cities in prehistoric
North America. The largest that we know about was Cahokia, across
from present-day St. Louis, which probably had a population of
20,000. To protect the population from raids from neighboring
peoples, many of these cities were protected by stockades. Like
the Indians of Mexico, the Mississippians built flat-topped mounds
in the center of their cities, where chiefs lived and the bones
of deceased chiefs were kept.
The
largest of the Mississippian settlements may have become city-states,
exercising control over surrounding farm country. Within their
towns, the Mississippians created a complex, stratified society,
with a distinct leadership class, specialized artisans, an extensive
system of trade, and priests. The Mississippians practiced a religion
known as the Southern Ceremonial Complex. Somewhat similar to
Mexican Indian religions, the "Southern cult," as it
is known, provided a set of symbols and motifs of rank and status
that recur in Mississippian art, notably a flying human figure
with winglike tatoos around the eyes.
The Mississippian cultures grew until the 1500s, when diseases
introduced by European explorers resulted in a sharp decline in
population. However, one group of Mississippians, the Natchez,
survived into the 1700s, long enough to be described by Europeans.
The
Eve of Contact
When Columbus arrived the Caribbean in 1492, the New World was
far from an empty wilderness. It was home to as many people as
lived in Europe--perhaps 60 or 70 million. Between seven and twelve
million lived in what are now the United States and Canada. Not
a single, homogeneous population, the people north of Mexico lived
in more than 350 distinct groups, which spoke more than 250 different
languages and had their own political structure, kinship systems,
and economies. These divisions would have fateful consequences
for the future, permitting the European colonizers to adopt divide-and-conquer
policies that played one group off against others.
In
each geographical and cultural area were deeply rooted historic
conflicts and vulnerabilities that European colonizers would exploit.
In the Southwest, many conflicts arose over control of the arid
region's scarce resources, as groups like Yaquis and the Pimas
struggled over access to water and fertile land. In the northern
portion of the Southwest, village dwellers, such as the Hopi and
Zuni, coexisted uneasily with migratory hunters and raiders like
the Apache. In the southern Southwest, patterns of land use would
make the inhabitants especially vulnerable to Spanish encroachment.
The dominant groups, the Pimas and the Papagos lived in isolated
communities, known as rancherias, spread across a thousand miles
along streams and other sources of irrigation. The Spaniards would
adopt a policy that sought to "reduce" the dispersed
Indian population into supervised towns.
In
the Southeast--where the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Cherokees,
the Seminoles and other peoples lived--extensive European colonization
was delayed until the seventeenth century because the area lacked
precious minerals. Here, Mississippian cultural patterns persisted:
towns, with several hundred to a few thousand residents; farming,
fishing and hunting; varying degrees of social stratification;
and a pronounced tendency toward matrilineality (tracing descent
through the mother's family) and matrilocality (newly married
couples residing with and working for the mother's family). Forms
of political organization ranged from autonomous towns to sets
of villages that paid tribute to a dominant town. A history of
intertribal warfare in the Southeast led many tribes to band together
for protection in confederations.
Stretching
from the Atlantic coast west to the Great Lakes and southward
from Maine to North Carolina lay the eastern woodlands. The eastern
woodland's major groups were the Algonquians, the Iroquois, and
the Muskogeans.
The Algonquians lived in small bands of from one to three hundred
members, combining hunting, fishing, and gathering with some agriculture.
A semi-nomadic people, who might move several times a year, the
Algonquians would plant crops, then break into small bands to
hunt caribou and deer, and return to their fields at harvest time.
These people lived in wigwams, dome-shaped structures containing
one or more families. A wigwam, made of bent saplings covered
with birchbark, typically housed a husband and wife, their children,
and their married sons and their wives and children.
During
the 1600s, the Algonquians and their allies the Hurons fought
a bitter war against the Iroquois. Around 1640, the Algonquians
were defeated and driven from their territory. This war and epidemics
of measles and smallpox reduced the Algonquian population sharply.
The
Iroquois were several related groups of people who still live
in what is now central New York State. Scholars disagree about
whether the Iroquois had long occupied this area or whether they
migrated from the Southeast around 1300. What does seem clear
is that beginning in the fourteenth century, bitter feuds broke
out among the Iroquois, which grew particularly intense during
the sixteenth century. According to Iroquois oral tradition, two
reformers, Dekanawidah, a Huron religious leader, and his disciple
Hiawatha, a Mohawk chief, responded to mounting conflict by proposing
a political alliance of the Iroquois tribes. During the sixteenth
century, five Iroquois tribes--the Cayugas, the Mohawks, the Oneidas,
the Onondagas, and the Senecas--joined together to form a confederation
known as the Iroquois league. A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined
the league in the eighteenth century.
Governing
the league was a council, consisting of the chiefs of each tribe
and fifty specially chosen leaders called sachems. Some scholars
argue that the Iroquois League, which combined a central authority
with tribal autonomy, provided a model for the federal system
of government later adopted by the United States.
Women played a very important role in Iroquois society--a fact
that shocked Europeans. Women headed the longhouses that were
the basic units of social and economic organization among the
Iroquois and were also the leaders of clans, which were comprised
of several longhouses. Although women did not sit on the league
councils that made decisions involving war and diplomacy, the
women who headed the clans did have the power to appoint or remove
the men who served on these councils.
Kinship
and Religion
Despite differences in language and culture, Native American societies
did share certain characteristics in common. Many Indian societies
were organized around principles of kinship. Kinship ties--based
on bloodlines or marriage--formed the basis of the political,
economic, and religious system. Succession to political office
and religious positions, ownership and inheritance of property,
and even whom one could or could not marry were determined on
the basis of membership in a kin group.
Indian
kinship systems included an intricate number of forms, with regulations
governing marriages, relations with in-laws, and residence after
marriage. In patrilineal societies, like the Cheyenne of the Great
Plains, land use rights and membership in the political system
flowed through the father. In matrilineal societies, like the
Pueblo of the Southwest, membership in the group was determined
by the mother's family identity. In the Algonquian-speaking tribes
of eastern North America, group membership was based on ties among
siblings and cousins.
Many
Indian peoples placed less emphasis on the nuclear family--the
unit consisting of husband, wife, and their children--than upon
the extended family or the lineage. On the Northwest Pacific Coast,
the household consisted of a man, his wife or wives, and their
children or the man's sister's sons. Among the western Pueblo,
the nucleus of social and economic organization was the extended
household consisting of a group of female relations and their
husbands, sons-in-law, and maternal grandchildren. Among the Iroquoian
speakers of the Eastern Woodlands, the basic social unit was the
longhouse, a large rectangular structure that contained about
ten families. One sign of the relative unimportance of the nuclear
family as opposed to larger kinship ties is that many Indian societies
provided for relatively easy access to divorce.
Apart
from a common emphasis on kinship, Native American societies also
shared certain religious beliefs and practices. Many European
colonists regarded Indian religions as a form of superstition.
One Catholic priest, Father Francois du Perron, described Iroquoian
beliefs in very negative, but not unusual, terms: "All their
actions are dictated to them directly by the devil...They consider
the dream as the master of their lives; it is the God of the country."
Far
from being "primitive" forms of religion, Indian religions
possessed great subtlety and sophistication, manifest in a rich
ceremonial life, an intricate mythology, and profound speculations
about the creation of the world, the origins of life, and the
nature of the afterlife. Unlike Islam, Christianity, or Judaism,
Native American religions were not "written" religions
with specific founders; also, they might be termed mystical religions,
since they allowed people to have direct contact with the supernatural
through "visions" and "dreams."
Despite
rich variations in ritual practices and customs, Native American
religions shared certain common characteristics, notably an outlook
that might be described as "animistic." This is a belief
that there is a close bonds between people, animals, and the natural
environment, and that all must live together in harmony.
Scholars have identified two dominant forms of Native American
religious expression: hunting and horticultural religions. The
hunting tradition was distinguished by its emphasis on the human
relationship with animals, establishing special rituals and taboos
surrounding the treatment of wild animals so as not to offend
their spiritual masters. Hunting societies often had a shaman
(or medicine man or woman), able to contact supernatural beings
on behalf of the community.
The agrarian tradition emphasized fertility, celebrated in a yearly
round of special ceremonies designed to encourage rainfall and
crop productivity. In contrast to the hunting tradition, which
tended to emphasize a single male diety, the agrarian tradition
had a larger number of gods and goddesses. Also, unlike the less
complexly organized hunting societies, agriculture societies tended
to have an organized priesthood and permanent temples or shrines.
The
centrality of kinship and religion in Indian societies was evident
in a series of social rites of passage that demarcated the transition
from one life stage to the next. Children were usually born in
a special birth hut, located some distance from the family home.
Newborn children were dipped in cold water or rubbed with animal
oil. Several months later, newborns underwent a special initiation
ceremony. In the presence of relatives, a child was given a name
from a wealth of family names. Among some peoples, children also
underwent a rite involving the piercing of the nose or earlobes.
Girls
underwent a puberty ceremony, consisting of isolation at the time
of first menstruation. During her isolation, which might last
from several weeks to a year, an older woman would care for her
and instruct her in her role as an adult. After her return, she
began to wear adult dress. Boys also underwent rites of initiation.
A number of firsts, including the first tooth, first steps, and
the first big game killed by a boy, were recognized in public
ceremonies. Among many peoples, when a boy approached adolescence,
he went alone to a mountaintop or into a forest to fast and seek
a vision from a guardian spirit. On his return he assumed adult
status.
Cultures
Collide
The collision of cultures that occurred when Europeans arrived
in the New World had vast consequences for both European and Native
Americans. Eating habits were revolutionized, as the potato, corn,
and chocolate were introduced to the Old World, and sugar, cattle,
chickens, pigs, and sheep were introduced to the New World. Patterns
of world trade were also overturned, as New World crops--like
tobacco and cotton--and vastly expanded production of sugar--ignited
growing consumer markets.
Even
the natural environment was transformed. Native Americans had
not only adapted to the physical environment--they also shaped
it to meet their needs. By building irrigation systems and using
fire to clear out brush, the Indian people provided themselves
with agricultural land and encouraged the growth of wild game.
But Europeans had a much more devastating impact on the environment,
clearing huge tracts of forested lands and inadvertently introducing
a vast variety of Old World weeds. The introduction of cattle,
goats, horses, sheep, and swine also transformed the ecology,
as grazing animals ate up many native plants.
The horse, extinct in the Americas for 10,000 years, produced
a cultural revolution. It radically reshaped the lives of the
Plains Indians, transforming hunting, transportation, and warfare.
Initially, Indians did not know what to make of these huge animals,
which one group described as elk dogs.The
introduction of the horse encouraged groups like the Cheyenne,
who had been farmers, to become hunters. Horses made hunters much
more adept at killing wild game.
Death
and disease--these too were consequences of contact. Diseases
against which the Indian peoples had no natural immunities caused
the greatest mass deaths in history. Within a century of contact,
the germs that Europeans carried had killed 50 to 80 percent of
the Indian population. Disease radically reduced the resistance
that Native Americans were able to offer to the European intruders.
For thousands of years, Indians had lived in biological isolation.
Unlike Europeans, who were exposed to a large variety of pathogens
from birth, the people of the Americas were immunologically defenseless.
They had crossed into the New World in small bands, too small
to keep epidemic diseases alive. The extremely cold climate of
present-day Alaska and Canada kept many diseases from penetrating
southward into the Americas. Furthermore, the Indians had no herds
of cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep to keep pathogens active. And
in America north of Mexico there were few cities with the thousands
of inhabitants necessary to spread diseases. As a result, the
peoples of the New World proved extraordinarily vulnerable to
cholera, gonorrhea, measles, mumps, smallpox, whooping cough,
and yellow fever.
Adult
men were particularly susceptible to the ravages of disease. Although
sometimes called the "stronger" sex, men between the
ages of fifteen and forty were particularly likely to die in epidemics.
The spread of disease also strained religious belief systems,
persuading many that their ancestral gods had forsaken them and
leading some Indians to embrace Christianity. While the ravages
of disease caused some people to adopt a more nomadic existence,
other Indians responded by establishing new tribes out of the
surviving remnants of earlier societies.
With
the Indian population decimated by disease, Europeans would introduce
a new labor force into the New World: enslaved Africans, who would
be put to work in mines and on sugar and tobacco plantations in
astonishing numbers. Between 1502 and 1870, when the slave trade
was finally suppressed, ten million Africans were shipped to the
Americas.
Yet
it is important to realize that despite the death, disease, and
destruction wrought by contact, the people of North America were
not transformed into helpless pawns. They retained vibrant cultures
that struggled mightily to adapt to a radically changing environment.
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