History

American History I

HIS 131

Chapter 1

Native Peoples of America, to 1500

I. Introduction

Deganawida (Two Rivers Flowing Together), was born in Ontario and was an Iroquois

visionary who prophesized about peace among the constantly warring five Iroquois

nations (the Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Senacas, and Mohawks).

As he traveled south, he met a young Onondaga individual named Hiawatha who joined him in his efforts to create an alliance among the Iroquois nations.

Deganawida had a speech impediment, therefore he acted as the visionary while Hiawatha served as the spokesman for their cause.

His message to the Iroquois was that all men are brothers; therefore, they should cease their practices of killing, scalping, and cannibalism. Together, Deganawida and Hiawatha convinced the five tribes to make peace and join together in an alliance of friendship instead of destroying each other.

This alliance became known as the Iroquois Confederation. This organization was made up of a grand council of all the chiefs of the five nations. These chiefs were elected into power by merit instead of by heredity. Also, each tribal chief had an equal voice in the grand council. As the council developed over the years, it became deeply involved in matters of diplomacy, including war and peace, associations with other tribes, and eventually treaties with European settlers.

Deganawida is credited with the development of this advanced political system of the Iroquois Confederation, which was primarily democratic.

The highly successful Iroquois Confederation flourished into the 19th century. Although we do not know the exact date of the League’s beginnings, through Native American oral history, which can be corroborated by Archaeological findings, the League’s beginnings appear to date back to 1400 AD.

The story of Deganawida, Hiawatha, and the founding of the League of the Iroquois illustrates but one moment in the long history of the Native Americans. It also points out the highly developed culture and the remarkable cultural diversity that existed amongst America’s indigenous inhabitants prior to Christopher Columbus arriving in 1492.

Although, the different Native American groups developed significantly diverse cultures, because there was so much interaction among the different groups, Native Americans had much in common.

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First, they primarily identified themselves as members of multigenerational families as opposed to being identified as individuals or part of a particular governing body.

Second, most Native American groups existed within a system of reciprocity or mutual obligation instead of a system of coercion. This had the effect of normally maintaining peace and harmony between Native American communities.

Third, Native Americans saw the universe and everything in it as sacred. These central ideals arrived here with the original Native Americans and stayed with them even through the European Invasion and the clash of the two cultures, and is often found intact today.

II. The First Americans, ca 13,000-2500 B.C.

A. Peopling the New World

Everything was water except a very small piece of ground. On this were the eagle and the coyote. Then the turtle swam to them. They sent it to dive for the earth at the bottom of the water. The turtle barely succeeded in reaching the bottom and touching it with its foot. When it came up again, all the earth seemed washed out. Coyote looked closely at its nails. At last he found a grain of earth. Then he and the eagle took this and laid it down. From it they made the earth as large as it is. From the earth they also made six men and six women. They sent these out in pairs in different directions and the people separated. After a time the eagle sent the coyote to see what the people were doing. Coyote came back and said: "They are doing something bad. They are eating the earth. One side is already gone." The eagle said: " That is bad. Let us make something for them to eat. Let us send the dove to find something." The dove went out. It found a single grain of meal. The eagle and coyote put this down on the ground. Then the earth became covered with seeds and fruit. Now they told the people to eat these. When the seeds were dry and ripe the people gathered them. Then the people increased and spread all over. But the water is still under the world.

All humans are interested in their origins and try to account for their existence through

creation stories, like the one quoted above which is told by the Yaudanchi (a Yokut-

speaking Nation living in the south-central San Joaquin Valley of California).

According to Crow Indian legend, long, long ago there was only water. No America, no Indians. The world was empty, and boring. So, Old Man Coyote used mud which the diving ducks had brought him to make Earth, and more mud to make men. After a while, at the prompting of the ducks, he made women; and the women were so successful that Old Man Coyote made female ducks as well.

This is the Crow Indian story about how the Indians originally came to the Americas. The Europeans…of course…have always known better.

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In the 1830’s Lord Kingsborough spent his entire fortune in proving that the New World was populated by the Lost Tribes of Israel, a view which was later sanctified by the Mormon Church. Other theories have appeared that trace the Native Americans back to Egypt, Wales, Outer Space, and the lost continent of Atlantis.

Every native North American society has such stories recounting the actions and deeds of "power" in the past. They commonly explain how people came to live where they do, how they acquired tools and customs, and why one should act, or not act, in certain ways.

Most commonly they contain fundamental conceptions of nature, society, and how people ought to relate to the world and to one another.

Like North America's Native People, anthropologists and archaeologists also have creation stories which explain how America's native peoples came to be, though their stories differ markedly from those of most of the Native People. It's not a better story, just a different one.

Humans first evolved in Africa some 4 - 5 million years ago. Over the next 4 million years, through the interplay of evolution and adaptation, survival and extinction, many species of humans evolved.

By about 100,000 - 120,000 years ago, people looking physically like modern humans had evolved in Africa, and sometime around 100,000 years ago, some of them migrated out into the rest of the world, reaching central and eastern Asia by at least 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. And it was from these "out-of-Africa" populations that the first immigrants into the Americans came, reaching North America about 12,000 years ago by means of a "land bridge" between Asia and North America.

However, once in Alaska, these big game hunters were blocked from going south or east by the presence of the glaciers, that were in some places up to two miles thick and stretching from the Atlantic coast to the mountain ranges of Alaska and British Columbia, and from the southern shores of the Great Lakes to the north polar regions.

Then around 12,000 years ago the glaciers began to disappear and an "ice- free" corridor appeared between the receding glaciers of Alaska and British Columbia and those lying eastward in Canada, and opening the door to the Americas for the very first time in human history. And it was by means of this corridor that the hardy Siberian-cum-American pioneers made their way to the south, reaching the Great Plains of North America some 11,400 years ago.

Once the pioneers had traversed the "ice-free" corridor, they fanned out in many directions: some groups moved into the Eastern U.S.; others continued southward into

northern Mexico; while still other groups moved into the Great Basin and Southwestern regions of the U.S.

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In so doing they became the First Americans, or as the archaeologists call them, the Paleo-Indians , and they have been regarded as the ancestral populations to all of today's Native Americans.

The earliest, and best-known, of these "founders" are called the Clovis people, named after a site in Clovis, New Mexico where, in the 1930s, large, flaked stone spear points were found in direct association with mammoth bones (in some instances actually embedded in the rib bones on the mammoths).

Clovis hunters left their stone points and butchered animal bones at kill sites scattered across much of North America. When radiocarbon dating was introduced in the 1950s,

Clovis sites were shown to range in age from about 11,000 to 11,400 years old - several thousands of years older than any other sites in the Americas (at least that was the thought then).

Everything seemed to fit quite nicely: no people in the Americas before 12,000 years ago (because of the ice sheets), the opening of an ice-free corridor beginning around 12,000 years ago, and the "sudden" appearance of Clovis at about 11,400 years ago, and their seemingly rapid spread over much of North America. Thus Clovis were the First Americans.

A simple, persuasive, once might even say seductive, story - several small bands of nomadic big-game hunters from Siberia colonizing a virgin land and over thousands of years their descendants would spread to every corner of the Americas and give rise to most of the native people in the Americas today. This was (and for many archaeologists it still IS) the gospel of American archaeology.

But .... it now seems that this scenario is much too simple. All across the Americas, archaeologists and anthropologists, along with geneticists, linguists, geologists, and some of America's native peoples, are assembling new data, reassessing older data, and generating new models that call into question both the single genetic and cultural origin model as well as the Clovis First model.

There is now another theory that has recently developed. The skeletal remains known as Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 by two young men along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. When the skeleton was brought to James Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, Chatters first believed that the remains were those of a 19th century pioneer.

He was astonished when radiocarbon dating revealed the skeleton to be approximately 9,500 years old, making it one of the oldest skeletons found in North America. But what was really amazing was that despite his antiquity, Kennewick Man did not resemble what we know of as Native Americans. His physical characteristics suggest the people of

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Polynesia (South Pacific culture) as his common ancestors. As Chatters consulted other experts, he learned that Kennewick Man’s physical features were shared by other ancient skeletons that had been discovered in the Americas.

Although it is very possible many of the original people in the “New World” may have come from the South Pacific, it must be pointed out that this theory does not throw out the previously mentioned Clovis Theory on the peopling of North America, it just adds an additional way that the first Americans may have arrived.

Unfortunately, Chatter’s investigation has been cut short because local Native American groups in The Washington State area have claimed Kennewick Man’s remains under NAGPRA the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is a Congressional act passed in 1992 that allows indigenous Native American groups to claim human remains and artifacts as their own, and to have them returned to them for ceremonial reburial. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the land where Kennewick Man was found, has seized the skeleton and put it into federal storage, where it remains until this day waiting for the courts to decide what to do with the remains.

And the answers now emerging to the questions of who were the First Americans, from where did they come, how did they get to the Americas, when did they arrive in the Americas, and what were their lifeways during initial colonization, are very different from those of just a few years ago and suggest a picture very different from the standard textbook story of who the first Americans were.

The accumulating skeletal and genetic evidence suggests that the earliest populations to move into the Americas were not Asians whose primary genetic background was that of residents of northeastern Asia and eastern Mongolia.

At the end of 1999 scientists met in California and New Mexico to mull over the implications of recently discovered or restudied ancient American skeletons most of which date between 8,600 and 11,000 years ago. And what they discovered has shaken the foundations of the anthropological communities.

Instead of resembling the historically known American Indians, the wide range of skull shapes which have come to light so far display affinities with populations as diverse as the Ainu of Japan, peoples of central Asia, Australia, India, southwest Asia, even the Neanderthals of Europe.

Genetic evidence also supports the idea of multiple migrations of people coming from distinctly different genetic populations: perhaps as many as four or five different genetic populations.

How did they get to the Americas?

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While some populations, perhaps the genetic and cultural forbears of the Clovis people, walked across the "land bridge" and down the ice-free corridor in western Canada, some theorists are beginning to consider the possibility that people migrated to the Americas by walking or boating along the now submerged Beringia and the continental shelves of North, Central, and South America.

While older ideas stressed that the late Ice-Age glaciers extended down and into the Pacific ocean, newer studies have shown that this was not the case. Indeed, even our ideas about the environment of the entire “land bridge” have changed markedly in the last several decades.

Perhaps the "ice-free" corridor was along the Pacific coast of the Americas, which would help explain why some of the oldest sites in the Americas are in South, not North America.

Other scientists have proposed a migration of boat people from Europe, basing their hypothesis on what they perceive as shared technologies and tool types between Clovis and people who we know lived in France around 18,000 years ago.

Presumably, European boat people would have used much the same route that the Vikings did thousands or years later (around 1,100 years ago), when they settled in Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the northeastern U.S.

When did they arrive?

Archaeological evidence suggests that people were already living in the Americas well before the initial appearance of Clovis. For example, people were living at a site called Monte Verde (in Chile) at least 12,500 years ago (and perhaps as much as 30,000-plus years ago).

At some point after the inhabitants left the site, rising creek waters covered the site, laying down a deposit of peat which preserved a wide range of items: animal bones, wood planks, stakes, and animals used to cover rectangular shaped living structures, fireplace ash, a human footprint, and the remains of over 70 kinds of edible plants.

At Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, in western Pennsylvannia, there is evidence of nearly continuous human occupation from the Iroquoian Seneca of the early centuries of English and American occupation all the way back to Clovis and beyond. The site's excavator claims he has found human-made fire pits dating to more than 14,000 years ago, with indications of some being as old as 17,000 years.

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After the Ice Age, about 10,500 B.C., these Paleo-Indians learned to use jasper or flint for tools and weapons for hunting. A warming climate altered the food chain, ending many of the big game species (mastodon, mammoth, long-hared bison, camelops, ground sloth, horse, etc.).

By 4000 B.C. this climatic change melted much of the ice which caused the sea level to rise and the glaciers to recede, filling the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River basin, and other waterways with the glacial runoff from melting ice. Treeless plains and evergreen forests gave way to deciduous forests in the East, grassland prairies on the Plains, and desert in much of the West.

B. Archaic Societies

In response to these climatic changes, Paleo-Indians began to modify their ways of life and develop new societies, called Archaic by archeologists….Archaic peoples of about 8000 B.C. to about 2500 B.C., lived off smaller mammals, fish, and wild plants. In the east and Midwest many dwelled in year-round villages, making more complex weapons and utensils and engaging in trade.

Over time Archaic Indians began to experiment with agriculture, tending wild plants and sometimes selecting seeds for future harvesting.

III. Cultural Diversity, ca 2500 B.C. - A.D. 1500

A. Introduction

After 2500 B.C. many Native American societies moved beyond Archaic ways of life. The most far-reaching transformation occurred among peoples whose cultivated crops were their primary sources of food.

Some non-farming as well as farming societies transformed trade networks into extensive religious and political systems and some of these groupings evolved into formal confederacies and even hierarchical states.

In environments where sources of food were few and widely scattered, mobile bands still survived by hunting, fishing, and gathering.

B. Mesoamerica and South America

In Mesoamerica (Central America) and South America selective breeding of crops, particularly maize (corn), led to surpluses that enabled the development of large urban centers. Several closely clustered communities would form a chiefdom ruled by hereditary leaders.

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After A. D. 1, a few states arose, with centralized, hierarchical power and institutions that extended across broad spans of territory.

Around the 15th century two mighty empires challenged these states:

First, were the Aztecs of Mesoamerica and second, were the Incas of the South American

Andes. The arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century violently crushed both the Aztec and Inca empires.

C. The Southwest

In the Southwest, fulltime farming did not begin until after 400 B.C., when a more drought-resistant strain of maize made possible increased population throughout the region.

During the 3rd century B.C. the Hohokam peoples began farming in the river valleys of southern Arizona, building elaborate irrigation canals and living in permanent villages.

Among the last south-westerners to make farming the focus of their subsistence were the Anasazis .

From the beginning of the 10th century to the middle of the 12th century they expanded over much of what is today the region where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah meet.

They established towns; controlled rainwater runoff through dams, terraces, and other devices; and developed a turquoise industry that manufactured beads for trade with Indian tribes in Mexico.

One of the most significant aspects of the Anasazi culture was its architecture. Their villages were made up of vast complexes of attached apartments and storage areas. In addition to these apart mental features, there existed kivas which were underground structures where the Anasazi men participated in religious ceremonies. Even today, these types of apartments and kivas are the main architectural features of the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest.

Extreme drought at the end of the 12th and in the early 13th centuries brought an end to the Anasazi culture. As its important population centers were abandoned, some inhabitants moved to the upper Rio Grande while others went south or west to establish the Zuni and Hopi pueblos.

The drier lands of the Southwest attracted Apaches and Navajos by the end of the 13th century after their long migration from northwestern Canada.

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D. The Eastern Woodlands

In the Eastern Woodlands…the land from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic Ocean…Indians established complex political organizations as well as developing a flourishing agriculture system…As early as 1200 B.C. a mound-building culture existed on the Mississippi River in

Louisiana.

Another mound-building culture, the Adena , emerged in the Ohio Valley in the 5th century B.C. The Adena people spread over a wide area and built hundreds of mounds, most containing graves. Artifacts in these graves reflect differences in social status and indicate a significantly developed trade network.

During the 1st century B.C. the Adena culture developed into an even more complex and widespread culture known as Hopewell . It covered a wider area, including the Illinois River valley, and built more complex ceremonial centers with a greater variety and quantity of goods.

Through trade networks the Hopewell influence spread over much of the Eastern Woodlands to Wisconsin, Missouri, Florida, and New York. However, for reasons that are unclear, the great Hopewell centers were abandoned in the 5th century A.D.

Agriculture became a dietary mainstay for woodlands people only between the 7th and 12th centuries A.D. The first full-time farmers in the East lived on the floodplains of the Mississippi and its major tributaries. They developed a new culture, the Mississippian , that combined elements of Hopewell culture with new ideas from Mexico.

The volume of Mississippian craft production and long-distance trade dwarfed those of the Adena and Hopewell cultures. Mississippian towns numbering 100’s and even 1,000’s of people were built around plazas like those of central Mexico. By the 10th century most Mississippian centers were linked in a single system with its center at the city of Cahokia , located near present-day St. Louis.

These remains of the most sophisticated prehistoric native civilization north of Mexico are preserved at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Within the 2,200-acre tract, located a few miles west of Collinsville, Illinois, lie the archaeological remnants of the central section of the ancient settlement that is today known as Cahokia.

According to archaeological finds, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to 1400. At its peak, from A.D. 1100 to 1200, the city covered nearly six square miles…. Houses were arranged in rows and around open plazas, and the main agricultural fields lay outside the city. The site is named for a sub-tribe of the Illini - the Cahokia - who occupied the area when the French arrived. Archaeological investigations and scientific tests have provided what is known of the once-thriving community.

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The fate of the prehistoric Cahokians and their city is unknown. Depletion of resources probably contributed to the city's decline. A climate change after A.D. 1200 may have affected crop production and the plant and animal resources needed to sustain a large population. War, disease, social unrest, and declining political and economic power may

have also taken their toll. A gradual decline in population began sometime after 1200 CE, and by the 1400s, the site had been abandoned.

Beginning in the 13th century the Mississippian centers underwent decline. Although that decline ended a trend toward political centralization, the Mississippians had affected culture profoundly, spreading new strains of maize and beans along with the techniques and tools to cultivate these crops.

E. Non-farming Societies

At the end of the Archaic period, roughly 2500 B.C., in western Alaska the Inuits and Aleuts perfected techniques of living in the tundra regions of the Far North, making and using bows and arrows, ceramic pottery, and pit houses as they spread eastward across upper Canada.

Along the Pacific coast from Alaska to southern California improvements in the production and storage of Salmon and other spawning fish enabled Indians to settle into villages, which on the northwest coast could number several hundred persons.

Farther south in California, Indians developed elaborate techniques for processing acorns for food. Competition for acorns resulted in defining territorial boundaries more rigidly than elsewhere in pre-Columbian North America and led to more intricate political, economic, and religious organization.

The end of the Archaic period is less noticeable in the Great Plains to the east of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin to the west, which both remained too dry to support large human settlements. Plains Indian hunters mainly lived off of buffalo, however, in the Great Basin, as the buffalo herds and other game dwindled and the climate grew even dryer the Native Americans in this area depended heavily on Pinon nuts.

IV. North American Peoples on the Eve of European Contact

A. Introduction

By A.D. 1500 the North American continent presented a broad spectrum of human societies, bound together by similar patterns of kinship, the norms of reciprocity and communal use and control of resources.

Between 7 million and 10 million Native Americans lived north of present-day Mexico.

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Trade facilitated the exchange not only of goods but of new ideas and techniques. The bow and arrow, ceramic pottery, and certain beliefs and rituals surrounding the burial of the dead came to characterize Indians everywhere.

As they had for thousands of years, small, mobile hunting bands people the Arctic, Sub-arctic, Great Basin, and much of the plains. More stable societies, based on fishing or gathering, predominated along the Pacific coast, while village-based agriculture was typical in the Southwest, the Eastern Woodlands, and portions of the Plains. Mississippian urban centers still existed in parts of the Southeast.

B. Kinship and Gender

Indians also shared a preference for the independent, kin-based communities that generally characterized indigenous North America.

Nuclear families , (a husband, a wife, and their biological children), never stood autonomously, in other words, they never lived separate. Instead, they lived with one of the parents; relatives known as their extended family.

In some Native American communities, such as the Iroquois in New England, the extended families of women ruled over the men. Once married, a new husband moved in with his wife’s family, and the main authority figure in a child’s early life was his mother’s oldest brother as opposed to his father. A husband and father was considered only a guest of his wife’s family.

However, other Indian societies considered the men’s extended family as the predominate one, while still other societies did not distinguish much between male and female family lines.

In farming societies around 1500, women did most of the work. The only exception to this was seen in the Southwest where the women and the men shared the farming responsibilities.

With the women producing the larger and more stable share of the food supply, they often were granted more power than were they’re European counterparts.

For example, the Iroquois women together owned the fields, handed out food, and played a huge role as political leaders.

C. Spiritual and Social Values

Native American religions held the conviction that all nature was alive, united in an unbroken web. This is what is meant by the Iroquois word manitou .

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Most Indian peoples sought to conciliate nature’s spiritual forces and to reach spiritual power themselves through physical ordeal, such as the Sun Dance (performed by Indians of the Great Basin and the Plains).

The Sun Dance required the cooperation of men’s and women’s societies and practitioners with special knowledge of rituals that are too complex for most to understand. The center point of the ceremony was a sacred tree trunk erected at the center of a circular lodge of poles and greenery.

The full ceremony took eight days, the first of which was spent in the sweat lodge where heated stones produced the steam needed to purify the participants. After several more days of fasting and prayer the participants, while gazing towards the sun, were tied to the sacred pole by ropes which ended in wooden skewers thrust through the flesh of the chest.

Blowing eagle-bone whistles and jerking backwards against the skewers they danced until the flesh gave away, leaving deep scars that they wore with pride as an assurance of divine blessing.

Another source of spiritual power was gained through a vision quest (a solitary venture that entailed fasting and awaiting the appearance of a spirit who would endow them with special powers or message).

Native American communities demanded conformity and close cooperation. In early childhood Indians learned to be accommodating and reserved, slow to reveal their feelings.

Because Indians valued consensus building in everyday life, their leaders’ authority depended primarily on gaining respect rather than on compulsion.

All Indian cultures possessed a strong sense of order and custom that mingled with the spiritual world at every turn. Even as they grew larger and more complex, Native American societies maintained a strong sense of interdependence.

V. Conclusion

The European “invaders”…that began arriving in the New World in 1492 and later….thought that they had entered a dormant, stagnant world…populated by savages.

However, from the evidence we have discussed…we can see that this was not the case.

For thousands of years…Native Americans had been able to adapt to harsh environments…actually flourishing as they communed with nature…developing advanced, sophisticated societies…equipped with agriculture, trade, and political structure.

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It also must be pointed out…that although the Native Americans transformed the American landscape…they never looked upon their endeavors as one of conquering or controlling nature…Actually they viewed their existence as one of a combined natural and spiritual existence, which needed to remain balanced….By living as one with nature…the natural resources were allowed to renew themselves guaranteeing the continued existence and way of life the Native Americans enjoyed.

After the arrival of the Europeans in 1492 and later…a new vision of the land made itself apparent.

Convinced that God had given them the control over their natural surroundings…the European invaders claimed large areas of land in the name of their rulers….The land was ultimately divided into plots – individually owned – and its value based on what wealth the land could produce.

Over the following centuries…the newcomers shunned the Native American ideals of living as one with nature.

Because the natural resources were not allowed to renew themselves…today’s American society that exists on the Native American’s ancient continent holds no resemblance to the world that Native Americans once saw.

Often today, we have a tendency to lump all Native Americans into one specific group…..This was a mistake that the European newcomers made as well.

Although we have found that the different Native American groups developed with many cultural aspects in common…they were also very diverse in many ways.

At the time of European contact there were over 320 recorded tribes speaking 9 known different languages with an infinite number of dialects.

But…even with this diversity considered…the Native Americans share one major and tragic aspect of their long history….On the eve of the European contact in 1492 and later…the Native American population was between 7- 10 million….By the 1800’s this population had dwindled to only 600,000!! Why?