I am rethinking my review and giving this the highest rating. This book has really stayed with me in the months since I read it. I'm always a sucker for prehistory stuff, people speculating on history and social structure and motivations for doing things when all you have to go on are oral history and some artifacts but nothing written down. And there is so much we don't know about the Native Americans, even though we act as if we do. This book reminds the reader that we base all our knowledge about Indian tribes on what they were like when we managed to really sit down and chat with them starting in the mid 1600's on the east coast and really the 1700's for the interior, and we didn't know much about the western tribes even by Lewis and Clark, in 1802. But the european contact affected them much earlier. You can see that even with tribes like the Wampanoag, who the Pilgrims met. The Pilgrims had time to sit in their villages and really write about what they were like, but by that point they had been trading with Europeans for almost a hundred years, european goods were ingrained in their society, and the first waves of disease had already arrived via fishing boats. The society was very different from what it had originally been. And so with plains tribes, this was even more of a big deal. A tribe like the cheyenne or sioux, let's say. We really don't record anything about them until the 1800s. But they started getting things from us, not only traded goods but also diseases, in the 1500s. They traded with tribes who traded with tribes who traded with the spanish. That's 300 years of change! It's not that far fetched to think that maybe in 1830 some of these nomadic plains tribes were living in tipis and surviving only on what they could hunt because 150 years ago their societies were decimated by disease and they were forced to become nomadic hunter-gatherers. But what we learn in school is only what we can prove: the Cheyenne were a small tribe of hunter-gatherers that lived a meager existence on the plains, subsisting mostly on buffalo. This makes it sound like they were always FAR behind the europeans, which might not have been true.
Another interesting theory. Remember learning about the thundering herds of buffalo, millions strong, dominating the plains. You just figure it must have always been like that, until the europeans came along. But we ignore that the dominant predator for the buffalo was the native american. And European diseases caused possibly 75% of the native american population to die, round about 1700. So what we really saw in the 1800s was a massive population surge of buffalo, because the only people eating them had vanished.
Plus there's all kinds of great writing in here about how advanced the Incans were how they may have had a written language after all, but using knots on rope, which is really cool when you think about it. I think people would find history a lot more interesting if they talked about this kind of stuff in school. Maybe it's just me.