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“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.” —Dakota proverb
The discovery of the use of fire led directly to humans living longer.
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.” —Chief Seattle, Duwamish
Up to ten million people may have lived in the Americas before the arrival of the first white settlers.
The Inuit were nomads, living in small, portable homes made of animal skin or even ice blocks and surviving by hunting seals and polar bears as they moved across the frozen landscape. The Aleut were more settled by comparison, often living in villages close to the sea and relying on fishing to provide food.
The population of these lands was sparse and semi-nomadic, with people living in tents or caves and surviving by hunting caribou and other large animals and by following this game as it migrated. The people living in the Subarctic can be broadly divided into two distinct ethnic groups with Athabaskan speakers in the east, including the Tsattine and the Gwich’in, and Algonquian speakers in the west, including the Cree and the Naskapi.
Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Blackfeet, and Arapaho. These people became more nomadic after the arrival of white settlers, and many of the things we associate as being typical of Native Americans, such as tepees and war bonnets, were actually exclusive to this group of people and only after they had changed their way of life following the arrival of settlers.
Tribes like the Hopi and the Yaqui became farmers, growing maize, beans, and squash. These people built permanent villages comprising adobe (mudbrick) houses.
Navajo and the Apache, lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, building only small, temporary homes out of wood and mud.
between the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the west and the Colorado Plateau to the south and the Columbia Plateau to the north. The tribes who lived in this area, including the Paiute and the Ute, were largely nomadic and subsisted by foraging for roots and berries and by hunting small animals and even snakes and lizards.
this land was the home to around 300,000 people who formed a bewildering number of different tribes. Up to 100 different tribes, each with its own social structures and often with a unique language, existed as nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in small, temporary, and portable homes of wood and skin. There was little agriculture in this area, though there was extensive trade between the network of tribes.
“When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us.” —Arapaho proverb
In the period before white settlement, there weren’t any horses in North America, nor were there any domesticated animals such as oxen, which meant that farming was limited to what could be achieved using human muscle.
Most farming involved the “three sisters:” winter squash, maize, and beans,
Those tribes who lived close to the sea or rivers often used rotting fish as a form of fertilizer.
Although there wasn’t one unified Native American religious tradition, many religions were at least similar.
Most of these religions believed in the persistence of the human soul and in an afterlife which wasn’t very different from real life.
Most Native American religions included a deity responsible for the creation of the world, and many included lesser deities who each had direct responsibility for some element of the natural world. Some of these were seen as helpful and beneficial while some were regarded as mischievous or even as evil.
One of the odd and so far unexplained factors of Native American religious tradition is the widespread inclusion of a story of a catastrophic flood which decimated humanity and left only a few survivors to start anew.
Personal protection such as armor of any kind was generally avoided as it was considered a mark of weakness; only small, mainly ceremonial shields were carried into battle.
The weapons used in war were the same as used in hunting—lances, tomahawks, knives, and stone and wooden clubs. The bow was also used in combat, generally shooting arrows with heads made from stone or bone.
“How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.” —Black Hawk, Sauk
The impact of the Vikings on Native American people appears to have been minimal.
King Philip’s War (also known as the First Indian War) was a series of conflicts between English colonists and their Native American allies against the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes. This conflict, which occurred from 1675 to 1678 ended with the almost complete destruction of the Wampanoag and Narragansett.
Some historians mark the beginning of what was to become a movement for American independence to this first major conflict between New England colonists and Native American tribes.
“Life is not separate from death. It only looks that way.” —Blackfoot proverb
Great Britain (England had become part of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707) was the largest with six colonies located mainly in present-day New England, with around two million settlers. France also had colonies in the north-west and in present-day Newfoundland, but there were only around 60,000 French settlers.
Spain still occupied parts of present-day Florida, but the Spanish Empire was becoming increasingly weak, and its hold on its American colonies was beginning to slip—there were never more than a few hundred Spanish colonists in Florida.
The most popular alcoholic beverage in New England was rum. Molasses and cane sugar were imported from British colonies in the Caribbean and used to make rum.
They would also freely pass around the rum during negotiations, knowing that the Native Americans were not used to alcohol and would quickly become intoxicated. Having no experience of the consumption of distilled alcohol, the effect on some tribes was disastrous. Social structures which had lasted for thousands of years disintegrated, and many Native Americans became completely and hopelessly addicted to the spirits traded by the settlers.
When the United States issued its famous Declaration of Independence, which is based on the assumption that all men were created equal and all had certain rights, they clearly did not feel that these things applied to Native Americans. The declaration specifically mentions “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that said that while Native Americans could live in their traditional homelands, they did not hold title to these lands. This led to the Indian Removal Act which was passed by Congress in 1830. This act made it legal for the president to authorize the ejection of Native American people, by force if necessary, from their tribal lands.
Around 4,000 Cherokees died of disease and starvation during their forced trek to Oklahoma, an event which passed into tribal lore as the “Trail of Tears.”
