The Native American world that history books forgot
BY Lewis Lord and Sarah Burke
28th Sep 2023 Inspire
5 min read
Before Christopher Columbus landed on its shores, America was already busy with a thriving and hugely diverse Native American culture
Most tourists driving along the Illinois motorway speed right past ancient Cahokia and its 15-acre
ceremonial mound. Only the curious pull off to
discover how a 12th-century feather-crowned ruler
known as the Great Sun kneeled on top of the earthen
temple in the morning and howled when the real sun came up.
At its peak this city boasted probably as many
residents as London at that time, and a trading
network that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico
to the Great Lakes. But basic history textbooks in classrooms today barely mention it.
"At its peak this city boasted probably as many residents as London"
Cahokia's
problem is that American history, in the minds of
many, started a mere 500 years ago in 1492, with
Columbus's arrival in the New World. By then,
Cahokia had already thrived and vanished.
Like many great modern cities, Cahokia could not
manage its growth. Cornfields that fed between
20,000 and 30,000 city dwellers gradually lost their
fertility, and forests were stripped. Warfare, disease
and social unrest may have added to the decline.
When
French settlers arrived at Cahokia in the mid-1700s, they found only grown-over mounds.
A not so New World
Yet the New World was far from
empty in Columbus's day. The first
Americans were Asians, who arrived
more than 12,000 years ago, probably
crossing a glacial land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.
By 1492, the
western hemisphere may have contained 90 million people. Most lived
south of the Rio Grande, but about ten
million inhabited what is now the
United States and Canada. Ancient
societies had been rising and falling
there for centuries.
Newcomers from Europe, though
accustomed to beheadings and people
being burned at the stake, were
shocked at what went on in America.
While cannibalism and human sacrifice were rare among Indians north of
Mexico, people in some tribes killed
unwanted infants and practised polygamy.
Columbus claimed he had to
take hundreds of Carib Indians to
Spain for their own good and that of
their Arawak neighbours, whom they
were eating (he found it harder to
explain why he also enslaved the
gentle Arawaks).
Language and identity
Monsheeda (Dust Maker), and his wife Mehunga (Standing Buffalo), of the Indigenous Ponca tribe, posed together in their wedding photo, circa 1900
Other customs
seemed alien as well: most Indians
took a daily bath, a practice the
Europeans abhorred. America was
not new, but it was different.
As the white man moved across
the country, the tribesmen he
encountered asked a recurring question: "Why do you call us Indians?"
The answer, of course, was that Columbus was mistaken. He called all
the natives los indios, thinking he was
in the distant Indies, somewhere
between Japan and India.
The natives
had no word for their race. They
called themselves "people" or "real
people," and gave other tribes names
like "friend," "enemy" or "snake."
"The natives had no word for their race"
The diversity that Americans relish
today existed long before Columbus
arrived. Most of the hundreds of
languages the Indians spoke were as
different from one another as Farsi is
from French. Some Indians loved
war; others hated it. After every
reluctant fight, Arizona's Pimas subjected their warriors to a 16-day cure
for insanity.
Ancient caste
systems endured. The Great Sun used
his feet to push leftovers to his
Natchez tribe subordinates. But three
centuries before the US Constitution
was adopted in 1789, the Iroquois
League had a Congress-like council,
exercised the veto, protected freedom
of speech—and ran a classless society.
"The Iroquois League had a Congress-like council, exercised the veto, protected freedom of speech"
Some tribes banned women from
their councils. Others were ruled by
female chiefs, like the "Lady of
Cofitachequi," who in 1540 greeted
explorer Hernando de Soto with
pearls from the Savannah River (he
ungraciously kidnapped her).
Pre-marital sex was unthinkable
among the Apache, but the Natchez
tribe of Mississippi encouraged teenagers to have flings while they could.
Once a Creek Indian of Alabama was
married, an extramarital affair could
cost a nose or an ear.
Still, some
tribes allowed a woman to end her
marriage by putting her husband's belongings outside their door—a sign
for him to live with his mother.
A ceremonial culture
Credit: Jennifer R. Trotter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. At Poverty Point, a view from a mound shows the sun rising over a stone plaza
Pioneers who found thousands of
abandoned mounds in the Ohio and
Mississippi valleys refused to believe
they had been built by "naturally
indolent" Indians. The Mound
Builders, they speculated, were stray
Vikings, Phoenicians or a lost tribe
of Israel. Not until the 1890s did
educated people agree that the
mounds had in fact been built by the
Indians' ancestors.
The genius of the Mound Builders
has become even more evident in
recent years. In north-eastern Louisiana, for example, lies Poverty
Point, a 3,000-year-old collection of
concentric semicircles of earth, the
biggest extending for nearly three-quarters of a mile. Visitors can stand
on top of a mound just west of
Poverty Point's rings.
"The mounds had in fact been built by the Indians' ancestors"
"At the time of the
spring and autumn equinoxes," writes
Roger Kennedy in Rediscovering
America, "one can still have a clear
view of the sun rising over the central
37-acre plaza, a view like that found
at similar conjunctions of earth and
sun at Stonehenge."
In Newark,
Ohio, the 20-centuries-old Hopewell
Indian earthworks contain circles,
squares and octagons that once
covered four square miles.
"Such nice equivalences of shape
and size are not the work of savages,"
says Kennedy, who is director of the
Smithsonian's National Museum of
American History.
Smoke signals
Every explorer and early settler
seemed to notice the aromas of
America that the Indians had long
enjoyed.
Traveller and historian
Robert Beverley was awed by "the
pleasantest smell" of Virginia's magnolias. Henry Hudson paused in New
York's harbour to enjoy the "very
sweet smells" of grass and flowers on
the New Jersey shore. But the visitors
also smelled smoke.
Every autumn, Indians burned
woodland to clear the way for cornfields and to create meadows for grazing. The animals flourished, and so
did the trees that survived. Sycamores
in Ohio grew seven feet in diameter,
and the white pines of New England
towered 200 to 250 feet.
Animals were bigger then. New
England trout, nearly two feet long,
were easy targets for Algonquian
arrows. Virginia sturgeon stretched
six to nine feet, and Mississippi catfish topped 100 pounds.
"Colonists interpreted the Indians' generosity as evidence they were childlike"
Off Cape
Cod, Indians caught 20-pound lobsters, and many oysters had to be
sliced into thirds to be swallowed.
The Bible taught that it is better to
give than to receive, and the Indians
couldn't have agreed more. Their
desire to share perplexed the newcomers.
Long after the Arawaks
showered Columbus with birds, cloth
and "trifles too tedious to describe,"
natives were offering Europeans anything from fish and turkeys to persimmon bread and the companionship of
a chief's daughter.
Colonists interpreted the Indians'
generosity as evidence they were
childlike. That they had no desire to accumulate wealth was seen as
laziness. But many Indian tribes were
traders.
Colorado's Pueblos kept
parrots that came from Mexico. The
Ottawas, whose name meant "to
trade," travelled the North-West's
Great Lakes exchanging goods.
"Hootchenoo," the North-west Chinooks' word for homemade liquor,
became the expression "hootch."
Disease and genocide
Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Pueblo Indians have gathered in Acoma for 1,000 years
Twenty years after Columbus colonised Hispaniola—the island now
shared by Haiti and the Dominican
Republic—diseases and taskmasters
reduced its Arawaks from a quarter of
a million to under 20,000. In a short
time Old World diseases killed millions of the New World's natives.
Death rates of up to 90 per cent were
common among some tribes.
Two years before de Soto visited
Cofitachequi's female chief, pestilence had swept her province,
decimating her town and emptying
others near by. And four years before
the Mayflower landed, a disease—probably smallpox or chicken pox—killed thousands of Indians on the
New England coast.
Fifteen years after the Powhatan
Indians' gifts of corn saved England's
toehold settlement at Jamestown, the
tribe was systematically wiped out,
its crops and villages torched by
settlers who wanted more land to
grow tobacco.
"Acoma is twice as old as St Augustine in Florida, the Spanish-settled city that is generally considered America's oldest community"
Indians shuddered
every time they found bees in a
hollow tree. These "English flies"
moved a hundred miles ahead of the
frontier— a sign that the white man
was on his way. Some tribes moved
west; others perished.
Yet, at least one ancient American
community that didn't move endures
today. In Acoma, high on a mesa in
the New Mexico desert, Pueblo
Indians have continuously occupied
the dwellings for 1,000 years,
through droughts, Apache raids and a
brutal Spanish occupation.
Acoma is
twice as old as St Augustine in
Florida, the Spanish-settled city that
is generally considered America's
oldest community.
This article is part of our archival collection and was originally published in February 1992. While we strive to present historical content accurately, please note that circumstances and information may have changed since the article's original publication. Some individuals mentioned in the article may no longer be alive, and events or details may have evolved. We encourage readers to consider the context of the original publication and to verify any current information independently
Banner credit: Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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