North America
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Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.
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History, North America, s.v. "Native Americans," accessed March 19, 2024.
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Native Americans
By the time European explorers first arrived in the Americas at the beginning of the 16th century, there were already millions of people (some experts estimate as many as 50 million across North, Central and South America and the Caribbean) living there. It is thought around 10 million people lived in North America. These Native Americans—also known as American Indians, Amerindians, or First Nations in Canada—were descendants of the Palaeo-Indians, a name given by archaeologists to people who first crossed into Alaska from Siberia in Asia by foot after about 26,500 years ago, then spread southwards across the continent.
Tribes
Over thousands of years, Native American people adapted to the various environments they chose to live in—forests, grassy plains, arid scrubland, lush river valleys—and diversified into a patchwork of nations and tribes, each with their own language, religious beliefs and customs. Wherever a tribe lived, daily life centred around providing the necessities of life—food and shelter. Many tribes were nomadic (wandering) and they lived by hunting animals such as buffalo and deer, or by gathering berries, roots and other wild plants. Others were farmers, growing maize, squash, beans and other crops.
Scientists have identified 10 “cultural areas” in North America, rough groupings of native peoples who shared similar environments: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau. They are shown on the above map.
The Arctic
The Arctic cultural area is the tundra region of present-day Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland. Its original inhabitants, known as Palaeo-Eskimos, came from the Siberian coast of the Bering Sea and crossed the Bering Strait in around 3000 BC—that is, long after the earlier migrations by the Palaeo-Indians, who were the ancestors of the Native Americans. Some Palaeo-Eskimo groups, known as the Tuniit or Dorset people (named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut, Canada where the first evidence of their existence was found), moved eastwards from Alaska to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland after 500 BC.
Following the Dorsets centuries later, in around 1000 AD, were the Thule people (named after a settlement in northern Greenland, now called Qaanaaq). They had split from their Aleut relatives in Alaska and spread eastwards across Canada, reaching Greenland by about 1300. The Thules eventually took over the Dorsets’ homeland for themselves. They were the ancestors of today’s Inuit.
The native population in the harsh landscape of the Arctic was small and scattered. Its peoples, including the Thules, were nomads. They hunted seals, polar bears and other game, following them as they migrated across the tundra or harpooning them at sea from their sealskin boats called kayaks (or larger boats, umiaks). Materials like whalebone and slate were used for making harpoon points and knives. They built tent-like huts, called qarmaqs, made of a circular wall of stones, sod or blocks of snow, and a framework of whale bone covered with a sealskin. Temporary shelters, made out of ice blocks, igloos, were built for hunting trips, often on the sea ice.
Many Arctic peoples in the far north mostly remained in isolation from European colonizers until the early 20th century: the lands they occupied were of little interest to settlers. But where the native peoples did come into contact with European traders, whalers or explorers—for example, the Aleuts in Alaska, colonized by Russians in the 18th century, and the Inuit in Labrador and the lands around Hudson’s Bay—their populations were soon devastated by diseases to which they had no resistance.
The Subarctic
The Subarctic cultural area, a vast region of Canada and Alaska and mostly covered by pine forest (taiga) was, like the Arctic, thinly populated. Small family groups hunted caribou (reindeer), following them as they migrated north to the tundra in the summer and back south to the forest for the rest of the year. The people lived in tents or underground dugouts.
Two broad groups of Native Americans inhabited the Subarctic. In the west were the Na-Dené, or Athabaskans, including the Gwich’in (or Kuchin) and Deg Xinag tribes, while in the east lived the Algonquians, including the Cree, Ojibwa, Odawa (Ottawa) and Naskapi tribes.
The growth of the fur trade with Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries changed the Algonquian peoples’ way of life. They began supplying beaver skins to the European traders in return for items such as metal axe heads, knives and fish hooks, cloth, jewellery, guns and alcohol. Some of the traders intermarried with the Algonquian women; this was the origin of the Métis, a Canadian people of mixed Native American-European ancestry.
The Northeast
The Northeast cultural area stretched from the Atlantic coast of southeast Canada as far south as today’s North Carolina, and inland to the Mississippi River. It was inhabited by two groups: the Iroquois (including the Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Huron), who lived in the St Lawrence lowlands and the eastern Great Lakes, and the Algonquians (including the Pequot, Fox, Powhatan, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Lenape and Mahican) who occupied the Atlantic coast and western Great Lakes. Both Iroquois and Algonquians lived in wooden longhouses clustered together inside a palisade. Some Algonquian tribes slept in wigwams, domed shelters made from bent saplings and covered with deerskins, during the summer months.
The people of the Northeast lived by a mixture of hunting (birds, beaver and deer), gathering (nuts, berries and seafood), fishing and farming. Many cultivated maize, beans and squash, (the “three sisters”), which formed the main part of their diet. In New England, tribes cleared their fields after the harvest by burning. They then moved on to another location after a year or two. This practice is today known as slash and burn agriculture.
The Iroquoian tribes were frequently at war with their Algonquian neighbours—or each other. Conflicts deepened when European colonizers arrived and started to supply arms in return for beaver furs. Eventually, as white settlement expanded, both Iroquois and Algonquians were forced from their lands.
The Southeast
The Southeast cultural area, north of the Gulf of Mexico and east of the Mississippi, offered good farmland and plentiful rain. The indigenous peoples included the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muskogee) and Seminole, known to the European settlers as the “Five Civilized Tribes”. Their languages all belonged to the Muskogean group.
The Cherokee lived in the area of modern Georgia and the Carolinas. They were expert farmers, growing crops such as maize, squash, beans, sunflowers and tobacco. Their houses were made of wooden frames, with mud and grass filling the walls. Markets and ceremonies took place in the centre of Cherokee villages.
The most important Cherokee ceremony was the Green Corn Ceremony, in which people thanked the spirits for a good maize harvest. They danced, prayed, fasted, feasted and played stickball. Stickball was similar to modern lacrosse, but the ball was carried and thrown with two sticks rather than one. The ball was made of a rock covered with animal hide. Only men played, and they were allowed to hit their opponents with their sticks. Versions of stickball were played by many other tribes of eastern North America.
By the time the United States came into being, the Southeast culture area had already lost many of its native peoples to disease. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act forced the remaining members of Five Civilized Tribes to move off their lands in the fertile southeast, which were wanted by white settlers, to lands in the West, which were, at the time, unwanted by white Americans. Between 1830 and 1838, nearly 100,000 Native Americans were forced off their lands by government troops and made to walk thousands of miles to reservations in “Indian Territory” (later Oklahoma), west of the Mississippi. Thousands died, and this journey became known as “The Trail of Tears”.
The Plains
The Plains cultural area comprises the vast Great Plains region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, extending from the Gulf of Mexico north into Canada. Its inhabitants, speakers of variety of languages of the Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan groups, were both hunters and farmers.
Buffalo (more correctly, bison) provided the Great Plains tribes, such as the Sioux, Cheyenne and Comanche, with most of their food. The animals' skins, fur and bones were useful for making clothes, tipis, weapons and tools. As soon as lookouts spotted a herd of buffalo, the hunters began to stalk them. Carefully herding the animals along valleys, they slowly drove them towards a strong wooden enclosure, called a corral, that they had already built. As the buffalo approached the corral, the hunters ran towards them, shouting, waving skins and prodding them with flint-tipped spears to make the buffalo run into the corral.
The Spanish settlers brought horses, which had long been extinct in the Americas, to the Plains in the 16th century. Horses quickly became prized possessions among the Plains Indians. Horses allowed peoples such as the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho to travel great distances at high speed and to hunt buffalo with greater success. A man on horseback could now gallop alongside a running buffalo, wielding his spear or bow and arrow with deadly accuracy. Hunting on horseback also made herding buffalo into corrals, or driving them over cliffs, easier for the hunters.
The Native Americans traded, stole and bred horses. This sometimes led to fighting between tribes when they raided one another’s camps. Some tribes, such as the Sioux, became famous for their particularly swift, fierce and ruthless attacks.
The most common dwelling for these buffalo hunters was the cone-shaped tipi, a tent made of buffalo skin that could be folded up and carried from one hunting ground to the next by dogs or horses on a sledge called a travois.
Indian Wars
As white traders and settlers moved west across the Plains, they brought guns, tools—and disease, which spread like wildfire through the local peoples who had no natural immunity to them. Others were killed in disputes who encroached on their lands. They did not want to move from their traditional homelands and fought bitterly against American government troops who tried to force them off. This conflict, which was at its most intense on the Plains from the 1860s until around 1890, is known today as the American Indian Wars.
Plains Indian warriors also attacked the settlers who moved into their territories. But their old ways of life were destroyed when white American hunters almost completely wiped out the herds of buffalo that lived on the Great Plains.
Sometimes, however, there were Indian victories over the army: for example, at the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), when Sioux warriors routed the US 7th Cavalry, which included Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s troops. But by the end of the 19th century, white colonists had taken over the Indian lands, all but exterminated the buffalo herds and defeated the Indians in battle. The surviving native peoples of the Plains were forced to live on government reservations.
The Southwest
The Southwest cultural area includes present-day Arizona and New Mexico and adjoining parts of other states. Some of its inhabitants, descendants of ancient peoples known as the Ancestral Puebloans, Hohokam and Mogollon, were long established in the region and lived in permanent settlements called pueblos. These consisted of multi-storey houses built of adobe and stone. Water was scarce, so they developed special techniques for finding it, often tapping water supplies deep beneath the ground. At the centre of each village was a square-walled, underground room, or kiva, used for ceremonial purposes. These Pueblo peoples, who included the Hopi, Zuni, Yaqui and Yuma, grew crops such as maize, beans and squash.
Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Athabaskan-speaking Navajo and the Apache, settled in the Southwest between 1200 and 1500 AD. Hunter-gatherers rather than farmers (although they took up farming later), these peoples were more nomadic than their Puebloan neighbours.
The Navajo and Apache lived in temporary shelters. Navajo homes, called hogans, were cone-shaped, wooden-framed structures covered in dried mud and with a rectangular entrance facing east to receive the sun each morning. The Apache built wikiups, round shelters with a wooden frame held together with yucca fibres and covered in brush. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Navajos had begun herding sheep and goats. The Apache and Navajo fought one another, as well as the Spanish colonists and Mexicans, for centuries.
By the time the Southwestern territories became a part of the United States after the Mexican War (1848), many of the region’s native people had already been exterminated (Spanish colonists had enslaved many of the Puebloans, forcing them to work on ranches, or encomiendas). Some fought against the Americans—until their resistance was crushed. During the second half of the 19th century, the US government resettled most of the region’s remaining native peoples on to reservations.
The Great Basin
The Great Basin cultural area is a vast natural bowl in the American West, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevada to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north and the Colorado Plateau to the south. It comprises what is now Nevada along with parts of neighbouring states. A semi-arid, sparsely-vegetated wasteland of desert and salt flats, the Great Basin was once home to wandering bands of Native Americans.
The people lived by hunting for snakes, lizards and small mammals and foraging for roots, seeds and nuts. Always on the move, they built small temporary shelters called wikiups, made of willow poles or saplings, covered over with leaves and brush.
The peoples of the Great Basin included the Bannock, Paiute, Shoshone and Ute, who spoke Uto-Aztecan languages, and the Washoe, whose language is unrelated.
Having made contact with the Spanish in the 16th century onwards, some tribes, including the Bannock and Shoshone, acquired horses. This allowed them to start hunting and making raids on other tribes in a similar way to the Great Plains peoples. After white settlers and gold prospectors started to arrive in the mid-19th century, most of the Great Basin’s people were relocated on reservations.
California
The California cultural area, which also includes Baja California in today’s Mexico, was, as it is today, a fertile land with a temperate climate. Because of the easy access to food, a relatively dense population of some 300,000 people occupied the area by the time Europeans arrived in the mid-16th century.
The people belonged to numerous tribes. Around 100 distinct languages were spoken, divided into more than 300 dialects. These languages included the Chumashian, Yukian (Yuki, Wappo), Hokan (Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), Penutian (Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts) and Uto-Aztecan (Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) groups. Athabascan-speakers (including the Hupa) were more recent arrivals.
Despite this great diversity, native Californians lived similar lives and co-existed peacefully. Because of the abundance of food in the wild, they did not need to cultivate crops, living instead by hunting, fishing, gathering and practising “forest gardening” (carefully nurturing those trees, shrubs and plants that would provide food). They used small, controlled fires both to prevent larger, catastrophic wildfires, and to re-invigorate their forest gardens.
Spanish explorers arrived the California region in the middle of the 16th century. In 1769, The Spanish built a mission at San Diego, the first of around 15 missions in Southern California. Native peoples from local tribes were rounded up and forced to work in them. People from different tribes were often mixed together. Many were baptized as Roman Catholics by the Franciscan missionaries. Disease, starvation, overwork and torture resulted in a near-extermination of the entire local population, who became known as “Mission Indians”.
The Northwest Coast
The Northwest Coast cultural area, which extended along the Pacific coast from Northern California to British Columbia, had a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources. The native peoples who lived in this region had a more settled lifestyle than many other groups elsewhere in North America. The ocean and rivers offered a constant supply of fish, seals, otters, whales and shellfish, so there was no need to travel in search of other game. The local peoples built permanent villages housing hundreds. Each had a rigid social structure. People were ranked according to both how closely they were related to the village’s chief and the number of possessions, including canoes, shells, skins, canoes and slaves, they had.
Prominent groups in the region included the Athabaskans (Haida, Tlingit, Willapa and Nisga’a), Penutians (Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos), Wakashans (Kwakiutl, Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth or Nootka) and Salishans (Tillamook and Coast Salish, a group of many tribes).
From the early 19th century, some peoples of the northwest, including the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian, carved totem poles. Before 1800, carvings were usually limited to small house posts. But from the start of the 19th century, craftworkers took advantage of better tools to carve giant, free-standing monuments. They were made from large trees, mostly western red cedar; some stood up to 18 metres (60 feet) tall. The carvings depicted family stories, animals and historical events. The word “totem” comes from the Algonquian word dodaem, meaning “family group”—the poles were symbols of the family or clan. The carving of totem poles had mostly died out by the end of the 19th century, but it was revived in the late 20th century.
By the time European settlers colonized the region, the native populations had already been ravaged by smallpox—a disease to which they had no resistance—which had probably been spread by Spanish expeditions made to the Northwest Coast from Mexico in the late 18th century.
The Plateau
The Plateau cultural area occupied the basins of the Columbia and Fraser rivers in what is now Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon and Washington in the northwestern United States. The native people lived by fishing for salmon and trout, hunting birds and deer, and gathering roots, berries and nuts. In summer, they lived in longhouses, covered over by mats of bulrush (also called tule), long reeds that grow in wetlands. For winter quarters, the people dug a pit in the ground and constructed a framework of poles over it, meeting at a ridge. This they covered with bulrush mats, or pieces of bark, piling up earth around the dwelling for warmth.
From the 18th century onwards, Plateau peoples adopted tipis from the Plains Indians. They also acquired horses, enabling them to travel east of the Rocky Mountains where they traded with Plains Indians and hunted for buffalo.
Most of the tribes living in the south of the region spoke Sahaptian languages (Klickitat, Modoc, Nez Percé, Walla Walla and Yakama), while to the north of the Columbia River, most spoke Interior Salishan dialects (Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Spokane and Sinkiuse-Columbia).
In 1805, the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the Plateau region, followed later in the 19th century by disease-spreading white settlers. By the end of the century, most of the remaining Plateau Indians had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.
Consultant: Steve Gallo