The American Indians

When the Italian navigator Christopher Colombus reached the Carribean islands at tge end of the 15th century, he mistakenly called the people he met “Indians”, because he thought he had landed in the East Indies. But the lands and people he found were actually part of the new world.

Unfortunately, very little is known about the Indian cultures because whatever records were kept were either destroyed or damaged by contact with Europeans.

First American Indians. Archeologists believe that people gave been living in the Americas as long as 10 to 30,000 years ago. The first Americans probably came from Asia in many separate migrations over a long period of time. Tget may have come over tge Bering Straight between Siberia and Alaska. The pre-historic people of the Americas used fire, stone tools, skin clothing, and domesticated dogs. Most of them lived by hunting and gathering. In the centuries before tge coming of the Europaeans, decendants of there people settled in North and South America.

Evidence shows that the American Indians were isolated from the civilizations of the Old World. Some scholars believe, however, that daring seaferers crossed the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans to America centuries before the Vikings of Colombus. Other authorities believe that the Indies developed ther culture independently.

Early American Farming. Perhaps as early as 7000B.C., some Indians already knew how to grow crops. As time passed, the people developed new varieties of plant life. The most important of these was the corn, whcih was developed around 3000 B.C. in th Central America.Corn became as important in the Western Hemisphere. Farming made it possible for people in America to settle in communities, to develop such skills as weaving and pottery making, and to set up some division of labor. There skills spread slowly throughout the Americas.

Culture of the North American Indians. There were many different Indian cultures. Each reflected the way the Indians learned to live with their environment.

The Eskimos who settled in the frozen lands of the North were hunters and fishers. They searched particularly for walruses, seals, small fish, and carbou. They used the bones and antlers of some of these animals to make tools such as needles, knives, fishhooks, and harpoons. Their clothing and tents were made of animal skins. During the bitterly cold Arctic winters, they made some areas, the Eskimos used blocks of ice and snow to build unique dome-shaped shelters known as igloos.

The Indians who settled in the North Pacific Coast also hunted and fished for food. But they gathered wild berries in the forest, as well. Unlike Eskimos, the North Pacific Coast Indians lived in villages and built wooden houses. In front of their  homewas a totem pole. These wooden poles were carved with totems – figures of animals or plants believed to be ancestrally related to a tribe or family. The totems identified families as belonging to the Weaver people, and so on. Strangers with the same totem were alwats welcome.

North Pacific tribes were divided into nobles, common people, and slaves, the latter usually being prisoners of war. One important custom of the nobles was a ceremony called potlatch. This was a great feast celebrating a remarkable event in their children’s lives, such as the day a daughter gathered her first berries. At the feast, the family would give away its most prized possessions because it was considered a greater virtue “to give rather than to receive.”

In the northeast woodlands of the eastern part of the continent, the Indians were not only hunters but also farmers. They lived in the villages and built long, traingular shaped houses calld wigwams out of poles covered with tree bark and animal skins.

Five woodland tribes – the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca – formed a confederation called the League of the Iroquois, or the “Five Nations”. Rivalry among them was strong and frequently erupted in war. Throughout his political organization, five tribes resolved to act together on matters of common interest. By the 1700s, the League controlled an area from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic and from the St. Lawrence River to the Tennessee River.