Journeys into the ancient world of the Native American Indians. The myths, the tales, and now, the truth. 500 Nations, next.
Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Welcome to the Hello, I'm Kevin Costner. Welcome to 500 Nations. The settling of this country has always been of interest to me.
It's fired my imagination and shaped my life both personally and professionally. But my knowledge of history has been... limited by what I was taught. As far as I was concerned, the history of the continent started 500 years ago when Columbus discovered the new world. But we know that's not true.
There were people here. So how is it we know so little about this past, the human history of North America, our own story. Could it be that we don't think it worthy of mention, the way history has remembered the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, or China?
The truth is we have a story worth talking about. We have a history worth celebrating. Long before the first Europeans arrived here, there were some 500 nations already in North America.
They blanketed the continent from coast to coast, from Central America to the Arctic. There were tens of millions of people here speaking over 300 languages. Many of them lived in beautiful cities, among the largest and most advanced in the world. In the coming hours, 500 Nations looks back on these ancient cultures, how they lived and how many survived. We turn for guidance to hundreds of Indian people across the continent.
You'll meet many of them in our programs. To bring the past alive, we searched archives for the oldest and most authentic images of Indian people. We sought out rare books and manuscripts for the actual words of participants and eyewitnesses to history.
Our camera crew... traveled throughout North America to film at the actual places where important events in Indian history occurred. We filmed incredible treasures of Indian creativity from museums across North America and Europe.
Historians and archaeologists work with visual artists and advanced computer technology to allow us for the first time to walk through virtual realities of ancient Indian worlds. What you're about to see is what happened. It's not all that happened, and it's not always pleasant.
We can't change that. We can't turn back the clock. But we can open our eyes and give the First Nations of this land the recognition and respect they deserve, their rightful place in the history of the world.
With that in mind, we take you first to where our story ends, on the Great Plains in the late 1800s. The rumor got about the school. The dead are to return.
The buffalo are to return. The Lakota people will get back their own way of life. That part about the dead returning was what appealed to me. To think I should see my dear mother, grandmother, brothers and sisters again. But boy, like I soon forgot about it.
Until one night when I was rudely awakened in the dormitory. Get up! Put your clothes on and slip downstairs.
We are running away. A boy was hissing into my ear. Soon 50 of us little boys, about 8 to 10, started out across country, over hills and valleys, running all night.
I know now that we ran almost 30 miles. There on the Porcupine Creek, thousands of Lakota people were in camp. By the late 1880s, a message of hope spread across the Great Plains. It was called the Ghost Dance, a dance to restore the past when Indian nations were free. They danced without rest, on and on.
Occasionally, someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there dead. The visions ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great encampment of all the Lakotas who had ever died. Where there was no sorrow, but only joy.
Where relatives thronged out with happy laughter. The people went on and on and could not stop. And so I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy.
But they weren't. They were only terribly unhappy. Driven off their lands, Indian nations were confined to desolate reservations, dependent on corrupt government agencies for food and supplies. The people were desperate from starvation.
We felt that we were mocked in our misery. We held our dying children and felt their little bodies tremble as their souls went out and left only a dead weight in our hands. Red Cloud. Oglala. The ghost dance hurt no one, but as it spread, white settlers panicked.
The United States government outlawed the dance. The white men were frightened and called for soldiers. We had begged for life and the white men thought we wanted theirs.
On a mild day just after Christmas of 1890, a band of Hock-Woo-Joo-Soo, under their leader Bigfoot, left the Cheyenne River Agency in South Dakota, heading for a meeting at Pine Ridge with Oglala leader Red Cloud. Traveling with Bigfoot were 106 men and 252 women and children. Among them was a boy, Dewey Beard, who would later tell his children and grandchildren about that day. Grandpa Dewey Beard being the last survivor, I would listen to what he had to say. In a way, it was sad, and yet...
It's beautiful because it's bringing back history. One thing that he would say is that had the soldiers, had the government left them alone, in time they would have looked outside and seen how things were changing and the change would come about from within the bands. Bigfoot's band was intercepted by the 7th Cavalry.
The officer in charge found Bigfoot wrapped in heavy blankets, dying from pneumonia in the back of a wagon. Bigfoot was ordered to make camp along Wounded Knee Creek. In the morning, his people would be stripped of their weapons and escorted to Pine Ridge. Bigfoot made assurances of his peaceful intentions, and the band made camp.
He's a peaceful man. He's always say that think about the elderly, think about the children and the women. and don't start the trouble.
Morning broke after a sleepless night surrounded by soldiers. Hock-wo-joo witnesses would later recall what happened next. Bigfoot, who was sick, came up with a flag of truce tied to a stick. Dewey Beard. As soldiers trained their guns on them, Bigfoot and his men brought forth all their weapons, placing them near the white flag of truce Bigfoot had planted in front of his lodge.
The soldiers then searched their tents and wagons for arms, even confiscating cooking and sewing tools. As Bigfoot's people gathered around the flag of truce outside his tent, four powerful Hotchkiss rapid-repeating guns were mounted above the camp. I noticed that they were erecting cannons up here, also hauling up quite a lot of ammunition for it. They encircled us like a band of sheep. I could see that there was commotion amongst the soldiers, and I saw on looking back they had their guns in position.
ready to fire. Thomas Tibbles, a white reporter who followed the troops to wounded knee, recorded what happened next. Suddenly I heard a single shot from the direction of the troops.
Then three or four. a few more and immediately a volley. At once came a general rattle of rifle firing.
Then the Hotchkiss guns. Awful noise was heard. And I was paralyzed for a time.
Then my head cleared. And I saw nearly all the people on the ground bleeding. My father, my mother, my grandmother, my older brother, and my younger brother were all killed. And he saw his mother walking toward him. She was walking along and she was shot.
Dewey, she said, keep walking, my son. She said, keep going. She said, I'm going to die.
And that was the last time he saw his mother. The women, as they were fleeing with their babies, were killed together, shot right through. And after most of them had been killed, a cry was made that all those not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight, a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.
American Horse, Oglala. The firing continued for an hour or two, wherever a soldier saw a sign of life. With the sunset, the weather turned intensely cold.
About seven o'clock that night, the 7th Cavalry brought in the long train of dead and wounded soldiers and Indians from Wounded Knee. 49 wounded Sioux women and children had been piled into a few old wagons. The wounded Indian women and children were eventually carried into an agency church, where they lay in silence on the floor beneath a pulpit decorated with a Christmas banner reading, Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men. Nothing I have seen in my whole life ever affected or depressed or haunted me like the scenes I saw that night in that church. One unwounded old woman held a baby on her lap.
I handed a cup of water to the old woman, telling her, give it to the child, who grabbed it as if parched with thirst. As she swallowed it hurriedly, I saw it gush right out again. A blood-stained stream through a hole in her neck. Heartsick, I went to find the surgeon.
For a moment, he stood there near the door, looking over the mass of suffering and dying women and children. Ah, the silence. The silence they kept was so complete, it was oppressive.
And then, to my amazement, I saw that the... surgeon who I knew had served in the Civil War attending the wounded from wilderness to Appomattox he began to grow pale this is the first time I've seen a lot of women and children shot to pieces he said and I can't stand it Thomas Tibbles reporter For three days, the frozen bodies of the dead, including Bigfoot, lay where they fell at wounded knee. Finally, the army dug a large trench at the massacre site.
Then, as they collected the bodies, a blanket was seen moving. Beneath it, snuggled against her dead mother, was a baby girl. The official military history is called Wounded Knee, the last battle in the Indian wars. But the tenacious struggle for Indian survival, as symbolized by a child clinging to life for three days on a frozen field, continues to this day.
500 nations will follow a path that covers thousands of years and will bring us full circle to 1890. In this hour, we will travel back in time to three stunning civilizations that flourished long before the arrival of Europeans. To the Anasazi of the Southwest, the mound builders of the Mississippi, and the great pyramid builders of the Maya. But when we return, we'll go back even farther, to creation as seen through the eyes of Indian people. When Earth was still young and giant Still roamed the earth, a great sickness came upon them.
All of them died, except for a small boy. One day while he was playing, a snake bit him. The boy cried and cried. The blood came out, and finally he died.
With his tears our lakes became. With his blood the red clay became. With his body our mountains became. And that was how Earth became. Taos Pueblo.
Pleasant it looked, this newly created world. Along the entire length and breadth of the earth, our grandmother extended the green reflection of her covering, and the escaping odors were pleasant to inhale. Winnebago.
God created the Indian country, and that was the time this river started to run. Then God created fish in this river, and put deer in the mountains. Then the Creator gave Indians life.
We walked. And as soon as we saw the game and fish, we knew they were made for us. My strength, my blood is from the fish, from the roots and berries and game. I did not come here. I was put here by the Creator.
Menainik Yakama. In the Old Testament, Adam and Eve were forced from the garden of creation and expelled to a cruel world. For most North American Indian nations, it was and is very different.
They stayed in the garden, the place of their creation, the single place on earth most perfect for them. The Crow Country is a good country. The Creator has put it exactly in the right place.
While you are in it, you fare well. Whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse. The Crow Country is exactly in the right place. A la'pooish. Crow.
There is a song in everything. Madej's Tim Shen. Make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunsets. Make me wise, so that I may know the things you have taught my people, the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
Make me ever ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eye, so that when life fades as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame. Tom Whitecloud, Ojibwe. To the outsider, the sun-beaten deserts of the American Southwest are a harsh and unforgiving land, reluctant to support life. To the ancient people who lived there, it was a place where the Creator provided everything. There is nothing there that you can see, even to this day.
Very little vegetation, you see a lot of rocks, you see a lot of sand. The Hopis have always maintained that that's a chosen place for them. It was chosen for them by the creator, the great spirit for the Hopis.
The ancient people of the desert were the ancestors of all the modern Pueblo nations. To their Hopi descendants, they are known as the Hisatsunan. But to most of the world, they are known by the Navajo name, Anasazi. Around 900 A.D., the Anasazi flourished in a wide circle covering parts of modern-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The Anasazi found balance with their world.
They learned where to find water and how to harness it. Villages joined together to build dams, reservoirs, and irrigation canals, turning deserts into gardens of corn and squash. They were a people intimately connected to their land.
In a very real sense, they emerged from it. Generations before the time of Christ, the Anasazi lived in subterranean pit houses, sunken homes with stonework walls and broad strong roofs. Formidable protection against the searing sun and bitter cold of the desert. With time they adapted their above-ground storage houses into living spaces, but the underground pit houses were not abandoned.
They were retained as spiritual places of teaching. The place of origin, the Kiva. 100 years before the first Gothic cathedrals were built in Europe, the master architects and stonemasons of the Anasazi were building great Kivas that could hold 500 people. Around 900 AD, the Anasazi leadership embarked upon a bold and visionary plan. Create a mecca for pilgrimages and a focal point for trade at the very center of their land.
They chose the barren, treeless Chaco Canyon, 100 miles northwest of present-day Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a monumental undertaking. They built 400 miles of distinctive graded roads and broad avenues, all leading to the canyon. At distant points, signal stations were constructed where fires blazed to communicate across the vastness of the desert and to guide travelers at night.
Over 50,000 trees were cut down in the surrounding mountains to build the towns of Chaco Canyon. Along with traders and pilgrims, the roads carried resources to maintain dozens of communities. None compared with the largest single complex the Anasazi ever built.
Pueblo Bonito, the wonder of the canyon. At its peak, Pueblo Bonito's 800 rooms may have housed over a thousand residents. Some sections overlooking the main plaza loomed five stories above the canyon floor. The plaza pulsated with life. Women gathered the colored corn blanketing the rooftops and knelt in rows to grind it.
Children played. Men returning from the fields gathered to talk. 37 sacred kivas scattered throughout the complex speak to Pueblo Bonito's rich ceremonial life. During ceremonies, the feet of dancers pounded the ground smooth as spectators huddled against buildings and thronged the roofs to watch.
But Chaco Canyon was more than a spiritual mecca. It was also a center of trade and commerce. And trade in one stone more valuable to Chaco's Mexican trading partners than gold or jade was the engine of the canyon's economic growth.
Turquoise. Here, raw stone arrived from distant mines for the craftsmen of Pueblo Bonito to cut and shape into small tiles and beads, which were then traded south to merchant centers in the heart of Mexico. There they were transformed into extraordinary creations. For 150 years, trade fueled the Chaco economy.
But the wealth and power of the canyon was fleeting. Chaco's major turquoise consumer, Tolan, in central Mexico, fell to civil strife. Extended drought or hostilities also may have contributed to the downfall of Chaco Canyon.
By 1150, it was in decline. The great turquoise road over the Mexican High Sierra abandoned. But the Anasazi world still flourished.
The people of Chaco Canyon simply moved to other locations. Many went north to Mesa Verde, which at that time was reaching its cultural and architectural height. There, under the shelter of the pine-studded mesas of southern Colorado, the architects of Chaco Canyon would help create some of the most stunning buildings of all time. The largest of these is known as Cliff Palace, though it is a palace in name only. These beautiful stone buildings of the Anasazi were home to common families.
It was a society based on equality. Men rotated service on public works. Women plastered houses.
The man who farmed also carved. Spiritual leaders tilled the fields. Each time when I see and visit any ancient dwelling, I feel close because these are my ancestors, my forefathers for centuries. With little meditation, looking at their dwellings, within a few minutes, half hour, I get refreshed. The people of Mesa Verde and many other Anasazi towns relocated around 1300. The period of the ancestors came to an end, and the modern-day Pueblo world took shape.
Traditions that live today in the American Southwest, the way of life, the architecture, the religion, are the resonance of a heritage reaching back thousands of years. The Coachel wanted to send a prayer to the sun. So he called on his friend the bear. And the bear came and he said, Oh, I'm very honored to be asked to do this, but I can only take it to the top of the highest tree.
But I know someone who can. So let's call Eagle. And so Eagle was called, and Eagle said, Yes, I can try. And so Eagle flew and flew and flew up, up, up, and got to the sun.
son and delivered the prayer. And the son was so taken with this, he said, give me one of your feathers. And so the eagle plucked out a tail feather and gave it to the son and the son kissed that feather, which is why, you know, he... Eagle feathers are black on the end, and it's because the sun sends them there.
I said, take this back, and forever this will be my recognition of my special people. Along the Mississippi River, six miles from present-day St. Louis, Missouri, there stood a city that once dominated the heart of the continent. At its center was a powerful leader.
A great number of years ago, there appeared among us a man who came down from the sun. This man told us that he had seen from on high that we did not govern ourselves well, that we had no master, that each of us had presumption enough to think himself capable of governing others while he could not even conduct himself. A thousand years ago, the Great Sun, a leader who was both king and pope, lived atop a man-made royal mountain, ten stories high. Its 16-acre base, larger than any pyramid in Egypt. He told us that in order to live in peace among ourselves, we must observe the following points.
We must never kill anyone but in defense of our own lives. We must never know any woman besides our own. We must never take any things that belong to another.
We must never lie, nor get drunk. We must not be avaricious. We must give generously and with joy and share our subsistence with those who are in need of it. From the heights of his royal estate, the great sun mediated between the creator and the people, between the sun and the earth. This is Cahokia, city of the sun.
The great sun ruled the thriving center of a vast Mississippian culture. Outside the walled city, communities of farmers, hunters, and fishermen stretched for miles, surrounded by fields of corn. With 20,000 residents, no city in the United States would surpass Cahokia's historic size before 1800. Only then would Philadelphia's population eclipse the ancient center.
These people lived in daub and wattle houses on top of the principal people did, the priest and the royalty. They lived in very substantial houses, not teepees, not teepees, teepees. western plains people.
Down here they lived in houses. They were sedentary. They were farmers. They used the rivers and the miles and the streams as not only for commerce but for sustenance as well. With the Mississippi and other major rivers as its highways, Cahokia was linked by trade to a third of the continent.
Copper arrived from the Great Lakes, obsidian from Yellowstone, mica and crystal from the Appalachians, gold and silver from Canada, shell from the Gulf of Mexico. Look at these old live oak trees that have seen so much pass by them. Magnificently dressed Indian people coming down that by in a dugout.
I'm greeting people standing right here on this bank. of having a good time, because they did. You know, Indian people have always known how to have a good time.
And there would be a feast prepared. The women would put the corn together, they'd make softki. They would roast a deer. People would bring gifts.
You never go to an Indian's house without bringing something. That's as old as the sunrise. Cahokia was the pinnacle of a mound-building culture with traditions dating back to the early Middle Ages.
dating back to before 1000 BC. Thousands of mounds still dot the landscape from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. An average funeral mound in the Ohio Valley was three stories tall.
Construction could represent 200,000 man hours of labor, or 100 men carrying the baskets of earth for a year. But few mounds compare with the religious effigy located 50 miles east of Cincinnati, Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound. The enormous snake stretches over 400 yards in length. While their earthworks are the mound builders most visible legacy, their smaller creations are their most beautiful. Only glimpses remain of the people who changed the course of life on the northern continent.
Most of their material world, wooden buildings, boats, baskets, woven textiles, leather footwear and clothes, have long since turned to dust. An old cattle relative of mine said that I used to go outside and hold my hands up and bless myself with the sun hot. I can't do that anymore because they say we sun worshippers. We didn't worship the sun.
We worshipped what was behind it, the power behind it. In the 19th century, 2,000 miles south of Cahokia, a group of European explorers carved their way into the jungles of southern Mexico. There, buried for centuries and surrounded by massive pyramids, they came upon a royal palace, resplendent with grand rooms, courts, and a tower. The Europeans recognized that by their own standards, the site was a legacy of greatness.
Standing in the middle of the largest Indian nation in North America, the Maya, descendants of the pyramid builders, the explorers could not imagine that the towering architecture was the work of Indian people. Instead, they speculated wildly about the lost civilization that could have built so grand an existence. Refugees from the sunken continent of Atlantis, a lost tribe of Israel, seafarers from the Orient, even beings from another planet.
They considered everything but the obvious. In 1949, a Mexican archaeologist came to the same magnificent ruins now known as Palenque. He climbed the steps to the top of the largest pyramid, the Temple of the Inscription. There he noticed holes in the floor below the capstones.
He removed the slabs and discovered a huge tombstone. ...discovered a rubble-filled passageway descending deep into the pyramid's heart. After three years of excavation, the passage was cleared.
At the bottom was a tomb that had been buried for over 1200 years. It would unlock the history of Palenque and help to reveal the past of the Mayan people, a past they left for the future to read. For centuries, Mayan glyphs were considered complex picture stories like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Only in the 1980s did archaeologists finally recognize that it was true writing. They were not looking at pictures to be interpreted, but symbols for sounds to be read. It was the Maya language. Instantly, a door was opened on the past. Beneath the five-ton sarcophagus cover at Palenque lay Pakal, shield in the Maya language.
He was born in 603 AD. His head was bound at birth to enlarge his forehead, a fashion that marked him as a member of the royal elite. He wore a cosmetic bridge on his nose and decorated his hair with water lilies. Pakal rose to power at the age of 12. He would build a holy city and rule for nearly 70 years, leading Palenque during a time of greatness and growth in the Mayan world.
As the Maya expanded, over 60 capital cities emerged, their growth fueled by a successful agricultural society. The roots of Mayan agriculture reached back thousands of years and stretched across Mexico and into Central America. Now, friends and brothers, listen to these words of dreaming.
Spring rains give us life and bring forth the golden corn silk. By the time of Christ, there were millions of people in the region, with agriculture allowing populations to settle and expand. Art.
Mathematics, astronomy, architecture, priesthoods, and royalty all flourished. By the mid 700s, at Palenque alone, the sons of Pakal ruled over 200,000 Maya living in regional communities of farmers, weavers, stonemasons, and feather workers. But the golden age of building and growth would be transformed by a new era of war and destruction. For reasons still locked in the past, the Mayan world turned against itself. Farmers became soldiers.
By 800 AD, an era had ended. Most of the capitals that had been among the living wonders of human creativity, including Palenque, were deserted and reclaimed by the jungle. South of here...