Understanding Pre-contact Native American Societies

Having spent time in our last lecture talking about the geography of North America, we now want to start bringing people into the story. And this is going to take us into a discussion of pre-contact societies in North America. Now, the first point I'll make is we're not going to have time to talk about all of the different groups, but we are going to say some general things about the various groups, groups of Native Americans who existed in North America prior to contact with Europeans. So I use the expression pre-contact to refer specifically to the period prior to 1492. Now you'll also sometimes see this referred to as the pre-Columbian era of Western history. And in truth, either expression is acceptable. I tend to prefer pre-Columbian. pre-contact because as we'll see later on pre-columbian suggests that columbus was the first and as we'll see later on there's plenty of evidence to suggest that there was contact between north america and other parts of the world specifically europe prior to columbus so in many ways i think pre-contact the expression pre-contact is is more accurate more reflective of of the the time period. In any case, the first question we want to ask then is when did people begin to migrate to the western hemisphere? Okay, and the answer to that question is we really don't know for certain. Okay, we really don't know for certain. We have ideas but there are very different ideas and very different opinions. among scholars. The most widely accepted theory today is that people especially began migrating to the Americas from Asia during the Pleistocene, that is during the Ice Age. Remember we talked about the Pleistocene in our last lecture. It was from roughly 20,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago. roughly 10,000 years ago that the temperatures on Earth became colder and colder and as temperatures got colder the polar ice cap grew and as the polar ice cap grew sea level dropped. Okay and I showed you this or I showed you a similar map in the last lecture and told you that during the Pleistocene the shorelines basically coincided with the very light blue areas. That is, today's shoreline looked very different during during the Pleistocene. And given that sea level dropped roughly 200 feet, that means that basically during the Pleistocene this is what the shoreline looked like. In other words, Alaska and Asia were connected. All of this land, or all of this what is now water, was then land. This very narrow passage between Alaska and Russia today is what's called the Bering Strait. During the Pleistocene, when sea level dropped, the Bering Strait basically became part of the landmass. During the Pleistocene, we saw the formation of a land bridge that connected North America to Asia. And during the formation of this land bridge, then, it made it possible for people to migrate literally on foot across this land bridge to North America. Now, the question then becomes, what would prompt people to do that? Because if you think about it, if you remember... It was very, very cold at this time. The world in general was much colder. But at higher latitudes, it was really frigid, bitterly cold. What would prompt people to migrate across this land bridge at this high latitude? And the answer, apparently, is that the people who were coming across the Bering Strait Lane land bridge what prompted their migration well they were very likely big game hunters okay most students are somewhat familiar with um the the belief um that the earliest arrivals in the americas were uh were big game hunters okay what you may not know is where that idea came from okay where the um theory came from you And again, it is still in many ways very theoretical. Well, we do know that during the... the Pleistocene, there were very large animals, mammoths, mastodons, mega giant bison. We do know that they existed, but what is it that tells us or suggests to us that the people who came across were hunting these animals? Well, that explanation dates back to the 1920s. It basically started with a young man, he was only 19 years old, who lived in eastern New Mexico. His name was James Ridgely Whiteman. James Ridgely Whiteman, growing up in eastern New Mexico, grew up in a ranching environment and was not particularly fond of school. He was much happier. being out and about and he was fascinated by artifacts and things like that he found you know he was very common to find things like arrowheads out on the plains and the story is told how in in the summer of of 1929 james ridgely whiteman was exploring he may have been doing ranch work but there had been heavy rains and he came across some very interesting artifacts that he had never encountered before. They were in a blowout area where wind had kind of exposed things and then the rain had greatly exposed them. And basically what he found was bones and he found a spearhead that looked very different than anything he had ever seen before. It was a spearhead like the one you see in this. in this slide with fluted edges it had been worked and the the spearhead was associated then with these very large bones that surrounded and were scattered about and basically James Ridgely Wright Whiteman believed that this was a very important hunting ground and he was able to it took time but he was able to convince scholars to come in and to look at this this hunting site and ultimately they came to the conclusion that yes James Ridgely Whiteman had found an early hunting camp and archaeological investigation started and basically they were able to date this particular site to about 12,000 years ago making it late Pleistocene. During the later Pleistocene there were these hunters that had been living at this site. They had been using these points to hunt very large animals. And since this was the oldest or earliest site that anybody had documented, it became the most popular and widely accepted theory that these hunters were the first Americans, the first people to come to the Americas. And Over time then, as we learn more about the Pleistocene, the theory of the land bridge began to kind of pan out. And this idea that the first Americans were these Clovis hunters gave rise to what's called the Clovis first theory. That is that the first Americans were Clovis big game hunters. And it is still a very, very widely accepted theory. The problem is that what we've now discovered is that there are other sites in the Americas that have also been worked by archaeologists and have demonstrated that there may have been people before the Clovis hunters. There's a place called, I think it's the Monteverde site in South America. which basically dates to perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago. But it could be much older than the Clovis site in New Mexico. The Clovis, New Mexico is where James Ridgely Whiteman's excavation was done, or the excavation was done on his site. In any case, there was the Meadowcroft site in Pennsylvania, which was also about thirteen years old thousand years old but it was a very different culture there they weren't big game hunters like that so The point is that to this day, we don't know for certain whether the Clovis people were the first people to arrive in the Americas. There are some who believe that the first people to come to the Americas came by boat, and they came long before 12,000 or 13,000 years ago. So the fact of the matter is the Clovis first theory is still widely debated. But... What we do feel confident about is that while the Clovis people may not have been the first people to have arrived here, we do increasingly recognize and understand that they certainly did have the most impact, the most enduring impact. They lasted. They survived. Whereas other culture groups didn't survive. The Clovis culture did. And we know this because DNA testing has actually been done among many different Native American groups. And those DNA tests do link to or are able to link to what we know about the DNA of the Clovis people. All right. So while the Clovis culture may not have been the first, we do know that it was unquestionably. the most enduring of the culture groups in the western hemisphere. And so those that almost certainly came via this land bridge, the Bering Strait land bridge, they arrived during the Pleistocene. And what we also know is that as they arrived in the Americas, they began spreading out. They didn't just stay in the north. They spread into, you know, not just the southern United States, but into Latin America, that is into Central America and even South America. All right. So the impact of the Clovis people and the Clovis culture was not only enduring over time, but it also spread out widely across space, that is, throughout the Western Hemisphere. And as people, as these Clovis people spread out, of course, they began encountering all kinds, all kinds of things. different environments and not surprisingly then they adapted to these different environments quite differently and the net result of course was that their cultures began to take on very different appearances okay that's one of the reasons or the ways in which cultures evolve culture evolves to a very large degree as a response to the natural environment all right so the diverse array of of cultures that began to appear in the Americas suggest that Native American people were very, very different from one another. And if you take nothing else away from this lecture, please understand that Native American people were much, much more different than they were alike, okay? much, much more different than they were alike. Okay. In this class, we're going to identify and talk about in some degree of detail three different culture groups in the Americas. Okay. We're going to focus initially on the, the region east of the Mississippi River and talk collectively about groups of people that are known as the Eastern Woodlands culture groups. Then we're going to move into the southwestern United States. We're going to talk a little bit about groups of people called the southwestern farmers and raiders or that I collectively group together as the southwestern farmers and raiders. These are the groups of people that the Spanish as they colonized in the Americas began to encounter and we're going to talk a little bit about Spanish colonization in the United States and later on we're going to talk about Western expansion and these Southwestern groups are going to be very important part of that story. Okay, finally We're going to spend some time talking about the Mesoamerican Civilizations and we're going to focus in that part of our discussion specifically on And especially on the Aztec people. Okay. Now we're not going to have time to talk about all three of these um culture groups in this lecture. We are going to talk about the eastern woodlands culture groups and then in our next lecture we'll talk a little bit about the southwestern farmers and raiders and then the Mesoamerican civilizations. But let's focus initially and specifically on the Eastern Woodlands culture groups. Okay, now I need to make something very clear before I go any further. Okay, and it concerns this notion or this concept that we call the Indian. Okay, the Indian. First of all, The application of the name Indian to Native American peoples was first made by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and 1493. We'll talk about Columbus a little bit later. But when Columbus identified all of these people collectively as Indians, it touched off a response in Europe. in which the people of Europe began to think collectively of all Native Americans as one race of people. Okay, the Indian was born. Okay, the Indian is a social construct. Okay, Indian is a socially constructed race. Okay, I can assure you that the, people of Native American, Native Americans themselves did not refer to themselves as Indians in the first place. That was completely a European construct. But they didn't think of themselves as a race of people either. They were very socially distinct from one another. Sometimes they got along with one another, sometimes they didn't. But the point is this whole notion of of an Indian, a monolithic, homogeneous group of people called the Indian. That is a completely European construct. And it is also very distorting of the historical realities of the past. If you are inclined to think of Native Americans as the Indian. And I encounter this in students'writings all the time. If you refer to Indians, that's your preference, but at least you're recognizing diversity. But if you refer to them as the Indian, that's kind of lumping them all together and saying they're all the same. And that simply was not and is not the case. It's no more instructive and no more meaningful than to refer to all of the Europeans as the white man. If we know anything, hopefully, we understand that the people who came from Europe came from the Netherlands, they came from England, they came from Germany, they came from France, they spoke German, they spoke French, they spoke English, they spoke Dutch, they practiced Lutheranism, they practiced Episcopalianism, they... practiced Catholicism, they were as different as can be imagined. To call them just the white man is to so grossly try to simplify or to overly simplify who these people were that it completely obliterates any understanding of the historical realities. The same is true of the Indian. If you refer to the Indian, that's basically lumping all Native Americans into one category that grossly oversimplifies and distorts the past. All right. So it is a racial concept. OK, and it becomes the basis then for racism. All right. So I would discourage you from using the expression the Indian. OK, I'm not saying. Indians is completely unacceptable because I refer to Indians sometime but again when used in the plural at least and you can make the claim that it's racist okay but at least if you use the expression Indians there's a recognition of diversity differences that existed among the people okay and in truth probably Native Americans is a better more acceptable expression term when referring to pre-contact peoples. Alright so these people were and are very diverse. Okay diverse cultures in general within the eastern eastern woodlands groups or among the eastern woodlands groups we can say that these people engaged in hunting and gathering activities and they engaged in a kind of a primitive form of agriculture that we call horticulture okay i mean you may remember and we'll talk about this the people who came from europe when they first encountered native americans and They basically encountered people who were already engaged in farming on some level. Okay, so hunting and gathering, it was their survival strategy. They hunted game like their ancestors had hunted game. And they gathered nuts, berries, whatever they could find to help sustain their populations. Okay, and over time they developed horticultural practices. Now, horticulture is a little bit different than agriculture in that it is less labor intensive. OK, in agriculture, basically people plant seeds and then they tend those seeds. They tend to those seeds. They water the seeds if necessary. They, you know, they drive away pests that would destroy the crops. They cultivate. and then they harvest. In horticulture, horticulture is a little bit more simple and less labor intensive. In early agriculture, basically groups of people would farm. Or excuse me, they would plant seeds. They didn't really farm, they would just plant seeds. And then they'd let the seeds grow and whatever grew, whatever... birds didn't take and insects didn't take, they would then come back later and they would harvest. Okay, it wasn't very labor intensive and because it wasn't labor intensive, it wasn't as reliable as farming, for example. Okay, nevertheless, it was a source of food. All right. And so the net result then is that you plant, you move away. And then you come back later and harvest what has survived, what can be taken. Okay, so what that meant then is that Native Americans, oops, don't want that coming up yet, Native Americans in this eastern woodlands tradition were nomadic. Okay, that is they moved about. That's what nomadism is. It's a movement of people from place to place. Okay, now later on, um, the people that were encountered out on the high plains. I talk about them especially in my History 1302 class. These were people who were nomadic and who followed especially the bison. It was the movement of game that determined their movements. But in the eastern woodlands, the areas east of the Mississippi River, the people were more seasonally nomadic. That is, their movements took them from place to place to place based on the availability of resources, and especially food resources. So, where the hunting or fishing was good, they would locate during hunting and fishing season. On the other hand, if acorns were ripening, they would locate in orchards or places where there were lots of oak trees growing. Okay? The point being that they would move from place to place in, you know, following a seasonal rhythm, depending on the availability of resources. OK, so they were seasonally nomadic because they were seasonally nomadic. They also became somewhat territorial. Right. That is, there were regions. that they identified as their territories. If there were certain resources that they relied on heavily, they would claim those resources. And groups of people would defend those territories. And that then introduces a very important stereotype that is often associated with Native Americans. Okay. And it is this stereotype that Native Americans were very violent. Okay. It's one of the most destructive of the racial stereotypes that is associated with Native Americans and certain tribes, especially. are associated with violence and they're often depicted as violent people. And the most notorious of these depictions is the Comanche people of Texas. Okay, it is important to understand that yes, pre-contact people in the eastern woodlands traditions and elsewhere, they clashed. There was violence, okay, but Part of this perception of Indians, Native Americans, as being violent is the way that Europeans constructed this race. Indians were constructed, or the Indian was constructed, by Europeans as a violent person. That's why I include this image in this slide. This is a very common image that was... constructed in Europe of Native Americans. Theodore de Bry was an artist, and like so many others, he became fixated on Native Americans, and one of the things that he and other Europeans tended to focus on was warfare and violence. A lot of that was simply their own European fascination with warfare and violence, which they projected on Native Americans as well. On the other hand, yes, there were violent... violent societies. We'll talk about the Aztecs and the Aztecs did have a history of violence. But the point is that violence became very much part of and built into this racial stereotype of Native Americans. Well, in many cases, the violence that existed among and between different groups of Native Americans was an outgrowth of territoriality among different groups. Different groups claimed resources. Those resources were critical to survival of populations. And if necessary and when necessary, they fought for control of those resources. But that doesn't mean that they were just naturally and inherently given to violence. OK, when you know when there were disputes, violence and warfare did happen. But try to get away from this idea that even Comanches were somehow a naturally violent people. OK, nothing could be further from the truth. OK, nothing could be further from the truth. These were not inherently racially predisposed, violent people. All right, that. is a construction of European racism, okay? European racism and the way the Indian was constructed, okay? So, the eastern woodlands, hunting and gathering societies, horticulture, the planting of seeds and harvesting of seeds, seasonally nomadic people, and territorial, okay? Let's talk a little bit about their culture and their society. First of all, social organization. Well, among most Native American groups, kinship was the key bond that tied societies together. Kinship or family ties. And so it is very common if we look at Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands tradition and throughout most of North America. Kinship and family ties is the social bond that brings people together. Now, it is important to understand then that Native American people, though pulled together by kinship and partly because they were pulled together by kinship, did not tend to organize in large congregations of people. Okay? they tended to organize more at the clan level. And by clan, we're talking about small groups of extended families, perhaps not more than 30 or 40 people, 30 to 40 people bound together by kinship, bound together by their longstanding cultural traditions. Now, sometimes groups of families, clans, kinship, would come together. It was usually the case, for example, that when hardship existed, especially times of either drought or very cold temperatures, When resources, and especially food, became scarce, clans of people would organize into larger groups called tribes. A tribe of people would be a group of clans, a group of families. Kinship was still very important, but on the other hand, tribes of people may be different clans, different families. but still groups of families that have a similar culture. So think of a tribe as a collection of families, a collection of families that share a longstanding culture, a longstanding tradition, if you will. And so now a tribe of people can start adding up to, I don't know, 100, 200, 300 people or more. OK, so a tribe is a collection of families. And sometimes tribes can identify, even with larger groups of people, at the level of a nation. What is a nation? Well, a nation would be a collection of tribes. And when we talk about nation now, the concept of family largely is obscured. Nations of people are people who share a common culture. It's not just families. It's now groups, large groups of families and people who share a common culture. And so we can talk and we'll talk in this class later on about the Cherokee Nation. We'll talk about the Iroquois Nation. These are nations of people who are... You know, they're not just families, they're just very large culture groups. And again, now we're talking about thousands and thousands of people. All right. So very seldom do did people in the Eastern Woodlands tradition identify themselves as a nation? Okay, nations came together typically, and during times of especially duress, if if a group of of people felt threatened, as in the Iroquois nation or the Cherokee nation, then they might become active at the national level. But generally, people operated, they functioned, their lives focused more on kinship and maybe tribal activity. Now, one other level of organization I need to mention is the Confederation. Okay. We'll talk in this class later on about confederations like the Shawnee Confederation, like the Iroquois Confederation. Sometimes nations of people would come together and organize for political and military purposes. That's what happened during the American Revolution. That's what happened during the War of 1812. The Shawnee Confederation was actually a collection of different nations of people.. The Iroquois Confederation was actually a confederation of different nations of people. All right. So when we're talking about a confederation of Native Americans, historically, we're talking about different culture groups, different nations of people who have come together and bound together through political and military alliances with one another. When we talk about the Powhatan Confederation. in Jamestown. That's the kind of alliance that we're talking about. Nations and tribes of people that have come together who are very different from one another culturally, very different, but they have a strong political and military interest and alliance with one another. So social organization among Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands tradition was very complex, very complicated. Spiritually, In terms of their religion, it's important to understand that Native Americans adopted and embraced an animistic worldview. Okay, animism is basically a belief and recognition that within the physical world, there are all kinds of, you know, apparently inanimate objects. Okay, that is trees. rocks, mountains, okay? All of these things to the eye are rather inanimate, but in an animistic world, view, they have spiritual essences, if you will, that are more than simply their physical appearance. OK, so that is a mountain. A mountain is just not a mountain. A mountain has spiritual relevance. It has spiritual significance that impacts life. It impacts the universe. And because it impacts the universe, it impacts humans. OK, rivers, trees, animals. All of these things that are very much part of the Native American universe and the Native American world are not simply the physical entities that we see with our eyes and we can hear. These are spirits. And as such, they have to be respected. They are part of a spiritual world that includes humans. And humans have to exist within that spiritual world in a way that appreciates that spiritual world. If humans start to alter or change that world too much, well, humans will pay the price. And the fact of the matter is, you know, any kind of devastating event could be attributed to an imbalance in the spiritual world. All right. So. An animistic worldview, very much part of the Native American worldview more generally. Finally, I want to mention just a little bit about the economies of Native Americans. Native Americans generally embraced a subsistence worldview in terms of their economies. They lived, and it was partly because of their animistic worldview, a They lived off the land, but they didn't seek to exploit the land, so to speak. They took what they needed to survive. They generally did not produce at the surplus level. And that's an important distinction to make. A subsistence economy is an economy in which the individual basically produces enough to survive. That's the production level. You don't worry about producing surpluses. You don't worry about producing enough to trade, okay, or to engage in sales, right? Subsistence is all about how much I need to survive today, okay? And so within the eastern woodlands groups, there were times when surpluses existed, okay? If they were planting something and there was a bumper crop, well, they're— would be a surplus and they would then engage in a localized trade okay localized commerce and in some ways um they had even um a currency that that could circulate okay what you're looking at in this picture is um shells that are called wampum you may have heard the expression wampum wampum were shells um that were greatly valued especially in the northeast okay um they were carved and they were very pretty, very decorative. And for the most part in Native American societies, they were given away as gifts. On the other hand, though they were given away as gifts, they could also be given away in trade. If somebody had corn and we needed corn, they might be wampum might be exchanged for corn. And in that sense wampum could kind of exist as as currency as a form of money. But they weren't thought of as money. Wampum was never thought of as money until Europeans came on the scene. The Europeans quickly realized the value that was attached to shells to wampum and they basically recognized that they could use wampum, use shells, to effectively acquire or purchase things. And so for that reason, then, after the Europeans arrived, wampum began to circulate like money, as a form of currency. So that's one of the ways in which the commercial economy began to change. the subsistence economies of Native Americans. We'll talk about that later on as we go on. When Europeans arrive, all of the production is going to be geared not towards subsistence, but towards surplus, to having surplus production that allows for selling of goods. Last point I want to make real quickly, I just want to make note of some of the groups associated with the eastern woodlands. that we're going to be encountering during this semester. We'll talk about the Powhatan Confederation. We'll talk about the Iroquois Confederation. We'll talk about the Shawnee Confederation. We will talk about the Cherokee. There are many others. We don't have time to talk about all of the different groups because there were so many. But these are some of the groups that we will be encountering. These are well, three of these are confederations. The Cherokee are a nation. Okay, I'll wrap it up here. When we come back in our next lecture, then we're going to spend some time talking about the Southwestern hunters and hunters and raiders and then the Mesoamerican civilizations.

So I use the expression pre-contact to refer specifically to the period prior to 1492. Now you'll also sometimes see this referred to as the pre-Columbian era of Western history. And in truth, either expression is acceptable. I tend to prefer pre-Columbian.

pre-contact because as we'll see later on pre-columbian suggests that columbus was the first and as we'll see later on there's plenty of evidence to suggest that there was contact between north america and other parts of the world specifically europe prior to columbus so in many ways i think pre-contact the expression pre-contact is is more accurate more reflective of of the the time period. In any case, the first question we want to ask then is when did people begin to migrate to the western hemisphere? Okay, and the answer to that question is we really don't know for certain. Okay, we really don't know for certain.

We have ideas but there are very different ideas and very different opinions. among scholars. The most widely accepted theory today is that people especially began migrating to the Americas from Asia during the Pleistocene, that is during the Ice Age. Remember we talked about the Pleistocene in our last lecture. It was from roughly 20,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago.

roughly 10,000 years ago that the temperatures on Earth became colder and colder and as temperatures got colder the polar ice cap grew and as the polar ice cap grew sea level dropped. Okay and I showed you this or I showed you a similar map in the last lecture and told you that during the Pleistocene the shorelines basically coincided with the very light blue areas. That is, today's shoreline looked very different during during the Pleistocene.

And given that sea level dropped roughly 200 feet, that means that basically during the Pleistocene this is what the shoreline looked like. In other words, Alaska and Asia were connected. All of this land, or all of this what is now water, was then land. This very narrow passage between Alaska and Russia today is what's called the Bering Strait.

During the Pleistocene, when sea level dropped, the Bering Strait basically became part of the landmass. During the Pleistocene, we saw the formation of a land bridge that connected North America to Asia. And during the formation of this land bridge, then, it made it possible for people to migrate literally on foot across this land bridge to North America.

Now, the question then becomes, what would prompt people to do that? Because if you think about it, if you remember... It was very, very cold at this time. The world in general was much colder. But at higher latitudes, it was really frigid, bitterly cold.

What would prompt people to migrate across this land bridge at this high latitude? And the answer, apparently, is that the people who were coming across the Bering Strait Lane land bridge what prompted their migration well they were very likely big game hunters okay most students are somewhat familiar with um the the belief um that the earliest arrivals in the americas were uh were big game hunters okay what you may not know is where that idea came from okay where the um theory came from you And again, it is still in many ways very theoretical. Well, we do know that during the... the Pleistocene, there were very large animals, mammoths, mastodons, mega giant bison. We do know that they existed, but what is it that tells us or suggests to us that the people who came across were hunting these animals?

Well, that explanation dates back to the 1920s. It basically started with a young man, he was only 19 years old, who lived in eastern New Mexico. His name was James Ridgely Whiteman. James Ridgely Whiteman, growing up in eastern New Mexico, grew up in a ranching environment and was not particularly fond of school.

He was much happier. being out and about and he was fascinated by artifacts and things like that he found you know he was very common to find things like arrowheads out on the plains and the story is told how in in the summer of of 1929 james ridgely whiteman was exploring he may have been doing ranch work but there had been heavy rains and he came across some very interesting artifacts that he had never encountered before. They were in a blowout area where wind had kind of exposed things and then the rain had greatly exposed them.

And basically what he found was bones and he found a spearhead that looked very different than anything he had ever seen before. It was a spearhead like the one you see in this. in this slide with fluted edges it had been worked and the the spearhead was associated then with these very large bones that surrounded and were scattered about and basically James Ridgely Wright Whiteman believed that this was a very important hunting ground and he was able to it took time but he was able to convince scholars to come in and to look at this this hunting site and ultimately they came to the conclusion that yes James Ridgely Whiteman had found an early hunting camp and archaeological investigation started and basically they were able to date this particular site to about 12,000 years ago making it late Pleistocene.

During the later Pleistocene there were these hunters that had been living at this site. They had been using these points to hunt very large animals. And since this was the oldest or earliest site that anybody had documented, it became the most popular and widely accepted theory that these hunters were the first Americans, the first people to come to the Americas. And Over time then, as we learn more about the Pleistocene, the theory of the land bridge began to kind of pan out. And this idea that the first Americans were these Clovis hunters gave rise to what's called the Clovis first theory.

That is that the first Americans were Clovis big game hunters. And it is still a very, very widely accepted theory. The problem is that what we've now discovered is that there are other sites in the Americas that have also been worked by archaeologists and have demonstrated that there may have been people before the Clovis hunters.

There's a place called, I think it's the Monteverde site in South America. which basically dates to perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago. But it could be much older than the Clovis site in New Mexico. The Clovis, New Mexico is where James Ridgely Whiteman's excavation was done, or the excavation was done on his site.

In any case, there was the Meadowcroft site in Pennsylvania, which was also about thirteen years old thousand years old but it was a very different culture there they weren't big game hunters like that so The point is that to this day, we don't know for certain whether the Clovis people were the first people to arrive in the Americas. There are some who believe that the first people to come to the Americas came by boat, and they came long before 12,000 or 13,000 years ago. So the fact of the matter is the Clovis first theory is still widely debated.

But... What we do feel confident about is that while the Clovis people may not have been the first people to have arrived here, we do increasingly recognize and understand that they certainly did have the most impact, the most enduring impact. They lasted.

They survived. Whereas other culture groups didn't survive. The Clovis culture did.

And we know this because DNA testing has actually been done among many different Native American groups. And those DNA tests do link to or are able to link to what we know about the DNA of the Clovis people. All right. So while the Clovis culture may not have been the first, we do know that it was unquestionably. the most enduring of the culture groups in the western hemisphere.

And so those that almost certainly came via this land bridge, the Bering Strait land bridge, they arrived during the Pleistocene. And what we also know is that as they arrived in the Americas, they began spreading out. They didn't just stay in the north. They spread into, you know, not just the southern United States, but into Latin America, that is into Central America and even South America.

All right. So the impact of the Clovis people and the Clovis culture was not only enduring over time, but it also spread out widely across space, that is, throughout the Western Hemisphere. And as people, as these Clovis people spread out, of course, they began encountering all kinds, all kinds of things. different environments and not surprisingly then they adapted to these different environments quite differently and the net result of course was that their cultures began to take on very different appearances okay that's one of the reasons or the ways in which cultures evolve culture evolves to a very large degree as a response to the natural environment all right so the diverse array of of cultures that began to appear in the Americas suggest that Native American people were very, very different from one another. And if you take nothing else away from this lecture, please understand that Native American people were much, much more different than they were alike, okay?

much, much more different than they were alike. Okay. In this class, we're going to identify and talk about in some degree of detail three different culture groups in the Americas. Okay.

We're going to focus initially on the, the region east of the Mississippi River and talk collectively about groups of people that are known as the Eastern Woodlands culture groups. Then we're going to move into the southwestern United States. We're going to talk a little bit about groups of people called the southwestern farmers and raiders or that I collectively group together as the southwestern farmers and raiders. These are the groups of people that the Spanish as they colonized in the Americas began to encounter and we're going to talk a little bit about Spanish colonization in the United States and later on we're going to talk about Western expansion and these Southwestern groups are going to be very important part of that story. Okay, finally We're going to spend some time talking about the Mesoamerican Civilizations and we're going to focus in that part of our discussion specifically on And especially on the Aztec people.

Okay. Now we're not going to have time to talk about all three of these um culture groups in this lecture. We are going to talk about the eastern woodlands culture groups and then in our next lecture we'll talk a little bit about the southwestern farmers and raiders and then the Mesoamerican civilizations. But let's focus initially and specifically on the Eastern Woodlands culture groups.

Okay, now I need to make something very clear before I go any further. Okay, and it concerns this notion or this concept that we call the Indian. Okay, the Indian. First of all, The application of the name Indian to Native American peoples was first made by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and 1493. We'll talk about Columbus a little bit later. But when Columbus identified all of these people collectively as Indians, it touched off a response in Europe.

in which the people of Europe began to think collectively of all Native Americans as one race of people. Okay, the Indian was born. Okay, the Indian is a social construct.

Okay, Indian is a socially constructed race. Okay, I can assure you that the, people of Native American, Native Americans themselves did not refer to themselves as Indians in the first place. That was completely a European construct. But they didn't think of themselves as a race of people either.

They were very socially distinct from one another. Sometimes they got along with one another, sometimes they didn't. But the point is this whole notion of of an Indian, a monolithic, homogeneous group of people called the Indian.

That is a completely European construct. And it is also very distorting of the historical realities of the past. If you are inclined to think of Native Americans as the Indian. And I encounter this in students'writings all the time.

If you refer to Indians, that's your preference, but at least you're recognizing diversity. But if you refer to them as the Indian, that's kind of lumping them all together and saying they're all the same. And that simply was not and is not the case. It's no more instructive and no more meaningful than to refer to all of the Europeans as the white man. If we know anything, hopefully, we understand that the people who came from Europe came from the Netherlands, they came from England, they came from Germany, they came from France, they spoke German, they spoke French, they spoke English, they spoke Dutch, they practiced Lutheranism, they practiced Episcopalianism, they...

practiced Catholicism, they were as different as can be imagined. To call them just the white man is to so grossly try to simplify or to overly simplify who these people were that it completely obliterates any understanding of the historical realities. The same is true of the Indian.

If you refer to the Indian, that's basically lumping all Native Americans into one category that grossly oversimplifies and distorts the past. All right. So it is a racial concept.

OK, and it becomes the basis then for racism. All right. So I would discourage you from using the expression the Indian. OK, I'm not saying.

Indians is completely unacceptable because I refer to Indians sometime but again when used in the plural at least and you can make the claim that it's racist okay but at least if you use the expression Indians there's a recognition of diversity differences that existed among the people okay and in truth probably Native Americans is a better more acceptable expression term when referring to pre-contact peoples. Alright so these people were and are very diverse. Okay diverse cultures in general within the eastern eastern woodlands groups or among the eastern woodlands groups we can say that these people engaged in hunting and gathering activities and they engaged in a kind of a primitive form of agriculture that we call horticulture okay i mean you may remember and we'll talk about this the people who came from europe when they first encountered native americans and They basically encountered people who were already engaged in farming on some level.

Okay, so hunting and gathering, it was their survival strategy. They hunted game like their ancestors had hunted game. And they gathered nuts, berries, whatever they could find to help sustain their populations.

Okay, and over time they developed horticultural practices. Now, horticulture is a little bit different than agriculture in that it is less labor intensive. OK, in agriculture, basically people plant seeds and then they tend those seeds.

They tend to those seeds. They water the seeds if necessary. They, you know, they drive away pests that would destroy the crops.

They cultivate. and then they harvest. In horticulture, horticulture is a little bit more simple and less labor intensive. In early agriculture, basically groups of people would farm.

Or excuse me, they would plant seeds. They didn't really farm, they would just plant seeds. And then they'd let the seeds grow and whatever grew, whatever...

birds didn't take and insects didn't take, they would then come back later and they would harvest. Okay, it wasn't very labor intensive and because it wasn't labor intensive, it wasn't as reliable as farming, for example. Okay, nevertheless, it was a source of food.

All right. And so the net result then is that you plant, you move away. And then you come back later and harvest what has survived, what can be taken.

Okay, so what that meant then is that Native Americans, oops, don't want that coming up yet, Native Americans in this eastern woodlands tradition were nomadic. Okay, that is they moved about. That's what nomadism is. It's a movement of people from place to place. Okay, now later on, um, the people that were encountered out on the high plains.

I talk about them especially in my History 1302 class. These were people who were nomadic and who followed especially the bison. It was the movement of game that determined their movements. But in the eastern woodlands, the areas east of the Mississippi River, the people were more seasonally nomadic. That is, their movements took them from place to place to place based on the availability of resources, and especially food resources.

So, where the hunting or fishing was good, they would locate during hunting and fishing season. On the other hand, if acorns were ripening, they would locate in orchards or places where there were lots of oak trees growing. Okay? The point being that they would move from place to place in, you know, following a seasonal rhythm, depending on the availability of resources. OK, so they were seasonally nomadic because they were seasonally nomadic.

They also became somewhat territorial. Right. That is, there were regions. that they identified as their territories.

If there were certain resources that they relied on heavily, they would claim those resources. And groups of people would defend those territories. And that then introduces a very important stereotype that is often associated with Native Americans. Okay.

And it is this stereotype that Native Americans were very violent. Okay. It's one of the most destructive of the racial stereotypes that is associated with Native Americans and certain tribes, especially.

are associated with violence and they're often depicted as violent people. And the most notorious of these depictions is the Comanche people of Texas. Okay, it is important to understand that yes, pre-contact people in the eastern woodlands traditions and elsewhere, they clashed. There was violence, okay, but Part of this perception of Indians, Native Americans, as being violent is the way that Europeans constructed this race. Indians were constructed, or the Indian was constructed, by Europeans as a violent person.

That's why I include this image in this slide. This is a very common image that was... constructed in Europe of Native Americans.

Theodore de Bry was an artist, and like so many others, he became fixated on Native Americans, and one of the things that he and other Europeans tended to focus on was warfare and violence. A lot of that was simply their own European fascination with warfare and violence, which they projected on Native Americans as well. On the other hand, yes, there were violent... violent societies. We'll talk about the Aztecs and the Aztecs did have a history of violence.

But the point is that violence became very much part of and built into this racial stereotype of Native Americans. Well, in many cases, the violence that existed among and between different groups of Native Americans was an outgrowth of territoriality among different groups. Different groups claimed resources.

Those resources were critical to survival of populations. And if necessary and when necessary, they fought for control of those resources. But that doesn't mean that they were just naturally and inherently given to violence.

OK, when you know when there were disputes, violence and warfare did happen. But try to get away from this idea that even Comanches were somehow a naturally violent people. OK, nothing could be further from the truth. OK, nothing could be further from the truth. These were not inherently racially predisposed, violent people.

All right, that. is a construction of European racism, okay? European racism and the way the Indian was constructed, okay?

So, the eastern woodlands, hunting and gathering societies, horticulture, the planting of seeds and harvesting of seeds, seasonally nomadic people, and territorial, okay? Let's talk a little bit about their culture and their society. First of all, social organization.

Well, among most Native American groups, kinship was the key bond that tied societies together. Kinship or family ties. And so it is very common if we look at Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands tradition and throughout most of North America.

Kinship and family ties is the social bond that brings people together. Now, it is important to understand then that Native American people, though pulled together by kinship and partly because they were pulled together by kinship, did not tend to organize in large congregations of people. Okay?

they tended to organize more at the clan level. And by clan, we're talking about small groups of extended families, perhaps not more than 30 or 40 people, 30 to 40 people bound together by kinship, bound together by their longstanding cultural traditions. Now, sometimes groups of families, clans, kinship, would come together. It was usually the case, for example, that when hardship existed, especially times of either drought or very cold temperatures, When resources, and especially food, became scarce, clans of people would organize into larger groups called tribes.

A tribe of people would be a group of clans, a group of families. Kinship was still very important, but on the other hand, tribes of people may be different clans, different families. but still groups of families that have a similar culture.

So think of a tribe as a collection of families, a collection of families that share a longstanding culture, a longstanding tradition, if you will. And so now a tribe of people can start adding up to, I don't know, 100, 200, 300 people or more. OK, so a tribe is a collection of families. And sometimes tribes can identify, even with larger groups of people, at the level of a nation.

What is a nation? Well, a nation would be a collection of tribes. And when we talk about nation now, the concept of family largely is obscured.

Nations of people are people who share a common culture. It's not just families. It's now groups, large groups of families and people who share a common culture. And so we can talk and we'll talk in this class later on about the Cherokee Nation.

We'll talk about the Iroquois Nation. These are nations of people who are... You know, they're not just families, they're just very large culture groups. And again, now we're talking about thousands and thousands of people.

All right. So very seldom do did people in the Eastern Woodlands tradition identify themselves as a nation? Okay, nations came together typically, and during times of especially duress, if if a group of of people felt threatened, as in the Iroquois nation or the Cherokee nation, then they might become active at the national level. But generally, people operated, they functioned, their lives focused more on kinship and maybe tribal activity.

Now, one other level of organization I need to mention is the Confederation. Okay. We'll talk in this class later on about confederations like the Shawnee Confederation, like the Iroquois Confederation. Sometimes nations of people would come together and organize for political and military purposes.

That's what happened during the American Revolution. That's what happened during the War of 1812. The Shawnee Confederation was actually a collection of different nations of people.. The Iroquois Confederation was actually a confederation of different nations of people.

All right. So when we're talking about a confederation of Native Americans, historically, we're talking about different culture groups, different nations of people who have come together and bound together through political and military alliances with one another. When we talk about the Powhatan Confederation. in Jamestown.

That's the kind of alliance that we're talking about. Nations and tribes of people that have come together who are very different from one another culturally, very different, but they have a strong political and military interest and alliance with one another. So social organization among Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands tradition was very complex, very complicated.

Spiritually, In terms of their religion, it's important to understand that Native Americans adopted and embraced an animistic worldview. Okay, animism is basically a belief and recognition that within the physical world, there are all kinds of, you know, apparently inanimate objects. Okay, that is trees.

rocks, mountains, okay? All of these things to the eye are rather inanimate, but in an animistic world, view, they have spiritual essences, if you will, that are more than simply their physical appearance. OK, so that is a mountain. A mountain is just not a mountain.

A mountain has spiritual relevance. It has spiritual significance that impacts life. It impacts the universe.

And because it impacts the universe, it impacts humans. OK, rivers, trees, animals. All of these things that are very much part of the Native American universe and the Native American world are not simply the physical entities that we see with our eyes and we can hear.

These are spirits. And as such, they have to be respected. They are part of a spiritual world that includes humans. And humans have to exist within that spiritual world in a way that appreciates that spiritual world.

If humans start to alter or change that world too much, well, humans will pay the price. And the fact of the matter is, you know, any kind of devastating event could be attributed to an imbalance in the spiritual world. All right. So. An animistic worldview, very much part of the Native American worldview more generally.

Finally, I want to mention just a little bit about the economies of Native Americans. Native Americans generally embraced a subsistence worldview in terms of their economies. They lived, and it was partly because of their animistic worldview, a They lived off the land, but they didn't seek to exploit the land, so to speak. They took what they needed to survive.

They generally did not produce at the surplus level. And that's an important distinction to make. A subsistence economy is an economy in which the individual basically produces enough to survive. That's the production level. You don't worry about producing surpluses.

You don't worry about producing enough to trade, okay, or to engage in sales, right? Subsistence is all about how much I need to survive today, okay? And so within the eastern woodlands groups, there were times when surpluses existed, okay?

If they were planting something and there was a bumper crop, well, they're— would be a surplus and they would then engage in a localized trade okay localized commerce and in some ways um they had even um a currency that that could circulate okay what you're looking at in this picture is um shells that are called wampum you may have heard the expression wampum wampum were shells um that were greatly valued especially in the northeast okay um they were carved and they were very pretty, very decorative. And for the most part in Native American societies, they were given away as gifts. On the other hand, though they were given away as gifts, they could also be given away in trade. If somebody had corn and we needed corn, they might be wampum might be exchanged for corn. And in that sense wampum could kind of exist as as currency as a form of money.

But they weren't thought of as money. Wampum was never thought of as money until Europeans came on the scene. The Europeans quickly realized the value that was attached to shells to wampum and they basically recognized that they could use wampum, use shells, to effectively acquire or purchase things. And so for that reason, then, after the Europeans arrived, wampum began to circulate like money, as a form of currency.

So that's one of the ways in which the commercial economy began to change. the subsistence economies of Native Americans. We'll talk about that later on as we go on.

When Europeans arrive, all of the production is going to be geared not towards subsistence, but towards surplus, to having surplus production that allows for selling of goods. Last point I want to make real quickly, I just want to make note of some of the groups associated with the eastern woodlands. that we're going to be encountering during this semester.

We'll talk about the Powhatan Confederation. We'll talk about the Iroquois Confederation. We'll talk about the Shawnee Confederation. We will talk about the Cherokee. There are many others.

We don't have time to talk about all of the different groups because there were so many. But these are some of the groups that we will be encountering. These are well, three of these are confederations. The Cherokee are a nation. Okay, I'll wrap it up here.

When we come back in our next lecture, then we're going to spend some time talking about the Southwestern hunters and hunters and raiders and then the Mesoamerican civilizations.

Transcript for:Understanding Pre-contact Native American Societies

Transcript for:
Understanding Pre-contact Native American Societies