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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The latest edition of an accessible and comprehensive survey of Native America
In this newly revised third edition of Native America: A History, Michael Leroy Oberg and Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich deliver a thoroughly updated, incisive narrative history of North America’s Indigenous peoples. The authors aim to provide readers with an overview of the principal themes and developments in Native American history, from the first peopling of the continent to the present, by following twelve Native communities whose histories serve as exemplars for the common experiences of North America’s diverse Indigenous nations. This textbook centers the history of Native America and presents it as flowing through channels distinct from those of the United States. This is a history of nations not merely acted upon, but rather of those that have responded to, resisted, ignored, and shaped the efforts of foreign powers to control their story.
This new edition has been comprehensively updated in all its chapters and expanded with wider coverage of the most significant recent events and trends in Native America through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Native America: A History, Third Edition also includes:
- A survey of pre-Columbian North American traditions and the various ways in which these traditions were deployed to comprehend and respond to the arrival of Europeans.
- In-depth examinations of how Native nations navigated the challenges of colonialism and fought to survive while marginalized behind the frontiers of European empires and the United States.
- Nuanced analyses of how Indigenous peoples balanced the economic benefits offered by assimilation with the cultural and political imperatives of maintaining traditions and sovereignty.
- An accessible presentation of American tribal law and the strategies used by Native nations to establish government-to-government relationships with the United States despite the repeated failures of that state to honor its legal commitments.
Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students seeking a broad historical treatment of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Native America: A History, Third Edition will earn a place in the libraries of anyone with an interest in seeking an authoritative and engaging survey of Native American history.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
List of Maps
Introduction
1 Myths and Legends
The Beginning of the World
Rules for Living
Bears
2 Worlds New and Worlds Old
The Fundamental Violence of Discovery
Paths of Destruction
Tsenacommacah
The Mohegans
New Worlds
3 Living in the New World
Mourning Wars
Colonizing the Mohegans
The Word of God
Colonizing the Powhatans
Forging the Covenant Chain
Indigenous Peoples and the French in a World of War
The Pueblos’ Revolt
Horses
The Grand Settlement
The Cherokees
Indigenous Peoples and the Nature of Empires
4 Indigenous Peoples and the Fallof European Empires
Penn’s Woods
The Potawatomis in a World of Conflicting Empires
Settlement and Unsettledness
Life at the Western Door
Behind the Frontier
The Great Wars for Empire
The Proclamation and the Indian Boundary Line
Indians and Empires
5 Indigenous Peoples and the Rise of a New American Empire
Change in the Far Western World
Declarations of Independence
The Revolution and the Longhouse
Cherokees and Chickamaugas
England’s Allies and the Confederation
The Six Nations and the Empire State
Confederations
A New Order for the Ages
1794, A Year of Consequence
The White Man’s Republic
6 Relocations and Removes
The Mohegans’ Struggle for Independence
The Rise of the Prophet
Handsome Lake
Dispossessing the Senecas
Pioneers and Exiles
Removing from the Missions
The Optimism of the Imperialist
7 The Invasion of the Great West
Pledges and Promises
Settling In and Settling Down
Homesteaders
Concentration
The Indians’ Civil War
Peace and War
8 The Age of Dispossession
“Conform To It or Be Crushed By It”
Spelatch
Ghost Dancers
The Assault on Indian Identity
Living Under the New Regime
The New Life in the Indian Territory
The Crows and the Life on the Northern Plains
Indigenous Peoples in the Eastern United States
A Movement for Reform
The Origins of the Indian New Deal
9 New Deals and Old Deals
Reforming Indian Policy
Indigenous Peoples and World War II
Termination and the Coalminer’s Canary
Cleaning the Slate
New Frontiers
Red Power
10 Sovereign Nations and Colonized Nations
The Importance of 1978
The State of the Nations
Exercising Sovereignty
Toward the Future
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Emanuel Leutze’s painting,
The Founding of Maryland
(1861) presen...
Figure 1.2 Silver Horn/Haungooah/Hangun (Kiowa),
Painting On Skin
(1904). Sa...
Figure 1.3 Joseph Medicine Crow receiving Presidential Medal of Freedom (200...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Photograph of Zuni Pueblo (1880).
Map 2.1 The De Soto Entrada.
Figure 2.2 Map of Powhatan Chiefdom (1618).
Figure 2.3 Pocahontas, a copy based on work of Simon van de Passe (after 161...
Figure 2.4 Massacre of the Pequots. John Underhill,
Newes from America
(1638...
Chapter 3
Map 3.1 Map of Southern New England.
Figure 3.1 King Philip (Metacom).
Map 3.2 Pueblos in the American Southwest.
Map 3.3 Cherokees in the east.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Samson Occom (1768).
Chapter 5
Map 5.1 The Kiowas’ migration.
Map 5.2 The Chumash.
Map 5.3 Map of “Some Important Villages of Southern Coast Salish in the Earl...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Tenskwatawa (
c
.1830–1833). Painting by Henry Inman.
Figure 6.2 Red Jacket, Seneca War Chief (
c
.1837–1844).
Figure 6.3 Cherokee Chief John Ross (1843).
Map 6.1 Caddo Country.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
International Indian Council (Held at Tallequah, Indian Territory
...
Map 7.1 The Cherokee Nation in the Indian Territory.
Figure 7.2 Little Crow (1858).
Map 7.2 Santee Sioux Territory.
Figure 7.3 Chief Satanta (White Bear), wearing Peace Medal, Leather Bag, and...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Portrait of Messiah Squ‐Sacht‐Un, called John Slocum, and with Ch...
Figure 8.2 School on the Crow Indian Reservation (1910). Photo Lot 24, SPC P...
Figure 8.3 Thomas Wister (1898).
Map 8.1 Crow Country.
Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians
, Vol. 1...
Figure 8.4 William Terrill Bradby, Pamunkey leader, dressed in traditional a...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Kiowa Indians of Anadarko, Oklahoma, make recordings of tribal mu...
Figure 9.2 A delegation of Senecas, left, view a map describing flooding of ...
Figure 9.3 Gathering at Taos Pueblo to learn about Return of Blue Lake.
Figure 9.4 American Indians Occupy Alcatraz (1969).
Figure 9.5 Russell Means and Dennis Banks: Occupation at Wounded Knee. Denni...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Protests at Standing Rock, November 18, 2016. Cannon Ball, North...
Guide
Introduction
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
List of Maps
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Michael Leroy Oberg is Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. In addition to this textbook, he has written: Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); the first edition of Native America; Professional Indian: Eleazer Williams’s American Odyssey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). He has worked as a historical consultant for native communities in New York and North Carolina, as well as for the Indian Resources Section of the United States Department of Justice. He has won awards for his teaching and research in Montana and in New York, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Peter Jakob Olsen‐Harbich received his Ph.D. in History from William & Mary in 2021. He is the editor of The New American Antiquarian.
Native America
A History
Michael Leroy Oberg
Peter Jakob Olsen‐Harbich
Third Edition
This third edition first published 2022© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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The right of Professor Michael Leroy Oberg and Peter Jakob Olsen‐Harbich to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data applied for
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Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © Warriors Dance War Dance, 1874–75 (pen, ink & w/c on ledger paper)/Howling Wolf (1849–1927)/ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM/Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA/Bridgeman ImagesSet in 10/12pt Warnock by Straive, Pondicherry, India
List of Figures
Cover Howling Wolf (Cheyenne), Warriors Dance War Dance (1874–1875)
1.1 Emanuel Leutze’s painting, The Founding of Maryland (1861) presents a fanciful depiction of Indians welcoming the first European settlers in 1634. Courtesy of Maryland Historical Society.
1.2 Silver Horn/Haungooah/Hangun (Kiowa), Painting On Skin (1904). Saynday and figures from the Kiowa Pantheon. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
1.3 Joseph Medicine Crow receiving Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). Associated Press Photo Series.
2.1 Photograph of Zuni Pueblo (1880). Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
2.2 Map of Powhatan Chiefdom (1618). National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
2.3 Pocahontas, a copy based on work of Simon van de Passe (after 1616). National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
2.4 Massacre of the Pequots. John Underhill, Newes from America (1638). John Underhill/Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
3.1 King Philip (Metacom). National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
4.1 Samson Occom (1768). National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
6.1 Tenskwatawa (c.1830–1833). Painting by Henry Inman. National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
6.2 Red Jacket, Seneca War Chief (c.1837–1844). Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
6.3 Cherokee Chief John Ross (1843). National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
7.1 International Indian Council (Held at Tallequah, Indian Territory, in 1843) painting by John Mix Stanley. Smithsonian Institution/CC0 1.0.
7.2 Little Crow (1858). Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives ‐ Smithsonian.
7.3 Chief Satanta (White Bear), wearing Peace Medal, Leather Bag, and Military Jacket (c.1867–1875). Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives ‐ Smithsonian.
8.1 Portrait of Messiah Squ‐Sacht‐Un, called John Slocum, and with Chief High Priest Ai‐Yal or Louis Yowaluch, both Shakers of Puget Sound (1892). Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
8.2 School on the Crow Indian Reservation (1910). Photo Lot 24, SPC Plains Crow NM 183804#52 ‐110 00488700. Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
8.3 Thomas Wister (1898). Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives.
8.4 William Terrill Bradby, Pamunkey leader, dressed in traditional attire (1899). Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives.
9.1 Kiowa Indians of Anadarko, Oklahoma, make recordings of tribal music for the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, April 28, 1939. AP/AP Images.
9.2 A delegation of Senecas, left, view a map describing flooding of the Allegany Reservation as a result of the proposed Kinzua Dam. TF/AP Images.
9.3 Gathering at Taos Pueblo to learn about Return of Blue Lake. Guy Bralley/AP Images.
9.4 American Indians Occupy Alcatraz (1969). AP/AP Images.
9.5 Russell Means and Dennis Banks: Occupation at Wounded Knee. Dennis Banks (March 1973). Anonymous/AP Images.
10.1 Protests at Standing Rock, November 18, 2016. Cannon Ball, North Dakota, United States. VWPCSr/AP Images.
List of Maps
2.1 The de Soto Entrada. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14, Southeast, p. 129. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
3.1 Map of Southern New England. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15, Northeast, p. 178. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
3.2 Pueblos in the American Southwest. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 9, Southwest, p. 225. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
3.3 Cherokees in the east. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14, Southeast, p. 338. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
5.1 The Kiowas’ migration. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 13 (2), Plains, p. 907. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
5.2 The Chumash. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8, California, p. 506. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
5.3 Map of “Some Important Villages of Southern Coast Salish in the Early 19th Century.” In Wayne Suttles, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7, Northwest Coast (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 486.
6.1 Caddo Country. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14, Southeast, p. 617. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
7.1 The Cherokee Nation in the Indian Territory. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14, Southeast, p. 355. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
7.2 Santee Sioux Territory. Source: Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 13 (2), Plains, p. 762. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
8.1 Crow Country. Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 13 (2), Plains, p. 696. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
Introduction
In this third edition of Native America, we hope to convey to you something of the history of America’s Indigenous peoples. As in the first two editions, we will not cover everything, and we will try to avoid what we consider the pitfalls of textbook writing: an effort to be encyclopedic to leave nothing out. We do not want our readers to feel as if they are awash in a sea of facts, disconnected from any coherent narrative. Too often, textbooks encourage students to view the past as a collection of names, dates, and places, never enabling them to realize that history—the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures—is so much more than that. History, the philosopher R. G. Collingwood aptly noted long ago, is “nothing capable of being memorized.”
We hope to provide students interested in the Native American past with an understanding of how the varied stories they will encounter in this text, and throughout their broader learning, fit into a larger whole. To that end, we will focus upon twelve Indigenous communities whose histories encapsulate what we see as the principal themes and developments in Native American history.
The Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley in today’s New Mexico and the Chumash peoples of coastal Southern California each confronted Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionaries for the first time more than two centuries apart. Both rose up against a colonial system that brought devastation to their communities; both lived under successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. The Pueblos received enormous attention from non‐Indians, some of whom sought to civilize and Christianize them, and others who indulged fantasies about the Pueblos’ way of living for a variety of purposes. Throughout, they quietly resisted those who intended to transform them. They never fought a war against the United States, for instance, nor did they ever sign a treaty. Yet the Pueblo communities stood firmly at the center of many of the most interesting discussions of American Indian policy. The Chumash, on the other hand, slipped into relative obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century, so much so that some Californians assumed they had become extinct, a product of epidemic and chronic diseases introduced by Europeans, the brutality of the mission system, and intermarriage with non‐Indians. Their “re‐emergence” in the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous peoples and their ability to turn up in unexpected places, but also how a native community’s assertion of Indian identity can spark ugly and acrimonious debates in societies that claim to tolerate diversity.
The Powhatans of Virginia greeted the English colonists at Jamestown in 1607 after emerging as a regional power in the Chesapeake Bay over the course of the preceding decades. Many Americans know something of the mythical tale of Pocahontas and John Smith, but fewer understand the important role played by Indigenous peoples in the early history of this continent. By looking at the experience of the Powhatans—a collection of village communities unified under the leadership of a king named Wahunsonacock and his heirs—from their initial attempts to welcome the English and incorporate them as subject peoples, to their growing disillusionment with the colonists’ territorial aggressiveness, to the attacks they launched against the English in 1622 and 1644 and the wars that followed, and their subjugation and reduction to the status of tributary peoples, we gain insight into how Indians viewed those episodes that Europeans called “first contact,” “colonization,” and “conquest.”
The Powhatans survived the English onslaught, though at great cost. They faced additional struggles as Indigenous peoples living “behind the frontier” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: continuing assaults on their dwindling land base and way of life, as well as the efforts of white Virginians to classify them along with African slaves as peoples of color. In the first half of the twentieth century, they confronted a systematic and racist campaign to eradicate all traces of their existence from the state’s vital records. The Powhatans have consistently fought against those who attempted to erase them from history.
Indigenous peoples were not simply acted upon by their would‐be colonial overlords. Leaders like Uncas, for instance, of the Connecticut River Valley Mohegans, forged alliances with the newcomers and used the threat of English violence to extend power over neighboring Indigenous communities. Uncas provided the English with intelligence and allies, but at the same time worked to preserve enough strength to demonstrate to the English that they needed the Mohegans, who could pose a substantial threat to the colonists should they become disaffected. This approach worked for a time—Uncas played as large a role in shaping New England’s early history as did any of the region’s Puritan founding fathers—but the Mohegans soon enough found themselves surrounded by English settlements, their lands and their way of life under siege. In many ways they conformed to what colonists hoped they might become: they converted to Christianity, dressed like their neighbors, farmed their lands, and served as soldiers in times of war. They were consistent friends to the English. But they also preserved a distinct Indigenous identity in the midst of a white population that greatly outnumbered them. That is a noteworthy accomplishment, one that defies the long enduring image of the “Vanishing American.” Today the Mohegans live upon what remains of their ancestral landholdings. Thanks to their enormously profitable casino, they have reemerged as a significant cultural and economic power in eastern Connecticut.
The Senecas, the westernmost of the Five, and later Six, Nations of the Iroquois League, occupied a critical space in the European struggle for empire in North America, but they were never mere pawns in an outsiders’ game for control of the continent. Their actions, the meaning of which are debated intensely by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, were always directed toward the protection of Seneca interests and the interests of the broader Iroquois League. They confronted waves of epidemic disease and numerous invasions of their homeland by enemies both native and European. Still, they were a power with whom their rivals had to reckon. They suffered the dispersal of their population following the American Revolution. They faced the efforts of state and federal authorities to “remove” them to new homes in the west, to reeducate their children, and to deprive them of their lands. Yet they still reside on reservations that, if any number of people had their way, they would have left long ago. Owing to gaming and the retail sale of cigarettes and gasoline, as well as powerful assertions of their enduring sovereignty, the Senecas continue to inspire envy, admiration, and outrage among their neighbors in western New York.
The peoples who came to be known as the Caddos confronted three imperial powers: the Spanish, the French, and the United States. Their experience reveals the creativity with which native peoples adjusted to the new worlds wrought by the arrival of European colonists. They held these newcomers at bay, taking from them what they wanted but rejecting much else. Over time, however, they found themselves less able to resist the Europeans. No longer necessary as allies and trading partners, and with their lands coveted by growing numbers of settlers, the Caddos were driven out of their homes along the Texas–Louisiana border and relocated. The Caddos’ history of movement neither began nor ended with the Indian removals of the Jacksonian period. It was not until 1867 that the United States finally established a reservation for them. Even here, security proved elusive as they lost much of this land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Caddos ended up sharing their reservation with, among others, their Kiowa enemies, a people whose historic movements covered a vast expanse of the Great Plains. The Kiowas resisted fiercely the efforts of agents, missionaries, and soldiers to confine them to their reservation. The Kiowas’ experience allows us to analyze the devastating price Indigenous peoples paid for combating the United States, but also the integrity and determination of a community that struggled to preserve the core elements of its culture in the wake of military defeat. Like many Indigenous peoples, the Kiowas transformed their reservation from a prison into a homeland.
Not all of the Plains tribes resisted the United States militarily. The Crows, who live today on their reservation in eastern Montana, viewed their expansive and aggressive Lakota Sioux enemies as a more immediate threat than the United States, and they acted accordingly to secure an American alliance. Befriending the United States, however, provided the Crows with few benefits. Crow leaders helped their people make the difficult adjustment to reservation life, rallied opposition against the efforts of those who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hoped to break apart and appropriate their lands, and rejected the efforts of the United States to reshape their tribal government during the era of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. Settlement on reservations could be a harrowing and demoralizing experience for Indigenous peoples, but the Crows’ experience shows how they survived, how they acted to defend their way of life, and how they continue to innovate to promote and protect the interests of their community.
The Dakota, or Santee, Sioux, relatives of the Crows’ Lakota enemies, attempted to incorporate the first European traders they encountered into a network of kin‐based relationships. Over time, the Dakota bands learned that Europeans would not reciprocate such gestures, and that they would not respect Dakota ways if they did not have to. In 1851, the Dakotas accepted a reservation in Minnesota that brought with it the worst abuses of that system. Federal forces brutally crushed their short‐lived but violent uprising in 1862, an episode that clearly demonstrated the fundamental flaws in federal Indian policy in the era of the American Civil War. The Dakotas did not disappear. Today, they occupy reservations in three states and operate some of the most profitable tribal gaming enterprises in the country. Those profits, in places, have benefited individual tribal members, but they have also underwritten efforts to diversify Dakota economies, improve health care and education, and preserve Dakota language and culture.
The Salish‐speaking peoples of the Puget Sound region in today’s Washington State have histories that in many ways parallel those of the Plains tribes, even though their lush homeland bore little resemblance to the harsh Great West. They confronted a host of explorers and traders before Americans began arriving to settle on their lands in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They were compelled by American officials to sign treaties consigning them to life on reservations. And yet they did not disappear. They continued to shape the history and culture of the “Salish Sea.” They stand at the center of some of the most vigorous debates over the rights of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous polities under the United States Constitution.
The Cherokees are best known for the Trail of Tears they followed to new homes in the west in 1838, a result of Andrew Jackson’s brutal policy of Indian Removal. Four thousand Cherokees died during this forced relocation. Thousands more were stripped of their property. Americans are less aware of the fact that Cherokee history did not end with their removal. The Cherokee experience offers an example of how eastern Indigenous pioneers created new homes for themselves in the American west. The Cherokees reestablished their constitutional government in the Indian Territory, only to split apart along sectional lines during the Civil War. The Cherokees survived this crisis and others as well, and continue to demand from the United States respect for their sovereignty.
Federal forces drove the Potawatomis of the Great Lakes west in 1838 as well. The Potawatomis called this ordeal the “Trail of Death.” Many Potawatomis died along the way. But Potawatomi communities began moving long before Americans called for the expulsion of all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, and many of them in later years returned to their homelands. They moved for a variety of reasons: to settle near the Catholic missions established by French Jesuit priests; to improve their position in intercultural trade; to avoid the raids of Indigenous enemies; and to reconstitute communities broken apart by land loss, disease, or military defeat. The Potawatomis’ history, like that of many Indigenous peoples, has been one of continual motion in an effort to preserve core values. Deciding the precise content of those core values was often a contentious process for the Potawatomis.
We will concentrate on these communities, while not neglecting the tangled and complex relationships they maintained with the colonial powers and, later, the United States. A word on terminology is in order. We use phrases like Indigenous peoples, Indians, and Native Americans interchangeably. Each of these terms, of course, contains flaws, but in the absence of convenient and easily comprehended alternatives, we have decided to stick with them. Careful students will remember that it was often the prerogative of the colonizer to name the colonized, of the discoverer to name those they discovered. That is how American history always has worked, and we continue to confront the problems this has caused. Alert students will question the terms employed by non‐Indians to describe Indigenous peoples, and keep in mind that these labels seldom bear much relationship to what the group in question calls itself.
These Indigenous peoples lived lives of enormous diversity, and their varied experiences make clear the difficulties of generalizing about Native Americans and their history. These groups cannot be viewed as monoliths. There are Cherokees in Oklahoma, removed there during the Jacksonian period, but there are also Cherokees in North Carolina who managed with difficulty to remain on their lands. The Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of slaves once owned by the Cherokees, contest vigorously their continuing marginalization within the Cherokee Nation. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation disagrees with the Seneca Nation of Indians on a number of issues including gaming, government, and religion—all differences which shape their relationship with the larger Iroquois League. Both assert powerfully a sovereignty they believe the United States acknowledged in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. There is no one Potawatomi tribe, and it appears that there never was; indeed, there are today nine different Potawatomi communities located in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario, Canada. Many of the constituent communities that made up Powhatan’s chiefdom in Virginia still exist, but they are no longer unified under a single powerful leader. The Chumash of Santa Ynez, the only federally recognized Chumash community, represent only a small portion of the thousands of Californians who trace their descent to the region’s Indigenous peoples. Chumash and non‐Chumash alike debate, intensely at times, who ought to be considered legitimate and “real” Chumash. We will focus upon these Indigenous peoples and others, and place them, and their varied experiences, at the center of this narrative. We will look at the local level. It was here that the conflicts and controversies emerged that shaped federal policies, came before the federal court system, and, on occasion, exploded into vicious warfare. It was at the local level where Indians confronted what one historian called the “three horsemen of the Indians’ apocalypse”: disease, warfare, and the encroachment of white settlers on Indigenous land, a resource that Indians and non‐Indians used, and at times continue to use, in incompatible ways.
This third edition of Native America has been entirely updated, and coverage of the twentieth and twenty‐first century expanded considerably. To help instructors and students make use of this text and to get the most out of their studies, we have created a supplemental website at www.michaelleroyoberg.com that includes documents, bibliographic essays, images, maps, suggestions for writing assignments, and a blog.
The point we would like students to understand as they make use of these materials is that Indigenous peoples do not exist merely as an adjunct to American history. They have stories of their own. They were not merely acted upon by Europeans. They are more than the subjects of federal Indian policies. Native American history at times flowed through channels distinct from that of the United States. We will discuss these histories, and allow the experiences of these communities to rest at the center of our story. We will learn how Indigenous peoples debated and discussed among themselves the courses they should follow in the face of a complex of challenges that today many scholars place under the label “settler colonialism.” As they confronted the newcomers who sought to remake their world, they found Indigenous means to live within what became the United States, and to respond to, resist, ignore, or shape the policies meant to control their lives.
1Myths and Legends
The Beginning of the World
Many accounts of this continent’s past begin with Europeans striding ashore, claiming this “new found land” and its human inhabitants for their respective empires. These ambitious assertions have always been challenged by native peoples, but nonetheless, over time, jurists and scholars inscribed them in American law and in the written histories from which the law springs. And with heads bowed, or with a bounteous welcome, Indigenous peoples in too many of these accounts greet their colonizers as saviors, whatever their initial misgivings. When the Algonquian‐speaking peoples of Ossomocomuck first saw the English colonists sent to occupy “Virginia” in 1585, for instance, the English scientist Thomas Harriot reported that they “began to make a great and horrible crye as people which never before had seene men appareled like us.” Confused and savage, “they made out cries like wild beasts or men out of their wits.” Soon they calmed themselves, in Harriot’s eyes, and stopped acting like beasts, and regained their wits, but only after the newcomers presented them with gifts that demonstrated and confirmed their benevolent intent. These Indigenous peoples soon would consider the great power these newcomers seemed to possess, and wonder whether they were “gods or men.”
Today, too many Americans still believe that it is with the arrival of Europeans that their nation’s history begins. We could find, if we looked, dozens of accounts of “discovery” that differed from Harriot’s only in their details. These moments of encounter, depicted so often over the years in the work of American artists, historians, and myth‐makers, represent the opening of a grand story—the discovery of America, the growth and development of the United States, the conquest of the American frontier. All that happened before these seminal moments was ignored or trivialized by earlier generations of historians, who celebrated the progress of a new nation, conceived in liberty, and nurtured on Indigenous land. Yet even in Harriot’s account we can see that Indigenous peoples were not merely waiting for Europeans to arrive, and American history to begin. Their beliefs, values, fears, hopes, and experiences all informed how they reacted to the arrival of these unfamiliar newcomers with whom they would create together a new world. The people of Ossomocomuck incorporated these English colonists into a world where Indigenous rules prevailed.
Too often the words and phrases we use when we attempt to tell this story privilege Europeans, and their perspectives, over those of Indigenous peoples. Words like “Indian,” for example, or phrases like “Native American,” are of course flawed. Even terms that have recently emerged as proposed improvements on this terminology, “Indigenous” and “First Nations,” ascribe a continental or even global identity that would have been alien to North America's original inhabitants. All of these terms would have meant little to peoples whose names for themselves often translated as “people,” or “the real people,” or the “real human beings.” But the problem with words goes even deeper than this. Too many historians, for too long, have relied upon flawed dichotomies: there was a “pre‐contact” or “prehistoric” period that came before “contact” and before the arrival of Europeans ushered in the “historic” era. Native peoples had long histories on this continent before Europeans arrived. They interacted and exchanged with and fought against Indigenous neighbors near and far, and these contacts bred a host of cultural practices that pertained to their “contact” with others. They did not simply drop these practices when Europeans arrived. Words can be tricky things. Colonists settle but Indians do not: they are nomads who wander and roam. Europeans plant crops, but Indians forage; colonists serve as soldiers while Indigenous peoples fight as warriors. Language can emphasize difference, and an emphasis on difference can be misleading. In reality, differences between natives and newcomers at the outset might not have been as great as our flawed language leads us to believe. Both natives and newcomers, in general, lived in towns. Both grew crops and relied upon agriculture to stay alive. Both supplemented their agricultural produce with sources of protein they acquired systematically. Both distributed these labors unequally and away from persons whose proper roles were believed to be governing and warring rather than provisioning. Native peoples in the east, for instance, managed forests, burned underbrush, and generated new growth that attracted game that could be more easily “harvested” by hunters. Newcomers, meanwhile, turned their livestock loose and allowed it to forage and fend for itself. When the “settlers” got hungry, they went out into the woods to hunt down their nearly feral cattle and hogs.
The very notion that the European “discovery of America” began the “colonial period” in American history is deeply flawed. Discovery did not reveal a new world to Europeans so much as it brought into contact two worlds, both very old. Europeans arrived on the edge of lands long inhabited by Indigenous peoples. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples controlled the vast majority of what became the United States. Their cultural traditions, patterns of thought, and ways of comprehending the cosmos, shaped the lives of the people who called this “new world” home. While colonists clung, at times precariously, to the coast, casting their eyes eastward toward the Atlantic much more than westward, Indigenous peoples controlled the continent’s interior. To understand this American history, a history of the peoples who were here first, we must commence our story long before the Europeans, sea‐weary and frightened themselves, stumbled ashore in a world that was new only to them.
So we shall begin at the beginning, at the start of all things, as these first peoples remembered it. The Powhatan Indians, the Algonquian‐speaking peoples of Tsennacommacah (what English‐speaking people would later label the Virginia coastal plain), told an English chronicler in 1610 that a “Great Hare” had decided long before Europeans arrived “how to people this world, and with what kind of Creatures.” So began the Powhatans’ tale of how the world came to be. The Great Hare made “divers men and women and made provision for them to be kept up yet in a great bag.” The Great Hare struggled to protect the Human Beings from enormous “Caniball Spirits” who wanted to eat them. Their safety at last assured, he made the water and the fish and the land “and a great deer which should feed upon the land.” But the Great Hare had enemies still. The Four Winds grew envious of his creation and killed the deer. The Great Hare, not so easily discouraged, “took all the hairs of the slain deer and spread them upon the earth with many powerful words and charms whereby every hair became a deer.” The Great Hare then opened his bag of tricks and freed his people, placing “them upon the earth, a man and a woman in one country and a man and a woman in another country, and so the world took first beginning of mankind.” So the Powhatans’ tale of creation, their genesis, begins not with a man created in God’s image, but with a rabbit, a figure capable of great deeds who could harness extraordinary powers.
Figure 1.1 Emanuel Leutze’s painting, The Founding of Maryland (1861) presents a fanciful depiction of Indians welcoming the first European settlers in 1634.
Courtesy of Maryland Historical Society.
The people who came to be known as the Cherokees, who lived in a vast territory in the interior of the American southeast, told a different story. They called themselves Yunwiya, the real people, and they lived in a crowded cosmos. At first, they believed, the earth was all water. The animals lived above in a sky world, but they felt crowded. They wondered if more space might be found below. The Water Beetle went to look. He dived to the bottom of this world of water and came up with a clump of soft mud, which began to grow and grow until it became a floating island, affixed to the sky with four strong cords. Other animals followed, giving shape and texture to the earth, setting the motion of the sun across the sky. The people followed, but they shared this new world with giants, water serpents, little people, ghosts, and spirits. Animal bosses, meanwhile, took care of their own kind, and watched closely relations between the human and the other‐than‐human beings.
The earliest of these ancestors of the Cherokees were Kanati, a hunter, and his wife Selu. In a river near their house, she cut up and washed the meat that Kanati brought home from a hunt. One day their son, who played beside this river, found another child, a stranger, who had emerged, magically, from the water. Selu and Kanati knew that the strange boy had come from the blood of the game. They decided to raise the mysterious child as their own.
The two boys grew and played together. One day, they decided to learn how their father hunted. The strange boy changed himself into a tuft of bird’s down. Surely this was no ordinary child. Carried by the wind, he followed Kanati unnoticed. He watched Kanati perform a number of rituals, and then followed his father as he climbed a distant mountain. At a certain spot, and aided by the powerful rituals that he had conducted so carefully, Kanati lifted up a large rock that covered the opening to a cave, out from which sprang a large buck. Kanati killed the deer with a single arrow and carried it home to Selu.
The strange boy told his brother what he had witnessed, and together they returned to Kanati’s rock and let loose all the deer, and then the raccoons, rabbits, turkeys, partridges, and pigeons. They ignored their father’s rituals and paid the animals no respect, teasing them when they entered the world. Kanati was furious. He climbed the mountain, lifted the rock, and brought out four jars that he found deep in the cave. These he opened and out came bedbugs, flies, gnats, and lice. The bugs attacked the boys. For ignoring the rituals, they would be punished.
But not chastened. They returned home, hungry and tired. Selu had no meat for them, for there could be nothing to eat when the proper rituals were ignored. Selu told the boys that she would go to the provision house to get them something. Ever curious, they followed her and watched secretly how she produced their food. They watched as Selu, the Corn Mother, leaned over her empty basket, rubbed her stomach, and filled it halfway with corn. They watched her rub her armpits, and fill the basket with beans. Convinced that their mother was a witch, the boys decided that they must kill her.
Selu, a woman of great power, a creator of life, knew her boys’ intentions. She loved them still, and she instructed them on what they needed to do to feed themselves and, someday, their people. “When you have killed me,” she told the boys, “clear a large piece of ground in front of the house, and drag my body seven times around the circle, and stay up all night and watch, and in the morning you will have plenty of corn.” The boys murdered their mother, but they followed her instructions only in part. They cleared only a few small plots of land, and dragged Selu’s body only twice around the circle. Where her blood fell, corn began to grow, and by morning it was ripe and ready. But because the boys had not done all that she had asked them to do, Cherokees learned from Selu’s tale, “corn only grew in certain places.”
Like the Cherokees, the people of Iroquoia, which included today’s upstate New York but also a much larger region through which Haudenosaunee people regularly traveled, found their origins in a sky world. A man and a woman lived there, on opposite sides of a hearth. Every day, the woman crossed to the other side of the fire and combed the man’s hair. Soon, she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. The Haudenosaunee called her Sky Woman. When she reached adulthood, her father’s spirit told her to visit the distant village of the man who would become her husband. Like her mother before her, Sky Woman and her husband slept on opposite sides of the fire. When Sky Woman mysteriously became pregnant, her husband, filled with jealousy, uprooted a large tree and pushed her through the hole in the sky.
Sky Woman fell. The animals of the air and water below saw her falling. Ducks flew to catch her on their wings. They carried her down and placed her on Turtle’s back. Muskrat succeeded in bringing mud from beneath the water which, when placed on Turtle’s back, became the earth. On that world that grew on Turtle’s back, Sky Woman gave birth to a daughter. There the little girl grew, and in time she became pregnant with twins by the spirit of Turtle.
The Good Twin, born first, was known by different names—Sky Grasper, or Tharonhiawagon. He was followed into this world by his evil brother, Tawiskaron, who chose to kill his mother by emerging into this world through her side. Tawiskaron convinced Sky Woman that it was Tharonhiawagon, and not he, who had slain their mother.
So Sky Woman banished the Good Twin, and cherished instead the killer of her daughter. Tharonhiawagon, a selfless exile, worked to improve Iroquoia. This he did during his years in the wilderness with the assistance of his father, the Turtle. At every step, Tawiskaron and his spiteful mother undermined his work. At last, the two twins fought and with the assistance of ritual, the Good Twin triumphed. But he could not repair all the damage his brother and Sky Woman had done. He could not make the rivers flow both ways at once, as he had intended. He could not lower the mountains raised up by his brother. With so many hardships and dangers facing his people, Tharonhiawagon taught them how to survive in this world, and showed them how to grow corn and perform the ceremonies and rituals necessary to keep the world in balance.
The formation of the earth on Turtle’s back was the first of two founding stories recited by the Iroquois. The second involved the formation of the Iroquois League, the union of the Haudenosaunee Five Nations—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, in the metaphorical Longhouse that stretched from east to west across present‐day New York State. The story of the League’s formation focused upon a man named Hiawatha, left deranged by the grief caused when he lost his daughters in the endemic violence that lacerated Iroquoia. “Feuds with other nations, feuds with brother nations, feuds with sister towns and feuds of families and of clans,” one telling of the “Deganawidah Epic” went, “made every warrior a stealthy man who liked to kill.” Mourning and grieving, Hiawatha wandered into the woods where he encountered Deganawidah, the Peacemaker, a transcendent bearer of the Good News of Peace and Power. The Peacemaker gave to Hiawatha strings of wampum, shell beads of great ritual significance, as he spoke the words of Condolence. The first dried Hiawatha’s weeping eyes. The second opened his ears to reason. The last opened his throat so that he could speak.
As with the story of the creation of this world on Turtle’s back, the Peacemaker epic taught villagers the importance of maintaining balance, of alliance and exchange among the peoples of the Iroquois Longhouse. The rituals of condolence became an Iroquois gospel, a message carried by Hiawatha and the Peacemaker to all the peoples of Iroquoia and beyond. The pair traveled through the war‐haunted lands of the Haudenosaunee. They faced many challenges, but none greater than that posed by the Onondaga sorcerer Thadodaho, whose misshapen body and hair made of a tangle of writhing snakes symbolized the disorder of his mind. If Hiawatha had been deranged by violence as a victim, and his grief had rendered him senseless, Thadodaho represented the opposite extreme. His own violence and wickedness had damaged him. He was a killer and a sadist. Thadodaho resisted joining the League, but over time, Hiawatha restored him to reason and to a good mind. Hiawatha combed the snakes from his hair, and straightened out his crooked and deformed body. Thadodaho became the Firekeeper of the Iroquois Longhouse, and his home at Onondaga, near present‐day Syracuse, New York, became the ceremonial center of the Haudenosaunee. It remains so today.
In the Longhouse the fifty sachems, or chiefs, of the League gathered to discuss matters that affected the League as a whole. The league sachems, appointed by Haudenosaunee women who played an instrumental role in community decision‐making, became men of peace. At Onondaga, a Tree of Peace grew, with its roots extending in four directions. Those who wished could follow the roots to Onondaga and join in the Great Peace. With their weapons buried beneath the Tree of Peace, Hiawatha and the Peacemaker taught that “hostilities shall not be seen or heard among you,” and peace “shall be preserved” among the Five Nations.
The Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee preserved the Great Peace that ended the constant warfare and grief that had damaged both Hiawatha and Thadodaho, through the rituals of condolence and through the exchange of gifts in the form of wampum. Its function was to preserve peace, power, and righteousness, to maintain balance and order, and to preserve a good mind.
Earth divers and worlds beyond the sky—from there came to this creation the people who would be known as the Iroquois and the Cherokees. Other Indigenous peoples believed that they had emerged out into the world from beneath the ground, genesis stories that rooted them firmly, and quite literally, in their homelands. The peoples of the Red, Sabine, Neches, and Angelina river valleys of today’s east Texas, who by the nineteenth century were known collectively as Caddos, lived at first in a world of darkness, beneath the surface of the earth. So said their stories of creation. Here the people found themselves short of food, so they held a council. The leaders decided that some of the people should transform themselves into animals. They would live apart from the human beings, and allow the humans to hunt them for food. The animals each had ten lives and, according to a Caddo storyteller, “when killed the first time, the second life was to arise from the blood that was spilled on the ground, and so the third life was to arise from the blood that was spilled … and so on through their lives up to the tenth.”
Yet still the Caddos lived in darkness. Led by Moon, the people and their animal relations moved westward through their neverland until they emerged into the light, through the mouth of a cave near a lake somewhere on the south bank of the Red River. An old man first emerged into this landscape of myth and history. He carried in one hand fire and a pipe and in the other a drum. His wife followed, carrying corn and pumpkin seeds, symbols of the highly productive agriculture upon which the Caddos would soon rely. Others followed them, human and other‐than‐human beings, men and women and animals. All of them intended to come out from below, but Coyote sealed the hole, enclosing the remaining people and animals under the earth. The people who had emerged out into the light grieved here, the “place of crying” in their language, for those they left behind. Their grief after a time assuaged, they spread out and split up and moved in different directions. They built mounds and ceremonial centers, cultivated their expertise as traders, artisans, and, eventually, farmers, and became members of the most socially complex communities between the Mississippi River and the Rio Grande. Caddoan peoples dominated the world into which they emerged for centuries before Europeans arrived and for more than a century and a half thereafter.
The Kiowas, who at the time they encountered Europeans lived on the Southern Plains, like the Caddos emerged from beneath the earth, and their story involves movement and migration before they settled upon a homeland. Saynday, an important figure in Kiowa legend, “was coming along in darkness” upon the face of a sunless earth. Saynday always was “coming along” in Kiowa stories: that is how many Kiowa stories begin. He wandered alone in a world without people and animals. Tired and lonely, he stopped to rest beside what he recognized as the rough bark of a cottonwood tree. There Saynday heard sounds—voices—coming from beneath the hollow trunk of the tree. “We are people,” they told Saynday, and “we want to come out into your world.” Saynday reached in and pulled the first person through a hole in the trunk, “and he watched in amazement as the people poured out as ants.” As in the Caddos’ story, not all who wanted to emerge into this world were able to do so. A pregnant woman, too large to pass through the opening, blocked the entrance and prevented many from entering this world. For this reason the Kiowas, whose name meant “coming out,” were a small community—Saynday’s people. He was their friend, he told them. He brought them the Sun and, he said, “I will teach you how to live in this world, how to find food to eat, and how to be happy.”
Figure 1.2 Silver Horn/Haungooah/Hangun (Kiowa), Painting On Skin (1904). Saynday and figures from the Kiowa Pantheon.
Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.
Rules for Living
These are only a few of the many stories we could tell: of emergence, of sky worlds and worlds beneath, of Great Hare and Coyotes, and of animal helpers and tricksters and other mythic beings. They are stories of creation, of origins, and of how the world came to be. They tell of movement and migration, of how the peoples of this continent came to occupy their homelands. They are histories. They have been preserved, modified, related, and recalled for generations as the peoples of the Americas sought to make sense of their past and to understand their place in the world—no different, in this important sense, than the religious traditions and creation stories of any other culture.
There are, of course, challenges in using these stories as historical evidence. Operating on the premise that to accept these stories as true is to dismiss Christian traditions as false, for many decades non‐Indian scholars have condescendingly described them as “myths” and “legends.” They cannot be true, these students of the Indigenous past sniffed. Rich in metaphor and straddling the line between myth and memory, these stories do not provide scholars—whether archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians—with much in the way of specifics. Tracing how the stories have changed over time is often difficult, and some clearly contain anachronisms that indicate significant revision. They cannot tell us, moreover, when Indigenous peoples emerged on this land, how many Indigenous peoples lived here, and how the enormous variety of Indigenous cultures in the Americas developed. But critical readers will recognize that these questions exist with all religious texts.
Since the first Europeans arrived on this continent they wondered about the origins of the “Indians” they encountered. Early Anglo‐Americans observed the earthworks left by Indigenous cultures, and speculated about the people who made them. Most believed that the ancestors of the American Indians had migrated into America from Asia, but how, when, and from which parent group they originated remained a matter of debate. Some thought the Indians had descended, for instance, from one of the lost tribes of Israel. There seemed to be significant cultural similarities, these observers believed, between the cultural practices of the indigenous people of this continent and the Jews of the Old Testament. This hypothesis had a short life, and the Bible offered little additional guidance for those who wanted to understand Indian origins. Thomas Jefferson, for his part, excavated ancient burial mounds near his home in Virginia, and collected word lists from a variety of languages. Eighteenth‐century Americans, like Jefferson, believed that through the study of comparative vocabularies a judicious scholar might discover the origins of the American Indians. Jefferson’s studies led him to conclude that America’s Indigenous peoples were the parent stock of the peoples of Asia, but few people, then as now, took him seriously.
