Native American History - Introductory

Slash-and-burn was a product of European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.

Particular places might hold spiritual or religious significance for any Indigenous nation, such as a place mentioned in an origin story or where ancestors are buried.

So I fished around in my pocket and brought out an Indian arrowhead that I’d found the day before and gave that to her.

“Now then, let us barter. In exchange for a fig or two I will share my nelumbo nuts, the best you ever ate.”

In 2012, the Fort Peck tribes saw the historic return of 63 Yellowstone buffalo to their reservation under a plan crafted by state, federal and tribal bison managers.
– Reuters

Then the warrior told his wife to lead him to the bear so he could kill it. When they found the bear the man had great fear because the bear was big, very big. The bear slapped the woman with his paw and changed her into a bear. The man ran to the camp to get the rest of the braves to help him kill the big bear.
– National Park Service

The Indigenous peoples who lived on the Great Plains also used fire to extend those vast grasslands to make more grazing lands for buffalo herds.

Indigenous peoples are portrayed as having helped make the country great by sharing corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, and even the basic concepts of democracy.

Chief Rain-in-the-Face, the Sioux chief who had killed Custer’s brother and now occupied Sitting Bull’s cabin in the Midway, wore green paint that streamed down his face.

Corn, their staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably by clan mothers, the oldest woman from each extended family.

The continued influence of settler colonialism and genocide show up when history is retold in a way that celebrates settlers and makes Indigenous peoples disappear from the historical record.

While Smith was establishing a colony at Jamestown, for instance, Pocahontas likely did save his life, although little of the rest of the legend embodied in the Disney cartoon is true.

Patuxet was one of the dozen or so settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that comprised the Wampanoag confederation.

My mother motioned toward the door of our hogan and I went inside.

Other horses hauled lodgepoles and folded lodges when the people moved from one place to another.

I use “maize” because Indian maize—multicolored and mainly eaten after drying and grinding— is strikingly unlike the sweet, yellow, uniform kernels usually evoked in North America by the name “corn.”

I sat behind our hogan, leaning against its familiar walls and looking up toward the mesa.

Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear.

They were nomads, living on horseback, traveling to graze their herds, defeating anyone who tried to move into their cold, high territories.

The Kwakwaka’wakw believe that their wealth, which comes from their surroundings, is a result of their connection to the spirit beings. It is through the potlatch—an elaborate gift giving and feasting ceremony—that they offer thanks to the ancestral spirits for their generosity, share their riches, and celebrate family ties. National Museum of the American Indian

“My mother loved going to powwows. But she never danced. She never owned a dance outfit. This couldn’t be hers.”

They walked out of the pueblo, across the mesa.

We were going on vacation to Crater Lake and we stopped at a resort on an Indian reservation for the buffet lunch.

And as a shaman, I can discover things in the spirit where I cannot go in the body, and I spent much time in trance, exploring that world.

“Get—” The spirits of the dead began shimmering dangerously bright, and Nico had to take up the chant again to keep them at bay.

The village itself consists of some thirty lodges or tepees of the largest and most ornate description known to Sioux architecture.

The Indian invented the toboggan, but he seems to have used it for a sled of burden and not as a pleasure chariot.

Before he buried the tomahawk, Red Cloud was undoubtedly the most celebrated warrior of all the Indians now living on the American continent.

Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-reliefs, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic system based on an ovoid shape that has no name in European languages.

Faced with ongoing Indigenous resistance and continuous pressure from settlers, Washington’s administration negotiated the first of many treaties it would make with Indigenous nations.

The whole Navajo tribe was forced to walk hundreds of miles to a strange and faraway place the white men called Fort Sumner.

Despite these very early first steps, neither pottery nor weaving took off until people became sedentary and thereby escaped the problem of transporting pots and looms.

“We’ll do like the Ojibway Indians. We’ll bend saplings from one side to the other to form a dome—a wigwam—and we’ll cover it with bark, just like they did.”