An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (4 page)

This book claims to be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples' perspective but there is no such thing as a collective Indigenous peoples' perspective, just as there is no monolithic Asian or European or African peoples' perspective. This is not a history of the vast civilizations and communities that thrived and survived between the Gulf of Mexico and Canada and between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. Such histories have been written, and are being written by historians of Diné, Lakota, Mohawk, Tlingit, Muskogee, Anishinaabe, Lumbee, Inuit, Kiowa, Cherokee, Hopi, and other Indigenous communities and nations that have survived colonial genocide. This book attempts to tell the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that, like colonialist
European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonial relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for millennia before they were displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated.

This is a history of the United States.

ONE

Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale.

—Charles C. Mann,
1491

Humanoids existed on Earth for around four million years as hunters and gatherers living in small communal groups that through their movements found and populated every continent. Some two hundred thousand years ago, human societies, having originated in Sub-Saharan Africa, began migrating in all directions, and their descendants eventually populated the globe. Around twelve thousand years ago, some of these people began staying put and developed agriculture—mainly women who domesticated wild plants and began cultivating others.

As a birthplace of agriculture and the towns and cities that followed, America is ancient, not a “new world.” Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approximately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America. The other early agricultural centers were the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Yellow River of northern China, and the Yangtze River of southern China. During this time, many of the same human societies began domesticating animals. Only in the American continents was the parallel domestication of animals eschewed in favor of game management, a kind of animal husbandry different from
that developed in Africa and Asia. In these seven areas, agriculture-based “civilized” societies developed in symbiosis with hunting, fishing, and gathering peoples on their peripheries, gradually enveloping many of the latter into the realms of their civilizations, except for those in regions inhospitable to agriculture.

Indigenous American agriculture was based on corn. Traces of cultivated corn have been identified in central Mexico dating back ten thousand years. Twelve to fourteen centuries later, corn production had spread throughout the temperate and tropical Americas from the southern tip of South America to the subarctic of North America, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean on both continents. The wild grain from which corn was cultivated has never been identified with certainty, but the Indigenous peoples for whom corn was and is their sustenance believe it was a sacred gift from their gods. Since there is no evidence of corn on any other continent prior to its post-Columbus dispersal, its development is a unique invention of the original American agriculturalists. Unlike most grains, corn cannot grow wild and cannot exist without attentive human care.

Along with multiple varieties and colors of corn, Mesoamericans cultivated squash and beans, which were extended throughout the hemisphere, as were the many varieties and colors of potato cultivated by Andean farmers beginning more than seven thousand years ago. Corn, being a summer crop, can tolerate no more than twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high temperatures. Many of the areas where corn was the staple were arid or semiarid, so its cultivation required the design and construction of complex irrigation systems—in place at least two thousand years before Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of agriculture and cultigens could not have occurred without centuries of cultural and commercial interchange among the peoples of North, Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as other goods and cultural practices.

The vast reach and capacity of Indigenous grain production impressed
colonialist Europeans. A traveler in French-occupied North America related in 1669 that six square miles of cornfields surrounded each Iroquois village. The governor of New France, following a military raid in the 1680s, reported that he had destroyed more than a million bushels (forty-two thousand tons) of corn belonging to four Iroquois villages.
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Thanks to the nutritious triad of corn, beans, and squash—which provide a complete protein—the Americas were densely populated when the European monarchies began sponsoring colonization projects there.

The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fifths in North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported some thirty million people. At the same time, the population of Europe as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million. Experts have observed that such population densities in precolonial America were supportable because the peoples had created a relatively disease-free paradise.
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There certainly were diseases and health problems, but the practice of herbal medicine and even surgery and dentistry, and most importantly both hygienic and ritual bathing, kept diseases at bay. Settler observers in all parts of the Americas marveled at the frequent bathing even in winter in cold climates. One commented that the Native people “go to the river and plunge in and wash themselves before they dress daily.” Another wrote: “Men, women, and children, from early infancy, are in the habit of bathing.” Ritual sweat baths were common to all Native North Americans, having originated in Mexico.
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Above all, the majority of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had healthy, mostly vegetarian diets based on the staple of corn and supplemented by wild fish, fowl, and four-legged animals. People lived long and well with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.

As on the two other major continental landmasses—Eurasia and Africa—civilization in the Americas emerged from certain population centers, with periods of vigorous growth and integration
interspersed with periods of decline and disintegration. At least a dozen such centers were functioning in the Americas when Europeans intervened. Although this is a history of the part of North America that is today the United States, it is important to follow the corn to its origins and briefly consider the peoples' history of the Valley of Mexico and Central America, often called Mesoamerica. Influences from the south powerfully shaped the Indigenous peoples to the north (in what is now the United States) and Mexicans continue to migrate as they have for millennia but now across the arbitrary border that was established in the US war against Mexico in 1846–48.

The first great cultivators of corn were the Mayans, initially centered in present-day northern Guatemala and the Mexican state of Tabasco. Extending to the Yucatán peninsula, the Mayans of the tenth century built city-states—Chichen-Itzá, Mayapán, Uxmal, and many others—as far south as Belize and Honduras. Mayan villages, farms, and cities extended from tropical forests to alpine areas to coastal and interior plains. During the five-century apex of Mayan civilization, a combined priesthood and nobility governed. There was also a distinct commercial class, and the cities were densely populated, not simply bureaucratic or religious centers. Ordinary Mayan villages in the far-flung region retained fundamental features of clan structures and communal social relations. They worked the nobles' fields, paid rent for use of land, and contributed labor and taxes to the building of roads, temples, nobles' houses, and other structures. It is not clear whether these relations were exploitative or cooperatively developed. However, the nobility drew servants from groups such as war prisoners, accused criminals, debtors, and even orphans. Although servile status was not hereditary, this was forced labor. Increasingly burdensome exploitation of labor and higher taxes and tribute produced dissension and uprisings, resulting in the collapse of the Mayan state, from which decentralized polities emerged.

Mayan culture astonishes all who study it, and it is often compared to Greek (Athenian) culture. At its core was the cultivation of corn; religion was constructed around this vital food. The Mayan people developed art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, employing
a variety of materials, including gold and silver, which they mined and used for jewelry and sculpture, not for use as currency. Surrounded by rubber trees, they invented the rubber ball and court ball games similar to modern soccer. Their achievements in mathematics and astronomy are the most impressive. By 36 BC they had developed the concept of zero. They worked with numbers in the hundreds of millions and used extensive dating systems, making possible both their observations of the cosmos and their unique calendar that marked the passage of time into the future. Modern astronomers have marveled at the accuracy of Mayan charts of the movements of the moon and planets, which were used to predict eclipses and other events. Mayan culture and science, as well as governmental and economic practices, were influential throughout the region.

During the same period of Mayan development, the Olmec civilization reigned in the Valley of Mexico and built the grand metropolis of Teotihuacán. Beginning in AD 750, Toltec civilization dominated the region for four centuries, absorbing the Olmecs. Colossal buildings, sculptures, and markets made up the Toltec cities, which housed extensive libraries and universities. They created multiple cities, the largest being Tula. The Toltecs' written language was based on the Mayan form, as was the calendar they used in scientific research, particularly in astronomy and medicine. Another nation in the Valley of Mexico, the Culhua, built the city-state of Culhuacán on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco, as well as the city-state of Texcoco on the eastern shore of the lake. In the late fourteenth century, the Tepanec people rose in an expansionist drive and subjugated Culhuacán, Texcoco, and all their subject peoples in the Valley of Mexico. They proceeded to conquer Tenochtitlán, which was located on an island in the middle of the immense Lake Texcoco and had been built around 1325 by the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs who had migrated from northern Mexico (today's Utah). The Aztecs had entered the valley in the twelfth century and been involved in toppling the Toltecs.
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In 1426, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán formed an alliance with the Texcoco and Tlacopan peoples and overthrew Tepanec rule. The allies proceeded to wage war against neighboring peoples and eventually succeeded in gaining control over the Valley of Mexico. The
Aztecs emerged as dominant in the Triple Alliance and moved to bring all the peoples of Mexico under their tributary authority. These events paralleled ones in Europe and Asia during the same period, when Rome and other city-states were demolished and occupied by invading Germanic peoples, while the Mongols of the Eurasian steppe overran much of Russia and China. As in Europe and Asia, the invading peoples assimilated and reproduced civilization.

The economic basis for the powerful Aztec state was hydraulic agriculture, with corn as the central crop. Beans, pumpkins, tomatoes, cocoa, and many other food crops flourished and supported a dense population, much of it concentrated in large urban centers. The Aztecs also grew tobacco and cotton, the latter providing the fiber for all cloth and clothing. Weaving and metalwork flourished, providing useful commodities as well as works of art. Building techniques enabled construction of enormous stone dams and canals, as well as fortress-like castles made of brick or stone. There were elaborate markets in each city and a far-flung trade network that used routes established by the Toltecs.

Aztec merchants acquired turquoise from Pueblos who mined it in what is now the US Southwest to sell in central Mexico where it had become the most valued of all material possessions and was used as a means of exchange or a form of money.
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Sixty-five thousand turquoise artifacts in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, are evidence of the importance of turquoise as a major precolonial commodity. Other items were also valuable marketable commodities in the area, salt being close to turquoise in value. Ceramic trade goods involved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde, Colorado. Shells from the Gulf of California, tropical bird feathers from the Gulf Coast area of Mexico, obsidian from Durango, Mexico, and flint from Texas were all found in the ruins of Casa Grande (Arizona), the commercial center of the northern frontier. Turquoise functioning as money was traded to acquire macaw and parrot feathers from tropical areas for religious rituals, seashells from coastal peoples, and hides and meat from the northern plains. The stone has been found in precolonial sites in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the Wichitas served as intermediaries, carrying turquoise and other goods farther east and north. Crees in the Lake
Superior region and communities in what is today Ontario, Canada, and in today's Wisconsin acquired turquoise through trade.
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Traders from Mexico were also transmitters of culture and features such as the Sun Dance religion in the Great Plains, and the cultivation of corn by the Algonquin, Cherokee, and Muskogee (Creek) peoples of the eastern half of North America were transmitted from Central America. The oral and written histories of the Aztecs, Cherokees, and Choctaws record these relations. Cherokee oral history tells of their ancestors' migrations from the south and through Mexico, as does Muskogee history.
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