Native Americans

Native Americans, preferred term to designate aboriginal peoples who inhabited the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. It is generally believed that the ancestors of these first Americans migrated from Asia 26,000 years ago across a land bridge (now the Bering Strait) between Siberia and Alaska. A less popular theory suggests that the Native Americans evolved on the American continent. It is certain that by 6000 B.C. they were distributed widely throughout North and South America.

Central and South American tribes

The major Native American groups in Central and northern South America at the beginning of the European conquest (16th century) included the Caribs, Arawaks, Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. The Maya civilization had reached its zenith some 700 years before, but the Inca and Aztec were at their peak. The cultures were overthrown and millions were killed by warfare and disease during the 16th-century Spanish conquest. The Spanish government proclaimed the Native Americans to be subjects and not slaves, but the settler community treated them as chattels and subjected them to forced labor. The situation was little better in Portuguese Brazil, though Jesuit-run plantations treated the indigenous population humanely. Where they were able to, Native Americans withdrew physically and psychologically from European culture. South American independence in the 19th century did little to improve their status. Atrocities committed against them by robber barons in the early 20th century brought a degree of government protection. In Mexico Native American influence in the 1910–17 revolution, the restitution of certain Native American property rights, and some integration between Native Americans and European cultures greatly improved the status of Native Americans. In South America progress continues to be fitful, however, for cultural more than racial reasons. There is still a good deal of exploitation and maltreatment of remote tribes, often by government officials; they are still sometimes brutally driven off their lands or simply massacred.

North American tribes

By the time of the European incursion, there appeared to have been about 900,000 Native Americans north of the Rio Grande. European weapons, diseases, and destruction of natural resources took their toll, however, and the Native American population declined rapidly. Comprising hundreds of peoples and nations, with as many languages, Native Americans can be divided into 6 broad culture areas (the Eskimos are treated separately). (1) Early inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands region in the eastern part of the United States were the mound builders of the Mississippi Valley. Later tribes in the area belonged to the great Algonquian and Iroquoian linguistic families, which included Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek. In the southeast the Seminole were the dominant tribe, living largely by farming. (2) The vast Plains area lay between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. It was uninhabited until the 1600s, when the introduction of horses and guns by settlers made it possible for tribes to live as nomadic buffalo hunters. These included the Apache, Cheyenne, Sioux, Comanche, Blackfoot, and Arapaho. The Plains tribes maintained a long resistance to white encroachment with skill and courage. (3) The original inhabitants of the Southwest included a group called the basketmakers (A.D. 100–700), who may have been the ancestors of the Pueblos. The peace-loving Pueblo peoples depended on agriculture for food, while their neighbors, tribes of the Apache and Navaho, relied on hunting and marauding. (4) The Plateau region included most of what is now California and the Great Basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Rangers. Most tribes lived simply by gathering. Their culture was not sophisticated, and there was little warfare. (5) The tribes of the Northwest Coast, notably the Haida, Kwakiutl, and Nootka, lived along the Pacific coast from southern Alaska to northern California. The area was rich in food, principally fish, freeing the tribes to develop an elaborate and sophisticated culture. Art, particularly carving, was complex and developed; it still flourishes today. The northern tribes retain much of their culture. (6) The peoples of the sparse North, or Subarctic, region from Newfoundland to Alaska belonged to the Athabascan language group in the west and the Algonquian group around Hudson Bay. Warfare played a small part in their seminomadic life styles; too much energy was required in the search for food.

Religion

Most Native American religion reveals a deeply felt communion with nature and a belief in a divine power. Individuals and kin groups of many tribes had spiritual ties with particular totems and animals. Shamans performed sacred rituals and treated the sick. The 1800s saw the tragic rise and fall of another Native American religion, the millenarian Ghost Dance.

North American Native Americans and European Americans

The paternalistic attitudes of the first English colonists did not stop their encroachment on Native American lands, leading to the Indian Wars. Native Americans were caught up in British and French rivalry in the French and Indian Wars. With the Northwest Ordinance (1787), the newly independent United States, in need of Native American support, proclaimed a policy of peaceful coexistence, yet with new expansion hostilities increased. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was followed from 1850 by campaigns against Plains tribes, which ended in the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, S. Dak., in 1890. In 1871 Congress ceased to recognize the tribal nations' independent rights; the Dawes Act (1887), by breaking up tribal land into individual grants, deprived the Native Americans of around 86 million acres (35 million hectares), more than half their territory. Reform began with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, aimed at increasing Native American autonomy and improving their economic position; it restored some lands. Other reforms followed, but poverty, poor education, and unemployment are still problems on the reservations, where the majority of U.S. Native Americans still live.