AMIND 140 Notes PDF

Textbook: PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST: In 1870 Charles Windolph emigrated from Prussia to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War. But for Windolph America did not live up to its promise as a land of opportunity. Unable to find work in New lork, Windolph joined the army —...

Textbook: PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST: In 1870 Charles Windolph emigrated from Prussia to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War. But for Windolph America did not live up to its promise as a land of opportunity. Unable to find work in New lork, Windolph joined the army — the very fate he had left home to avoid. Six years later, on the night of June 25, 1876, he found himself pinned down with other survivors of Major Marcus Reno's battalion of the 7th Cavalry, on a hill overlooking the Little Big Horn River. That day, Windolph and his comrades had attacked the south end of the great Lakota and Cheyenne village that had assembled in the valley of the Little Big Horn under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Rallying to defend their homes and families, Indian warriors had swept out of the village, routed Reno's command, and sent the survivors scrambling back up the ridge where they dug in for a siege. Only the assault by George Armstrong Custer at the other end of the village saved Windolph and his comrades from being overwhelmed; most of the Indian warriors had hurried off to the north to attack Custer. That night, as Charles Windolph looked down into the valley, his mind plagued with terrible scenes from the day's disaster and agonizing questions about what had happened to Custer's men, he heard the Indians drumming and singing in what he imagined were "wild victory dances." "We felt terribly alone on that dangerous hilltop," Windolph recalled later. "We were a million miles from nowhere. And death was all around us." He expected to be killed come morning. But Windolph's peril was more imagined than real. The "wild victory dances" he thought he was hearing were in fact the mourning songs of Lakota and Cheyenne women who had lost husbands, brothers, and sons in the fight-ing. A Cheyenne warrior named Wooden Leg also recalled that night in his later years. "There was no dancing or celebrating in any of the camps," he said. "Too many people were in mourning. Too many Cheyenne and Sioux women had gashed their arms and legs to show their grief." Late the next day, the Indians struck their lodges and moved off toward the Big Horn Mountains. On the morning of the 27th, an army relief column ar-rived. Charles Windolph did not die on Reno Hill. He died in 1950, at the age of ninety-eight, the last American soldier to survive the Battle of the Little Big Horn.' Windolph's experience vividly illustrates some important points about living through and reconstructing historical events, and about the need to use a variety of sources in retelling the past. Windolph's understanding of what was going on down in the Indian village was dead wrong, and any historian who repeated it without question would be equally wrong. Only the Indian people in the village knew what was really happening there and only by hearing from them can we know whether Windolph was really in any danger. But Windolph's terror was also real, and we need his testimony to help us appreciate the depth of his feelings and to remind us that fear, prejudice, and ignorance often shape one group's perceptions of another. Windolph and Wooden Leg remember the same night, and the same events, very differently. Each one gives a vivid account of his own experience, but we need them both to get the full story. In short, Indian sources are vital to understanding Indian history but they can also foster a fuller understanding of non-Indians' history; non-Indian sources, used carefully, can be important for understanding Native American relations with non-Indians and throw light on Indian experiences. AMERICA'S MASTER NARRATIVE: History is not, as someone once said, "just one damn thing after another." Unless it is badly taught or written, it is not a dry record of events; it is about how people experience, study, and interpret the past. Each generation reviews and rewrites history in the light of its own experiences and understandings, aspi-rations, and anxieties. Different societies, different groups within society, and even different individuals will often disagree about the meaning of events, the ways in which events happened, and even, sometimes, whether events happened at all. There is no single history that tells the whole story; there can be many different histories, telling many different stories, and many different ways of remembering, recording, and recounting the past? American history, however, was for a long time written and taught as a single story, a narrative of nation building and unending progress that united the diverse participants in the country's past in a single American "experience." It was a national success story, celebrating the human triumphs made possible in a society based on the principles of liberty and equality. American historians tended to ignore or dismiss people whose experiences and interpretations of the past dia not conform to the master narrative. The experiences of American Indians during the years of nation building told a story of decline and suffering rather than of "progress" and "the pursuit of happiness." As a result, notes historian Frederick E. Hoxie, the authors of United States history textbooks had "great difficulty shaping the Native American experience to fit the upbeat format of their books." "3 The Indians' story was not the American story; best to leave them out. When it was told at all, the Indians' story was usually portrayed as one of futile resistance to the march of civilization. As in the movies, "Indian history" was little more than a chronicle of hostility to Euro-American settlers. The image of savage warriors attacking hardy pioneers became firmly fixed in popular conceptions of the past: Writing in the New York Times Magazine as recently as 1996, novelist Melissa Bloch said that when she learned she was about to lose a breast to cancer, "The first thing I thought of was ambushed wagon trains, debreasted pioneer women lying in their dying campfires."* When Indians were not killing settlers, their "history" was usually a narrative of the federal government's efforts to solve the "Indian problem." In many classrooms and in most history books, Indian people were either conspicuous by their absence or treated in such stereotypical and distorted terms as to rob them of their hu-manity. Times change and history — how we understand the past — changes too. Forty years ago, few colleges or universities offered courses in American Indian history or Native American studies. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unrest at home and anxiety about America's war in Vietnam caused many people to question long-accepted views about American society and its relation to native peoples. Political pressure from students and community activists produced new college courses, and scholars began to reexamine the Native American past. These ethnohistorians endeavored to combine historical research with an understanding of anthropological principles, asking new questions of their sources, and incorporating oral history into their research to gain a better sense of how Indian people perceived, experienced, and shaped their own histories. In doing so, they began to change how historians looked at American history. History books, films, and television today are likely to portray Indians in a much more positive and romantic light: Indian people lived in harmony with nature and with each other before Europeans arrived, and then fought courageously to defend their lands and way of life against racist and aggressive in-vaders. No longer savage foes of civilization, Indians are often portrayed as tragic victims of Euro-American expansion. Unfortunately, their basic role in American history has changed little. They continue to be depicted in one-dimensional terms and enter the mainstream narrative of American history only to fight and be defeated. INDIAN HISTORY: A SHARED PAST: Renditions of United States history that portray Indian people only as warriors or victims may serve to justify past actions or present agendas, but they do not tell a story that includes all participants as real people with human qualities and failings. They assign blame for or excuse the past, allowing us to feel good or guilty about what happened, but do little to help us understand how it hap-pened. Understanding the past involves looking at history from the viewpoints of the many people who made it over several centuries rather than from a single modern stance seeking to celebrate or condemn the actions of people who lived in very different times. Indians must be included as a central strand in the history of the United States - after all, the nation was built on Indian land — and their historical experiences require looking beyond stereotypes, old and new, and rethinking some basic assumptions. The history of the millions of Indian people who have inhabited North America, and of the few million who still do, is important in itself, but it also provides alternative perspectives on the history of the United States. It reminds us that one people's triumph often means another's tragedy; that building a new nation often entails conquest of other, older nations; and that the expansion of one civilization often brings chaos and suffering to another. It demands that we recognize invasion, racism, and acts of genocide, along with pioneering, liberty, and equality, as part of America's history, and that Native struggles to protect their resources and rights continue today. It is a story of conquest and colonization, but it is also a story of resilience, innovation, and survival. Native American history is more than a mirror image of United States his-tory; it is also part of a shared past. Including Indian people as participants in that history requires us to acknowledge that American history began long before 1492 and that Indian history did not end when Indians stopped fighting. Instead of viewing American history as the story of a westward-moving frontier— a line with Indians on one side, Europeans or Americans on the other — it might be more appropriate to think of it as a kaleidoscope, in which numerous Europeans, Africans, and Indians were continually shifting posi-tions. European invasions changed forever the world Indian peoples inhab-ited. The biological disasters that befell Indian America after 1492 had tremendous repercussions in Indian communities, as well as creating the notion that America was vacant land awaiting European settlement. The policies of European powers and the United States affected Indian lives and limited Indian op-tions. But Indian people also made their own histories and helped shape the story of this country. They responded to invasion in a variety of ways and coexisted with the newcomers as often as they fought against them. They fought to survive as Indians long after the so-called Indian wars were over, and continue to exert influence on the legal, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual climate of the United States. They also, from first contacts to the present, married Europeans, producing families and population of mixed ancestry and multiple heritages. MAP I. Approximate Tribal Locations at First Sustained Contact with Europeans Many maps which purport to show America in 1492 place Indian tribes in their modern locations, conveying the impression that these communities remained unchanged in composition and place. In reality, groups formed, separated, amalgamated, and moved throughout history. Many so-called "tribes" did not exist in 1492; others were evolving, and many communities that did exist subsequently disappeared as their members died or joined other groups. By the time they came into contact with Europeans, many tribes had incorporated other peoples, and Indian villages commonly included visitors, traders, spouses, refugees, and others from different tribes. European contact produced additional disruption, dislocation, and social reorganization. Colin G. Calloway, adapted from New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), WORKING WITH SOURCES: The shared past is a complicated place. Whether we study American history, Native American history, or any other area and era, we need to draw on multiple perspectives and listen to many voices to get a well-rounded and richly textured picture. I grew up hearing about the Second World War. My parents met while serving in the British Royal Air Force, aunts and uncles served in various capacities across the globe, and everyone remembered the impact of the war on their lives. There were many stories, and I learned things I never could have read in books. But only when I began to read written accounts and histories of the war did I get a sense of the conflict as a whole, and its different meanings for the different countries involved, even as I read things that were contradicted by what I had heard as a child. My understanding of that enormous event was enriched by both sets of sources; it would have been incomplete without either of them. Students of Indian history must consider sources other than the written word, sources they are not accustomed to "reading," and which they are often ill-equipped to understand. Native American pictographs, winter counts or calendars recorded on buffalo robes, events depicted on pages torn from account books and known as ledger art, and oral traditions that rely on stories recounted to an audience may strike us as strange, lacking in "hard evidence," and "inaccessible." As with any other historical source, we need to learn how to "read" these texts, to understand their purposes and conventions, and to interpret them. We must become "literate" in reading these sources so that we can better appreciate them as repositories of knowledge and history and begin to incorporate them into a more fully grounded reconstruction of the past. Most historians are trained to trust the printed word and many distrust oral sources of history as "unreliable." Samuel Purchas, writing in the early seventeenth century, said that literacy made history possible. "By speech we utter our minds once, at the present, to the present, as present occasions move... us: but by writing Man seems immortall." Indians in colonial America soon recognized the power of printed words as employed by Europeans, especially in treaties, but they continued to attribute great power to spoken words, and, living in an oral tradition, stood in what Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday describes as "a different relation to language." Momaday, himself a master of the written as well as the spoken word, suspects that writing, because it allows us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely, "encourages us to take words for granted." Too many words may actually obscure meaning. But in an oral tradi-tion, words "are rare and therefore dear. They are jealously preserved in the ear and in the mind... They matter, and they must not be taken for granted; they must be taken seriously and they must be remembered." Ritually uttered words possessed magical powers. "By means of words can one quiet the raging weather, bring forth the harvest, ward off evil, rid the body of sickness and pain, subdue an enemy, capture the heart of a lover, live in the proper way, and venture beyond death." For Momaday there is "nothing more powerful" than words, but he has "come to know that much of the power and magic and beauty of words consist not in meaning but in sound." Other Indian writers echo his sentiments. "Where I come from," says Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko, "the words most highly valued are those spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed. Among the Pueblo people, a written speech or statement is highly suspect because the true feelings of the speaker remain hidden as she reads words that are detached from the occasion and the audience." Written documents are valuable but they are not always to be trusted. They do not convey the "truth" i hat hamened; thes to nico happened. Like the oral traditions of native peoples, they were created by individuals and influenced by the times and culture that produced them. The documents that historians use may be simply the ones that survived by chance: how many hundreds more, telling perhaps a different story, have been destroyed by fire, flood, malice, or mice? Daniel Richter, who has spent years working in colonial records to reconstruct a history of the Iroquois, acknowledges and explains the limitations and frustrations of trying to recapture the lives of people long since dead: As a Euro-American of the late twentieth century, I do not pretend to have plumbed the mind of seventeenth-century native Americans, for most of the mental world of the men and women who populate these pages is irrevocably lost. Neither historians who study documents produced by the colonizers, nor anthropologists who make inferences from their knowledge of later culture patterns, nor contemporary Iroquois who are heirs to a rich oral tradition but who live in profoundly changed material circumstances can do more than partially recover it.... In more ways than one, we must all remain outsiders to a long-gone Iroquois world because of the inadequacies of the source material available.? As Richter recognizes, the views of a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest about Iroquoian people were shaped by his own experiences, values, and prejudices as a Frenchman in a world that was alien to him. The views of a twentieth-century Iroquois about seventeenth-century missionaries and Indians must surely be shaped by his or her sense of history, views of native and non-native society, and experiences in the modern world. But the views of both, seventeenth-century priest and contemporary Iroquois, are valuable, even essential, in attempting to reconstruct as complete a picture as possible of the Native American past. Contrary to commonly held opinion, Indian people are not mute in the written records of the past. They spoke often and at length in meetings with Eu-ropeans, and Europeans recorded their words. But the fact that Indian words made it into print should not give them instant authority or authenticity, any more than the writings of European people should enjoy such status without question. The Iroquois were master diplomats in colonial America, and the treaty councils in which they spoke are rich and essential sources for understanding Iroquois history and colonial Indian relations. Those speeches also have serious limitations: "all were recorded by Europeans rather than Iroquois," notes Richter; "all were translated by amateur linguists who lost volumes meaning conveyed in the original, a few were deliberately altered to further colonizers' designs, and none preserves the body language and social context that were central to the native orators' messages."8 Just as some historians insist that native oral traditions are unreliable, so some Native Americans insist that only Indian people grounded in their tribal culture and oral traditions can understand or attempt to tell Indian history. They argue that historical records are inevitably biased and inaccurate and that Western concepts of history and time are irrelevant to understanding Native American experiences and worldviews. Certainly many non-Indian observers, like Charles Windolph, totally misunderstood what they saw, and non-Indian writers have often misrepresented Native American life. But although the documents written by observers and the histories written by Euro-American academics may be flawed, they are not always worthless. As Canadian historians Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert note in their anthology, Reading Beyond Words, "the encounter between Native and non-Native people has been a long and complex engagement of mutual dialogue, communication, and mis-communication. Given the intensity of the engagement, even the most confidently Eurocentric of texts cannot help but provide glimpses of Native actions, traces of Native voices." A Jesuit priest may not have understood, or even liked, the people among whom he lived, but he was there, sometimes for most of his life. He was able to recount things that happened that affected people's lives even if he was unable to understand how they thought or felt about those events. Documents are invaluable to historians, but they must be used carefully, scrutinized, examined for bias, and checked against other sources. The fact that they are in print does not guarantee their reliability. After all, most documents were produced for particular purposes, not to add to the historical record; if they were produced specifically to inform historians they are probably even more suspect. "There is no such thing as an objective, innocent, primary doc-ument," wrote the French historiographer Jacques le Goff. "In the end, there is no documentary truth. Every document is a lie. It is up to historians not to feign innocence." ° But as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins warns, neither can they adopt cynicism and assume "that an author who may be suspected of lying on the grounds of interest or ideology therefore is lying — not even a Christian missionary."'' Scholars may dream of a "historian's heaven," in which, wrote the late Michael Dorris, "if we have been good little historians," we will finally learn what really happened. In reality, the biases, gaps, and possible distortions in the sources, combined with the historian's own subjectivity, sympathies, and biases, mean that anyone attempting to write Indian history had better "admit in advance to fallibility." 2 The sources historians use "present us with complex sub-jectivities, multiple ways of knowing the world" The different voices in the sources "can be listened for, articulated, balanced with one another; but only through silencing or suppression can they be melded into a single voice or unquestioned truth." 13 Rather than chase the illusory historian's heaven or attempt to provide a single voice, this book offers a historical overview, in this case written from the perspective of a European student of American Indian history living in the United States, and a selection of documents that present multiple perspectives on the past. The documents have been chosen and edited to illustrate key themes, highlight significant events, and provide broad coverage, but they represent only a small sampling of the many different sources available to scholars and students of Indian history. They should not be read just to gather in-formation, find "the facts," or learn "what really happened." They represent different experiences, perspectives, and agendas. Often, one can learn more by reading critically between the lines than by accepting documents at face value. The book also includes historic images in a series of picture essays and in-text illustrations. Pictures, like written documents, can help us to understand the past, but they too must be used critically and carefully. They illustrate and help bring history to life, but they also interpret the past, often in subtle ways that might escape those not accustomed to reading and analyzing images. What was the artist's purpose in creating the picture? Where was the picture displayed and for what audience? Is the painting based on firsthand observation, accurate information, pure imagination, or a mixture of all three? Are the images most valuable for what they tell us about the subjects and the events they portray, or for what they reveal about the assumptions, aspirations, and agenda of the artist who created them and his intended audience? What do the images suggest about the power of art in shaping history? As with written documents, each picture "must be evaluated on its own merits," with knowledge acquired from other sources. The late John Ewers, a scholar of Plains Indian history and culture and art of the West, warned that it "is dangerous to appraise the individual works on the basis of the general reputation of the artist who created them." What's more, warns another writer, sometimes each element in a picture must be evaluated separately, since pictures often contain "a mixture of observed facts, added fiction, and borrowed material." It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words but if it is to be used as an historical source "it may require a thousand words of documentary evidence to show that it is based on actual observation by a credible witness, that it is accurately drawn..., and that no well-meaning person has tried to 'improve' it."'s "Works of art are, of course, historical documents, notes Plains art scholar Janet Berlo, "but... they are not merely historical documents." 16 The past is a complex story, made up of many interwoven lives and expe-riences. Ámerican history without Indians is mythology — it never happened. The last five hundred years of American Indian history likewise includes increasing numbers of non-Indian participants in a range of roles. As with the different views of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, we need to take into account many stories and sources if we are to have a history that includes all people and if we are to understand the past not as history but as their story. A NOTE ON NAME USAGE: Neither Indian nor Native American is entirely satisfactory as a description of the indigenous peoples of North America. The very term Indian is a European con-ception, or rather misconception, about the first Americans. When Columbus landed in the Caribbean he mistakenly believed he had found a westward route around the world to India. He called the people he met "los Indios, and the name stuck. But both Indian and Native American serve as collective terms in the absence of any more suitable designation that does not require explanation or create confusion. I use the terms interchangeably, giving preference to Indian as stylistically less problematic and because most of the Indian people I have met, especially in the West, employ the term. My preference is to use the term Indian people, with Indian as an adjective for people, rather than on its own as a category. The names that Indian groups applied to themselves usually translate into "the people," "the real people," or something similar. However, many of the names that have been used historically and continue to be used to designate Indian tribes — Iroquois, Huron, Sioux— are names that were applied to them by enemies and carry pejorative connotations. Sioux, for example, is a French corruption of an Algonquian word meaning "snakes" or "adders," that is, "ene-mies." Some Native people find these terms offensive; others continue to use them. I use the tribal names that seem to be most easily recognizable to read-ers, and do so in recognition, and with apologies, that some of these terms are inappropriate. I use the term Lakota when referring only to the western branch of the Sioux people; I use Sioux when referring to that nation in general or to several groups of the nation. The names Chippewa and Ojibwa are used historically to refer to both bands of essentially the same people; this is still often the case. To use both, or to use one and exclude the other, is confusing, how-ever, and I employ the name that most of these people use to refer to them-selves: Anishinaabeg (noun) and Anishinaabe (adjective), meaning "original people." I use Pueblos when referring to the Indian groups living along the Rio Grande and pueblos (lowercase) when referring to the towns they inhabited. AMERICAN HISTORY BEFORE COLUMBUS: DETERMINING WHAT CAME BEFORE As recently as 1987, a widely used United States history textbook, written by a team of eminent historians and first published in 1959, declared that while human beings elsewhere in the world were developing civilizations over thousands of centuries, "the continents we now know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works." The story of America, in the minds of these historians was "the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed." The revised ninth edition of the textbook, published in 1995, acknowledged that there was "as much variety among the civilizations of the Americas as among the civilizations of Europe, Asia and Africa." Nevertheless, it devoted only four of its almost one thousand pages to "America before Columbus."! For Indian people, history did not begin when Christopher Columbus landed in San Salvador in October 1492; it began when their ancestors fell from the sky (Iroquois), emerged from under the earth (Pueblo, Navajo, Mandan), were transformed from ash trees into people (New England Algonquian), entered the world through a hollow log (Kiowa) - or entered North America via the Bering Strait from Siberia (archaeologists). (See "The Beginning," a Navajo emergence story, pages 37-42.) Countless generations of Indian people settled the land and developed ways of living on it, built communities, and maintained relationships with their spirit world. What Columbus "discovered" was not a "new world" but another old world, rich in diverse peoples, histories, communities, and cultures. Basing their estimates on numbers recorded by explorers, traders, and colonists who often arrived after diseases had hit Indian America, scholars used to believe that the native population of North America numbered no more than 1 million in 1492. In recent years, scholars employing more sophisticated techniques of demographic calculation have dramatically increased their estimates of pre-Columbian populations. Their figures still vary widely, from as low as 2 million to as much as 18 million people for the area north of Mexico. Most estimates fall between these extremes. The total population of North and South America may have constituted as much as one-fifth of the population of the world at that time: one recent calculation suggests a population of between 43 and 65 mil-lion. Whatever the actual figures, much of America was well populated by 1492. Revisions of Native American population sizes explode many stereotypes about the nature of Indian society on the eve of European invasion. They also discredit old theories that rationalized dispossession and conquest on the premise that America was virgin wilderness and that the few Indians living there "wandered" the land but made no good use of it. Heavier concentrations of population suggest more sophisticated social structures, political systems, and economic activities than most Europeans imagined; they also mean that the idea of America as a pristine landscape before 1492 is a European fiction. In different times and places, Indian peoples had modified the extent and composition of forests, created and expanded grasslands, built towns and earthworks, trails and roads, canals and ditches. They sometimes placed pressure on food sources and occasionally degraded the environment. The notion of America as an untouched land may stem from the observations of seventeenth-century Eu-ropeans, who saw it when the Indian presence had largely disappeared after epidemics caused massive declines in Native populations and before European immigrant populations increased significantly. Creation Stories and Migration Theories: Estimates of how long Indians have lived in America also vary. There is firm archaeological evidence of human presence in North America up to 12,000 years ago, but some estimates push habitation back as far as 40,000 years. The creation stories and oral traditions of most Indian tribes tell how their people had always lived in the land that Europeans called America, but that they knew as Ndakinna (Abenaki), Anishinaabewaki (Anishinaabe), and Dinétah (Navajo). European theories have suggested that American Indians were one of the lost tribes of Israel; that they were descendants of a legendary Welsh prince named Madoc and his followers who arrived in the twelfth century; or that they are descended from early voyagers from Polynesia, Phoenicia, the Middle East, or Japan. Most non-Indian historians and archaeologists believe that Indian peoples migrated to America from Asia via the Bering Strait, and cite genetic, dental, and even linguistic evidence linking Native populations of the Americas to the Porere at The worry ho an the he ida lan brid 5 of pera-s sand miles across what is now the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. Nomadic hunters made their way across this land bridge over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, following migrating game. Finding rich hunting territories and more hospitable climates, they edged their way onward along corridors that opened up as the ice shield receded. The newcomers continued to arrive and scatter as some groups pushed on south to the tip of South America. During the Archaic period (c. 8000 B.C.-1000 B.C.), small bands moved into almost every area of the continent. But migration via land from Asia offers only one explanation of the peopling of America: maritime people would have been more likely to make the trip by sea, expanding back the time when migration may have taken place. Native traditions say the ancestors have always been here. Key archaeological evidence of early settlement has been found at many North American sites. In 1925, at Folsom, New Mexico, archaeologists found worked flint alongside the bones of a bison species that had been extinct for about 8,000 years. Seven years later, at Clovis, New Mexico, archaeologists discovered weapon points that were even older than the Folsom artifacts. Since then, such Clovis points, as this type of stone weapon is known, have been found from Mexico to Nova Scotia. The oldest Clovis spear points —about 11,500 years old — have generally been considered the benchmark for the beginning of human habitation in the Americas. But the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania may have been occupied as long as 20,000 years ago, and some archaeologists say humans could have lived in North America much ear-lier. The evidence is inconclusive, and many scholars remain skeptical. The most widely accepted estimates for the earliest human occupation of America range between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago, although new evidence and clues emerge each year. After long debate, many archaeologists reached consensus that humans were inhabiting southern Chile 12,500 years ago. Bone and stone tools found at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile have been dated as more than a thousand years earlier than the oldest Clovis points in North America. "Nothing at Monte Verde was more evocative of its former inhabitants than a single footprint beside a hearth," reported the New York Times. "A child had stood there by the fire 12,500 years ago and left a lasting impression in the soft clay." If the people living in Chile migrated south via ice-free corridors through the glaciers that engulfed North America between 13,000 and 20,000 years ago, they must have spread with remarkable speed to the southern end of America. If they did not travel south overland, as previously supposed, they must have come by a different route, perhaps by sea along the western coast. Or they must have entered the Americas more than 20,000 years ago; as Native traditions as-sert, they must have already been there.? Many Native people refute the idea that their ancestors came to America via the Bering Strait and insist that they are truly indigenous people, not just the first immigrants to America. The Miami chief, Little Turtle, offered a different interpretation of the Bering Strait theory. On a visit to the East, Little Turtle reported to have met Thomas Jefferson and a group of French scientists who were debating the origins of the American Indians. They pointed out the similarities between American Indians and people from Siberia, which they believed proved that Indians came from Asia. Little Turtle considered the evidence but came to a different conclusion: the Asian people must have migrated from America, he concluded.' The Lakota writer and scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., takes a more militant position. He dismisses the idea that Indians came to America via the Bering Strait as something that "exists and existed only in the minds of scientists," and asserts that "immense political implications" make it difficult for people to let go of this theory. Portraying Indians as "latecomers who had barely unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door" allowed Europeans to brush aside Indian claims to aboriginal occupancy based on having "always been here." Lakota writer Joseph Marshall Ill offers another perspective that might help readers reconcile opposing beliefs about the peopling of America, and to understand Native peoples' insistence that they have always been here, in the face of what may seem to be weighty evidence pointing to Asian origins and Bering Straits migration. The original stories among many Native peoples in North America "do not bother with when," Marshall explains. Instead, many such stories deal with the obvious fact that we are here and have always been here. When a moment or an event happened so long ago that it has ceased to exist in collective memory, it then begins to exist — as my grandfather liked to say — on the other side of memory. In such an in-stance, always becomes a relative factor. And what emerges as a far more important factor is first. Caddo Creation Legend: In many tribal legends the people emerged from below ground, often with corn and other plants to sustain them in their new world. This Caddo creation legend depicted by Creek-Pawnee artist Acee Blue Eagle (1907-59) includes squash and a turtle, too. Caroline Dormon Collection, Cammie G. Henry Research Center, Watson Memorial Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Questions of who was where when continue to spark heated debate today. In 1996, the skeleton of an adult male aged between forty and fifty-five years was discovered on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash-ington. The skeleton showed evidence of violence, including a stone projectile point lodged in the left hip, and was dated as between eight and nine thousand years old. When physical archaeologists reported that the skeleton exhibited Caucasoid features, suggesting that the man was European rather than Native American, "Kennewick Man" became the center of a storm of controversy. Five tribes demanded that the remains be returned to them for reburial, but, in August 2002, a United States District Court found that scientists must be allowed access to the skeletal remains. GLIMPSES OF PRECONTACT SOCIETIES: It is too easy to dismiss scholars' skepticism and insistence on meeting scientific criteria as stemming from political or racist motivations. And few scholars today would argue that precontact (the time before interaction with Euro-peans) America was empty when the Europeans arrived. America was "a pre-European cultural landscape, one that represented the trial and error as well as the achievement of countless human generations." Indian peoples in different times and regions pursued varied activities. They built irrigation systems that allowed them to farm in the deserts. They cultivated new strains of crops, and built settled and populous communities based on corn, beans, and squash. They improved hunting and fishing techniques and crafted more efficient weapons and tools. They exchanged commodities and ideas across far-reaching trade networks. They fought wars, established protocols of diplomacy, and learned to communicate with speakers of many different languages. They developed various forms of architecture suited to particular environments, different seasons, and shifting social and economic purposes. While medieval Christians were erecting Gothic cathedrals in Europe, Indians were constructing temple mounds in the Mississippi basin. They built societies held together by kin, clan, and tradition. They created rich forms of art, music, dance and oral literature, and developed ceremonies and religious rituals that helped keep their world in balance. West Coast Affluence: People were harvesting the rich marine resources of the California coast ten thousand years ago. As the climate stabilized and came to resemble that of today, the coastal regions of California supported large populations of hunter-gatherers who lived in permanent communities. The inhabitants cultivated only one crop — tobacco —but harvested an abundant variety of natural foods. Women gathered acorns and ground them into bread meal; men fished the rivers and ocean shores and hunted deer and smaller mammals. The Chumash Indians of the Santa Barbara region lived well from the ocean and the land, following an annual cycle of subsistence that allowed them to harvest and store marine mammals, fish, shellfish, acorns, pine nuts, and other wild plants. Chumash traders were part of an extensive regional exchange network, and Chumash villages sometimes housed a thousand people. The sophisticated and diversified hunter-gatherer lifestyle in California supported a population of 300,000 people and a great diversity of languages and cultures before Europeans arrived. MAP I. Native North America before Columbus: Selected Peoples and Key Sites Indian peoples sometimes shifted location over time, and different societies developed, changed, and disappeared, but environmental conditions determined broad areas of cultural similarity in Native North America. People exchanged foods, materials, influences, and ideas within and across regions. On the northwest Pacific coast, from northern California to Alaska, seagoing peoples were harvesting rich marine resources five thousand years ago. Men fished with harpoons and nets from canoes, and villages accumulated reserves of dried fish and sea-mammal meat. Large villages of communal rectangular plank houses were built in sheltered coves. In time, these peoples created prosperous and stratified societies. Craftsmen developed specialized woodworking tools and skills, producing seagoing canoes and ceremonial cary. ings. At Ozette on the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington state, Makah Indians occupied an ideal site for sea-mammal hunting. The village was inhabited for at least two thousand years before a massive spring time mudslide engulfed it probably around 1700 preserving its contents like a North American Pompeii. Columbia Plateau Fishers: On the Columbia Plateau, between the Cascade Mountains on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east, salmon were central to Indian life and culture. Huge and fast-flowing rivers like the Fraser, Columbia, and Snake provided a organ harot for pengle inhabiting the banks anthe all sa site th nu through a rocky channel, Indian people harvested salmon runs more than seven thousand years ago. Men caught the salmon with harpoons, dipnets, weirs, and traps; women butchered, dried, and stored the catch. Fish were dried or smoked on racks and packed in baskets for eating or for trading, and fishing stations became sites of social and ceremonial activity. Described as "the finest salmon fishery in the world" and located where Chinookan-speaking peoples from downriver met Sahaptian-speakers from upstream, The Dalles became one of the largest trade fairs in western North America, linked to trade routes that extended south to California, east to Yellowstone, and, ultimately, all the way across the continent.? Rituals accompanied the start of the spring salmon runs, and only after the ceremonies were completed was the fishing season open. People threw salmon bones back into the water to allow the spirit of the salmon to return to the sea and ensure that the cycle of abundance would continue. Taboos limited women's contact with salmon and water, especially during menstruation when their blood had the power to offend the salmon and jeopardize the run.' Earthquakes and landslides occasionally blocked salmon runs on the Columbia River; and changes in water temperature and mineral content could discourage the fish from returning to their spawning grounds — events explained and retold in Native stories handed down across generations. Kettle Falls, Fort Colville: Paul Kane's painting from 1847 shows Indians fishing salmon at Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia River, near present-day Spokane, Washington, as they had done for centuries. Men used harpoons, traps, and dipnets to catch the fish; women dried and stored the catch, Fishing sites often became centers of social and ceremonial activity when the salmon were running. Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas. Great Basin Foragers: The Great Basin, an area of some 400,000 square miles between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, embraces tremendous environment and topographical diversity. Ancient inhabitants exploited a broad range of food sources to survive in a hard land. Between ten and twelve thousand years ago, lakes in the region shrank, rivers dried up, and the lusher vegetation retreated to higher elevations and to the north. Temperatures rose until about 4000 or 3000 B.C., and hot, arid conditions continued to characterize the region into historic times. The diverse environments of the Great Basin underwent constant change, and populations moved regularly to take advantage of unevenly distributed and often precarious resources. For instance, on the shores of Pyramid Lake and Walker River in Nevada, people lived in sedentary communities for most of the year, supplementing a staple diet of fish with game and plants. In other areas, people harvested wild plants and small game, a subsistence strategy that required intimate knowledge of the land and its animals, regular movement to take advantage of seasonal diversity and changing conditions, and careful exploitation of the environment. Amid these adaptations, however, hunting and gathering endured for ten thousand years. ° Trade, too, was a part of Great Basin life: shells from the Pacific coast and obsidian — volcanic glass — from southern Idaho, which may have been present in the Great Basin as early as seven thousand years ago, were traded over vast areas along with food, hides, and other perishable items. Between about A.D. 400 and 1300, horticultural communities appeared in Utah, eastern Nevada, western Colorado, and southern Idaho, growing corn, making poetry, and living relatively sedentary lives. Called "Fremont Culture" By archaeologists and anthropologists, this way of life proved short lived in Great Basin terms— a mere nine hundred years. First Buffalo Hunters of the Plains: Life in ancient America was varied and changing, but nowhere did Indians wearing feather headdresses hunt buffalo from horseback; the horse-and-buffalo culture of the Plains Indians developed much later, a byproduct of contact with Europeans. The way of life that popular stereotypes depict as typical of all Indians at all times never existed in most of North America and was not even typical of the Great Plains until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Between about 12,000 and 8000 B.C., Native American peoples hunted on foot on the Great Plains for big game— mammoths, mastodons, and bison. Over time, these people, known as Paleo-Indians, worked increasingly lethal projectiles, such as Clovis points flaked on both sides, to produce stone spear points bound into split wooden shafts. Experiments by archaeologist George Frison demonstrated that hunters using Clovis point spears could inflict mortal wounds on animals as large as African elephants." As Paleo-Indians refined their hunting toolkits, they also developed more effective methods of hunting large game, such as buffalo drives and corrals. These communal hunting techniques required greater degrees of social organization. At Head Smashed In buffalo jump in Alberta — the largest, oldest, and best-preserved buffalo drive site in the western Plains — Indians hunted and slaughtered buffalo for more than seven thousand years. Many species of large animals became extinct - mastodons, mammoths, giant beaver and bear, saber-toothed cats and American lions, camels, and horses —but the demise of the large Ice Age mammals was a worldwide phenomenon, and most likely the result of climatic change rather than relentless and greedy human predators. By 8500 B.C. most Paleo-Indians were hunting bison. Bows and arrows — a major innovation in hunting and warfare — spread south from the Arctic, and were in use throughout the Plains by A.D. 1000. When the first Spaniards ventured onto the "vast and beautiful" southern Plains in the 1520s, they saw huge herds of buffalo. They noted that the Indians of the region "live upon them and distribute an incredible number of hides into the interior"12 Nomadic hunters traded with farming groups on the edges of the Great Plains, but they did not yet travel by horseback. In 1541, Spaniards on the southern Plains encountered peoples who traded each winter with the Pueblos® in the Rio Grande valley and who "go about like nomads with their tents and with packs of dogs harnessed with little pads, pack-saddles and girths." 13 °The name Pueblo comes from the Spanish term for a town and was applied by early Spaniards to the people they met living in multistory adobe towns in New Mexico and Arizona. At the time of first contacts with Europeans, the Pueblo Indians lived in many communities and belonged to eight different language groups. Then, as now, most Pueblo communities nestled it the Rio Grande valley — Taos, San Juan, Cochiti, Acoma — but the Zunis of western New Mexico and the Hopis of Arizona are also regarded as Pueblo Indians. Pecos Pueblo around 1500: One of the easternmost Pueblo communities, Pecos functioned as a trade center and rendezvous between the farming peoples of the Rio Grande valley and the hunting peoples of the Great Plains long before the Spanish arrived. This 1973 painting by Tom Lovell depicts a harvest-time trade fair at Pecos. The inhabitants of the pueblo trade corn, squash, pottery, and other items to visiting Plains Apaches, who transport the products of the buffalo hunt on dogsleds. Later, Spanish seizures of Pueblo food surpluses disrupted these longstanding trade relationships, while access to Spanish horses increased the Apaches mobility and military power. Courtesy of Abell-Hanger Foundation and of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Library and Hall of Fame of Midland, Texas, where this painting is on display. First Farmers of the Southwest: For virtually the entire span of human life on earth, people have survived as hunters and gatherers, living on wild plants and animals. Then, beginning about ten thousand years ago, many hunters became farmers at various places around the world. Within the relatively short period of about five thousand years, people began cultivating domesticated plants in Southeast and Southwest Asia, China, South America, Mesoamerica, and the eastern United States. The transition to agriculture involved more than simply developing a new food source; it entailed a changed relationship with the environment. Ultimately it produced new social structures and organizations, as people cleared lands, cultivated and stored foods, adopted new technologies for farming, and lived in more populous and sedentary communities. 14 Between about A.D. 700 and 1100, warmer climatic conditions fostered westward expansion of the tall-grass prairie and peoples living on the eastern edges of the Plains began cultivating corn and beans. By the end of the first mil-lennium, eastern Plains peoples were living in earth-lodge villages, growing corn and beans, as well as hunting and gathering. In the twelfth century, other farming peoples moved into the middle Missouri valley, although agriculture on the Plains became more precarious by the mid-thirteenth century as the climate grew colder and drier. The ancient inhabitants of the southwestern United States developed agriculturally based societies approximately three thousand years ago. About two thousand years ago in the highlands of the Arizona-New Mexico border and in northwest Mexico, Mogollon people grew corn and squash. They first lived in pit house villages, but later built multi-apartment structures above ground. Southwestern peoples began making clay pots by about A.D. 200, and pottery was widespread by A.D. 500, bringing improved methods for preparing and storing food. Mogollon potters were making the distinctive black on white Mimbres style pottery more than a thousand years ago, although their culture went into decline after about 1100. Between about 800 and 1400, the Hohokam people, ancestors of the Akimel O'odham or Pimas and Tohono O'odham or Papagos, built sophisticated irrigation systems to tap sources of precious water in their Sonoran Desert homeland. They created a network of canals that transported water hundreds of miles. Freed from dependence on the unpredictable Gila River, the Hohokam people were able to store crops and develop larger and more permanent com-munities. Snaketown, near present-day Phoenix, had three to six hundred inhabitants and was continuously occupied for twelve hundred years. Drought or increased soil salinity may explain the decline of Hohokam culture after about 1300. In the four-corners region of the Southwest where the present states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, the Anasazi culture emerged around A.D. 900 and reached its height between 1100 and 1300, about the time of the Crusades in Europe, Anasazi people grew and stored corn, wove and decorated baskets, made pottery, studied the stars, and were master architects. In Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico's San Juan River basin, they constructed a dozen towns and perhaps two hundred outlying villages. At least five thousand and perhaps as many as fifteen thousand people inhabited the area. D-shaped Pueblo Bonito, one of many such structures in the canyon, contained hundreds of rooms and housed hundreds of people, making it "the largest apartment building in North America until New York City surpassed it in the nineteenth century."15 Most Anasazi villages housed a few families and were located on mesa tops, but Anasazi people also built impressive cliff dwellings. At Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, people occupied more than two hundred rooms in a multitiered fortress-like cliff dwelling that provided defense against enemies. (See Pueblo Bonito and Mesa Verde images, pages 57 and 58.) With more than four hundred miles of straight roads spoking out from it, Chaco Canyon was a center of trade. The people of Chaco Canyon exchanged turquoise to distant peoples, obtaining sea shells from the Gulf of California, exotic birds and feathers from Central America, and minerals and ores from the Rocky Mountains. MAP 1.2 Southwest Civilizations and Chaco Canyon as Trade Center, c. 900-1200: Structures like the cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde and the town of Pueblo Bonito show that the ancient Southwest was a region of remarkable activity and lasting achievement. Pueblo Bonito sat in Chaco Canyon, itself the center of a series of communities in the San Juan River basin and a focus of trade, in which turquoise was exchanged for goods as far away as Mexico, California, and the Rocky Mountains. The dots on the detail map (right) locate some of the outlying settlements. The lines show straight ancient roads, some of them stretching four hundred miles, that have been documented by either ground or aerial surveys. Adapted from a drawing by Tracy Wellman. From Ancient North America by Brian M. Fagan, copyright © 1995 Thames and Hudson, Ltd. Natural disaster and climatic change altered the lives and locations of southwestern peoples. In 1064, near present-day Flagstaff, Arizona, Sunset Crater volcano erupted, filling the sky with fire and smoke, and causing dramatic shifts in patterns of settlement. Beginning in the twelfth century, a severe and prolonged cycle of droughts hit the American Southwest. Soil erosion, crop failure, increased competition for farming lands and the ensuing social tensions and warfare seem to have dispersed people into smaller, less stable settlements. Some Anasazi moved south; others joined the Zunis and Hopis in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. The rest moved east and mingled with Pueblo communities that had developed in the Rio Grande valley, causing a dramatic population upsurge in that area. Some scholars believe that a new religion —what they call the Kachina phenomenon —drew Anasazi people eastward to the Rio Grande; in a period of drought, southwestern farming peoples may well have placed more faith in kachinas, the spirits that brought rain. According to one account, Pueblo people had a rather different explana-tion. The sid their lies i people" ta trut lot that in the ki, ra. is. antelope, bison, and birds— and he gave them corn, squash, berries, yucca, cactus, and all they needed to wear. Then one night he left them. They followed his tracks until they disappeared in the water of a big river, the Rio Grande. So they gathered up their things and moved to the river, "where they found another town already living. There they took up their lives again amidst the gods of that place." 16 Whatever the causes, over the next 150 years, a period known as the Great Migration, Anasazi people abandoned their sophisticated towns and moved away to be amalgamated with other established peoples. No new Chacoan buildings were constructed after 1150, and by 1300 the canyon was abandoned. Great cliff dwellings that had once echoed with human activity became empty and silent. About the same time other movements of peoples altered the populations of the Southwest. Nomadic Athabascan peoples, ancestors of the Apaches and Navajos, began to migrate from far northwestern Canada, probably reaching the Southwest by the 1400s. Long before Europeans arrived in America, Anasazi civilization had emerged in the Southwest, flourished for centuries, and declined. The Pueblo cultures and communities the Spanish invaders encountered in the Southwest in the sixteenth century were descendants of ancient civilizations that stretched back thousands of years. People had mi-grated, scattered and regrouped, were able to survive and often flourish in a challenging and sometimes harsh environment. When a Spanish expedition reached the Hopi town of Walpi in 1582: More than one thousand souls came, laden with very fine earthen jars containing water, and with rabbits, cooked venison, tortillas, atole (corn flour gruel), and beans, cooked calabashes, and quantities of corn and pinole, so that, although our friends were many and we insisted our friends should not bring so much, heaps of food were left over. Indian women may have begun domesticating indigenous seed plants such as sunflowers, squash, and marsh elder that thrived in the floodplains of the eastern United States as much as four thousand years ago. & Some Indians in pres-ent-day Illinois were growing squash by 5000 B.C. As long as seven thousand years ago Indian farmers in Mesoamerica crossbred wild grasses and created maize, or corn, which has become a staple food over much of the world; over time, corn cultivation spread north into what is now the United States. It was present in Tennessee about 350 B.C., in the Ohio valley by 300 B.C., and in the Illinois valley by A.D. 650. Corn does not grow without human care and cultivation; Indian farmers selected the seeds of plants that did best in their environments and developed new strains for particular soils, climates, and growing seasons. Corn provided people with food they could store. By about A.D. 1000 corn had become the major field crop in the Eastern Woodlands and the core of society and economy. It was a staple of life that also reflected the rhythmic cycle of life. Indian peoples developed a system of agriculture based on corn, beans, and squash — the "sacred three sisters" of the Iroquois — supplemented with a variety of other crops. 19 "The only reason we have corn today is that for thousands of years humans have selected seeds and planted them," says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an Iroquois agronomist who studies native methods of cultivation and crop yields.20 "White farmers did not make similar progress in plant breeding until the development of agricultural experiment stations in the late nineteenth century," notes another scholar of Indian agriculture. When Frenchman Jacques Cartier visited the Iroquoian town of Hochelaga (modern Montreal) in 1536, he found it inhabited by several thousand people and surrounded by extensive cornfields. (See Hochelaga image, page 61.) The Hochelagans brought the French fish and loaves of corn bread, "throwing so much of it into our longboats that it seemed to rain bread."? Huron Indians north of Lake Ontario tried to grow enough corn each year so that they had a two- or three-year surplus to guard against crop failure and enough left over to trade to other tribes. Huron cornfields were so large that a visiting Frenchman got lost in them.23 In the Eastern Woodlands, over a period of about 4,000 years, Indian peoples constructed tens of thousands of large earthen mounds. Archaeologists have discovered a complex of eleven mounds, near the town of Watson Brake in northeast Louisiana, built between 5,000 and 5,400 years ago. It is the earliest mound-building complex yet found in America, predating other known sites by almost 2,000 years.24 Three thousand years ago at Poverty Point in the Mississippi valley in Louisiana, between two and five thousand people inhab-ited, or assembled periodically at a town of elaborate earthworks constructed in a semicircle surrounding an open plaza, with a huge ceremonial mound (640 by 710 feet) in the shape of a falcon. The earthworks contained "nearly 1 million cubic yards of dirt and required perhaps 5 million man-hours of sus-tained, coordinated effort" by people who dug with stone tools and transported the earth in woven baskets. The site received its name in the nineteenth century because it was considered a poor location for a modern plan-tation, but in its heyday around 1500 B.c. it was "the largest, most prosperous locality in North America," standing at a crossroads of commerce for the whole lower Mississippi valley (see Map 1.1, "Native North America before Columbus: Selected Peoples and Key Sites," page 17).25 Trade for raw materials for ceremonial use, burial goods, and personal adornment connected peoples as distant as Florida and the Missouri valley. The Poverty Point people seem to have exported stone and clay items and transported heavy, bulky goods by dugout canoe; their imports ranged from copper from the Great Lakes, flint from the Ohio valley, chert (flaked stone) from the Tennessee valley and the Ozarks, to steatite (soapstone) from the Appalachians, and galena a lead sulphide ore usually ground into a powder and used to make white body paint) from the upper Mississippi valley and southern Mis-souri. Indian Woman of Florida: John White, who made the voyage to Roanoke in North Carolina in 1585, was the first Englishman to paint Indian people in North America. His watercolors, now in the British Museum, provide a valuable record of the people and plant life of early America. This tattooed Timucuan voman from northeastern Florida offers corn, testifying to the importance of the crop in southeastern Indian culture and to the role of women in producing it. From a sixteenth-ntury drawing by John White. © British Museum. Continuation.. In the Ohio valley, more than two thousand years ago, people of the Adena culture built mounds that held their honored dead. The Hopewellian culture that emerged from that of the Adena about the first century flourished for some four centuries. Hopewellian people built more elaborate burial mounds and earthen architecture and developed greater ceremonial complexity. Their culture spread through extensive exchange networks, and they obtained valuable raw materials from vast distances: grizzly bears' teeth from the Rockies; obsidian for spear points and blades from Yellowstone; silver from Ontario; copper from the Great Lakes; mica and copper from the southern Appalachians; galena from the upper Mississippi; quartz from Arkansas; pottery, marine shells, turtle shells, shark and alligator teeth from the Gulf of Mex-ico. Hopewellian craftsmen and artists fashioned the raw materials into tools and intricate orna-ments. Many of the items were deposited with the dead in mortuary mounds; others were traded to outside communities. The Hopewellian culture went into decline around A.D. 300, and seems to have disappeared by about 550. But the spread of corn agriculture throughout eastern North America between 500 and 800 brought population increases and the emergence of more complex societies. Beginning in the lower Mississippi valley around 700 and displaying evidence of Mesoamerican influences, Mississippian cultures spread north to the Great Lakes, east to Florida and the Carolinas, and reached their height between 1100 and 1300. Mississippian societies typically were stable agriculturally based settlements close to floodplains with relatively large populations and complex ceremonial and political structures. Powerful chiefs from elite families collected tribute, mobilized labor, distributed food among their followers, waged war against neighboring chiefdoms, were buried with large quantities of elaborate goods, and appear to have been worshipped as deities. Mississippian towns contained temples, public buildings, and elite residences built atop earthen mounds which surrounded open plazas where ceremonies were conducted and ballgames were played. The Mississippian town of Cahokia was a thriving urban market center. Founded around A.D. 700 close to the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers and occupied for about seven hundred years, Cahokia had a population of between 10,000 and 30,000 at its height, about the population of medieval London (see Cahokia Mounds image, page 60). Cahokia was the largest settlement north of the Rio Grande before the end of the eighteenth cen-tury, when it was surpassed by New York and Philadelphia. Trade routes linked Cahokia to distant regions of the continent, bringing shells from the Atlantic coast, copper from Lake Superior, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, and mica from the southern Appalachians. By the fourteenth century, Cahokia was in decline. Most likely, the growing population had exhausted the resources needed to support it in a period of climatic change; archaeological evidence suggests there may have been increasing pressure from enemies. Whatever the causes, the once-thriving metropolis lay abandoned half a century before Columbus. The remains of Cahokia's spectacular mounds can still be seen after five hundred years of erosion-"[t]he great pyramid at Cahokia is greater in extent than that at Gizeh, in Egypt"26 — and offer impressive testimony to a civilization that developed before Europe entered its middle ages, flourished longer than the United States has existed as a nation, and declined before Europeans set foot in America. Emerging Tribes and Confederacies: The influences of the Mississippian cultures were still very visible when the Spaniards invaded the Southeast in the sixteenth century. Chiefdoms and temple mound towns were common. Moundville in Alabama, Etowah in Georgia, and Spiro in the Arkansas valley of eastern Oklahoma were mound centers of population, trade, and artistic and ceremonial life. When the Spaniards arrived in northern Florida, the Apalachee and Timucua Indians were living in permanent settlements, planted two crops annually, and rotated their fields to keep the soil fertile; the Spaniards sustained their campaigns by seizing these corn supplies Political structures — the great chiefdoms that ruled in the South — collapsed in the wake of war and epidemics following contact with the Spaniards in the sixteenth century; out of their ruins emerged the historic peoples of the Southeast: Caddos, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and various tribes of Creeks. The Natchez continued to display significant elements of Mississippian culture until they were effectively destroyed by the French in 1731. In the North, over the course of several centuries, the Iroquoian-speaking Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals moved from scattered settlements to fortified villages. Eventually, they formed loose confederacies numbering thousands of peoples. Sometime before direct contact with Europeans, the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of upstate New York ended intertribe conflict and organized a Great League of Peace (see "The Laws of the Confederacy," pages 48-54). The league, composed of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, met in council and reached decisions by consensus, pursuing common policies on issues of mutual concern. But Iroquois tribes retained autonomy over questions of more local interest, and daily life revolved around the village and the longhouse. Iroquoian villages consisted of elm and bark longhouses, sometimes exceeding a hundred feet, that sheltered families related by clan through the female line. Iroquoian women tended the homes; cultivated and harvested the extensive cornfields that surrounded their villages; gathered berries, fruits, and nuts; made clothing and pottery; and cared for children. Iroquoian men prepared the fields for planting, but the main foci of their activities — war, trade, and diplomacy — lay outside the villages. The Iroquois fought, traded, and communicated with Algonquian-speaking peoples who surrounded the Iroquoian homeland in New York and Ontario: Ottawas, Algonquins, and Montagnais to the north; Mahicans, Abenakis, and Wampanoags to the east in New England; Delawares and Susquehannocks to the south; and Shawnees, Potawatomis, Anishinaabeg,® Illinois, and Foxes in the west. Algonquians lived in semipermanent villages of wigwams and longhouses and followed a mobile lifestyle, "commuting" from one resource locale to another and practicing varying methods of farming, hunting, and fishing. Seaborne Strangers: The first Europeans who came to America did not enter a void; they entered a Native American world where alliances, rivalries, commerce, and artistic and cultural exchanges had been going on for centuries, where civilizations had risen and fallen, and where great centers like Chaco Canyon and Cahokia were already ancient history. Europeans, in a sense, entered Indian America "through the back door." They saw only the edges of that world and only hints of its past. Before Europeans, Indian populations and activities had tended to focus on the great river systems in the heart of the continent. After Europeans arrived, Indian peoples "did an about-face toward the new oceanic powers, and were forced to confront seaborne strangers." 28 Native traditions from throughout North America tell of ancient prophecies predicting the coming of Europeans. We may suspect these as the products of hindsight or of rumors running along trade networks, but they became an important part of historical memory. Some tribes said that the arrival of Europeans was foretold in dreams; in many East Coast traditions, the strangers arrived on what appeared to be floating islands or giant white seabirds. The prophecies generally carried a sense of foreboding and omens of hard times. Later, other dreams prophesied disaster in the West. "There is a time coming" the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine warned his people, "when many things will change. Strangers called Earth Men will appear among you. Their skins are light-colored and their ways are powerful." Sweet Medicine urged the Cheyennes to keep their own ways but he predicted that "at last you will not re-member... You will take after the Earth Men's ways and forget good things by which you have lived and in the end become worse than crazy." Another prophecy, said to have been made by a Spokane Indian just before American missionaries penetrated the Columbia Plateau region of present-day Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, warned the people that, "Soon there will come from the rising sun a different kind of man from any you have yet seen, who will bring with them a book and will teach you everything." After that, said the prophet, "the world will fall to pieces." 30 The history of Indian peoples in North America stretches back thousands of years, but the last five hundred have been the story of how their world fell to pieces, and of how those who survived tried to rebuild it. MAP 1.3 Agriculture and Trade in Native America, c. 1450: Europeans often pictured Indians as nomadic hunters living in isolation. In reality, long before European contact, much of Indian America was farming country crisscrossed by well-traveled networks of trade and communication. For centuries, Indian people had been developing and farming corn. Hunting people regularly developed reciprocal economic relations with farming people. Prized items were traded over vast distances, usually along river systems, from community to community or by wide-ranging individual traders. Adapted from The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to Ellis Island and Beyond by Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Janice Reiff, and John H. Long, Editors. Copyright © 1995 by Swanston Publishing Ltd. A Navajo Emergence Story: The Navajo Indians, one of the largest Indian tribes in North America today with almost 300,000 people today, emerged into written history in the 1620s when Spaniards began to distinguish from the Apaches a people whom they called "Apaches del Navajo." Long before that — some scholars say as much as five hundred years, others no more than a hundred — the ancestors of the historic Apaches and Navajos migrated from northern Canada and traveled south. The people who became the Navajos, in their own language the Diné, settled in the Colorado Plateau country of what is now northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. There they raided and traded with Pueblos and Spaniards, and adopted cultural elements from both of them. In time, they evolved from a nomadic hunting people into a more settled farming and herding society. Sifting through early documents, scholars can piece together increasing "sightings" of the Navajos as they emerge from the distant past into "recorded history," where sources are richer and the light is better. But many Indian peoples have a much clearer sense of their ancient past. Communal stories passed down through the generations link the people to their homelands, explain how they came to be there, and show them how to live in those home-lands. "Through the stories we hear who we are," writes Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko: the ancient Pueblo people depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a worldview complete with proven strategies for survival. The oral narrative, or story, became the medium through which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained. Whatever the event or the subject, the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient, continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.! Like the Navajos who became their neighbors in the Southwest, Pueblo peoples told and continue to tell stories of creation, emergence, and migration that brought the people from lower worlds into the present world.? But, explains Silko, the stories "are not to be taken as literally as the anthropologists might wish." Rather, "the Emergence was an emergence into a precise cultural identity." Linked to prominent features of the landscape, the various narratives tie the people to an ancient world whose lessons they must not forget and to the natural world in which they must survive by maintaining proper relations with other forms of life. "Thus, the journey was an interior process of the imagina-tion," a growing awareness that human beings were different from other forms of life and yet, springing from the same source, never inseparable from them. MAP 1.4 The Navajo World Whether they migrated from the far north of Canada or emerged from lower worlds, the Navajos made their home in the Southwest, in an area bordered by sacred mountain ranges representing the four directions, recognized as sources of knowledge, and named for their minerals or the colors they represent: Sisnaajini (shell white; Blanca Peak); Tsoodzit turquoise; blue; Mount Taylor); Dook'oostiid (abalone; yellow; San Francisco Peaks), and Dibé nitsaa, (black jet or obsidian; Hesperus Peak). It was also a world surrounded by other peoples with whom, over time, the Navajos experienced both contact and conflict. Navajo origin stories also tell how people emerged into this world from several lower worlds. There are many versions of these creation and emergence sto-ries, but they share common themes and messages. In some versions, the first world was black, the second blue, the third yellow, and the fourth or present world bright or glittering. First Man and First Woman exist alongside, and talk with, insects and animals — "people" of nonhuman form. But in each of the worlds, they fight, squabble, and behave badly. Each time, the people flee to higher world, where they meet new people. In one version, the fourth world is covered with water, but eventually the waters recede. Finally, the people emerge into the present world. Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, takes shape, bounded by four sacred mountains: Abalone Shell Mountain (San Francisco Peak) in the west, Dawn or White Shell Mountain (Blanca Peak) in the east, Blue Bead or Turquoise Mountain (Mount Taylor) in the south, and Obsidian Mountain (Hesperus Peak) to the north. About the time Dinétah was taking form, the sun, moon and stars, night and day, and the four seasons of the year appear. With the four sacred mountains in each of the four directions, the four seasons, men and women living in harmony, and humans living together with the animals and plants, the Navajos have moved from lower worlds of chaos and strife into a higher world of beauty and harmony. Like the legends of any people, these stories embody communal experience, communal wisdom, and guides for proper conduct, as well as explaining how their world came to be and why things are the way they are. They define the Navajos place in the world and make as one their history and the landscape of the Southwest. As Keith Basso explains on the basis of his experiences among the Western Apaches: For Indian men and women, the past lies embedded in features of the earth— in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields— which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the way they think. Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one's position in the larger scheme of things, including one's own com-munity, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person.* The stories establish proper relations with other peoples and with other living things. Antisocial behavior and conflict produce misfortune. Aberrant sexual behavior is destructive; good relationships between the sexes, between First Man and First Woman, are crucial to creation and to social harmony. The stories of recurrent movement emphasize the need to restore balance to produce healing; they make clear the Navajos' responsibility for maintaining order and harmony by good living and ritual. The Navajos "have always progressed intellectually, physically, socially, and spiritually," writes Navajo Rex Lee Jim. "The story of their journey to and settlement in the Southwest is one of wanderers becoming a people. This process lies at the center of the Navajos' sense of their history." The creation story is part of a dynamic Navajo oral tradition. One scholar who studied it in depth found it to be not a single story so much as a "boundless, sprawling narrative with a life of its own." It could change from telling to telling, "depending upon the singer, the audience, the particular storytelling event, and a very complicated set of ceremonial conditions having to do with illness, departure, return, celebration, or any one of a number of social occasions?" Any written text can do only partial justice to the poetic and social richness of the storytelling event. The version of the Navajo creation story reprinted here was told to Allen O'Bryan in November 1928 at Mesa Verde National Park. The storyteller was a Navajo chief named Sandoval or Hastin Totsi hee (Old Man Buffalo Grass) whose words were translated by his nephew Sam Ahkeah. "You look at me and you see an ugly old man," Sandoval told O'Bryan, "but within I am filled with great beauty. I sit as on a mountaintop and I look into the future. I see my people and your people living together. In time to come my people will have forgotten their early way of life unless they learn it from white men's books. So you must write down what I tell you; and you must have it made into a book that coming generations may know this truth." O Bryan recorded the story "without interpolation, and presented it, in so far as is possible, in the old man's words." It is reprinted together with the notes Sandoval provided. HASTIN TLO TSI HEE The Beginning (1896) THE FIRST WORLD: These stories were told to Sandoval, Hastin To'tsi hee, by his grandmother, Eszan Hosh kige. Her ancestor was Esdzan at a, the medicine woman who had the Calendar Stone in her keeping. Here are the stories of the Four Worlds that had no sun, and of the Fifth, the world we live in, which some call the Changeable World. The First World, Ni'hodilqil,° was black as black wool. It had four corners, and over these appeared four clouds. These four clouds contained within themselves the elements of the First World. They were in color, black, white, blue, and yellow. The Black Cloud represented the Female Being or Substance. For as a child sleeps when being nursed, so life slept in the darkness of the Female Being. The White Cloud represented the Male Being or Substance. He was the Dawn, the Light-Which-Awakens, of the First World. In the East, at the place where the Black Cloud and the White Cloud met, First Man, At-se hastqin, was formed; and with him was formed the white corn, perfect in shape, with kernels covering the whole ear. Dohonot i'ni is the name of this first seed corn,° and it is also the name of the place where the Black Cloud and the White Cloud met. The First World was small in size, a floating island in mist or water. On it there grew one tree, a pine tree, which was later brought to the present world for firewood. Man was not, however, in his present form. The conception was of a male and a female being who were to become man and woman. The creatures of the First World are thought of as the Mist People; they had no definite form, but were to change to men, beasts, birds, and reptiles of this world.® Now on the western side of the First World, in a place that later was to become the Land of Sun-set, there appeared the Blue Cloud, and opposite it there appeared the Yellow Cloud. Where they came together First Woman was formed, and with her the yellow corn. This ear of corn was also per-fect. With First Woman there came the white shell and the turquoise and the yucca.® First Man stood on the eastern side of the First World. He represented the Dawn and was the Life Giver. First Woman stood opposite in the West. She represented Darkness and Death. First Man burned a crystal for a fire. The crystal belonged to the male and was the symbol of the mind and of clear seeing. When First Man burned it, it was the mind's awakening. First Woman burned her turquoise for a fire. They saw each other's lights in the distance. When the Black Source: Aileen O'Bryan, The Diné: Origin Myths of the Navaho Indians, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 163 (Wash-ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 1-13. °Five names were given to this First World in its relation to First Man. It was called Dark Earth, Ni hodilgil; Red Earth, Ni halchi; One Speech, Sada hat lai; Floating Land, Nita na elth; and One Tree, De east'da eith. "Where much corn is raised one or two ears are found perfect. These are always kept for seed corn. °The Navaho people have always believed in evolution. Five names were given also the First World in its relation to First Woman: White Bead Standing, Yolgai'na ziha: Turquoise Standing, Dolt i zhi na ziha; White Bead Floating Place, Yolgai'dana elth gai; Turquoise Floating Place, Dolt zhi na elth gai; and Yucca Standing, Tasas y ah gai. Lucca represents cleanliness and things ceremonial. Cloud and the White Cloud rose higher in the sky First Man set out to find the turquoise light. He went twice without success, and again a third time; then he broke a forked branch from his tree, and, looking through the fork, he marked the place where the light burned. And the fourth time he walked to it and found smoke coming from a home. "Here is the home I could not find," First Man said. First Woman answered: "Oh, it is you. I saw you walking around and I wondered why you did not come." Again the same thing happened when the Blue Cloud and the Yellow Cloud rose higher in the sky. First Woman saw a light and she went out to find it. Three times she was unsuccessful, but the fourth time she saw the smoke and she found the home of First Man. "I wondered what this thing could be," she said. "I saw you walking and I wondered why you did not come to me," First Man answered. First Woman saw that First Man had a crystal for a fire, and she saw that it was stronger than her turquoise fire. And as she was thinking, First Man spoke to her. "Why do you not come with your fire and we will live together." The woman agreed to this. So instead of the man going to the woman, as is the custom now, the woman went to the man. About this time there came another person, the Great-Coyote-Who-Was-Formed-in-the-Water,® and he was in the form of a male being. He told the two that he had been hatched from an egg. He knew all that was under the water and all that was in the skies. First Man placed this person ahead of himself in all things. The three began to plan what was to come to pass; and while they were thus occupied another being came to them. He go y elth chili. *The Great Coyote who was formed in the water, Mai also had the form of a man, but he wore a hairy coat, lined with white fur, that fell to his knees and was belted in at the waist. His name was At-se hashke, First Angry or Coyote.® He said to the three: "You believe that you were the first per-sons. You are mistaken. I was living when you were formed." Then four beings came together. They were yellow in color and were called the tsts na or wasp people. They knew the secret of shooting evil and could harm others. They were very powerful. This made eight people. Four more beings came. They were small in size and wore red shirts and had little black eyes. They were the naazo zi or spider ants. They knew how to sting, and were a great people. After these came a whole crowd of beings. Dark colored they were, with thick lips and dark, protruding eyes. They were the wolazhi'ni, the black ants. They also knew the secret of shooting evil and were powerful; but they killed each other steadily. By this time there were many people. Then came a multitude of little creatures. They were peaceful and harmless, but the odor from them was unpleasant. They were called the wolazhi ni nlchu nigi, meaning that which emits an odor.® And after the wasps and the different ant people there came the beetles, dragonflies, bat people, the Spider Man and Woman, and the Salt Man and Woman,® and others that rightfully had no definite form but were among those people who peopled the First World. And this world, being small in size, became crowded, and the Some medicine men claim that witchcraft came with First Man and First Woman, others insist that devil concep- Angry. tion or witchcraft originated with the Coyote called First °No English name given this insect. Ants cause trouble, as also do wasps and other insects, if their homes are harmed. °Beetle, ntlsa'go; Dragonfly, tganil ai'; Bat people, la abani; Spider Man, nashjei hastgin; Spider Woman, nashje esdza; Salt Man, ashi hastin; Salt Woman, ashi esdza people quarreled and fought among themselves, and in all ways made living very unhappy. THE SECOND WORLD: Because of the strife in the First World, First Man, First Woman, the Great-Coyote-Who-Was-Formed-in-the-Water, and the Coyote called First Angry, followed by all the others, climbed up from the world of Darkness and Dampness to the Second or Blue World.° They found a number of people already living there: blue birds, blue hawks, blue jays, blue herons, and all the blue-feathered beings.® The powerful swallow people® lived there also, and these people made the Second World unpleasant for those who had come from the First World. There was fighting and killing. The First Four found an opening in the World of Blue Haze; and they climbed through this and led the people up into the Third or Yellow World, THE THIRD WORLD: The bluebird was the first to reach the Third or Yellow World. After him came the First Four and all the others. A great river crossed this land from north to south. It was the Female River. There was another river crossing it from east to west, it was the Male River. This Male River flowed through the Female River and on;° and the name of this place is tqo al-na'osdli, the Crossing of the Waters, The Second World was the Blue World, Ni'hodotl'ish. The names of the blue birds are: bluebird, do le; blue hawk, gini tso dolt ish; blue jay, jozh ghae gi; and blue heron, qualtl a'gaale, The swallow is called tgash ji'zhi. *The introduction of generation. There were six mountains in the Third World.® In the East was Sis na' jin, the Standing Black Sash. Its ceremonial name is Yol gai' dzil, the Dawn or White Shell Mountain. In the South stood Tsodzil, the Great Mountain, also called Mountain Tongue. Its ceremonial name is Yodolt i'zhi dzil, the Blue Bead or Turquoise Mountain. In the West stood Dookoslid, and the meaning of this name is forgotten. Its ceremonial name is Dichili dzil, the Abalone Shell Mountain. In the North stood Debe'ntsa, Many Sheep Mountain. Its ceremonial name is Bash'zhini dzil, Obsidian Mountain. Then there was Dzil na'odili, the Upper Mountain. It was very sacred; and its name means also the Center Place, and the people moved around it. Its ceremonial name is Ntl'is dzil, Precious Stone or Banded Rock Mountain. There was still another mountain called Chol?i or Dzil na odili choli, and it was also a sacred mountain. There was no sun in this land, only the two rivers and the six mountains. And these rivers and mountains were not in their present form, but rather the substance of mountains and rivers as were First Man, First Woman, and the others.... Within this land there lived the Kisa'ni, the ancients of the Pueblo People. On the six mountains there lived the Cave Dwellers or Great Swallow People.® On the mountains lived also the light and dark squirrels, chipmunks, mice, rats, the turkey people, the deer and cat people, the spider people, and the lizards and snakes. The beaver people lived along the rivers, and the frogs and turtles and all the underwater people in the water. So far all the people were similar. They had no definite form, but they had been given different names because of different characteristics. Now the plan was to plant. First Man called the people together. He brought forth the white corn which had been formed with him. First Woman brought the yellow corn. They laid the perfect ears side by side; then they asked one person from among the many to come and help them. The Turkey stepped for-ward. They asked him where he had come from, and he said that he had come from the Gray Mountain.® He danced back and forth four times, then he shook his feather coat and there dropped from his clothing four kernels of corn, one gray, one blue, one black, and one red. Another person was asked to help in the plan of the planting. The Big Snake came forward. He likewise brought forth four seeds, the pumpkin, the watermelon, the cantaloup, and the muskmelon. His plants all crawl on the ground. They planted the seeds, and their harvest was great.... At this time the Great-Coyote-Who-Was-Formed-in-the-Water came to First Man and told him to cross the river. They made a big raft and crossed at the place where the Male River followed through the Female River. And all the male beings left the female beings on the river bank; and as they rowed across the river they looked back and saw that First Woman and the female beings were laughing. They were also behaving very wickedly. In the beginning the women did not mind being alone. They cleared and planted a small field. On the other side of the river First Man and the chiefs hunted and planted their seeds. They had a good harvest. Nadle® ground the corn and cooked the food. Four seasons passed. The men contin. ued to have plenty and were happy; but the women became lazy, and only weeds grew on their land. The women wanted fresh meat. Some of them tried to join the men and were drowned in the river. First Woman made a plan. As the women had no way to satisfy their passions, some fashioned long narrow rocks, some used the feathers of the turkey, and some used strange plants (cactus). First Woman told them to use these things. One woman brought forth a big stone. This stone-child was later the Great Stone that rolled over the earth killing men. Another woman brought forth the Big Birds of Tsa bida'hi; and others gave birth to the giants and monsters who later destroyed many people. On the opposite side of the river the same condition existed. The men, wishing to satisfy their passions, killed the females of mountain sheep, lion, and antelope. Lightning struck these men. When First Man learned of this he warned his men that they would all be killed. He told them that they were indulging in a dangerous practice. Then the second chief spoke: he said that life was hard and that it was a pity to see women drowned. He asked why they should not bring the women across the river and all live together again. "Now we can see for ourselves what comes from our wrong doing," he said. "We will know how to act in the future." The three other chiefs of the animals agreed with him, so First Man told them to go and bring the women. °The Gray Mountain is the home of the Gray Yel, Hasch el'ba'i, whose other name is Water Sprinkler. The turkey is connected with water and rain. Interpreter's note: Gray Mountain is San Francisco Mountain, Ariz. To neinili, the Water Sprinkler, whose color is gray, lives there. He is also called the Gray God, Hasch e bai, and the Clown whose call is "do do," and whose name is Hasch e' dodi. °Nadle means that which changes. °Sis na' jin, Mount Baldy near Alamosa, Colo.; Tso dzil, Mount Taylor, N. Mex.; Dook'oslid, San Francisco Mountain, Ariz.; Debe ntsa, San Juan Mountains, Colo.; Dzil na'odili, El Huerfano Peak, N. Mex.; and Choli, also given as El Huer-fano or El Huerfanito Peak, N. Mex. These mountains of the Third World were not in their true form, but rather the substance of the mountains. Recorder's note: Although both Matthews and the Franciscan Fathers give Sis na' jin as Pelado Peak, Sam Ahkeah, the interpreter, after checking, identified it as Mount Baldy near Alamosa, Colo. Also, although the Franciscan Fathers give Dzil na odili choli as Herfanito Peak, Sam Ahkeah says that it is the Mother Mountain near Taos. °The Great Swallow People, Tgashji zhi ndilk'si, lived in rough houses of mud and sticks. They entered them from holes in the roof. After the women had been brought over the river First Man spoke: "We must be purified," he said. "Everyone must bathe. The men must dry themselves with white corn meal, and the women, with yellow." This they did, living apart for 4 days. After the fourth day First Woman came and threw her right arm around her husband. She spoke to the others and said that she could see her mistakes, but with her husband's help she would henceforth lead a good life. Then all the male and female beings came and lived with each other again. The people moved to different parts of the land. Some time passed; then First Woman became troubled by the monotony of life. She made a plan. She went to Atse hashke, the Coyote called First Angry, and giving him the rainbow she said: "I have suffered greatly in the past. I have suffered from want of meat and corn and clothing. Many of my maidens have died. I have suffered many things. Take the rainbow and go to the place where the rivers cross. Bring me the two pretty children of Tgo holt sodi, the Water Buffalo, a boy and a girl." The Coyote agreed to do this. He walked over the rainbow. He entered the home of the Water Buffalo and stole the two children; and these he hid in his big skin coat with the white fur lining. And when he returned he refused to take off his coat, but pulled it around himself and looked very wise. After this happened the people saw white light in the East and in the South and West and North. One of the deer people ran to the East, and re-turning, said that the white light was a great sheet of water. The sparrow hawk flew to the South, the great hawk to the West, and the kingfisher to the North. They returned and said that a flood was coming. The kingfisher said that the water was greater in the North, and that it was near. The flood was coming and the Earth was sink-ing. And all this happened because the Coyote had stolen the two children of the Water Buffalo, and only First Woman and the Coyote knew the truth. When First Man learned of the coming of the water he sent word to all the people, and he told them to come to the mountain called Sis na jin. He told them to bring with them all of the seeds of the plants used for food. All living beings were to gather on the top of Sis na'jin. First Man traveled to the six sacred mountains, and, gathering earth from them, he put it in his medicine bag. The water rose steadily. When all the people were halfway up Sis na'jin, First Man discovered that he had forgotten his medicine bag. Now this bag contained not only the earth from the six sacred mountains, but his magic, the medicine he used to call the rain down upon the earth and to make things grow. He could not live without his medicine bag, and he wished to jump into the rising water; but the others begged him not to do this. They went to the kingfisher and asked him to dive into the water and recover the bag. This the bird did. When First Man had his medicine bag again in his possession he breathed on it four times and thanked his people.... First Man had with him his spruce tree® which he planted on the top of Sis na'jin. He used his fox medicine® to make it grow; but the spruce tree began to send out branches and to taper at the top, so First Man planted the big Male Reed.® All the people blew on it, and it grew and grew until it reached the canopy of the sky. They tried to blow inside the reed, but it was solid. They asked the woodpecker to drill out the hard heart. Soon they were able to peek through the open-ing, but they had to blow and blow before it was large enough to climb through. They climbed up inside the big male reed, and after them the water con