Native America

A History

Michael Leroy Oberg

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118937136
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Native America: A History, Second Edition offers a thoroughly revised and updated narrative history of American Indian peoples in what became the United States. The new edition includes expanded coverage of the period since the Second World War, including an updated discussion of the Red Power Movement, the legal status of native nations in the United States, and important developments that have transformed Indian Country over the past 75 years. Also new to this edition are sections focusing on the Pacific Northwest. Placing the experiences of native communities at the heart of the text, historian Michael Leroy Oberg focuses on twelve native communities whose histories encapsulate the principal themes and developments in Native American history and follows them from earliest times to the present.

? A single volume text ideal for college courses presenting the history of native peoples in the region that ultimately became the United States from ancient America to the present

? A work that illustrates the great diversity in the historical experience of native peoples and spotlights the importance of Native Americans in the history of North America

? A supplementary website (MichaelLeroyOberg.com) includes resources for teachers and students, including a resource guide, links to primary source documents, suggestions for additional readings, test and discussion questions, and an author's blog.

1
Myths and Legends

The Beginning of the World

So many accounts of this continent’s past begin with Europeans striding ashore, claiming this “new found land” and its human inhabitants for their respective empires. These ambitious assertions always have been challenged by native peoples, but nonetheless, over time, jurists and scholars inscribed them in American law and in the written histories from which the law springs. And with heads bowed, or with a bounteous welcome, native peoples in too many of these accounts greet their colonizers as saviors, whatever their initial misgivings. When the Algonquian‐speaking peoples of Ossomocomuck first saw the English colonists sent to occupy “Virginia” in 1585, for instance, the English scientist Thomas Harriot reported that they “began to make a great and horrible crye as people which never before had seene men appareled like us.” Confused and savage, “they made out cries like wild beasts or men out of their wits.” Soon they calmed themselves, in Harriot’s eyes, and stopped acting like beasts, and regained their wits, but only after the newcomers presented them with gifts that demonstrated and confirmed their benevolent intent. These native peoples soon would consider the great power these newcomers seemed to possess, and wonder whether they were “gods or men.”

Today many Americans still believe that it is with the arrival of Europeans that their nation’s history begins. We could find, if we looked, dozens of accounts of “discovery” that differed from Harriot’s only in their details. These moments of encounter, depicted so often over the years in the work of American artists, historians, and myth‐makers, represent the opening of a grand story—the discovery of America, the growth and development of the United States, the conquest of the American frontier. All that happened before these seminal moments, these dynamic processes, has been ignored or trivialized by earlier generations of historians, who celebrated the progress of a new nation, conceived in liberty. Yet even in Harriot’s account we can see that native peoples were not merely waiting for Europeans to arrive, and American history to begin. Their beliefs, values, fears, hopes, and experiences all informed how they reacted to the arrival of these unfamiliar newcomers with whom they would create a new world. The people of Ossomocomuck incorporated these English colonists into a world where native rules prevailed.

Too often the words and phrases we use when we attempt to tell this story privilege Europeans, and their perspectives, over those of native peoples. Words like “Indian,” for example, or phrases like “Native American,” of course are flawed. They would have meant little to peoples whose names for themselves often translated as “people” or “the real people” or the “real human beings.” But the problem with words goes even deeper than this. Too many historians, for too long, have relied upon flawed dichotomies: there was a “pre‐contact” or “prehistoric” period that came before “contact” and before the arrival of Europeans ushered in the “historic” era. Native peoples obviously had long histories on this continent before Europeans arrived. They interacted and exchanged with and fought against native neighbors near and far, and these contacts bred a host of cultural practices that pertained to their “contact” with others. They did not simply drop these practices when Europeans arrived.

Words can be tricky things. Colonists “settle” but Indians do not: they are nomads who wander and roam. Europeans plant crops, but Indians do not, according to conventional wisdom; colonists serve as soldiers while native peoples fight as warriors. Language can emphasize difference, and an emphasis on difference can be misleading. In reality, the differences between natives and newcomers at the outset might not have been as great as our flawed language leads us to believe. Both natives and newcomers, in general, lived in towns. Both grew crops and relied upon agriculture to stay alive. Both supplemented their agricultural produce with sources of protein they acquired systematically. Native peoples in the east, for instance, managed forests, burned underbrush, and generated new growth that attracted game that could be more easily “harvested” by hunters. Newcomers, meanwhile, turned their livestock loose and allowed it to forage and fend for itself. When the “settlers” got hungry, they went out into the woods to hunt down their nearly feral cattle and hogs.

The very notion that the European “discovery of America” began the “colonial period” in American history is deeply flawed. Discovery did not reveal a new world to Europeans so much as it brought into contact two worlds, both very old. Europeans arrived on the edge of lands long inhabited by native peoples. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, native peoples controlled the vast majority of what became the United States. Their cultural traditions, and patterns of thought, and ways of comprehending the cosmos, shaped the lives of the people who called this “new world” home. While colonists clung, at times precariously, to the coast, casting their eyes eastward toward the Atlantic much more than westward, native peoples controlled the continent’s interior. To understand this American history, a history of the peoples who were here first, we must commence our story long before the Europeans, sea‐weary and frightened themselves, stumbled ashore in a world that was new only to them.

Figure 1.1 Emanuel Leutze’s painting, The Founding of Maryland (1861), offers a romantic depiction of Indians welcoming the first European settlers in 1634.

Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

So we shall begin at the beginning, at the start of all things. The Powhatan Indians, the Algonquian‐speaking peoples of Tsennacommacah, what English‐speaking people later would label the Virginia coastal plain, told an English chronicler in 1610 that a “Great Hare” had decided long before Europeans arrived “how to people this world, and with what kind of Creatures.” So began the Powhatans’ tale of how the world came to be. The Great Hare made “divers men and women and made provision for them to be kept up yet in a great bag.” The Great Hare struggled to protect the Human Beings from enormous “Caniball Spirits” who wanted to eat them. Their safety at last assured, he made the water and the fish and the land “and a great deer which should feed upon the land.” But the Great Hare had enemies still. The Four Winds grew envious of his creation and killed the deer. The Great Hare, not so easily discouraged, “took all the hairs of the slain deer and spread them upon the earth with many powerful words and charms whereby every hair became a deer.” The Great Hare then opened his bag of tricks and freed his people, placing “them upon the earth, a man and a woman in one country and a man and a woman in another country, and so the world took first beginning of mankind.” So the Powhatans’ tale of creation, their genesis, begins not with a man created in God’s image but with a rabbit, a figure capable of great deeds who could harness extraordinary powers.

The people who came to be known as the Cherokees, who lived in a vast territory in the interior of the American southeast, told a different story. They called themselves Yunwiya, the real people, and they lived in a crowded cosmos. At first, they believed, the earth was all water. The animals lived above in a sky world, but they felt crowded. They wondered if more space might be found below. The Water Beetle went to look. He dived to the bottom of this world of water and came up with a clump of soft mud, which began to grow and grow until it became a floating island, affixed to the sky with four strong cords. Other animals followed, giving shape and texture to the earth, setting the motion of the sun across the sky. The people followed, but they shared this new world with giants, water serpents, little people, ghosts, and spirits. Animal bosses, meanwhile, took care of their own kind, and watched closely relations between the human and the other‐than‐human beings.

The earliest of these ancestors of the Cherokees were Kanati, a hunter, and his wife Selu. She cut up and washed in a river near their house the meat that Kanati brought home from a hunt. One day their son, who played beside this river, found another child, a stranger, who had emerged, magically, from the water. Selu and Kanati knew that the strange boy had come from the blood of the game. They decided to raise the mysterious child as their own.

The two boys grew and played together. One day, they decided to learn how their father hunted. The strange boy changed himself into a tuft of bird’s down. Surely this was no ordinary child. Carried by the wind, he followed Kanati unnoticed. He watched Kanati perform a number of rituals, and then followed his father as he climbed a distant mountain. At a certain spot, and aided by the powerful rituals that he had conducted so carefully, Kanati lifted up a large rock that covered the opening to a cave, out from which sprang a large buck. Kanati killed the deer with a single arrow and carried it home to Selu.

The strange boy told his brother what he had witnessed, and together they returned to Kanati’s rock and let loose all the deer, and then the raccoons, rabbits, turkeys, partridges, and pigeons. They ignored their father’s rituals and paid the animals no respect, teasing them when they entered the world. Kanati was furious. He climbed the mountain, lifted the rock, and brought out four jars that he found deep in the cave. These he opened and out came bed‐bugs, flies, gnats, and lice. The bugs attacked the boys. For ignoring the rituals, they would be punished.

But not chastened. They returned home, hungry and tired. Selu had no meat for them, for there could be nothing to eat when the proper rituals were ignored. Selu told the boys that she would go to the provision house to get them something. Ever curious, they followed her and watched secretly how she produced their food. They watched as Selu, the Corn Mother, leaned over her empty basket, rubbed her stomach, and filled it halfway with corn. They watched her rub her armpits, and fill the basket with beans. Convinced that their mother was a witch, the boys decided that they must kill her.

Selu, a woman of great power, a creator of life, knew her boys’ intentions. She loved them still, and she instructed them on what they needed to do to feed themselves and, someday, their people. “When you have killed me,” she told the boys, “clear a large piece of ground in front of the house, and drag my body seven times around the circle, and stay up all night and watch, and in the morning you will have plenty of corn.” The boys murdered their mother, but they followed her instructions only in part. They cleared only a few small plots of land, and dragged Selu’s body only twice around the circle. Where her blood fell, corn began to grow, and by morning it was ripe and ready. But because the boys had not done all that she had asked them to do, Cherokees learned from Selu’s tale, “corn only grew in certain places.”

Like the Cherokees, the people of Iroquoia, which included today’s upstate New York but also a much larger region through which Haudenosaunee people regularly traveled, found their origins in a Sky World. A man and a woman lived there, on opposite sides of a hearth. Every day, the woman crossed to the other side of the fire and combed the man’s hair. Soon she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. The Haudenosaunee called her Sky Woman. When she reached adulthood, her father’s spirit told her to visit the distant village of the man who would become her husband. Like her mother before her, Sky Woman and her husband slept on opposite sides of the fire. When Sky Woman mysteriously became pregnant, her husband, filled with jealousy, uprooted a large tree and pushed her through the hole in the sky.

Sky Woman fell. The animals of the air and water below saw her falling. Ducks flew to catch her on their wings. They carried her down and placed her on Turtle’s back. Muskrat succeeded in bringing mud from beneath the water which, when placed on Turtle’s back, became the earth. On that world that grew on Turtle’s back, Sky Woman gave birth to a daughter. There the little girl grew, and in time she became pregnant with twins by the spirit of Turtle.

The Good Twin, born first, was known by different names—Sky Grasper, or Tharonhiawagon. He was followed into this world by his evil brother, Tawiskaron, who chose to kill his mother by emerging into this world through her side. Tawiskaron convinced Sky Woman that it was Tharonhiawagon, and not he, who had slain their mother.

So Sky Woman banished the Good Twin, and cherished instead the killer of her daughter. Tharonhiawagon, a selfless exile, worked to improve Iroquoia. This he did during his years in the wilderness with the assistance of his father, the Turtle. At every step, Tawiskaron and his spiteful mother undermined his work. At last, the two twins fought and with the assistance of ritual, the Good Twin triumphed. But he could not repair all the damage his brother and Sky Woman had done. He could not make the rivers flow both ways at once, as he had intended. He could not lower the mountains raised up by his brother. With so many hardships and dangers facing his people, Tharonhiawagon taught them how to survive in this world, and showed them how to grow corn and the ceremonies and rituals necessary to keep the world in balance.

The formation of the earth on Turtle’s back was the first of two founding stories recited by the Iroquois. The second involved the formation of the Iroquois League, the union of the Haudenosaunee Five Nations—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, in the metaphorical Longhouse that stretched from east to west across present‐day New York State. The story of the league’s formation focused upon a man named Hiawatha, left deranged by the grief caused when he lost his daughters in the endemic violence that lacerated Iroquoia. “Feuds with other nations, feuds with brother nations, feuds with sister towns and feuds of families and of clans,” one telling of the “Deganawidah Epic” went, “made every warrior a stealthy man who liked to kill.” Mourning and grieving, Hiawatha wandered into the woods where he encountered Deganawidah, the Peacemaker, a transcendent bearer of the Good News of Peace and Power. The Peacemaker gave to Hiawatha strings of wampum, shell beads of great ritual significance, as he spoke the words of Condolence. The first dried Hiawatha’s weeping eyes. The second opened his ears to reason. The last opened his throat so that he could speak.

As with the story of the creation of this world on Turtle’s back, the Deganawidah epic taught villagers the importance of maintaining balance, of alliance and exchange among the peoples of the Iroquois Longhouse. The rituals of condolence became an Iroquois gospel, a message carried by Hiawatha and the Peacemaker to all the peoples of Iroquoia and beyond. The pair traveled through the war‐haunted lands of the Haudenosaunee. They faced many challenges, but none greater than that posed by the Onondaga sorcerer Thadodaho, whose misshapen body and hair made of a tangle of writhing snakes symbolized the disorder of his mind. If Hiawatha had been deranged by violence as a victim, and his grief had rendered him senseless, Thadodaho represented the opposite extreme. His own violence and wickedness had damaged him. He was a killer and a sadist. Thadodaho resisted joining the League, but over time, Hiawatha restored him to reason and to a good mind. Hiawatha combed the snakes from his hair, and straightened out his crooked and deformed body. Thadodaho became the Firekeeper of the metaphorical Iroquois Longhouse, and his home at Onondaga, near present‐day Syracuse, New York, became the ceremonial center of the Haudenosaunee. It remains so today.

It is not possible to tell when the Five Nations came to...