Most of these people were agriculturists, not the idyllic nomads depicted in "Dances With Wolves."
In what we call "the West," I know the Navajos were farming. I believe most of the rest were hunter/gatherers. The Navajos could well have learned to farm from the Spanish, I don't know for sure. Remember, they had no "domestic" animals. For instance, the lives and culture of the tribes in the West were drastically changed by their acquisition of horses from the Spanish long before other Europeans showed up.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" is a well-known 1997 book by Jared Diamond. He points out that the lack of cows in the Western Hemisphere drastically limited the agriculture of the Natives. Same with pigs. They couldn't raise animals for meat because they didn't have any tame ones to speak of. They weren't "farming" Buffalo.
In the East, the Tribes were mixed. It's hard to get info on what they were doing when the White man showed up, because the immediate intermingling of the first white men with the tribes ended up with descendants of mixed marriages leading the tribes, and many being led by all-white Chiefs. By the time accounts of their daily life were written, it had already been Europeanized.
Since none of them had a written language, the oral tradition of their history is open to doubt. I am highly suspicious of the written versions of the history here in the Islands. People who memorized this had good reason to sanitize it. For instance, we do know for sure that after Cook was killed by them during the first week of contact, his returned body was partially eaten when the ship got it back. But you had better not bring this up when discussing "early days."
Added to our knowledge of Native history in the US is the historical filter set up by the fact that our recent historians tend to be followers of Rousseau and/or Multiculturalists. They are starting with "The Noble Savage" and the "They were a poor but proud people" outlook. You run into this all the time here. Reminds me of the crap we Fathers fed our boys in the "Indian Guides" program.
So early accounts of the Indians in America is discounted by present-day Historians as colored by the racism of the settlers and their desire to make the Indians look bad. Tough to find what was really going on. |
