Transcription
So one question we need to ask ourselves when we start talking about American history is where do we start this history? And the answer to that question is in the Indigenous Nations that already lived in North America before European arrival.
We often think of the North American continent based on European perceptions, which was that North America was largely uninhabited when they "quote unquote" discovered the continent, and that there were some people living there, but not really. And those people didn't have rich societies and cultures and civilization as Europeans would define it. In reality, there were Native American societies that were rich in culture, in history, in technology. They traded with each other. They had military alliances. And it's important to note that this disconnect between the Americas and the rest of the world meant that these two societies had really no frame of reference for how to interact with one another. They had completely different cultures, completely different norms.
So I want you to kind of imagine what that would look like for us. It's a pretty global world right now, so there's not really any type of similar situation unless we start to imagine if we made contact with people from another universe outside of Earth. So if that were the case, if somebody just showed up in a spaceship today, how would we interact with them? Would we shake hands with them? Well, we have no idea in their culture if they have any frame of reference for shaking hands, if that is potentially a hostile thing in their culture. Um, if we smile at them, would they have any idea what a smile is? Because they are from a completely different culture that we have not had any contact with. So how do you even make this frame of reference in how to deal with one another? And that sets us up for a lot of miscommunications. It sets us up for a lot of clashes. It's why we're calling this lecture a clash of cultures. You're having two people come together for the very first time. There are going to be problems, and there are problems.
One thing to note in talking about Native American societies is one, they are very diverse. There are a lot of different nations and peoples living in both North and South America, and they have different ways of life. You have hunter-gatherers. You have Native Americans who are farming. You have Native Americans who are relying on the ocean for their food. You have the Great Plains, the hunting buffalo. You have all sorts of different societies in North America and Central America. And you have large cities.
I want you to look at these populations between different areas of North America, and what you can immediately notice is Central America and South America are heavily populated compared to North America. So most of the very large cities are going to be found in Central and South America. But that doesn't mean that there aren't large cities in North America as well, but it is more sparsely populated than Central and Southern America. I also want to mention that cities like Tenochtitlan were dwarfing the population sizes of most European cities. Tenochtitlan is modern-day Mexico City. Mexico City was built over the ruins of Tenochtitlan, and that city was densely populated, dwarfed the size of most European cities, including places like Rome at this time. It rivaled Constantinople. And that is to dispel these ideas that America was not sophisticated enough to have civilization, large cities, irrigation, political structures, and all these things that the Europeans considered civilization and things that they didn't think that the Native Americans were capable of having.
I want you to notice in these charts as well. The Americas had about 54 million people, slightly less than Western Europe. But this was not a continent without people. There were already people here. And we're going to talk about these people today. For the purpose of this course, we are looking at North America specifically. Mississippian societies. This is where the English are going to encounter Native Americans. This is the focus of our class.
So what did life for Mississippian societies look like? They relied on the cultivation of maize as their primary crop. Maize was high in calories and easy to dry and store. Also, crops like squash. These are American crops that would not make their way over to Europe until that first encounter. In most Native American societies, it was the woman's role to do agricultural work and to do the manual labor when it came to farming, while the man would go out and hunt game for his tribe. The Native Americans practiced sustainable farming. They practiced sustainable farming by clearing forest, burning the underbrush, and in that nutrient-rich soil, planting their crops. And then, once they noticed that the yield started to decline, they would stop planting there for a while, let the nutrients replenish, and plant somewhere else. And then, in several years' time, they would move back to that cleared plot of land. So they had this understanding of sustainable farming and shifting cultivation.
Their societies were often centered around mounds. So this showed a hierarchy within their society. This is what these mounds would have looked like. So the center of their society would have been a large pyramid-like mound, in which you would have the important leaders of society live closer to the center, on top of these large mounds, whereas the smaller mounds surrounding the large mounds would have been lesser important, but still important people. And then further away from that center, that central large mound, you would see people living. And this would have been people more on the outskirts of society, further away from the centers of power. And often in these center mounds, historians think that you would have found the leaders of society and the religious leaders. You would have had marketplaces and gathering points for society. And this is a reimagining of Cahokia, which was a Native American city. You can still see signs of these mounds today. And again, this points to the social stratification of Native American societies. This idea that they did have these complicated hierarchies. They did have these signs of civilization as Europeans would define it, as they had organized cities.
They also had extensive trade networks. So that a Native American people living on North America's East Coast would have connections and access to products from the West Coast. That trade happened all across the continent, just like you would have had in Europe or Asia. These areas were connected with one another. And we had rival societies, just like any other societies and tribes went to war with each other, just like they did in the "quote unquote" Old World. So you have these networks of alliances, trade, and rivalries as well. And not only did they have rivalries with one another, but they had alliances. So in one case, there were five Iroquois tribes that gathered together and created this Great League of Peace, where they would all send representatives to some central council and discuss how they would deal with outsiders. Each tribe would just rule themselves. And then when an outside threat came and confronted them, they would send representatives to this council and discuss how to deal with those outsiders.
Now we're going to focus on the Eastern Woodlands, where specifically the Europeans would first encounter the Native Americans on that eastern coast. And what did their societies look like when the English arrived? Their societies were defined by communalism, in the sense that their communities took precedence over the individual. So they wouldn't have these notions of private property. They didn't have these ideas that they should accumulate as much wealth as possible. Whereas in European societies, your aspiration was to accumulate personal wealth and personal property. That didn't always make sense for Native Americans because even when they settled down, they often moved from place to place based on hunting, based on where the animals were migrating. So it didn't always make sense to accumulate a bunch of stuff, and that's just more stuff to carry with you. But that also would impact their culture. So leaders were not respected for how much stuff they accumulated, but how generous they were for their community and how much they took care of their community. That's what people really respected: if you used what you had to take care of your community.
And that also meant that there were differences in land ownership. So that a specific tribe or nation would not have ownership over the land, but they would live in more cooperation with the land, so that they wouldn't take everything from the land and basically subdue it to their will, as Europeans believed should happen to the land. Europeans believed that you should chop the trees down, build a city, farm the land, make use of it. And if you didn't make use of it, you were wasting it. Native Americans believed that you should only take what was needed. And they also didn't believe that you could actually own the land. So specific tribes would have the rights to hunt a specific part of land, but they didn't believe that these are my lands. You could tell by looking at this picture of a Native American city. One thing that you can notice is that there are not fences dividing the homes within that city. You see a fence surrounding it to protect it, but on the inside of that city, everything is pretty much open. That is because you didn't have this idea that property could be privately owned. The community had joint ownership over most things inside of that city, so you don't feel the need to protect your little plot of something.
Also meant with this culture of respecting people who gave to the community, most people were actually, everybody was taken care of in these societies. So you didn't have homelessness, you didn't have hunger. Everybody was looked after by the community. So you didn't have people suffering from want of food or shelter. Everybody was taken care of in that way.
This is a map of different Sioux Nations, and you can see the little square box in the bottom right corner is Virginia, and the circles are all different Native American groups. One thing to notice about this map: you would not use this map to navigate. You can't look at this map and say, "Well, if I take a right turn here and a left turn there, I'm going to get to Virginia." You just couldn't do that with this map. So the question is, what is the purpose of this map? What is it for, if not to give specific directions to how to get somewhere? This map shows the Native American mentality that there are not hard lines depicting strict borders. There are just general areas where each Native American tribe is allowed to farm or hunt, but that's their stewardship, that's their area of land. And over here somewhere to our right is another American tribe, and if you go far enough this way, you're going to find Virginia. That is what this map is depicting. It's depicting vague areas and relationships between different groups. That's really the focus of this map: relationships between the groups. It's not meant to show, "This is my land and that's your land. If you cross this line, you're stepping into my territory." It doesn't show that because that's not how Native Americans thought about land.
Native American societies were also matrilineal, meaning unlike European societies where the man had ownership of his family and he had all of the political rights over his family, he was basically considered the king over his family. That does not follow in Native American society. A child's family line is traced through the mother instead of through the father. My name is Redig because my dad's family is Redig. But for a Native American, their family line follows through the mother. That is their identity. That means a father and his children are going to move with the mother's family instead of vice versa.
Women also had more power in Native American societies than European women did. They were allowed to own property. They were allowed to choose who to marry and whether to leave that marriage when they wanted to. These are rights that European women were not able to have. And while they were not able to become the sole leaders of their societies, they were able to elect leaders. They had important roles in electing the chiefs, and they held important religious roles in their societies, which you would not find in European societies. Women were considered kept in the home, and their role was to remain within the home and not to be involved in politics or society at large at all. That was the domain of the man.
Native American religion was one of animism. So they believed that spirits embodied all physical things and all living creatures. So that the animals that they hunted had a spirit within them that needed to be respected, that the trees, that the land itself needed to be respected. And that really informed how they related with the land. So they wanted to please the spirits, they did not want to anger the spirits. So when you hunted, when you killed an animal, when you took a life, or when you harvested a plant, you had to do rituals to satisfy or appease the animal or plant that you killed. And you needed to make use of all of the different parts of that animal or plant. You couldn't be wasteful. And you weren't just trying to dominate the land or make use of it as Europeans would. They wanted to respect the spirits and in that way, respect the land and live in harmony with it.
Now, they had this rich history, but how do we think of them today? Native Americans are still around. They are still practicing their culture. They are not this thing of the past. But do we think of them as this living, breathing culture and people, or do we think of them and kind of boil down this rich, complex people and culture into a caricature, a cartoon, a mascot for our sports?
So these were the Native American societies on the Eastern Woodlands when the first Europeans arrived. And we're going to be looking at that first encounter, that clash of two different peoples in my next video.