Most of what middle and high school history lessons taught about Native Americans come
from European accounts of teepees and arrowheads and Thanksgiving dinners.
It’s an entirely oversimplified history, one that ignores the nuances and diversity
of the cultures that lived on North American soil for thousands of years before Columbus
accidentally bumped into some Caribbean islands and consisted of a population of more than
20 million people.
Life for the people who lived in North America before the Europeans arrived was anything
but easy.
There was conflict, disease, and natural disaster.
However, the years after Columbus first sailed the ocean blue saw a mass increase of violence
and hardships that’s only now starting to be confronted and dealt with.
Welcome back to Nutty History.
Today, we’re exploring the dangerous lives of Native Americans – pre and post European
settlement.
Ah, the story of Thanksgiving – that symbolic gesture of solidarity between two cultures
that sat down to have a peaceful meal together.
It’s true, the Native Americans did help the pilgrims out in the first years of their
settlement in Plymouth Colony – pilgrims who had just about starved to death in the
harsh winters and were unable to farm much in the rocky soil.
By early 1610, 80-90 % of the settlers had passed, leaving around 1300 left between 1607
and 1624, when thousands had originally made the voyages for new opportunities.
The Wampanoag tribe taught the settlers how to use shells to fertilize the soil, to grow
corn, and to hunt.
They were a huge reason any of the colonists lived long enough to celebrate that first
Thanksgiving.
However, it wasn’t all peace and love.
There was also terrible fighting between the settlers of New England and their indigenous
neighbors.
One of the earliest, and most violent, was the Pequot Conflict.
It pitted an alliance between the Massachusetts Bay, Saybrook, Connecticut, and Plymouth colonies
against the Pequot and Niantic tribes.
But it wasn’t just colonists versus natives.
Many of the Native American tribes didn’t get along, and there were rivalries and conflicts
between them over territory and things like the fur trade.
The Native Americans were shrewd and discerning.
They saw the potential for resources and trade with these pale-skinned, buckled-shoe wearing
foreigners, and wanted to take advantage of it.
As a result, the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes teamed up with the colonists in the
conflict.
However, these Native American warriors were soon appalled with the brutal nature of the
colonists.
The Pequot Conflict – which began as both a land grab by the colonists to control the
fur trade and as retaliation for the increasingly frequent raids by the Pequots on colonial
forts – ended with many casualties . In 1637, colonial forces burned a prominent Pequot
fort to the ground in what is today Mystic, Connecticut.
Of the estimated 500 or so Pequots inside, only 14 survived.
Pequots in surrounding villages then fled, but were quickly caught.
In the aftermath, the Pequots were effectively wiped off the face of the earth.
Some managed to flee west and integrate with the Mohawk tribe, but the rest were sold into
the labor trade and forced to harvest sugar cane in the Caribbean.
And while the causes of the conflict may have seemed territorial on the surface, there was
a deeper, darker side to it, at least from the standpoint of the pilgrims.
The historian Bernard Bailyn, a leading voice on the early conflicts between colonists and
Native Americans, attributes a lot of the fighting to many of the pious pilgrims’
belief that their indigenous neighbors represented the Antichrist, and needed to be, well, eliminated.
We know most Native American tribes were deeply spiritual.
They believed in Animism, the idea that nature was with a spirit or a soul.
These beliefs allowed them to live more harmoniously with nature.
However, Native American tribes didn’t always coexist harmoniously.
One law practiced widely by many tribes – the law of blood revenge – was particularly
gray.
The law of blood revenge isn’t particularly unique to Native Americans.
It’s one that has taken many forms for many millennia in many parts of the world.
It’s a lot like the Biblical “eye for an eye”.
Basically, if one Native American ends the life of another, the deceased’s family had
the legal right and societal obligation to do the same to someone in the assaulter’s
family.
This often happened between clans and between tribes, and the whole social structure revolved
around the respect for retaliation.
If the blood revenge was completed, the issue was accepted and resolved, and life went one
– though not for the two people whose lives were ended.
Despite its very inherent savage nature, the law of blood revenge was deeply spiritual.
It was believed that the soul of the victim couldn’t enter the spirit world until his
death was avenged.
This belief even carried into how Native Americans treated animals.
The Cherokee, for example, believed that the ghost of a deer killed during the hunt would
follow the hunters back to their village in an attempt to exact blood revenge.
So, to avoid this, Cherokee hunters would perform special rituals after their successful
hunt, over the deer..
Sometimes, the law of blood revenge could get out of hand, and lead to something called
a “Mourning War”.
These were protracted conflicts between clans and tribes due to endless cycles of revenge.
Some think that a series of these conflicts among the Iroquois during the fifteenth century
actually led them to learn from their mistakes, end the practice of blood revenge, and organize
into a peaceful confederation of clans.
There are conflicting accounts of just how peaceful or warlike Native Americans were
before Europeans set foot on the continent.
On one side, many argue the so-called “noble savage” story – the idea that Native Americans
lived a peaceful, harmonious life before the Europeans messed it all up.
On the other side, there are many experts that argue that Native Americans were aggressive
before the Europeans ever set foot on the continent.
In reality, both sides are probably kind of right.
It wasn’t utopia before colonization, but it wasn’t the belligerent savagery that’s
bled through the historical records either.
The term “noble savage” is itself a contradiction, if you take the Oxford definition of savage
as a “brutal or vicious person”, pairing it with noble seems ridiculous.
It’s a dated term in need of an update, maybe, but what it describes cuts to the center
of human nature.
Are we inherently savage and vicious, or inherently kind and peaceful?
Basically a Hobbes / Rousseau dynamic.
Hobbes argued that life was “brutish, nasty, and short”, while Rousseau argued that people
were inherently good.
The noble savage argument assumes that before civilization, before agriculture and the birth
of cities and bureaucracies and hierarchies, people lived in relative peace.
They lived healthier lives, more active lives, ate healthier foods, were more egalitarian
and concerned about the social welfare of the people around them.
In a lot of ways this is definitely true.
Archaeological evidence has shown that tribes all over the world had better teeth, a result
of a diverse diet of fruits and nuts and meat rather than the beer and grain and sugars
that marked the beginnings of agricultural civilizations.
In North America, some research has shown that evidence of more devastating injuries
in Native American remains increased by 50 percent after European contact.
This seems to suggest that the indigenous population was significantly more peaceful
in pre-Columbian times.
It makes sense.
The introduction of gunpowder, the chaos and tribal rivalries exploited by Europeans as
they marched across the continent, disease, an overall increase in hostilities as these
foreign people sought to take land for themselves – all these things contributed to higher
incidences of shocking deaths due to barbarity , both between Native Americans and Europeans.
On the other hand, there’s also archaeological evidence that there was plenty of savagery
among Native Americans pre-European settlement.
We’ve already talked about the law of blood revenge, but that was, for the most part,
a ritualized, highly spiritual thing that rarely led to widespread conflict.
Yet there has been evidence of widespread conflict among Native Americans in pre-colonial
times.
One of the most vicious, and maybe one of the most savage times per capita in the history
of the world, was during the beginning to middle of the 13th century in and around Mesa
Verde in Southwest Colorado.
Archaeologists there discovered that almost 90 percent of the skeletal remains in the
region from that period showed signs of grave injuries to the brain and extremities – meaning
they were either injured or perished in ways that were not natural.
Sure, you could maybe chock these findings up to buffalo stampedes, but the most likely
cause is conflict.
The apparent savagery that occurred in and around Mesa Verde in the second half of the
13th century led to the near extinction of the Pueblo and Anasazi populations.
Some archaeologists estimate that in the middle of the 1200s, there were some 40,000 people
living in the northern southwest region of what’s now Colorado and Arizona.
But by the beginning of the 1300s, that number had been reduced to a grand total of zero.
A huge factor for this massive decline was something called the Great Drought.
It began around 1276 and lasted until 1300, and most likely led to massive crop failures,
a decline in available animals to hunt, and an overall bad time for the people living
in the American southwest during this period.
It’s a well-documented fact that resource depletion leads to increased conflict amongst
people as they fight to control the few resources after a catastrophe like a flood, drought,
volcanic eruption or whatever else nature has and will throw at us.
And there’s evidence that there was quite a bit of natural chaos thrown at the indigenous
people in North America over the years.
Evidence of the Great Drought has been confirmed by archaeologists studying tree rings and
soil samples around the area.
There’s still a lot of controversy swarming around why exactly the Anasazi and Pueblo
and pretty much everyone else in the region around the 1200s basically disappeared, but
there’s a good amount of evidence based on archaeological finds that show bone damage
in skeletal remains that point to a connection between natural disaster and increased violence.
Unfortunately, we may never know the ultimate reason why the people of Mesa Verde disappeared
– they never left any written account of their history.
Any hypothesis we can make is based purely on plants, soil, and remains.
Whatever we may or may not know about the violence or peacefulness of Native American
societies before or after Europeans touched down on the continent, there is one certainty
– the advent of greedy foreigners in the Americas led to the wiping out of nearly an
entire group of people.
The indigenous people – people estimated by some to have made up a population as large
as 20 million people across South and North America – were pretty much wiped out.
They were forced onto reservations.
They were considered aliens in their own land, second-class citizens in the face of a civilizing
force of an invading people who thought they themselves represented the pinnacle of human
kind and saw these natives as an obstruction, as the Antichrist in some circles.
Andrew Jackson, that guy whose face strikes a pose on the twenty dollar bills, said the
following after signing the Indian Removal Act – the ink on paper that led to the infamous
Trail of Tears: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged
by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and
prosperous farms, embellished with more than twelve million happy people, and filled with
all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion.”
Forty years later, all treaties made with Native Americans were terminated , and were
essentially told that they could have some of the worst land the United States has to
offer – some of the most barren, unwanted land, and then anyone involved in this process
turned a blind eye to anything that might remind them of a past that they stole from
the people whose place it was long before any of their ancestors arrived on the shores
of the place they now called home.
The lives of Native Americans were dangerous in so many ways.
Dangerous in a way that the life of any human living hundreds or thousands of years ago
would be dangerous.
Dangerous in how they were stripped of so much by foreigners who knew so little about
the soil their boots were leaving imprints on.
What else would you like to know about the lives of Native Americans and a history that
has rarely been told in middle school and high school classes?
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