Part I: Happy Hunting Grounds: America the Beautiful, Before the White Man
Chapter I: Spirit Guides in the Land of the Free: The True Founding Fathers
God, the Man Maker, opened his oven and looked at the white clay figure he had made in dismay. "This white man is too pale," he moaned. "I did not leave the clay in the oven long enough. I must try again." The second time though he fell asleep and when he opened the oven the clay figure had burned. "Oh no," he sighed. "This black man is no use to me. I will try one more time." This time he sat watching attentively. When he opened the oven and beheld the red man, he was very pleased. "Perfect!" he exclaimed.
(Heavily paraphrased from Seminole, Shawnee and Pima myth)
There is of course a reason why Indians became known more accurately as Native Americans - they were the first inhabitants of the land now known as America. However calling them Indians might to some extent have been closer to the truth, as, though there is no definitive evidence as to how the land was first settled, generally it’s agreed that people from Eurasia may have migrated across one of those handy land bridges we spoke of in the History of England journal, this one spanning from Siberia to Alaska, and known then as Beringia. If this is the case, then India is part of Eurasia and so they could be called Indians. However they were of course given this name because of a major blunder by ostensibly one of the blind-luckiest navigators in history, who believed he had discovered the West Indies.
Nowadays they have also begun to be called the indigenous people of America or even the First Nation people, both of which are correct, and it is, I believe, now considered a racial slur to call them Indians, not to mention the confusion this engenders if you’re actually referring to the inhabitants of India, the sub-continent. For the purposes of this journal, therefore, and out of respect we shall refer to them throughout as Native Americans. It’s believed they moved into the American continent somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, which, while it may not come close to the colonisation of Britain by the English around 400,000 years ago, still means they have been there more than ten times as long as those who later would claim to be Americans, and still do.
I know it’s become somewhat popular to, as it were, take the side of the Native Americans in the issue of their expulsion from their lands - a hundred years ago it was seen as a sort of white privilege, or dare I say it,
lebensraum? and things were seen much differently - and without question, the time before the coming of the white settlers was not some sort of idyllic golden age where everyone loved everyone and there was no conflict. Native Americans were not hippies, and surely there were, shall we say, disagreements. But it’s become clear to me, reading about them, that in general - and I stress, in general - the larger part of the tribes who populated America at that time were peaceful. They lived on their own lands - which most if not all believed given to them by their gods - and were happy there. They were not a territorial people (other than protecting, if they had to, their own homes), neither were they an expansionist society. No Native American tribe - possibly with a few exceptions - coveted the land of another.
The main wars and struggles between the various tribes seem to have come about as a direct consequence of, and coinciding with the arrival of people like us in the New World. As much as they fought the invaders to preserve their own lands, they were also forced to encroach on the lands of other tribes, of necessity, as land became more precious a commodity, the white settlers taking it from them. In a very real way, while the Native Americans fought the white man and woman, these new enemies also pitted them against their own people, tribe fighting tribe as the strong realised they could only survive if they subjugated the weak. That’s why, I believe (and as we go on I’ll see if I’m right, which I may not be) the main wars between Native Americans broke out only after the arrival of men from Europe.
To a great degree, it would seem, for a while anyway, the white settlers awoke a sleeping giant, who would just as happily remained asleep, and had the two forces been matched, it’s doubtful that the Native Americans could have been chased off their ancestral lands by these interlopers. But the white man brought his technology, from better and more deadly weapons to industrialisation such as the railroad and the telegraph, and also played upon the naivete and innocence (in terms of being like children dazzled by shiny toys) of the original inhabitants of America, and the two forces were far from equal. A lack of cooperation between tribes prior to this also told in the enemy’s favour as, had all the over five hundred separate tribes been somehow able to band together under common cause, they could have mounted such a defence, even attack against the invaders as might have driven them back east.
But such things were unknown among the Natives, who might have traded with this or that tribe, or raided their villages, but really kept themselves to themselves, many of them sedentary and staying in their own territory, some nomadic or semi-nomadic, and a few, as alluded to above, outright warlike. Confederations were attempted later, but too late. Although it wasn’t that easy a victory for the settlers, for the new US Government, once the first few tribes were relieved of their land, whether through trickery, bribery, lies or outright genocide, all the rest would fall like dominoes in a reasonably short time.
Perhaps, in the end, the fatal flaw that undid the Native Americans was trusting their enemy, and believing he would honour his word, something no tribal chief could believe any man would fail to do.
There were over five hundred tribes or peoples spread across America before the white man arrived, and while I have no intention of writing about them all - you would have less intention of reading about them, I’m sure - here are some examples of what life was like before we arrived to mess it all up, and eventually dance gleefully on the bones of our ancestors.