CHAPTER I: Pre-Contact America
We have lived upon this land from days
beyond history's records, far past any living memory, deep into
the time of legend. The story of my people and the story of this
place are one single story. No man can think of us without thinking
of this place. We are always joined together.
- A TAOS PUEBLO MAN
The continent that Europeans happened upon in the late fifteenth century was home to a multitude of cultures-from the Eskimos in the far north; to the hunter-gatherer, farming, and fishing societies in what is today the United States; to the great empires in the south. The indigenous inhabitants of the Americas had lived here for thousands of years and consisted of 2,000 unique societies (Fagan, Great Journey 8). Archaeologists believe that the First Americans were Asian hunter societies who followed big game across the Bering "land bridge," although many Indians believe their ancestors evolved here. Archaeologists do not agree on how long ago archaic Americans appeared: the most conservative estimate is 14,000 years ago, when the North American ice sheets were retreating; but Louis Leakey, famous for his African fossil discoveries, believes the stone tools he found in southern California date to 200,000 years ago (Fagan, Great Journey 10-11). The most probable date is generally agreed to be approximately 25,000 years ago, but this debate remains one of the biggest mysteries in the archaeology arena.
The early North American Indians lived off the land in a variety of ways: the hunter-gatherer cultures of the Aleutian islands and the Arctic developed from earlier Paleoarctic traditions based on fishing and sea mammal hunting; the Indians of the far West made efficient use of favored locations by rivers, lakes, swamps and coastal resources; in the Midwest and South, powerful civilizations were organized around great ceremonial centers characterized by huge earthen mounds; the builders of pueblos and cliff dwellings in the Southwest depended on irrigated soil; and Eastern Woodland Indians developed effective ways of exploiting vegetable foods and aquatic resources (Fagan, People 199-200). The hunter-gatherer traditions eventually developed agricultural societies and became America's first farmers, perhaps 2500 years ago. Some of the early North American cultures that students should know about are the Hohokam and Anasazi cultures in the Southwest, and the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures-the Mound Builders-in the Northeast. They should subsequently be taught about the various cultural groups that existed in the Americas in the fifteenth century, shortly before these cultures encountered the Europeans. The North American Indians that lived in America when the Europeans arrived are generally divided into ten geographical areas: the Arctic Indians; the Far North Indians; the Northwest Coast Indians; the Plateau Indians; the California Indians; the Great Basin Indians; the Southwest Indians; the Plains Indians; the Eastern Woodland Indians; and the Southeast Indians. Many separate Indian cultures existed within each of these regions.
South America, before Columbus, was unique from its northern counterpart because of the huge empires that dominated the land. The Maya and Aztecs have been referred to as the Greeks and the Romans of the Americas (Beck 25). The Europeans thought Indians had no civilizations until they were awestruck by the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlán, an impressive metropolis that housed more than 200,000 people. The Mayas were master astronomers, kept precise calendars, had the only true writing system in the Americas, and their numerical system used the concept of zero-1,000 years before the Europeans adopted it from the orient (Beck 26). The Inca Empire in the Andes was bigger than Ming China or the Ottoman Empire, extending from Ecuador to Chile (Beck 26).
For years, American history textbooks either omitted or diminished information about pre-contact America. The content of the 20 textbooks I studied ranged from no information, to one or two paragraphs, to a few pages, to several chapters. The older the textbook, in general, the less information was presented. The 1966 textbook, Five Centuries in America, as the titles implies, begins with Columbus and his famous voyage. On page 26, it devotes a few paragraphs to the peopling of ancient America. The pre-Columbian world of the Americas was described in one paragraph:
We believe that these men and women of the Stone Age were ancestors of the Indians whom Columbus found. It is likely that, at first, all the newcomers from Asia had similar customs. As they settled in various parts of North and South America, groups in different regions developed different customs and ways of living. Some developed a highly civilized life. Others continued to live much as they had always lived, and made little progress. By the time European explorers reached America, the people of the New World were almost as varied as the different regions in which they made their homes. (26)
Liberty and Union, published in 1972, also begins with Columbus, opening with a unit entitled "Europeans Discover a New World." Chapter One of the unit is entitled "Columbus Discovers a New World." Pre-Columbian America is presented in Chapter Two, "An Age of Discovery Increases Knowledge of the New World," the title itself revealing the Eurocentric view of the world which it presents, for it was only a "new world" to Europeans. Some older textbooks provide no information about America prior to 1492, such as Exploring Our Country (1965), which shows Coronado exploring the southwest on the cover and presents no account of pre-Columbian life on the inside pages.
By the late 1970s, the accounts of pre-Columbian life had improved considerably in some textbooks. The 1977 edition of America! America! devotes one unit, consisting of three chapters, to pre-contact America, covering the arrival of humans in the Americas up to the year 1500. One of the areas covered in Chapter One stresses the importance of oral history to studying early America. This is an important observation because the lack of a written record is one of the reasons historians have traditionally ignored indigenous American cultures in history textbooks. However, much has been learned about pre-Columbian America through oral history, especially when studied in combination with archaeological evidence. A culture should not be dismissed because it does not possess a written record. Too often, as evidenced in the above excerpt from Five Centuries in America, a culture is considered uncivilized if it does not "progress" in the way that European cultures have evolved.
Despite the one example of an improving account of America prior to 1492 in America! America!, most textbooks continued the trend of presenting minimal information, as several examples from the 1980s demonstrate. The American People (1982) covers pre-contact America in three pages; Our Country's History (1983) presents it in twelve pages; and The United States: Its Past, Purpose, and Promise (1988) presents four pages.
However, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, most textbooks present at least one chapter, sometimes several chapters, on pre-contact America. The American Nation (1995) devotes one chapter, 29 pages long, to the pre-contact era. America: Yesterday and Today (1991) contains one chapter consisting of 18 pages, which covers many aspects of pre-Columbian life in America. The United States: Its History and Neighbors (1988) devotes one unit, consisting of two chapters and a total of 40 pages, and covers pre-Columbian cultures extensively. America Will Be (1994), America: The People and the Dream (1994), and Exploring America's Heritage (1991) cover early America in one chapter, each chapter averaging about 20 pages. The United States and Its Neighbors devotes one unit, "Settling America" to the subject. A History of US: The First Americans devotes 41 of its 140 pages to pre-contact America.
There are a few exceptions. A More Perfect Union (1991) begins with a chapter entitled "European Exploration and Settlement." The next chapter is entitled "Europeans and Native Peoples," but devotes less than one page to America before contact with Europeans. The United States: Past to Present (1989) does not cover pre-contact America at all. Chapter One is entitled "A Voyage That Changed History," and it never backtracks to cover the history of America before the voyage.
Despite these exceptions, the currently used textbooks are generally covering pre-contact life in America, certainly more than their older counterparts. Although there is still room for improvement in this area of Native American representation in textbooks, it is the area that has improved the most in the last several decades, particularly in terms of the amount of coverage.
Exploring Our Country | Living in the Americas | Living in the United States | Five Centuries in America | Liberty and Union | America! America! | The American People | America Past and Present | Our Country's History | The US: Its Past, Purpose and Promise |
|
Beringia migration | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
archaeology | N | N | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
oral history | N | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | N | N | N |
Aztec, Maya & Incas | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | N | Y | N |
Tenochtitlán | N | Y | Y | Y | N | N | N | N | N | N |
Mound Builders | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | Y | N | N | N |
Early SW Indians | N | N | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
NE Woodland Indians | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Hiawatha | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N |
SE Woodland Indian | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | N | N | Y |
Plains Indians | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Great Basin Indians | N | N | N | N | N | Y | N | N | N | N |
Plateau Indians | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | N | N | N |
California Indians | N | N | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | N | N |
SW Indians | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y | Y |
Pacific NW Indians | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N |
Far North Indians | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N | N | N | N |
Arctic Indians | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | Y | N | N | Y |
America: Yesterday & Today | Exploring America's Heritage | The US: Past to Present | America Will Be | The US & Its Neighbors | The US: Its History & Neighbors | America: People & the Dream | The American Nation | A More Perfect Union | A History of US |
|
Beringia migration | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y |
archaeology | Y | Y | N | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y |
oral history | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | N | N | N | N |
Aztec, Maya & Incas | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
Tenochtitlán | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
Mound Builders | Y | N | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Early SW Indians | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y |
NE Woodland Indians | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Hiawatha | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
SE Woodland Indians | Y | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Plains Indians | Y | Y | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Great Basin Indians | N | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Plateau Indians | N | N | N | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
California Indians | Y | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
SW Indians | Y | N | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Pacific NW Indians | N | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Far North Indians | N | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
Arctic Indians | Y | N | N | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |