Introduction

• Although Europeans referred to the Americas as “the New World”, it is important to remember that humans have lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years

• Native American communities were dynamic and diverse

  • They spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of different cultures

    • Each culture cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values

  • They built settled communities and followed seasonal migration patterns

  • They maintained peace through alliances and diplomacy but also warred with neighboring tribes

  • Their economies were self-sufficient and maintained large trading networks

• The arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes (otherwise known as the Columbian Exchange) changed the course of history

The First Americans

Origins:

• America’s Indigenous peoples have passed down many accounts of their origins, which share creation and migration histories

  • These stories include the story of a bald eagle that formed the first man from clay and the first woman from a feather (Salian people of present-day California), the story that claims that the earth was made when Sky Women fell into a watery world, and landed on a turtle’s back (the Lenape), and more

• Archaeologists and anthropologists (via studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures) have pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a “new world” for Native Americans as well

  • Twenty-thousand years ago, ice sheets extended across North America and connected it to Asia across the Bering Strait

  • Native ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands between the two continents

Agriculture:

• Agriculture flourished in the river valleys between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, a region known as the Eastern Woodlands

• Three crops in particular (corn, beans, and squash) known as the Three Sisters provided the nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations

• Many groups used shifting cultivation

  • Farmers would cut the forest, burn the undergrowth, and then plant seeds in the nutrient-rich ashes

  • When yields began to decline, farmers moved to another field to allow the land to recover before starting all over again

  • Particularly useful in areas with difficult soil

• Typically in Woodland communities, women practiced agriculture while men hunted and fished

Shared Cultural Characteristics

• Spiritual practices, understandings of property, and kinship networks different from traditional European standards

  • Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural

  • Most Native ancestries were matrilineal, so family and clan identity followed the female line (through mothers and daughters)

    • Women, therefore, had far more influence, while the level of influence a man had would depend on their relationships with women

  • Natives believed they had the right to use the land, but not the right to its permanent possession

Cahokia

• The largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, rivaled contemporary European cities in size (peaked at a population between 10,000 and 30,000 people)

  • The Mississippians lived in the American Midwest and South

• Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms

  • A hierarchal, clan-based system that gave leaders secular and sacred authority

• In Cahokia, war captives were an important part of the economy (as well as in the North American Southeast)

  • Native American slavery was not based on holding people as property, but instead considered enslaved peoples to be people who lacked kinship networks

    • Slavery was not always a permanent condition

  • Slavery and captive trading became an important way that Native communities to grow and maintained power

• By 1300, the once-powerful city had begun to collapse

  • New research points to mounting warfare or political tensions rather than an ecological disaster or depopulation as the cause

European Expansion

• Cristopher Columbus convinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to provide him with three small ships, which landed in the modern-day Bahamas on October 12th, 1492, where they met the Indigenous Arawaks or Taino

  • Columbus described them as innocents and noticed that they wore gold jewelry

  • Columbus returned to Spain, promising the Spanish crown gold and enslaved laborers if they gave him the opportunity for a return voyage

• The Spanish embarked on a vicious campaign to extract every possible ounce of wealth from the Caribbean, decimating the Arawaks in the process

  • They presumed the natives had no humanity, so the Spanish used violence to exploit them

• Despite the diversity of Native populations, Native Americans were unprepared for the arrival of Europeans

  • Their lack of immunity from the terrible disease of Europe, Asia, and Africa allowed those diseases to decimate the Native populations (90% of the population died within the first 150 years)

• However, Native Americans forged a middle ground, resisted violence, and adapted to the challenges of colonialism even as the Europeans kept coming

Spanish Exploration and Contact

• As news of the opportunities spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land, gold, and titles

• The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the encomienda, a feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indigenous laborers to vast estates

  • The Spanish crown granted a person not only land but a specific number of natives as well

  • After Bartolomé de Las Casas published an incendiary account of Spanish abuses, Spanish authorities replaced the encomienda with the repartimiento

    • It was intended to be a milder system, but repartimiento replicated many of the abuses of the older system and the exploitation of the Native population continued

• After conquering Mexico and Pero, Spain settled into its new empire

• Spanish migrants poured into the New World (usually single, young men)

• The Sistema de Castas was a racial hierarchy that organized individuals into various racial groups based on their “purity of blood

  • Peninsulares: Iberian-born Spaniards who occupies the highest levels of administration and had the greatest estates

  • Criollos: New World-born Spaniards who rivaled the peninsulares for wealth and opportunities

  • Mestizos: those of mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage

  • Some tried to manipulate the system by trying to pass as certain groups