The Many Stories of America's First Peoples
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In October 1492, Christopher Columbus encountered the native people of a small island in the Caribbean. He thought he was in the East Indies, so it made sense for him to refer to the people he met as “los Indios,” or Indians. Even after Europeans realized that Columbus was mistaken, the name stuck. Thus. the native people of the Americas are, collectively, Indians. But the people of the Americas had no collective term for themselves. The various names Native Americans call themselves often can be translated as “The Real People,” “The Principal People,” simply “The People,” or perhaps the people of a particular place.
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As each group had its name, it also had its own unique history. Communicated orally from generation to generation, these histories often begin with the creation of the world. The Cherokees, for example, tell of a time when the world was only water until a beetle grabbed some mud and brought it to the surface to make land. In the Iroquois story, the diving animal spread the mud on the back of a turtle so that Sky Woman, who had fallen through a hole in the sky, could have a dry place to live. The histories of the many Pueblo groups and other societies of the desert Southwest begin with the migration of their ancestors from deep within the earth to a cave or other kind of portal on the surface. The stories told the people who they were and reminded them that the place where they lived was theirs, that it had always been theirs, and that it was the place where they were meant to be. The stories underscore the distinctiveness of each group and remind us how inadequate it is to think, as Columbus did, of Native Americans collectively. They have become Indians in our thinking, but in reality, they have never been any such thing.
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Europeans, once they realized that Columbus’s geography was wrong, were dumbfounded by the idea that two continents of people, perhaps seventy- five million of them, had escaped their notice. The Bible, which Europeans believed told the full story of creation, could account for neither America nor American Indians. In the centuries since Columbus, there have been many attempts to explain the peopling of the Western Hemisphere. Unwilling to accept Native creation stories as “true,” most scholars have become convinced that the ancestors of American Indians came to America from Asia about 13,000 years ago, across the Bering Land Bridge, which periodically connected Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age.
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The earliest well-documented Paleo-Indian culture is called Clovis, where distinctive spear points were discovered in the 1930s in association with the remains of extinct Pleistocene bison. Identified by the unique design of spear points and found widely in North America, Clovis represents a hunting culture that exploited Pleistocene animals, especially bison and mammoths, in locations that stretch from coast to coast. While not numerous, Clovis sites are the remains of hunting camps and suggest that people followed their game in small groups over great distances, camping in temporary shelters.
