An Indigenous History of North America

What if people told European history like they told

Native American history?
09 Thursday MAY 2013

POSTED BY KAI IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

≈ 288 COMMENTS

“The first immigrants to Europe arrived thousands of years ago from central Asia. Most pre-contact
Europeans lived together in small villages. Because the continent was very crowded, their lives were ruled
by strict hierarchies within the family and outside it to control resources. Europe was highly multi-ethnic,
and most tribes were ruled by hereditary leaders who commanded the majority “commoners.” These groups
were engaged in near constant warfare.

Pre-contact Europeans wore clothing made of natural materials such as animal skin and plant and animal-
based textiles. Women wore long dresses and covered their hair, and men wore tunics and leggings. Both
men and women liked to wear jewelry made from precious stones and metals as a sign of status. Before
contact, Europeans had very poor diets. Most people were farmers and grew wheat and vegetables and raised
cows and sheep to eat. They rarely washed themselves, and had many diseases because they often let their
animals live with them.

Religion infused every part of Europeans’ lives. Europeans believed in one supreme deity, a father figure,
who they believed was made of three parts, and they particularly worshiped the deity’s son. They claimed
that their god had given humans domination over the earth. They built elaborate temples to him and
performed ceremonies in which they ate crackers and drank wine and believed it was the body and blood of
their god, who would provide them with entrance into a wondrous afterlife called heaven when they died.
Many wars were fought over disagreements about the details of this religion, each group believing their
interpretation was the right one that should be spread across the land.”

Now imagine that is part of a textbook that has entire chapters on the Mississippian polities of the
1200s and a detailed account of the diplomatic situation of the southeastern provinces in the 1400s
and 1500s, an enormous section that goes through the history of the rise of the Triple Alliance in
Mexico and goes through the rule of each tlatoani and their policies, the heritage of Teotihuacan and
its legacy in later Mesoamerican politics, elaborate descriptions of the trade routes that connected and
drove various nations in North America. Long explanations of the rise of various religious
movements such as the calumet ceremony and Midewiwin, and how they affected political agendas
and artistic trends. Pages and pages and pages going through the past thousand years of American
history century by century.
And these three paragraphs are the only mention of European history before the year 1500.

If your textbook of North American history goes into the details of the Middle Ages, the Reformation
and Renaissance, the Silk Road, and European monarchies, and you don’t include equal description
of the Mississippian coalescence and dispersal, Haudenosaunee-Algonquian relations, the
Woodlands, trans-plains, and southwestern trade systems, the Mexica conquests and the Fifth Sun
ideology with explicit naming of various places and leaders, then your textbook is inadequate.

Why do you include those “pre-contact” European things? Because they explain the motivations and
reasons for what Europeans did. But people largely imagine North America as this timeless place and
don’t recognize that pre-contact American history had just as much of an effect on post-contact
history because it provides explanations of the motivations and reasonings behind indigenous
peoples’ actions.

But of course, that would require people to recognize that indigenous people had their own histories
and agendas and agency that affected the course of history rather than making them a passive
recipient of European historical force.

thoughts on “What if people told European history like they told

Native American history?”

1. said:Eliot

August 13, 2013 at 3:27 am

In North America, I think, over half the population descends from the First Americas. From
Greenland’s Thule to the Cueva in Panama are a lot of peoples.

I am not Greek, but I know more about Greek history then the people that drank from the same
spring that I drank from as a child. Those people died 80 years before we moved there, North
California, in 1972. Their tools and the circles left from their homes still visible. As a child I found
what was left of a small village, and the adults didn’t seem to care. When I dug in the center of
one of the circles and found the fire-pit, confirming, I could imagine walking among them.

This was in the Sinkyone lands, I’ve also lived in: Matinecock lands; Shawnee lands;
Mouheneenne lands; Uluru in the Pitjantjatjara lands.

REPLY

2. said: calebhampton

August 15, 2013 at 8:51 pm