Native American

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Native Americans, also called American Indians or Amerindians, form the indigenous peoples who lived in the Americas before European colonization. Native Americans officially make up the majority of the population in Bolivia and Guatemala and are significant in most other Hispanic American countries, with the possible exception of Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Argentina.

In Alaska, because of legal use in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) and because of the presence of the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples, the term Alaskan Native predominates. Canadians now generally use the term First Nations to refer to Native Americans.

History

The Native Americans are widely believed to have come to the Americas via the prehistoric Bering Land Bridge. However, this is not the only theory. Some archaeologists believe that the migration consisted of seafaring tribes that moved along the coast. Based on anthropological evidence, at least three distinct migrations from Siberia occurred.

In recent years, anthropological evidence of migration has been supplemented by studies based on molecular genetics. The provisional results from this field suggest that four distinct migrations from Asia occurred and show a shared genetic background with some Europeans.

The first wave of migration came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late Pleistocene epoch, including mammoths, horses, giant sloths, and wooly rhinoceroses. The Clovis culture provides one example of such immigrants. Later the Folsom culture developed, based on the hunting of buffalo. There is some evidence that at least part of the first wave of migration consisted of people who were significantly different from the ancestors of modern Native Americans, see Kennewick Man.

The second immigration wave comprised the Athabascan people, including the ancestors of the Apache and the Navajo; the third wave consisted of the Inuit, the Yupik, and the Aleut, who may have come by sea over the Bering Strait. These last are so ethnically distinct from the remainder of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas that they are not usually included in the terms "American Indian" or "First Nations". The Athabascan peoples, late migrants, generally lived in Alaska and western Canada but several tribes migrated south as far as California and the American Southwest.

In the Mississippi valley of the United States, in Mexico and Central America, and in the Andes of South America Native American civilizations arose with farming cultures and city-states.

The Arrival of Europeans

Europeans also brought diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity. Common and rarely fatal ailments such as chicken pox and the measles often proved fatal to Native Americans, and other more deadly diseases, such as smallpox, were especially deadly to Indian populations. In the 15th century Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped their owners and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild.

Horse

Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the last American horses died out at the end of the last ice age. The re-introduction of the horse, however, had a profound impact on Native American cultures in the Great Plains of North America. This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange goods with neighboring tribes and to more easily capture game.

Diseases

It is difficult to estimate the percentage of the total Native American population killed by these diseases, since waves of disease oftentimes preceded White scouts and often destroyed entire villages. Some historians have argued that more than 80% of some Indian populations may have died due to European-derived diseases.

American expansion

Numerous Indian Wars broke out between US forces and many different tribes. In the 19th century the United States forced Native Americans onto marginal lands in areas farther and farther west as white settlement of the young nation expanded in that direction. Military defeat, cultural pressure, confinement on reservations and (especially) slavery have had deleterious effects on Native Americans' mental and ultimately physical health. Contemporary problems include alcoholism and diabetes: see New World Syndrome.

Authorities drafted countless treaties during this period and then later nullified them for various reasons. The fighting climaxed with the Native American victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn and with the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Then on January 31, 1876 the United States government ordered all Native Americans to move into reservations or reserves. This and the near extinction of the buffalo effectively ended the Prairie Culture that developed around the use of the horse for hunting, travel and trading.

American policy toward Native Americans has been an evolving process. In the late nineteenth century reformers in efforts to civilize Indians adapted the practice of educating native children in boarding schools. The experience in the boarding schools which existed from 1875 to 1928 was difficult for Indian children who were forbidden to speak their native languages and in numerous other ways forced to adopt white cultural practices.