1 Indigenous America
First Nations
The Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, is often credited as the person who “discovered” the Americas. In 1492, Columbus broke with European sea-going tradition and sailed west from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean under the theory that the earth was round and that he could therefore reach the Far East by sailing west. When he ran into the island that became known as Hispaniola (shared today by the Dominican Republic and Haiti), he thought he had landed somewhere in the East Indies—the islands in or near the Indian Ocean. That being the case, Columbus referred to the people he encountered as Indians. Although based on a geographical error, the term stuck and is still used today to refer to the Indigenous people of the Americas as a whole.
Of course, many critics of the claim that Columbus discovered America will point out that the Norse explorer, Leif Erikson, actually beat Columbus by about 500 years. Sometime around the year 1,000, historians believe, Erikson founded the short-lived colony of Vinland in present-day Newfoundland, Canada. However, this Norse colony did not survive.[1]
At any rate, from the perspective of America’s Indigenous peoples, both of these claims are Eurocentric distortions of world history. For by the time European explorers and settlers became aware of the Americas, both North and South America had already been discovered, explored, and settled for over 12,000 years (and perhaps for as long as 20,000 to 30,000 years).[2]
Well before the establishment of the United States, there were perhaps five to ten million Indigenous people organized in over six hundred independent tribes, bands, and groups inhabiting every part of North America. Each group had its own land base, economic system, government, social institutions, and cultural distinctiveness. Some groups lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering; others practiced intensive horticulture and trading. Some societies were organized in simple bands while others had complicated confederated governments. Hundreds of different languages were spoken representing as many as twelve distinct and unrelated linguistic families. Contrary to the way some early colonial sources portrayed North America, it was NOT an uninhabited wilderness.[3]
Now just to be clear, the descendants of the first inhabitants of the Americas are still here today, including in the lands currently comprising the United States. But unfortunately, continued Native presence is too often overlooked in discussions of the character of contemporary America. Here in the United States today, Indians are sometimes imagined as people who lived in the past, dressed themselves in picturesque clothing, and gave American settlers a hard time before finally being subdued in the final few years of the 19th century. Too many non-Indigenous people forget that like every other historical group, Indians moved on with the times, even as they had to endure more than their fair share of hardshi