An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: Introduction–Chapter 1

Their descendants, also called Indigenous peoples, carry memories and stories of how the United States came to be the nation we know today.

The Doctrine of Discovery was laid out in a series of communications from the pope, leader of the Catholic Church, who was extremely influential in European politics at the time. It asserted that Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land as soon as Europeans arrived and claimed it.

Similarly, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the first groups from England to settle what became the United States, believed they had a covenant with God to take the land.

The Continental Congress wrote the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, two years before the Constitution was ratified.

The multicultural perspective tends to cast Indigenous peoples in general as an oppressed racial group without considering important political differences between the Native nations and other oppressed populations.

Although Native historians and scholars have written at length about how events in US history have impacted Indigenous peoples, their perspectives are not often included in history courses.

The “nation of immigrants” framework obscures the US practice of settler colonialism.

The “nation of immigrants” framework obscures the US practice of settler colonialism.

The following statement from General William T. Sherman in 1873 is an example of what genocidal attitudes sound like:
We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children...during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.

All over North America are places that are described as “the first” settlement, building, or school. Invariably this means the first settlement, building, or school created by white settlers, as if no one lived there before they came.

This book tells the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that sought to crush and subjugate Indigenous populations.

This proliferation of corn and other crops such as beans, squash, and potatoes required vast networks of cultural and commercial exchange among the peoples of North, Central, and South America.

We do not know if they were content with this arrangement or if they felt exploited.

Mayan dominance of the region lasted more than five hundred years. Eventually dissension and uprisings led to the collapse of the Mayan state.

Mayan dominance of the region lasted more than five hundred years. Eventually dissension and uprisings led to the collapse of the Mayan state.

At the same time that Mayan civilization was developing, the Olmecs, sometimes called Mexico’s “Mother Culture,” flourished in the Valley of Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Aztecs extended their influence in the valley and eventually consolidated their power.

The area known today as the southwestern United States was once the northern periphery of the Aztec empire.

Autonomous tribal towns made decisions about trade and relations with other groups, but in some political and social matters, the towns worked together as a confederacy to make decisions that affected all of their members.

Corn, their staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably by clan mothers, the oldest woman from each extended family.

Corn, their staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably by clan mothers, the oldest woman from each extended family.

Native peoples also left an indelible imprint on the land with systems of roads that tied their nations and communities together across the entire landmass of the Americas.

From the Pueblo communities of the Southwest, travelers took roads eastward onto the semiarid plains along tributaries of the Pecos River.

Willfully or not, they depicted the land as empty, devoid of “civilized” peoples—and theirs for the taking.

Willfully or not, they depicted the land as empty, devoid of “civilized” peoples—and theirs for the taking.

Both Muscogees (Creeks) and Cherokees, for example, whose original homelands in North America are located in the Southeast, trace their lineage to migration from or through Mexico.

The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the mounds....The Muskogees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwestern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries.

The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the mounds....The Muskogees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwestern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries.

Although these practices vary from one community to the next, at the core of each dance, of each song, of each prayer is a commemoration of the gift of corn.

This brief overview of precolonial North America counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter and vast unused and uncharted lands.