Native Americans: Yesterday and Today
For centuries before the white man set foot on American soil, Native Americans, had been living in America. When the Europeans came here, there were probably about 10 million Indians populating America north of present-day Mexico. And they had been living in America for quite some time. It is believed that the first Native Americans arrived during the last ice age, approximately 20,000 - 30,000 years ago through a land bridge across the Bering Sound, from northeastern Siberia into Alaska. The oldest documented Indian cultures in North America are found in the cave paintings and petroglyphs in Wyoming, which are usually dated to 20,000 B.C.E. (Marcus & Fischer, 1986).
The name "Indian" was first applied to them by Christopher Columbus, who believed mistakenly that the mainland and islands of America were part of the Indies, in Asia. When the Europeans started to arrive in the 16th- and 17th-century they were met by Native Americans, and enthusiastically so. "The Natives regarded their white-complexioned visitors as something of a marvel, not only for their outlandish dress and beards and winged ships but even more for their wonderful technology - steel knives and swords, fire-belching arquebus and cannon, mirrors, hawkbells and earrings, copper and brass kettles, and so on" (Perry, 1991, 42).
However, conflicts eventually arose. As a starter, the arriving Europeans seemed attuned to another world, they appeared to be oblivious to the rhythms and spirit of nature. Nature to the Europeans - and the Indians detected this - was something of an obstacle, even an enemy. It was also a commodity: "A forest was so many board feet of timber, a beaver colony so many pelts, a herd of buffalo so many robes and tongues. Even the Indians themselves were a resource - souls ripe for the Jesuit, Dominican, or Puritan plucking" (Richter, 2002, 34).
When looking back on the long history of knowledge ...