Native American History: A History from Beginning to End

Until surprisingly recently, most history books claimed America was discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus. In truth, by the time Columbus arrived, people had been living there for more than 12,000 years. During that span, the indigenous peoples of North America lived without contact with other continents. Different groups developed separate and distinct ways of life, cultures, and societies, but all shared one trait: they relied on the land for food, and developed religions that, while distinct, shared a deep respect for nature and imbued animals and natural features with spiritual meaning. These beliefs, combined with relatively simple technologies compared to those emerging elsewhere in the world, allowed Native Americans to live in harmony with the natural world. These societies held sophisticated and complex belief systems, but they built no cities, no wheeled vehicles, and developed nothing beyond the most basic written language. Although millions of people lived across North America, their impact on the landscape and its natural systems remained minimal.

Then, abruptly, white settlers arrived, bringing new technologies and weapons, new religions, and an indifference toward nature. They also brought diseases to which Native Americans had never been exposed. Within two hundred years, the Native American population dwindled to a fraction of what it had been; survivors were herded onto reservations where they could not follow their traditional ways of life and were denied the most basic human rights.

Only in the twentieth century did the Native American population begin to recover, and only then did the broader American public begin to see these cultured, sophisticated peoples as anything but savages. This is the story of their gradual rise, sudden destruction, and slow, ongoing recovery.