North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction

North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction

Theda Perdue

Language: English

Pages: 160

ISBN: 0195307542

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today?
Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. They describe hunting practices among different tribes, how some made the gradual transition to more settled, agricultural ways of life, the role of kinship and cooperation in Native societies, their varied burial rites and spiritual practices, and many other features of Native American life. Throughout the book, Perdue and Green stress the great diversity of indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages before the arrival of Europeans and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to so successfully. Most importantly, the authors stress how Native Americans have struggled to maintain their sovereignty--first with European powers and then with the United States--in order to retain their lands, govern themselves, support their people, and pursue practices that have made their lives meaningful.
Going beyond the stereotypes that so often distort our views of Native Americans, this Very Short Introduction offers a historically accurate, deeply engaging, and often inspiring account of the wide array of Native peoples in America.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

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Mainland. Exploration led to permanent settlements, and in North America the Spanish occupied Florida in 1565 and New Mexico in 1598. The French and British soon followed with colonial outposts in Canada and Virginia. The Spanish never forgot their obligation to Christianize the Indians they encountered, and both the French and British, to varying extents, followed suit, but the compelling theme of the European colonial invasions and occupations of America was economic. After the Spanish stumbled.

1644 to 1646, while deadly for the English almost eradicated the Powhatans. The surviving Indians accepted small reservations from Virginia and agreed to pay an annual tribute to the governor. Remarkably, two of the reservations still exist in eastern Virginia, and the Indians still give the governor venison every year. Like indigenous Virginians, the Indians of southern New England spoke Algonquian languages and depended in large part on agriculture for their food. They also gathered wild.

Blundell TERRORISM Charles Townshend THEOLOGY David F. Ford THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield TRAGEDY Adrian Poole THE TUDORS John Guy TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimäki THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie THE VIKINGS Julian Richards WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar WRITING AND SCRIPT.

Dependent. Processing the extra hides demanded more workers, so successful hunters married more wives, raided for captives to enslave, or purchased slaves on the market. The Comanches on the south plains, for example, were distant from the trade in buffalo hides, but they excelled at raiding for horses and captives, which Cheyenne middlemen took north for sale. One way or another, wealthy northern hunters increased their labor force, their hide production, and their wealth. In the midst of this.

More important than others, and status differentiation has important cultural implications. It suggests, for example, that a group had grown large enough, and thus complex enough, to need some form of organized political system capable of providing leadership, a means of selecting leaders, and social rules. While hunting animals and gathering plants remained vital segments of the many subsistence economies, some groups of Native people, perhaps in response to ongoing population growth, embraced.

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