¡Descarga Unit 1. Native Americans y más Apuntes en PDF de Historia de los Estados Unidos solo en Docsity! UNIT 1: NATIVE AMERICANS. 1. Native American Society on the Eve of British Colonization. In Renaissance times, Europeans were not the only ones accomplishing great things. No one can deny the beauty of Michelangelo's brushwork or the brilliance of Shakespeare's verse. But societies elsewhere also flourished. As the modern world turned 1600, it seems as though each corner of the globe had its own "renaissance." The Native American societies of North America were no different. They had diverse cultures and languages, much like Europe. When the British staked their claim to the east coast of the modern United States, they could not have dreamed of the complexity of the peoples they were soon to encounter. There are between 140 and 160 different American Indian Tribes. There is no single Native American language. It would be as difficult for the Mohawk Indians of the East to converse with Zuni Indians of the West as it would be for Germans to converse with Turks. Twenty-seven states derive names from Indian languages. Native Americans turned wild plants such as corn, potatoes, pumpkin, yams, and lima beans into farm crops for human consumption. More than half of modern American farm products were grown by Native Americans before British colonization. Medicine was not an unknown science in the Western Hemisphere. Most natural herbs used for medicinal purposes in the modern world had also been used by Native Americans before European contact. Archaeologists have learned that North American Indians made salt by evaporation and mined a great many minerals including copper, lead, and coal. The buffalo played an important role in the survival of Native American tribes. In addition to providing food, the buffalo provided clothing and more. Despite myths to the contrary, not all Native Americans were peaceful. Like Europe, the American continent faced tribal warfare that sometimes led to human and cultural destruction. In short, there is no simple way to tell the tale of a continent that had been peopled by diverse communities for thousands of years. Their tales are as complex as any others, their cultures as rich, their knowledge as deep. British contact did not mark the replacement of established cultures by a better way of life, but rather the beginning of a new civilization based on a blend of diverse folkways. An examination of three groups — Anasazi, Iroquois, and Algonkian — serves as a beginning to learning about the American world that once was. 1.1 Diversity of the Native American Groups. Since 1492, European explorers and settlers have tended to ignore the vast diversity of the people who had previously lived here. It soon became common to lump all such groups under the term "Indian." In the modern American world, we still do. There are certain experiences common to the survivors of these tribes. They all have had their lands compromised in some way and suffered the horrors of reservation life. Stereotyping Indians in this way denies the vast cultural differences between tribes. First, there is the issue of language. The Navajo people of the Southwest and the Cherokees of the Southeast have totally unrelated languages. There were over 200 North American tribes speaking over 200 different languages. The United States used the uniqueness of the Navajo language to its advantage in World War II. Rather than encrypting radio messages, it proved simpler to use Navajos to speak to each other in their everyday language to convey high-security messages. It worked. Between 1942 and 1945, about 400 Navajos served as code talkers for the U.S. Marines. They could encode, transmit, and decode a message in a fraction of the time it took a machine to do the same. And unlike with machine codes, the Japanese were never able to break the Navajo code. i.e: America, Ne-he-mah, Our Mother. 1
