The native peoples of North America

Detail

Who came first, and how

• The earliest people of America came from Asia, more than 30,000 years ago. They walked across a land-bridge at the Bering Straits — a strip of dry land that joined Siberia to Alaska.
• This land-bridge is called Beringia. Sea levels fell in the last Ice Age, so the sea floor became walkable land [2].
• Asia and North America were fully joined by land from about 28,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE. At its widest, Beringia was about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from north to south [2].
• About 10,000 years ago, in the last Ice Age, these people began moving south into the continent.
• The oldest artefact found is an arrow-point, 11,000 years old.
• From about 5,000 years ago the climate became steady. Population then grew.

Note: Britannica says stone Clovis projectile points found in New Mexico were long taken as proof that people reached the Americas about 13,500 years ago; Clovis points are thin, lanceolate (leaf-shaped), with a long flake or flute struck off the base of each flat face. Sites older than Clovis were found in the late 20th century [2][3]. This is older than the 11,000-year figure in NCERT; keep the NCERT date for the exam.

How they lived — bands, villages, food

• They lived in bands (small groups of families), not in cities.
• Their villages stood along river valleys. Water meant fish, drinking water and soil.
• Food came from three sources:
• fish from the rivers,
• meat from hunting,

• vegetables and maize which they grew themselves.

• They made long journeys to hunt bison (the wild American buffalo of the grasslands).

• From the seventeenth century these journeys became easier, because they began riding horses bought from Spanish settlers. Horses were not native to America; the Spanish brought them.
• Key point for the exam: they killed only as many animals as they needed. No stockpiling, no killing for trade.

Why there were no kingdoms here

• No extensive agriculture → no surplus (no extra food left over after eating).
• No surplus means:
• no group could live off the work of others,
• no tax, no standing army, no court,

• so no kingdoms and no empires.

• This makes North America different from Central and South America, where big states (like the Aztec and Inca lands) did rise.

• Quarrels over territory were rare. Control of land was not an issue. They took food and shelter from the land without feeling any need to 'own' it.
• This idea of land — use it, do not own it — is exactly what the settlers later refused to accept. Settlers saw unowned land as empty land, free to take.

The gift economy

• Goods were not obtained by purchase. They were obtained as gifts.
• Gifts moved inside formal alliances and friendships — the gift built and proved the relationship.
• After a treaty, people exchanged wampum belts — belts made of coloured shells sewn together. The belt was the record of the promise.
• Because the belt, not paper, was the record, settlers could later deny what had been agreed.

Language, time and knowledge

• There were numerous languages, and they were unwritten — spoken only, not put on paper.
• They believed time moves in cycles (it goes round and repeats), not in a straight line.
• Each tribe kept and passed on its own origin-history by word of mouth, from elders to the young.
• They were skilled at weaving and crafts.
• They could 'read the land' — climates, landscapes, animal tracks, seasons — the way people who can write read a book. This was real, exact knowledge; it just was not written down.

What the settlers did to them (18th–20th centuries)

• Indian Removal Act — signed by President Andrew Jackson on 28 May 1830. It let the president give tribes land west of the Mississippi river in exchange for their lands inside existing US states [4].
• On paper removal needed the people's free consent. In practice it happened through fraud, threat and violence [4].
• About 100,000 Indigenous people were driven out of the East during the 1830s [4].
• Trail of Tears — in the autumn and winter of 1838–39 the Cherokee were forced west by the US government. About 4,000 Cherokee died on the march [5].
• Dawes Act, 1887 — made the US government responsible for handing out land inside reservations, breaking common tribal land into small individual plots [4].
• The Library of Congress keeps the primary documents of the Indian Removal Act, including maps of "lands assigned to emigrant Indians west of Arkansas and Missouri" [6].

Prelims Hooks

• Earliest inhabitants of America came from Asia over 30,000 years ago across the Bering Straits land-bridge.
• The Bering land-bridge is named Beringia; full Asia–America land link existed c. 28,000–10,000 BCE, spanning up to 1,600 km north to south [2].
• Oldest artefact of these people (NCERT): an arrow-point, 11,000 years old.
• Clovis projectile points — thin, lanceolate, fluted stone points first known from New Mexico, once dated to c. 13,500 years ago [2][3].
• Native North Americans got horses by buying them from Spanish settlers in the seventeenth century.
• Crops grown: maize and vegetables; big game hunted: bison.
• No surplus → no kingdoms/empires in North America, unlike Central and South America.
• Wampum belts = coloured shells sewn together, exchanged after treaties.
• Indian Removal Act signed 28 May 1830 by Andrew Jackson; about 100,000 people evicted in the 1830s [4].
• Trail of Tears, 1838–39: about 4,000 Cherokee died [5]. Dawes Act: 1887 [4].

Mains Points

• Different idea of land caused the conflict. Native peoples used land without owning it; settlers held land as private property with papers. So settlers treated used-but-unowned land as empty and available. The clash was not only military — it was a clash of two legal ideas.
• No state made them easy to defeat. Absence of surplus meant no kingdom, no treasury, no standing army. Bands could not combine at scale against an armed settler state. Compare India, where organised states could resist the English for decades.
• Law as a tool of dispossession. The Indian Removal Act, 1830 promised free consent but delivered removal by fraud and force [4]; the Dawes Act, 1887 broke common tribal land into individual plots [4]. Useful for answers on how colonial regimes used legal form to legitimise land seizure — set beside the Permanent Settlement in Bengal.
• Oral record versus written record. Unwritten languages, cyclical time and wampum belts meant native claims had no written proof that settler courts would accept. Their skill in 'reading the land' counted as nothing in a court that only read paper.