Indigenous Nations of North America — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · A city on the Mississippi

Cahokia grew fast. Around 1050 the settlement reorganised on a planned grid around a central plaza, in what archaeologists call the “big bang” — a deliberate act of city-building, not slow drift. At its height it held more people than any city in what is now the United States would hold again until Philadelphia passed it around 1780, nearly seven centuries later.

Building Monks Mound took an estimated fifteen million baskets of earth carried by hand. That is not a weekend's work by a few families; it implies organised labour, a food surplus to feed the workers, and authority able to direct both. The surplus came from maize, which had spread north from Mexico over centuries and reached the Mississippi valley in quantity by about 900.

The city drew people in. Analysis of teeth from Cahokia burials shows that a substantial share of those buried there grew up somewhere else, which is what you expect of a place people move to rather than a place that merely grows. Goods arrived from far off: marine shell from the Gulf coast, copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians.

Cahokia also declined, and the reasons are still argued. Deforestation of the surrounding uplands, flooding, drought after about 1150, and political strain have all been proposed. By around 1350 the site was largely empty. Societies in the Americas rose and fell on their own terms long before anyone arrived from across the Atlantic.

Part 2 · Different places, different answers

In the Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans built in stone. Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon had more than 650 rooms rising to five storeys, and roads ran out from the canyon in dead-straight lines for tens of miles across broken country. Building and maintaining those roads in a dry landscape implies co-ordination between communities far apart.

In the Eastern Woodlands, including what is now New York, farming meant the Three Sisters: maize, beans and squash grown together in one mound. The maize gives the beans a pole to climb, the beans return nitrogen to the soil, and the broad squash leaves shade out weeds and hold moisture. It is a genuinely sophisticated system that European farmers, planting single crops in rows, did not match for centuries.

On the Northwest Coast, cedar and salmon did the work that farming did elsewhere. Communities built plank houses and ocean-going canoes and accumulated enough wealth to hold potlatches, ceremonies at which a host gave away or destroyed goods to establish standing. None of this fits a simple ladder from hunting to farming to civilisation, which is why that ladder is a poor way to think about the continent.

Part 3 · How many people, and why the number is fought over

Estimates of the population of North America north of Mexico in 1492 range from about two million to about eighteen million. For the Americas as a whole, serious estimates run from roughly forty million to over a hundred million. These are not small disagreements; the high figure is nine times the low one.

The spread exists because the evidence is indirect. There was no census. Historians work from the carrying capacity of farmland, from the number of village sites found and their size, from early European accounts that were often written decades after the first epidemics had already passed through, and from later counts worked backwards through estimated death rates. Each method carries its own assumptions, and small changes in those assumptions multiply.

The argument matters because the number changes the story. If the continent held two million people, European settlement looks like expansion into thin country. If it held eighteen million, and disease removed most of them before most colonists arrived, then what the settlers found was not empty land but emptied land — and the difference between those two words is the difference between two versions of American history.

Part 4 · Nations, not tribes in general

It is worth being careful with words from the start. “Native Americans” covers hundreds of peoples who were as different from one another as the Portuguese are from the Finns, and who often did not regard themselves as having anything in common. Mohawk and Lenape lived a few days apart and spoke unrelated languages.

The nations of what is now New York State make the point locally. The five Haudenosaunee nations spoke related Iroquoian languages and farmed in palisaded villages of longhouses; their neighbours down the Hudson and along the coast — the Lenape, the Mahican, the Munsee — spoke Algonquian languages, unrelated to Iroquoian, and lived in smaller, more mobile settlements. Two very different ways of organising life, within a few days' travel of each other.

They were also in constant contact. Copper from Lake Superior, obsidian from the Rockies, shells from the Gulf and the Atlantic coast all turn up hundreds of miles from where they originated, which means long-distance exchange routes were running for centuries before 1492. Goods moved, and so did ideas, crops and people.

Nor were these nations frozen in place. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the subject of the next unit, was itself formed at some point in this period by nations that had been fighting one another; Cahokia rose around 1050 and was gone by about 1350; Chaco was abandoned after roughly 1150 and its people moved to the Rio Grande and to Hopi and Zuni country. Three centuries of change happened here before any of it was written down.

So when a European ship appeared off the coast, it did not arrive at an isolated place. It arrived at the edge of a continent that was crowded, connected and politically complicated, and the newcomers were drawn into alliances and rivalries that had been running long before they came. That is the subject of the next three chapters.