The American Indian and Problem with History

One of the greatest mistakes ever made in American history was the injustice and destruction inflicted on the indigenous natives by European Americans. No one, I think, should deny what it took for White Americans to stretch from the East to the West in creating the United States we know today. The results of European and White American conquests of the native population were the renowned myths that narrowly defined the history of the United States for a substantial amount of time. They classified American Indians as blood thirsty savages who were eventually brought to their demise by the “civilized” Christians of the eastern United States. In every sequence of events, history while written by the victorious is always filled with lies and many biases. The winning side feels that only their history is worthy of remembrance since they’re more powerful culturally, technologically, and politically. Even some historians have altered new research with their narrow cultural/religious perception of the events that took place. Recently, that barrier has been broken with new studies of the origins of Native Americans tribes all the way back around 40,000 to 12,000 B.C.

Although I have previous knowledge of the so-called Bering ‘land bridge’ that brought many tribes from Asia into North America, I was amazed by the amount of history there was about the migration into the continent and the establishment of the new North American tribes. Essentially, these tribes came onto the American continent in search of big game such as reindeer, moose, bison, and woolly mammoths. While there are hints of these people hunting great game across North America, most the evidence has been found within Alaska where the hunters cornered their prey at many ‘kill sites.’ Many of these tribes went as far as modern day Pennsylvania, which I suppose isn’t much of a surprise, but I was under the impression most of the tribes then settled in Canada and in the mid – western United States. In despite of leaving their original homes, these people made use of the tools and hunting methods they developed in Siberia, thus passing on their most ancient of traditions. Many of these traditions had been drawn from other cultures from East Asia to Europe, hinting that discovering the “New World” was merely an expansion of the old world. From reading that information, one can easily draw the similarities shared between Native Americans, Europeans, Asians, and so on.

Another interesting find in Native American history was the systematic process of adapting to the new environments and the creation of many substances to sustain the native way of life. Such innovations included making specially “fluted” spear points within camps located near rich quarries. These enable tribesmen to sharpen their spears in a way that allows them to kill their prey on site. In the areas where flint flourished, numerous animals were trapped in those regions, providing tribes with enough food and turning these people into a complex, organized society, greatly different from their ancestors. It all really shows how similar Native Americans are with other cultures, in terms of survival and maintaining their way of life.