Indian Hutary

Adena Civilization

The Adena, an early eastern Woodlands civilization, existed from about 1000 BCE to 500 CE. Best known for the mounds they built, the Adenas left a substantial number of artifacts as well as evidence of early agricultural practices. The Adena homeland extended from southeastern Indiana to southwestern Pennsylvania and from central Ohio to central Kentucky and West Virginia. Adena migrants, presumably later displaced by the Hopewell, could also be found as far east as the Chesapeake Bay and as far south as Alabama.

The Adena civilization is named after the estate of Thomas Worthington, the sixth governor of Ohio. Worthington's estate, near Chillicothe, Ohio, stands near a large Adena burial mound. At the time that Worthington built his mansion in the early nineteenth century, the Adenas were not recognized as worthy of importance. For this reason, many of the Adena mounds and the artifacts within them were plowed under by farmers, destroyed to build roads, and dismantled to construct buildings. Much of the Adena legacy has thus been lost.

The Adena legacy that remains is chiefly in the form of mounds. Although the Adenas had been present in Ohio for some centuries, they apparently began constructing mounds only after about 500. These mounds, found in and around Adena villages, were conical and dome-shaped structures of earth and stone. Mounds served as territorial and perhaps diplomatic markers. Topographic prominence appears to have been an important objective in placement, although the topography has likely changed somewhat since the era of the Adenas. Mounds built by the Indians in upland locations are typically located on ridge crests, hilltops, bluff lines, and the tips of promontories so that they could be easily seen. Mounds in lowland locations are usually found on higher terraces of flood plains, sites that would allow them to be visible from the waterways or the adjacent uplands, yet secure from all but the largest floods.

Many of the surviving Adena mounds are burial mounds. These structures are normally conical in

The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio was a product of the Adena civilization. (Richard A. Cooke/Corbis)

Shape and can be found in either lowland or upland locations. The burial mounds are located on the former sites of Adena wooden structures. The ground at a burial site has been ritually modified by clearing the surface vegetation or soil layer, adding sand or clay, or other sediments, and building a circular or rectangular wooden enclosure. The structures were once believed to be Adena houses but archaeologists now believe that the buildings were related to some ceremonial use, perhaps a mortuary ritual, and were never intended for habitation.

To construct a mound, the Adena began by preparing a special floor. Then, they ritually prepared the deceased for burial and interred the body in a chamber beneath or on the surface. The deceased was buried with a variety of goods. Lastly, a mound was built over and around the grave. In the early stages of the culture, low earthen hillocks were built up, basketful by basketful, over the burial pits of honored individuals. Later, high mounds were constructed of mostly earth and some stones over multiple burials, the corpses usually placed in log-lined tombs. With each new burial, another layer of dirt was added to the mound. Often these earthen monuments were surrounded by other earthworks—rounded walls or ridges of earth, usually circular in shape. Stone mounds were built in upland locations in the Appalachian and Interior Low plateaus but the purpose of these mounds is not yet well understood.

The mounds indicate that the Adenas had a high degree of social organization. Burial mounds were repositories for the dead, but they were also monuments to the dead whose bodies they covered and enveloped. The fact that the burial mounds required special effort to construct indicates that the deceased were sufficiently respected by their group to warrant the investment of time and labor required to erect the memorial. The Adena grave goods that have been found indicate the social inequalities in the culture: engraved stone tablets, often with raptorial bird designs; polished gorgets of stone and copper; pearl beads; ornaments of sheet mica; tubular stone pipes; and bone masks.

The Adenas also constructed earthen effigy mounds—totemic animals or symbols. The best-known Adena mound is the Great Serpent Mound

On Brush Creek near present-day Peebles, Ohio. It is an example of an effigy mound. It consists of a low, rounded embankment that extends 1,348 feet in the shape of a snake with open jaws and coiled tail, with what is thought to be its medicine bag within the jaws. (The object in the snake's mouth may have represented the sun, since there is a Native American legend that the sun was once swallowed by a snake.) When it was first measured in 1846, the body was close to 5 feet high and 30 feet wide, but, due to erosion and plowing, its height is now about 4 feet and its width about 20 feet.

Aside from their mound building, the lifestyle of the Adenas differed relatively little from that of their late Archaic period predecessors. Most Adena people apparently lived in small, widely scattered, and probably seasonally occupied sites that were ephemeral. A typical dwelling most likely was a simple and expendable wood-framed structure, perhaps formed of bent or upright saplings covered with woven branches, hides, or herb mats. Structures inhabited during the winter appear to have been more substan-fial, befitting the harsh winters in the area inhabited by the Adenas. The framework of Adena houses had a unique construction. Outward sloping posts, set in pairs, formed a circle. Four vertical center posts supported the high ends of the rafter poles that extended downward, beyond the wall posts, to form generous eaves. The walls were wattled and the roof was matted or thatched. There is also evidence that the Adena periodically occupied rock shelters and caves, features that are relatively numerous in the Appalachian Plateau and Interior Low Plateau.

The Adena people were primarily hunters, gatherers, and collectors. The region inhabited by the Indians was sufficiently lush enough to support a fairly sedentary lifestyle. There is some evidence of incipient agriculture in Adena culture—the cultivation of sunflowers, pumpkins, gourds, and goosefoot as food sources. It is also known that Adena Indians grew tobacco for ceremonial use.

The Adenas lived close to a number of major waterways and apparently participated extensively in trade. Adena products were apparently much sought after. They made cigar-shaped and tubular pipes of siltstone (also known as pipestone), a material that was easily drilled and easily carved and that had a nice sheen when polished. The pipes were in great demand and have been found as far away as the Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland, in New England, and in the Saint Lawrence River Valley in Canada. The pipes, as well as projectile points made of Vanport flint, were apparently exchanged for copper from the Great Lakes region and mica from the southern Appalachian Mountains. The Adena used these materials to make copper ornaments and mica crescents. They also made unique carved stone tablets. These items were small, flat rectangles, delicately carved with abstracted snake and bird designs. Since traces of pigment have been found on some, they apparently were used to stamp designs on some flat surface, perhaps bark cloth or deerskin. In addition to these objects, the Adena also crafted a wide range of stone, wood, bone, and copper tools, as well as incised or stamped pottery and clothes woven from vegetable fibers.

As is the case with so many prehistoric cultures, it is not known for certain what became of the Adena civilization. The Hopewell Indians, a subsequent mound-building people, somehow came to displace them. The Adena and Hopewell Indians shared many cultural traits, including an affinity for designing the same sort of pipes. They coexisted for five centuries but their exact relationship is not known— whether Adena peoples, or some among them, were ancestral to Hopewell, or whether Hopewell Indians invaded from elsewhere.

Caryn E. Neumann

See also Archaeology and the First Americans; Cahokia; Hopewell Culture; Mississippian Culture; Mound Cultures of North America; Ohio Valley Mound Culture; Trade.

References and Further Reading

Dragoo, Don. 1963. Mounds for the Dead: An Analysis of the Adena Culture. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum.

Hamilton, Ross. 2001. The Mystery of the Serpent Mound: In Search of the Alphabet of the Gods. Berkeley, CA: Frog.

Hothem, Lar. 1989. Treasures of the Mound Builders: Adena and Hopewell Artifacts of Ohio. Lancaster, OH: Hothem House Books.

Korp, Maureen. 1990. The Sacred Geography of the American Mound Builders. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Shaffer, Lynda Norene. 1992. Native Americans Before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Silverberg, Robert. 1986. The Mound Builders. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. 1974. The Adena People. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Woodward, Susan L., and Jerry N. McDonald. 2002. Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley. Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward.

African Americans

Mixed genealogy between African Americans and Native Americans is not unusual. For example, Cris-pus Attucks, son of an African American father and a Massachuset Indian mother, was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, the first death in the cause of the American Revolution. Attucks' father was a black slave in a Framingham, Massachusetts, household until about 1750, when he escaped and became a sailor. Attucks' mother lived in an Indian mission at Natick, Massachusetts.

Poet Langston Hughes, singer Tina Turner, actor James Earl Jones, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson all have some black-American Indian ancestry, although their specific tribal affiliations are not known. The Pequot founders of Foxwoods, in Connecticut, the largest Indian casino in the United States, are mixed African-Indian, a fact that has provoked some critics to challenge their Indian bona fides (Benedict, 2000).

The notable abolitionist Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on a farm on Lewiston Road, Tuckahoe, near Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818. He was the son of an unknown European-American father and Harriet Bailey, a slave who may have been partially Native American. No traces remain of the Native tribe or nation with which he may share ancestry. As a boy, Douglass's owner, Aaron Anthony, referred to him as his "little Indian boy."

In some cases, Native Americans and escaped slaves made common cause with Native Americans in sizable groups. One such example is the black Seminoles, who are sometimes called Seminole maroons by ethnologists, who live today mainly in Oklahoma, Texas, the Bahamas, and Coahuila, Mexico. Their ancestors were runaways from the plantations of South Carolina and Georgia between the late seventeenth and mideighteenth centuries who sought refuge in Spanish-controlled Florida. The name "Seminole," derived from the Spanish word cimaroon, meaning "fugitive" or "wild one," was incorporated into the Native language. The word "maroon," in English, stems from the same Spanish word.

Fugitive slaves from Charleston arrived in Spanish St. Augustine, Florida, as early as 1687, where many began new lives as free men and women in a multicultural community. Some of the men worked as cartwrights, jewelers, butchers, and innkeepers, while women were employed as cooks

A black Seminole named Abraham, one of many escaped black slaves absorbed into the Seminole nation. (Library of Congress)

And laundresses. Some owned small businesses. In 1838, the Spanish authorities established a settlement for escaped slaves, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, where roughly 100 men, women, and children came into contact with various bands of Native Americans living nearby.

The Seminoles, originally one of the five Civilized Tribes (the others being the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek) were chased into Florida in 1818 by armed forces under the command of General (and later U. S. President) Andrew Jackson. Florida was under Spanish jurisdiction (the area was ceded to the United States in 1821), and the invasion provoked a diplomatic furor. The Semi-noles, many of whom were descended from Creeks, had elected to ally themselves with the Spanish rather than the United States, an act of virtual treason in General Jackson's eyes.

Jackson's pretext for invading Florida (over Spanish diplomatic objections) was the pursuit of freed slaves as well as the Seminoles. For several decades, escaped slaves made common cause with the Seminoles, sometimes mingling and at other times establishing a separate identity and preserving their own cultures and traditions. In the meantime,

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The Seminoles fought the U. S. Army to a stalemate. To avoid capture, the black Seminoles developed skills at guerilla warfare. They also became very adaptable, finding ways to survive in new environments, such as the Florida Everglades, that other people regarded as uninhabitable or marginal.

In addition, the Seminoles gave shelter to escaped slaves. The pretext of Jackson's raid thus was the recovery of stolen human property. After the U. S. purchased Florida from Spain, slave-hunting vigilantes invaded the area en masse, killing Semi-noles as well as blacks. Later, in the 1830s, when President Jackson proposed to remove the Seminoles to Indian Territory, they refused. Moving deep into the swamps of southern Florida (an area that ironically was being used as a removal destination for other Native peoples), the Seminoles fought U. S. Army troops to a bloody stalemate during seven years of warfare. They were never defeated, and they never moved from their new homeland.

In 1823, Seminole leaders agreed to the Treaty of Moultrie Creek that ceded land and created reservations for the Seminoles. Later, as a result of U. S. removal policies, the Treaty of Payne's Landing (1832) required all Seminoles to leave Florida for Indian Territory within three years. According to the treaty, Seminoles with African American blood were to be sold into slavery.

Escaped slaves joined the Seminoles during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), a guerilla campaign during which the blacks served prominent roles as advisors, spies, and intermediaries. At one point, General Thomas S. Jesup said it was "a Negro and not an Indian War.” Jesup eventually promised the former slaves freedom if they would emigrate to the Indian Territory as part of the Seminole nation.

The war against the Seminoles was one of the most expensive Indian campaigns that the U. S. Army had waged to that time. In addition to the 1,500 soldiers killed (one for every two Seminoles eventually removed to Indian Territory), the government spent an average of $6,500 for each Native person transferred to Indian Territory. At a time when the average job paid less than $1,000 a year, this amount represented a small fortune.

Following the First and Second Seminole Wars (1817-1818 and 1835-1842), some of the black Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas. Others were separated from their Native American allies and transported to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), where they became known as Freed-men. Some moved to Mexico where their descen-dents, known as Indies Mascogos, still live. After the Civil War, some black Seminoles moved to Texas, where, during the 1870s and 1880s, they served with the U. S. Army on the Texas frontier as the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. Today, members of the black Seminole community in Texas refer to themselves as Seminoles to set themselves apart from other blacks and to emphasize the pride that they have in their unique history of having escaped slavery.

Bruce E. Johansen

See also Black Seminoles; Slavery.

References and Further Reading

Benedict, Jeff. 2000. Without Reservation: The Making of America's Most Powerful Indian Tribe and Foxwoods, the World's Largest Casino. New York: HarperCollins.

Black Indians: An American Story. No date. A

Documentary film directed by Chip Richie, produced by Steven R. Heape, written by Daniel Blake Smith, and narrated by James Earl Jones. Available at: Http://www. richheape .com/native-american-videos/Black _Indians_An_American_ Story. htm

CCNY Libraries. 1998. "The Black Seminoles' Long Road to Freedom.” Available at: Http://www .ccny. cuny. edu/library/News/seminoles2 .html. Accessed January 9, 2007.

Forbes, Jack D. 1993. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Agriculture

While popular imagination sometimes stereotypes them solely as nomadic hunters, many, if not most, of North America's Native peoples practiced agriculture, or the domestication of plants for human consumption. At least half of the earth's staple vegetable foods, the most important being corn (maize) and potatoes, were first cultivated by American Indians, who often drew their sustenance from hunting, gathering, and agriculture. By the year 800, agriculture was an established way of life for many Native peoples in North America.

At first sight, many immigrating Europeans did not recognize Native American agriculture, because it did not resemble their own. Indians did not domesticate draft animals and only rarely plowed their fields. Sometimes crops were grown in small clearings amid forest. When Europeans first laid eyes on North America, it was much more densely

This hand-colored engraving depicts Native American farmers in Florida, circa 1562. Native American agriculture introduced many foods, including corn, squash, and chocolate to European palates. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Forested than it is today. The park-like appearance of many eastern forests was a result of Native American peoples' efforts to manage plant and animal life.

Some Native peoples used fire to raze fields for farming and to drive game while hunting. These were not fires left to blaze out of control, however. For instance, Navajos who used range fires customarily detailed half of their hunting party to contain and control the fire and to keep it on the surface, where the flames would clear old brush so that new plant life could self-generate instead of destroying the forest canopy.

Agricultural Contributions to the World

Native Americans first cultivated many of the foods that today are taken for granted as everyday nourishment. The main ingredients of Crackerjacks (peanuts and popcorn), for example, are both indigenous to the Americas, as are all edible beans except horse beans and soybeans, all squashes (including pumpkins), Jerusalem artichokes, the "Irish" potato, the sweet potato, sunflowers, peppers, pineapples, watermelons, cassava, bananas, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and pecans.

Native American agriculture has influenced eating habits around the world so completely that many people forget their foods' culinary origins. Before the voyages of Columbus, the Italian food of today (with its tomato-based sauces) was unknown. The Irish cooked their food without potatoes. Europeans satisfied their desire for sweets without chocolate. Corn was unknown outside the Americas. These crops were produced by experimentation by many Native American cultures over thousands of years. Knowledge of plant life was passed along from generation to generation with other social knowledge, usually by the elder women of a Native tribe or nation.

Food Production and Spiritual Life

The production of food is woven into Native American spiritual life. Among the Iroquois and many

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Other Native peoples, for example, festivals highlight the key role of the three sisters (corn, squash, and beans). Archaeologists tell us that the food complex of corn, beans, and squash was transferred northward from Mexico as a set of rituals before it was an agricultural system. By practicing the rituals, Native Americans in the corn-growing areas of North America became farmers. Corn requires a one-160-day frost-free growing season; the northern limit of corn cultivation also often marks the limit of intensive Native agriculture.

Agriculture among Native American peoples enabled higher population densities. According to William Cronon, the Indians in Maine, who did not use widespread agriculture, sustained an average density of about forty people per 100 square miles, while Native Americans in southern New England, who raised crops (corn being their major staple), averaged 287 people (seven times as many) on the same amount of land (Cronon, 1983, 42).

Native American agriculture often seemed disorderly to European eyes, accustomed as they were to large monocultural fields of one crop. Native fields showed evidence of thought and practice, however. Samuel de Champlain described how Indians planted corn on small hills mixed with beans of several types. "When they grow up, they interlace with the corn, which reaches to the height of five to six feet; and they keep the ground free from weeds," Champlain wrote (Cronon, 1983, 43). John Winthrop, describing Indian fields in Massachusetts within a generation of the Pilgrims' arrival, said that their agriculture "load[ed] the ground with as much as it will beare" (Cronon, 1983, 44). Indian farming methods (usually the responsibility of women, except when growing tobacco) not only kept weeds at a minimum but also preserved soil moisture.

Many Native peoples offered their thanks to the plants as well as to the animals that they consumed, out of a belief that the essence of life animating human beings also is present in the entire web of animate and inanimate life and objects. Long before a science of "sustained yield" forestry evolved, Native American peoples along the Northwest Coast harvested trees in ways that would assure their continued growth, as part of a belief that trees are sentient beings. Some Native Americans charted farming cycles through complicated relationships with the sun and moon. In addition to domesticating dozens of food plants, they also harvested the wild bounty of the forests for hundreds of herbs and other plants used to restore and maintain health.

Mayan Agriculture

While the Mayas are known for their temples in such places as Tikal, Copan, and Palenque, the commoners who supported the small elite that maintained the temples, spent most of their time cultivating food, principally corn. Most of the Mayan ceremonial centers were surrounded by very large earthworks, which were used for agriculture. These artificial ramparts were not discovered by modern archaeologists until they started using satellite images of the land, because today the earthworks often are submerged in jungle and thus very difficult to see from ground level. The earthworks included complex irrigation channels and raised fields, often hewn from reclaimed swampland. The Maya dredged nutrient-rich soil from the bottoms of the irrigation ditches to fertilize fields that they raised above the flood level of the rainy season. The fields were so rich that they produced several crops a year to feed the people of the urban ceremonial centers.

The discovery of complex agricultural earthworks among the Maya caused scholars to question earlier assumptions that the Maya had practiced slash-and-burn agriculture that was said to have deforested the land, exhausted and eroded the topsoil, and played a role in the collapse of the "classic" age of the Maya. Today, the collapse of the Maya is usually ascribed not to deforestation caused by agriculture, but to ecological damage and social disorganization caused by escalating warfare between city-states. Not all of the Mayas' earthworks were constructed to aid agriculture. Some ramparts were defensive, and, as war became more common and deadly, the Mayas' complex agricultural system suffered immensely.

Pueblo Agriculture: Water Is Life

About the same time that the Mayan civilization collapsed, the ancestors of today's Pueblos were building a corn-based culture in the Chaco Canyon of present-day New Mexico. The Pueblos of the Rio Grande are cultural and economic inheritors of the Mogollon, Ancestral Puebloan, and Hohokam communities to the west and southwest of the upper Rio Grande Valley. The cultivation of corn was introduced into the area about 3000 BCE. About 2000 BCE, beans and squash were added. Cotton later became a third staple crop.

Also about 2,000 years ago, irrigation was introduced to supplement dry farming in the area. The

Pueblos used brief, heavy precipitation to advantage by constructing some of their irrigation works at the bases of steep cliffs that collected runoff. The residents of this area constructed roads that often ran for hundreds of miles to provide a way to share food surpluses; if one pueblo had a bad harvest, others would make it up. The cultivation of corn in Chaco Canyon supported a civilization that constructed the largest multifamily dwellings in North America. Such a high degree of agricultural organization supported a culture that dominated the turquoise trade in the area. Turquoise was important as a liquid asset, a medium of trade. Pueblo centers such as Pueblo Bonito became centers of trade, manufacturing, and ceremony.

The vital role of water and irrigation in Pueblo agriculture is illustrated by the fact that the great classic Pueblo civilizations were destroyed by a drought so severe that not even ingenious water management could cope with it. In the thirteenth century, residents abandoned most Pueblo settlements outside the Rio Grande Valley after fifty years of nearly rainless drought that destroyed their agricultural base.

Following the Spanish colonization of New Mexico, access to water became a crucial cause for conflict. Land without water is worthless in the arid Southwest. Paradoxically, the Pueblos in 1680 used the waters of the Rio Grande to defeat the Spanish; they staged their revolt while the river was flooding to keep Spanish reinforcements out.

The irrigation of farmland is the key factor in Pueblo agricultural land use. To plan, construct, and maintain elaborate land systems, cooperation between several villages was crucial. The irrigation systems needed routine maintenance that rendered clans inefficient, so nonkinship associations were created to cope with the work. This organizational framework had other community functions, and it revolved primarily around the spiritual life of the Pueblos. The basic rationale for the nonkinship associations was irrigation, however.

The Importance of Corn

Corn, the major food source for several agricultural peoples across the continent, enjoyed a special spiritual significance. Corn and beans (which grow well together because beans, a legume, fix nitrogen in their roots) were often said to maintain a spiritual union. Some peoples, such as the Omahas of the eastern Great Plains, "sang up" their corn through special rituals. Some groups cleaned their storage bins before the harvest, "so the corn would be happy when they brought it in" (Brandon, 1961, 116). The Pawnees grew ten varieties of corn, including one (called holy or wonderful corn) that was used only for religious purposes and never eaten. The Man-dans had a Corn Priest who officiated at rites during the growing season. Each stage of the corn's growth was associated with particular songs and rituals, and spiritual attention was said to be as important to the corn as proper water, sun, and fertilizer. Among the Zuni, a newborn child was given an ear of corn at birth and endowed with a corn name. An ear of maize was put in the place of death as the heart of the deceased and later used as seed corn to begin the cycle of life anew. To Navajos, corn was as sacred as human life.

Corn is intertwined with the origin stories of many Native American peoples. The Pueblos say that corn was brought to them by Blue Corn Woman and White Corn Maiden, who emerged to the surface of the earth from a great underground kiva (sacred place). At birth, each infant is given the seed from an ear of corn as a fetish, to carry for life as a reminder that the Corn Mothers brought life to the Pueblos. The corn fetish has a practical side as well: Should a harvest completely fail for drought or other reasons, the fetishes may become the seed corn for the next crop.

Corn's biological name is Zea Mays, from which the name "maize" is derived. The first distant relatives of today's foot-long ears of corn were probably grown in central Mexico, in caves near Teotihuacan, about 7,000 years ago, from a wild grass called teosinte. Early corn was small, perhaps three to four inches long, with two rows of mismatched kernels. Utilization of corn spread to South America as well as to the Ancestral Puebloan country in present-day Arizona and New Mexico, first as a wild grain, then as an agricultural product, gradually gaining length and kernels along the way. Corn was firmly established as a staple in the Southwest by about 1,500 years ago. By 1,000 years ago, corn had spread over all of North and South America having the requisite warmth and growing season and had become a stable crop of many Native peoples across the hemisphere. As the use of maize spread north and south from Mexico, Native peoples domesticated hundreds of varieties and bred them selectively so that the edible kernels grew in size and numbers.

Corn was introduced in eastern North America shortly after the birth of Christ in the Old World (about 200) and had become a dominant food source across much of the region (from southern Ontario to northern Florida) by about 800. During this time, Native American farmers took part in the selective breeding of several strains of corn to increase production as well as hardiness in the face of freezes and drought. By 900, a major advance in breeding, commonly called flint or eastern eight row, secured corn's dominance of agricultural food production throughout the East because it was even hardier than earlier strains. The spread of corn as a staple crop did not reach its greatest extent until a hundred years before Columbus's first voyage.

When colonists arrived in eastern North America, many of the Native peoples they met farmed corn in large tracts. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, admired abandoned Native cornfields and declared that God had provided the epidemic that killed the people who had tended them as an act of divine providence, clearing the way for the Puritans. Native Americans taught the Puritans which seeds would grow in their territory. Most of the seeds that the Puritans had brought from England did not sprout when planted in the area that the colonists called "New England."

Corn also enhanced the role of agriculture in many Native American economies. The Iroquois' oral history, for example, holds that corn had a key role in establishing agriculture as a major economic enterprise. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) adopted corn as a staple crop and developed large-scale architecture shortly after 1000. Their ability to produce a surplus of corn played a role in the political influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which reached, through a chain of alliances, from their homelands in present-day upstate New York across much of New England and the Middle Atlantic regions.

The Iroquois' adoption of corn-based agriculture, along with cultivation of beans and squash (called the three sisters) played an important role in their adoption of a matrilineal social structure and a consensus-based political system. Before roughly the year 1000, the Iroquois were less prone to alliance and more frequently disposed to murder for revenge. An older confederacy to the north, probably the Wyandot (Huron), are said to have sent an emissary, Deganawidah, to persuade the Haudenosaunee to make peace with each other and outlaw the blood feud, which was threatening social stability.

Deganawidah and Hiawatha, the Mohawk cofounder of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, spent most of their adult lives persuading the feuding Haudenosaunee to accept their vision of peace. According to calculations by Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields, the Confederacy was finally accepted in 1142, within living memory.

Bruce E. Johansen

See also Adena Civilization; American Indian

Contributions to the World; Ancestral Puebloan Culture; Archaeology; Environment and Pollution; Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Political System; Hohokam Culture; Hopewell Culture; Mississippian Culture; Squanto; giving Holiday, Origins; Trade; Water Rights; Women in Native Woodlands Societies; Women of All Red Nations.

References and Further Reading

Ballantine, Betty and Ian. 1994. The Native Americans: An Illustrated History. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing.

Brandon, William. 1961. American Heritage Book of Indians. New York: Dell.

Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1992. God Is Red. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.

Dozier, Edward P. 1970. The Pueblo Indians of North America. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Grinde, Donald A., Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen. 1995. Ecocide of Native America. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers.

Hughes, J. Donald. 1983. American Indian Ecology. El Paso: Texas Western Press.

Iverson, Peter. 1992. "Taking Care of the Earth and Sky." In America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus. Edited by Alvin Josephy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sando, Joe S. 1976. The Pueblo Indians. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press.

American Indian Contributions to the World

For many years, immigrants to the continent they came to call North America studied history as if they had shaped its First Peoples—it was their westward movement, their religion, their civilization, their conquest. Often left unexamined until recent years are the many ways in which the more recent immigrants absorbed Native foods, sports, and social and politi-

Cal ideas. Assertions also have been made that Indian contributions helped shape non-Native folksongs, the locations for railroads and highways, ways of dying cloth, and even bathing habits (Frachtenberg, 1915, 64-69; Edwards, 1934, 255-272).

The U. S. Army did more than subjugate the Plains Indians. As troops chased the Lakota, they also learned from them. Many Plains people used sign language, their smoke signals could be seen for many miles in open country, and the Sioux later devised a system of signaling by mirrors. The Army adopted some of these signaling systems (in some cases, symbol-bearing blankets became flags), and they became the basis of the techniques used in the modern U. S. Army Signal Corps.

Even after more than five centuries in America, non-Natives are still discovering the lands and inhabitants of a place their ancestors called the New World. Felix Cohen, author of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law, a basic reference in that field, compared Native American influence on immigrants from abroad to the ways in which the Greeks shaped Roman culture: "When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. What the Roman historians did not see was that captive Greece would take captive conquering Rome [with] Greek science [and] Greek philosophy. . ." (Cohen, 1952, 180). Cohen wrote that American historians had too often paid attention to military victories and changing land boundaries, while failing to see that "in agriculture, in government, in sport, in education, and in our views of nature and our fellow men, it is the first Americans who have taken captive their battlefield conquerors" (Cohen, 1952, 180). American historians "have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," Cohen asserted. In his view, "[t]he real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man" (Cohen, 1952, 180).

Cohen published his essay in 1952. His idea was not invented by a new generation of scholars, however. It was being rediscovered. Such an understanding had always existed, as evidenced by a letter that the poet Walt Whitman wrote to the Santa Fe City Council in 1883, four years after General Pratt started his Carlisle School under the slogan "Kill the Indian and save the Man" (i. e., "assimilate or die"). "As to our aboriginal or Indian population. . . ," wrote Whitman, "I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank." He continued: "But I am not at all clear about that. As America develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we to see it cheerfully accepting. . . all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones distinctly its own?" (Moquin, 1973, 5-6).

Many borrowings are indirect and so deeply engrained in present-day culture that we have forgotten, for the most part, where they came from. The word "tuxedo," for example, is anglicized from the Delaware (Leni Lenape) word for wolf, p'tuksit. Neither wolves nor most American Indians wore tuxedos when this borrowing took place during the 1880s, of course. The tuxedo was first worn in a New York village by the name of Tuxedo, however. In our time a "tux" is taken to be very conventional dress, but, in the 1880s, young men wore it as an alternative to the older fashion of jackets with tails.

An Encyclopedia of Borrowings

An entire encyclopedia devoted to this idea is evidence that the idea of two-way communication has reached a degree of maturity in the academy. Such an idea has brought us a long way from the boarding school days of forced one-way acculturation. As its title suggests, Keoke and Porterfield's Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World is the first attempt to compile a wide array of such material under one cover. It is a wide-ranging effort, one that may surprise even the most diligent student of ways in which Native American cultures have shaped others worldwide.

The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World is a groundbreaking compilation of Native American contributions to sciences, technology, foods, lifeways, government, and other aspects of history and modern life. It is also, at the same time, a monument to cultural amalgamation, a reminder that everything ultimately finds itself mixed with everything else. This was as true 500 years ago as it is in today's world of accelerated communication and transportation. Consider "Indian" (that is, Indian as in the subcontinent) curry. The spices that comprise it actually began as a chili in what is now Brazil. They were transported to India by Portuguese seafarers and then mixed with Asian spices to produce the mixture we know today. Democracy developed similarly: a piece from Greece, a dash from Rome, a sprinkle of Iroquois

Law, all brought together in a common porridge of English legal precedent, spoken now in English, and often served to the world as a uniquely American tradition. One wonders what the Italians ate before tomato sauce, what the Irish consumed before potatoes, and what Jewish celebrants of Hanukkah used in lieu of potatoes for their latkes.

The idea of playing a game with a bouncing ball is indigenous to the Americas, particularly to Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs and Mayas played a game that had the attributes of basketball, American football, and soccer. Europeans had no rubber before Columbus and thus no rubber balls. The Olmecs, who lived in the Yucatan Peninsula, invented a way to treat raw latex to make usable items from rubber. They used it to make balls, soles for sandals, hollow bulbs for syringes, and waterproofed ponchos. This process was similar to vulcanization, which was patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844. Many present-day ball games share both European and American Indian precedents. Baseball, for example, shares attributes of English cricket and a Choctaw game.

Many of Native America's contributions have become so familiar for so long that many of us have forgotten their origins. When we "sleep on it," for example, we forget that we are invoking an Iroquois custom, in which chiefs in council are implored to let at least one night intervene before making important decisions. The passage of time was said to allow the various members of a Haudenosaunee council to attain unanimity—"one mind"—necessary for the consensual solution of a problem. Similarly, to "bury the hatchet" refers to the Iroquois practice of sequestering weapons under the Great Tree of Peace.

Native American Sciences

Pre-Colombian American Indian astronomers (notably the Maya) used a sophisticated system to calculate celestial events such as solar eclipses. The Maya also created calendar systems that were based on detailed observations of the sun and moon. Mayan astronomers' observations were so accurate that by the fifth century they had calculated a year's length to within a few minutes of today's calendars.

Keoke and Porterfield assert that indigenous Americans employed technology that was, in some respects, more advanced than non-Native techniques. They write, for example, that American Indian metallurgists invented electroplating of metals hundreds of years before its discovery in Europe. The Moche, who lived on the coast of northern Peru, utilized electroplating between 200 BCE and 600 CE. Europeans did not discover the process of electroplating until Sir Humphrey Davy's experiments during the late 1700s (Keoke and Porterfield, 2002, 98).

Native Medicines in the Pharmacopoeia of the United States

Several American Indian medicines have come into use among European-Americans. By the late twentieth century, more than 200 drugs first used by American Indians were listed in the United States Pharmacopoeia, an official listing of all effective medicines and their uses. These include quinine, laxatives, muscle relaxants, and nasal remedies, as well as several dozen drugs and herbal medicines. To this day, scientists are discovering more beneficial drugs in plants once known only to Native Americans. One reason that many people are concerned at the demise of the Amazon rainforests is that such destruction could keep us from learning more about the Native American uses of plants there.

Native Americans in the North American Northeast used foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) to treat heart problems. They administered it with extreme care because high doses were needed and the plant is highly toxic. Keoke and Porterfield maintain that pre-contact American Indian healers had developed a sophisticated system of medical treatment compared to European healers of the time, who relied on bloodletting, blistering, and religious penance, as well as concoctions of lead, arsenic, and cow dung to treat disease. In addition to performing surgery, American Indians from several culture groups understood the importance of keeping wounds sterile and used botanical antiseptics. They made syringes out of bird bones and animal bladders to administer plant medicine.

Native peoples in the Americas had developed so many botanical medications by the time of contact that the Spanish King Philip II sent physician Francisco Hernando to the Americas in 1570 to record Aztec medical knowledge and bring it back to Europe. As early as 1635, after less than a generation in America, English colonists were using herbal medicines introduced to them by the Native peoples. "A Relation of Maryland," written to give prospective immigrants information on the new colony, included this passage:

This Countrey affords naturally, many excellent things for Physicke and Surgery, the perfect use of which, the English cannot yet learne from the Natives: They have a roote which is an excellent preservative against Pyson, called by the English the Snake roote. Other herbes and rootes they have wherewith they cure all manners of wounds; also Saxafras, Gummes, and Balsum. An Indian seeing one of the English, much troubled with the tooth-ake, fetched of the roote of a tree, and gave the party some of it to hold in his mouth, and it eased the pain presently (Birchfield,

1997, 5: 705-706).

By the eighteenth century, European-American observers, many of them missionaries, were compiling lists of Native herbal remedies, some of which were published in several European languages. One of these lists carried to Europe the knowledge that the bark of a particular tree that grows in North America could alleviate toothache. The Canada shrubby elder could be used to combat agues and inflammations. The Jalap root could be used as a laxative and also to relieve the pain of rheumatism; the Ipecacaunha also functioned as an enematic, as well as an antidote to snakebite. Peter Kalm, the Swedish botanist, visited the Middle Atlantic states between 1748 and 1750 to catalogue Native medicinal herbs.

Captain John Smith learned through Pocahan-tas that her people applied a root that she called wighsacan to wounds for its healing power. John Lawson, visiting the Carolinas about 1700, observed that Natives there chewed a root (which he did not name) to soothe stomach ailments. European observers also wrote of Indians who committed suicide by eating certain roots and mushrooms. William Penn wrote that a Delaware woman who had been betrayed by her husband "went out, plunk't a Root out of the Ground, and ate it, upon which she immediately died" (Birchfield, 1997, 5: 706). Native peoples often warned Europeans which plants, if eaten, could make them ill, produce skin rashes, or kill them. In some cases, Native peoples also provided antidotes. The Delaware, for example, dealt with the rash produced by contact with poison sumac by preparing a tea from the inner bark of the sour gum tree, which gave off a distinctive odor that caused Native peoples to compare it to raw fish.

Some Native plant remedies became popular among Europeans based on their biological record, while others took Europe by storm on the basis of unsupported health claims. Use of sassafras root (the "saxafras" in the "Relation of Maryland) was noted as early as Shakespeare's time. The use of sassafras tea spread throughout Europe as a general health tonic, and a trading network grew up across the Atlantic specializing in its harvest, sale, and transport. At about the same time, all sorts of extravagant claims were being made for the tonic effects of tobacco that now do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Tobacco was said to aid digestion, cure toothaches, kill nits and lice, and even stop coughing. The advocates of tobacco seemed to draw their advice from Native peoples who often used tobacco as a ceremonial herb and who only very rarely became addicted to nicotine.

Tobacco was one of many herbal weapons in the arsenal of Native "medicine men," or shamans, across the continent. The role of the medicine man had no direct counterpart in Europe. The various Native names for the persons who performed these functions can be translated as shaman, juggler, conjurer, sorcerer, priest, and physician, as well as medicine man. Even the translation of Native words that correspond to "medicine" in English can be tricky, because Western culture has no single term that incorporates all the aspects of the shaman's work. Whereas "medicine" in English connotes the treatment of a disease with a drug or other specific remedy, a medicine man was a spiritualist, as well as a person who had learned the basics of physical medicine and herbal cures. Native shamans combined the art of mental suggestion with physical cures as well; the mental attitude of the "patient" was often considered as important as any physical cure. The casting of spells (and other kinds of sorcery) had as much to do with a person's state of mind as with physical and biological reactions.

Most Native American peoples used the byproducts of animals, as well as plants, for medicinal and cosmetic purposes. English immigrants in Virginia and Massachusetts learned early that an emollient of bear grease allowed Native people to range in the woods wearing a minimum of clothing on hot summer days without being bitten by mosquitoes and other stinging insects. Goose grease and bear fat were widely used as hair dressings, and skunk oil was sometimes applied to the chest and throat to relieve the symptoms of colds, including chest congestion. The Delawares sometimes slowed the flow of blood from a cut by inserting

Spider webs, which probably helped with the clotting of blood.

Witch hazel is a commonly used Native botanical remedy that has been adopted generally by nonNatives in America. Used as a first-aid treatment for insect bites and cuts, witch hazel is the distilled extract of the witch hazel bush combined with alcohol. The shrub grows commonly in the eastern United States; its leaves were boiled and applied to bites and cuts by many Native peoples in that area. The root and leaves of the wintergreen contain methyl salicy-

Late, which is used today in creams and in other forms to treat rheumatic pain, muscular aches, and similar ailments. Salicylic acid is the main active ingredient of aspirin, probably the most widely used relief for minor pain in modern times. The inner bark of the white pine (the national symbol of the Iroquois Confederacy) today is used in cough syrups. Terpin hydrate, a prescription drug used to treat coughs and colds, is derived from the sap of pine trees (turpentine). The Indians also were the first people to utilize caffeine as a stimulant.

American Gold and European Capitalism

Jack Weatherford's Indian Givers (1988) takes the influence of Native American contributions to European capitalism beyond individual products. It begins with the birth of money capitalism, fueled by Indian gold and silver, which provided the necessary capital for the rise of industrial capitalism. Spain, England, and France did not set out to America as empires. Each acquired much of its riches in America and elsewhere around the world.

England's industrial revolution provoked urbanization, which also created a need for an agricultural revolution to feed the populations of burgeoning cities. Weatherford argues that, without Native American corn, potatoes, and other crops, many increasingly urbanized Europeans could have starved to death. Some scholars may argue that Weatherford has something of an intellectual love affair with the potato. How greatly any one contribution shaped history as a whole often has been a point of departure for debate. Regardless of possible differences regarding emphasis, Weatherford makes his point for the appreciation of Native precedents.

In Weatherford's Native Roots (1991), ancient Native ingenuity is described in ways that bear on present-day problems. Read, for example, how the Ancestral Puebloans fashioned their dwellings to take advantage of passive solar energy, as well as the shading of overhanging cliffs, blunting the seasonal extremes of the Southwest and reducing the amount of precious firewood they had to burn. Weatherford also describes how the Inuit created a kayak that fits its occupant like a wetsuit, a boat so watertight that its occupant can turn upside down, then right side up again, without getting wet.

Ideas of Freedom

Europe didn't discover America, but America was quite a discovery for Europe. For roughly three centuries before the American Revolution, the ideas that made the American Revolution possible were being discovered, nurtured, and embellished in the growing English and French colonies of North America. America provided a counterpoint for European convention and assumption. It became, for Europeans in America, at once a dream and a reality, a fact and a fantasy, the real and the ideal. To appreciate how European eyes were opened on the "New World," we must take that phrase literally, with the excitement evoked in our own time by stories of travel to other planets. There was one electrifying difference: The voyagers of that time knew that their New World was inhabited. They had only to look and learn, to drink in the bewildering newness and enchanting novelty of seeing it all for the first time.

The idea of personal equality in the societies of many Native peoples pervades both of Weatherford's books, especially as he contrasts Native concepts of liberty with European notions of hierarchy. Weatherford sometimes describes architecture to make his point: nowhere did Native peoples of the Americas create the cathedrals or palaces commissioned by European elites. Instead, the Ancestral Puebloans (for example) built relatively comfortable housing for the average person that European peasants might have envied. In the world of ideas, liberty and equality have a long American lineage: Over time and space, the roomy homes of the Ancestral Puebloans could be imagined as the precursor of Jefferson's freehold farmer in his snug log cabin and the tract housing suburbs of modern-day American urban areas. Could it be argued that the Ancestral Puebloans helped create the type of housing that characterizes the "American dream"?

Europeans didn't bring liberty and prosperity to America; they sought it here, meanwhile forcing on Native people its antithesis—slavery and indentured servitude. Weatherford, in Native Roots, reveals that Native Americans were forced into slavery in large numbers. The Spanish, French, and English all enslaved Native peoples. Indeed, the name of Labrador, for example, may have been handed down from a Portuguese term for "slave coast," Weatherford writes (1991, 138).

Who Invented Scalping and Introduced Syphilis?

Keoke and Porterfield also weigh into the debate regarding who invented scalping. Their verdict: Native Americans didn't do it. They rely on precontact records indicating that Europeans took scalps centuries before they offered money for Native American scalps. This book describes the practice as a well-established tradition for Europeans as early as 440 years before the common era, when the Greek historian Herodotus noted the practice. Much later, according to the authors of this book, the English paid bounties for Irish scalps because scalps were easier to transport and store than entire heads. They display records indicating