Indigenous Peoples Resources: Historical Context

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Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas, a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago. In fact, by the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the area that would become the United States. As time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed south and east, adapting as they went. In order to keep track of these diverse groups, anthropologists and geographers have divided them into “culture areas,” or rough groupings of contiguous peoples who shared similar habitats and characteristics. Most scholars break North America—excluding present-day Mexico—into 10 separate culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau.

On November 29, 1864 members of the Colorado Territory militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village in the southeastern part of the Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were killed, the majority of which were women, children, and the elderly.

On a Monday in early August I find myself spooning soil from Geronimo’s grave at a prisoner of war cemetery in Oklahoma into a double ziplock bag I bought at Target. I will carry this soil, by car and bus, to Guachochi, a provincial Mexican town in the Sierra Madre Occidental. There, three Mexican sisters who recently traced their ancestry to this famous Apache medicine man are about to hold a Ceremonia del Perdón—a Ceremony of Forgiveness. The soil is my gift to them.

Native American cultures in the United States include a wide array of socially and geographically diverse groups, whose nomadic ancestors are believed to have traveled via a long-gone land bridge across the Bering Strait at least 13,000 years ago. Displaced and often persecuted by European explorers and the settlers that followed, Native Americans have struggled to maintain their ancestral practices, while increasing their representation in American political and cultural life.