*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Click here to help improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

Millions of Indigenous people called the Americas home long before Europeans arrived and labeled North and South America the “New World.” While new to Europeans, this land had inhabitants for millennia before colonization. By the time Europeans crossed the Atlantic, Native people spoke hundreds of languages, built diverse political systems, created cultures adapted to hundreds of distinct environments—human beings lived and loved and lost. Kinship ties knit ancient Indigenous communities together over distance, time, and space. Each community possessed unique art forms and spiritual practices and participated in extensive trade networks where they exchanged items such as salt, pottery, shell jewelry, and even bison meat. Political units ranged from small family units to vast empires. These continents teemed with life. Massive piles of discarded material, including shells, testify to past ways of living.¹ Other communities were careful to leave no trace.

Because there was no mention of North America or its peoples in the Bible, many Europeans were confused by its existence. Spanish missionary José de Acosta (1540–1600) was puzzled over where the continent’s Indigenous people had originated. Even more puzzling were the diverse kinds of peoples and cultures that the Europeans encountered. When the Spanish arrived in 1519, Tenochtitlán—later Mexico City—rivaled the world’s largest cities.² The Spanish could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perhaps 250,000 people, all built on a lake and connected by causeways and canals. Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo later recalled, “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments.”³ What was foreign for these new arrivals had emerged over vast stretches of time. The origins of America begin with its first inhabitants and their many cultures, polities, and lives.

II. First Americans

Indigenous peoples recount origin stories in the form of maps, inscriptions, paintings, wampum belts, or other weavings. Other historic tales are told through dances, songs, or story cycles told on specific occasions.⁴ All transmit sacred knowledge of previous generations to the ears of current-day listeners.⁵ The many different creation stories reflect the diversity found within Indigenous cultures and polities. These stories serve as both history and testaments to the power and endurance of these communities.

The origin stories of land, plants, and animal relatives are equally important as are the stories of human emergence, as they teach about the interconnectedness of all beings. Cherokee people explain that long ago, before humans, the Sky World was inhabited only by animals such as Rabbit, Bear, and Possum, which were much bigger than they are now. When Sky World became too crowded, all the animals gathered in council and decided to explore the waters below to look for land. Only Dayunisi, the Water Beetle, could dive deep enough to bring up mud from the Under World to make an in-between world, Elohi, where everyone could live.⁶ According to a Lenape (Delaware) tradition, the Earth was made when Sky Woman fell down to the watery world and, with the help of Beaver, Goose, and Muskrat, landed safely on the back of the Great Turtle. Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people teach that Sky Woman brought Tobacco and Strawberry with her from Sky World; as she danced, the clay under her feet expanded to become the Earth. This is Turtle Island, or North America.

Indigenous American stories hold thousands of years of information, and most are specific to the places from which they come. For example, Utes explain how the Creator once gave Coyote a bag of sticks with instructions not to open it until he reached the mountains. When Coyote disobeyed, people came streaming out, speaking many different languages. Coyote closed the bag again and took it to the mountains, where the Ute people were the last to emerge.⁷

Some stories recount how people came into existence through the process of migration. For example, Anishinaabe families place their origins on the waters of the Northeast but tell of being led by a megis (white shell) to their homelands where food grows on water. That food was manoomin (wild rice). Traveling by canoe and dogsled, the Anishinaabe family paused in seven different places, including on a turtle-shaped island and at the rapids of Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie), where Great Beaver built a dam between Lakes Huron and Superior.⁸ At this place, the Confederacy of the Three Fires was born: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi.⁹

Indigenous stories of creation and migration, passed down from generation to generation, contain remembrances and instructions for relationships, obligations, and ways of being. They also speak to understandings of power and connection. Kinship relationships, in particular, have enabled the adaptation to changing environments and the preservation of this complex history.¹⁰ Whether emerging from the earth, water, or sky; formed by a creator; or migrating from elsewhere, current-day Indigenous American communities recount histories in America that date long before human memory.

III. Beginnings and Arrivals

Conventionally, archaeologists, anthropologists, and climatologists have focused on migration histories and excavation sites to understand America’s past. By studying pottery fragments, tree rings, genetic signatures, or ice cores, for example, they have constructed a story that claims the Americas were once a “new world” for all. These scholars’ ancestors—the majority of whom arrived in the Americas over the last five centuries—assert a different kind of timeline for human presence on the continent, one that is not without its own historical and political context.¹¹

On many points, Western and traditional Indigenous knowledge sources converge. Oral, linguistic, ecological, archaeological, and genetic evidence illustrates a great deal of diversity, with numerous groups migrating, settling, and traveling, potentially from many different points of origin, over thousands of years.¹² Results from combined archaeological, linguistic, and climatic data, for example, emphasize the arrival of two distinct yet diverse ancient “founding” populations from what is currently Siberia in Asia. Western scientists estimate that these people arrived along the Pacific coast between 24,000 and 15,000 years ago. Around 1,000 years later, overland arrivals began, followed by more coastal migration around 12,000 years ago.¹³

Low sea levels exposed the continental shelf along the northern Pacific Rim, an area called Beringia, named after the waters of the Bering Strait that would later flood it. This was an open area of exposed sea floor stretching over six hundred miles across, which hosted different species of grasses and other low vegetation. Giant fauna grazed across the volcanic steppe-tundra landscape, crossing back and forth between the places now called Siberia and Alaska.¹⁴ North of the Bering Strait, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which crosses the central and eastern Siberian Arctic, was also a potential route for transarctic crossings.¹⁵

Indigenous ancestors took advantage of the lower sea levels to navigate along and between the Pacific Rim islands, following the currents and marine life, to arrive on the Northwest Coast of North America—then a 2,500-mile stretch of ice from the Bering Strait to current-day Washington State.¹⁶ There is evidence of early landings and migrations elsewhere as well. For example, fossilized human footprints at White Sands National Park, in what is now called New Mexico, point to humans walking there 23,000 years ago.¹⁷

As the climate became increasingly warmer and wetter, about 19,000 years ago, glaciers around the globe began to melt. Ice sheets up to two miles thick experienced cycles of freezing and thawing, creating new landscapes with new lakes and valleys. Vast amounts of melted freshwater flowed into the oceans, raising sea levels and creating new waterways. The warming planet and glacial terrain meant that ice-free lands could host new plant, animal, and human life.¹⁸ Some Indigenous travelers followed their four-legged relatives onto these newly dry lands.

Around 16,000 years ago, Indigenous navigators crossed the seas and voyaged along the largely unobstructed and island-rich Pacific coast, settling where local ecosystems permitted. As these skilled ancestors piloted the ocean waves and inlets, they located coves and rivers with plentiful fish, shellfish, and other marine gifts, as well as pathways further inland.¹⁹

In the coastal Pacific Northwest, Native groups lived alongside salmon-filled rivers and celebrated the generosity of nut-bearing trees. They used nets, dams, and traps to fish, and then dried or smoked their caches. At Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, people fished, hunted whales and seals, and traveled in cedar log canoes.²⁰ As sea levels rose, some Indigenous ancestors moved inland to escape the floodwaters and find new food sources.

On the tundra, plains, and prairies, hunting communities followed caribou and bison herds, moving according to seasonal patterns. Following great riverways also led inland: the Columbia and the Snake in the Northwest, for example, lead to the headwaters of the Upper Missouri Basin in the mountains of today’s Montana and Wyoming, and the waters flow from there to the Lower Missouri and Mississippi. In the Southwest, archaeological evidence points to settlements in Central Texas around 14,500 years ago.²¹ At this time, coastal Mid-Atlantic forests would have comprised a rich ecozone of grasslands with a mixed variety of coniferous and deciduous trees, including spruce, pine, birch, and oak.²² Evidence also records human settlement off what is now Maryland’s Eastern Shore on Parson’s Island around 14,500 years ago, as well. Further south, the shallow wetlands of the Gulf Coastal Plains served then, as now, as a rich biome for waterfowl and aquatic life, and provided a myriad of ways to navigate the region, whether on foot or by dugout canoe.²³

Archaeologists believe the Na Dene, the ancestors of the Apache and Navajo (or Diné), traveled the Bering Strait between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE, in small bands of hunter-gatherers, before eventually traveling to what would be the American Southwest.²⁴ Archaeological evidence indicates that around 3000 BCE, the next wave of migrators were the ancestors of the Aleut and Inuit peoples, who would eventually relocate to the Aleutian and Pribilof islands of current-day Alaska.²⁵

These were times of rapid change that required adaptability, careful observation, and skill to respond to extreme climates. The Great Plains provided grazing areas for large animals like bison and mammoths, while the colder weather further north opened areas perfect for other midsize mammals, like caribou. Despite the disappearance of most megafauna by this time, the abundant fish and wildlife—such as bear, deer, possum, rabbit, raccoon, and squirrel—as well as nut trees and berries made for accessible food sources.²⁶ Indigenous hunters developed sophisticated techniques for hunting bison and caribou in drives, which required the cooperation of large groups rather than the efforts of individuals or small bands.²⁷ Those large animals that survived the end of the glacial age—bison, caribou, elk, moose, pronghorn, mountain goat, mountain sheep, and muskox—were hunted seasonally and socially, providing more opportunities for family, cultural, and material exchanges.²⁸ These people built social and political arrangements to coordinate hunting and to organize their relationships.

Before the end of the last glacial cycle—a period about 11,700 years ago—Indigenous ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands; some traveled in small, nimble bands while other groups seasonally expanded into larger communities with more developed political structures. In mountains, prairies, deserts, and forests, the cultures and polities of America’s first peoples were as varied as the continent’s geography. Indigenous peoples made their lives alongside the rest of the beings in their environments, moving and changing according to their own desires and needs. As the climate began to stabilize around 6,000 years ago, Indigenous communities began to leave behind more physical traces of their presence on the land. By the medieval warm period (around 950 CE), Indigenous communities found it easier to increasingly turn to agriculture to meet both their nutrition needs and to help maintain political structures. Agriculture made settlement and the creation of cities possible, and Indigenous leaders seized on the possibilities of agriculture to secure their power. By the end of the fifteenth century, Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere would reach one hundred million, with two-fifths in North America. Meanwhile, the population of Europe was only around fifty million.²⁹

IV. Continent-Wide Changes

In the Mississippi Valley, Indigenous ancestors long enjoyed abundant fish and wildlife along the river. Rivers and streams that fed the Mississippi slowed, allowing silt to build up, creating the rich alluvial plains that would later be known as the American Bottomlands renowned for its agricultural potential.³⁰ Moreover, as the weather extremes that had characterized so much of early Indigenous life abated, summers became longer and rain more predictable. As a result, people who had mainly been foragers, hunters, and fisherfolk found it more feasible to cultivate domesticated plants. These choices made by Indigenous leaders had considerable social and political implications. Indigenous women especially contributed to the growth of agriculture as they learned to domesticate wild plants and cultivate new ones.³¹

Some communities developed what has been called the Eastern Agricultural Complex, where wild plant relatives were selected and managed into larger and more dependable crops. Others continued to practice mixed and seasonally dependent ways of making their lives by combining the gathering of wild foods, hunting, and fishing, with deliberate cultivation. Today, 10,000-year-old bottle-gourd seeds in Florida tell of the people who carefully tended and harvested the crop.³² Further south, evidence of some of the earliest plants to be grown has been found in the caves of current-day Mexico. There, preserved ancient specimens of chili peppers, avocados, prickly pear cactus, squash, beans, and maize reveal what the community members were growing. Indigenous farmers also supplemented their diet with rabbit, deer, fish, and other wild relatives.

Agriculture served a variety of political structures. Ancestors of the Menominee created an agricultural site called Anaem Omot in northern Wisconsin around 1000 CE that served individual families in a largely decentralized egalitarian society. Corn, climbing beans, and winter squash were grown intensively on raised fields.³³ Other communities used agriculture to enable larger, more hierarchical political structures.

The Maya in modern-day Mexico and Central America were the first to care for a species of wild grasses to cultivate into maize (corn) as early as 8,700 years ago.³⁴ These farmers identified, observed, and selected the largest and hardiest of these plants, pollinating them until their kernels and stalks grew bigger, taller, and stronger, eventually creating a plant similar to the corn we know today. Knowledge held by one Indigenous community eventually found its way to others, and maize spread to the Gulf coast area around 6,000 years ago. It was high in caloric content, easily dried and stored, and, on Mesoamerica’s warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be harvested twice a year. Maize required complex irrigation systems, leading to further agriculture development even in the more arid climates of North America.³⁵

At what is now called Watson Brake, Louisiana, 5,400 years ago Indigenous peoples began creating possibly the oldest monumental earthen architecture on the continent.³⁶ The structure comprises eleven earthworks connected by ridges into an oval formation that is nearly nine hundred feet across. The sophistication and precision involved in these projects speak to cultural creativity, technical expertise, and political coordination. In addition to hunting deer, fishing, and foraging for nuts, the people also raised some of the earliest wild crops on the continent: goosefoot, knotweed, and marsh elder. Other foodstuffs eventually domesticated in the Mississippi River Valley included sunflowers and gourds.³⁷

Later in northeastern Louisiana, Indigenous travelers and traders began to work on an immense space of public architecture known as Poverty Point. Over a period of six hundred years, people used basketfuls of dirt to create a complex of concentric, crescent-shaped earthworks that aligned with celestial configurations. This sacred geometry, carried out with the help of an extremely accurate measurement system based on equilateral triangles, was later used across the eastern Mississippi Valley. Although hundreds of people lived among the earthworks, the site seems to have been most important as a place of trade: artifacts and stone materials recovered there have come from as far as eight hundred miles away—from the Appalachian Mountains to the hills of Iowa. Artisans decorated stone and ceramic pieces with images of owls, other birds, and panthers. Rather than a farming community, the people at Poverty Point gathered nuts, seeds, and wild fruits; they fished and hunted turtles, deer, and alligators. The residents also used “cooking balls,” small clay spheres that when heated and covered could be used to cook meat.

Around 4,500 years ago, in the area along the current borderlands of southwestern Texas and northwestern Coahuila, artists in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands painted scenes in red, black, yellow, and white on the walls of rock shelters and shallow caves. This rock art, featuring panthers, deer, human figures, serpents, and geometric shapes, holds stories and knowledge sacred to the peoples of this place, and is a reminder of their presence today.

In those days, bison ranged across much of the continent but concentrated on the Great Plains, the largest grassland in North and South America. A warming climate led to a longer bison breeding season and the expansion of short-grass prairie—perfect for bison sustenance—even during periodic drought. Roughly 4,800 years ago, Indigenous peoples began making pemmican, a food consisting of pounded and dried bison meat mixed with fat and berries. Pemmican is particularly suited to seasonally mobile lifestyles because it serves as a complete, portable, and lasting energy source.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingits, Haidas, and hundreds of other communities speaking dozens of languages thrived in a land with a moderate climate, lush forests, and many rivers. They depended on salmon for survival, and this important relative was treated with respect. Its image represented prosperity, life, and renewal: salmon images decorated and continue to decorate poles, baskets, canoes, oars, and other tools. Each season, as salmon were spotted for the first time, the Coastal Salish people and others celebrated the First Salmon Ceremony.³⁸ Sustainable harvesting practices ensured the survival of salmon populations. Massive cedar canoes, as long as fifty feet and carrying as many as twenty men, also enabled extensive fishing expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, where skilled fishermen caught halibut, sturgeon, and other fish, sometimes hauling thousands of pounds in a single canoe.³⁹

Around 3,200 years ago, in the highlands of the regions now called Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, Olmec people were growing maize along with avocado, cacao, beans, squash, and yucca.⁴⁰ Olmec people made rubber balls from the latex of the local rubber tree, which they used in a ball game that became popular across the Mesoamerican region. Besides the ball game, Olmec society produced many other notable inventions. They developed the Long Count Calendar, which was among the first mathematical expressions of the concept of zero and would be used later by the Maya. Olmecs developed a writing system more advanced than those in Europe at the time. Their artwork included colossal busts made from volcanic rock. These monumental stone sculptures often depicted rulers and weighed up to forty tons.⁴¹ The Olmec also carved masks and smaller figurines from greenstone, jade, and clay with distinct coffee-bean-shaped eyes. Their trade networks reached across the isthmus of Mexico, and their artistic styles were imitated for hundreds of years.

V. Political Change

With surplus food came the ability to support more people, necessitating newer, larger political structures. The Pacific Northwest became one of the most densely populated regions of North America. There, a unique social organization centered on elaborate feasts, called potlatches, developed. These potlatches celebrated births and weddings and determined social status. Hosts demonstrated their wealth and power by entertaining guests with food, artwork, and performances. The more the hosts gave away, the more prestige and power they had within the group. Some would save for decades to host an extravagant potlatch that would, in turn, give them greater respect and power within the community. Potlatches also served as a vehicle for political activity. Tlingit potlatches, for instance, can be understood as a way of managing conflicts, including competing land and resource claims, the selection of clan leaders, the establishment and reaffirmation of alliances, and resolving individual disputes.⁴²

With developments in agricultural technology came the ability—and need—for the centralization of large numbers of people. Agriculture flourished in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, an area known as the Eastern Woodlands, as well as irrigated areas of the Southwest. The hands required to maintain these crops were many, and some groups—such as the large population at Cahokia, a massive city in the Mississippi River Valley—relied on coerced labor made possible through extended empires. For others, food security enabled them to pursue artistic, administrative, and spiritual activities. It also enabled the growth of large advanced early societies, such as that at Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico, Cahokia along the Mississippi River, and ancestral Puebloan communities in the desert oasis areas of the Greater Southwest.

Maize arrived in the US Southwest from different parts of Mexico about 3,200 years ago, carried by travelers and by exchanging seeds along trade networks. It spread from there across the Great Plains to the eastern half of the continent over 2,000 years ago, reaching the far north about 1,000 years later.⁴³

Corn, however, did not become a dominant food source right away, but as a highly nutritious food, it continues to hold an important spiritual and cultural place in many Native communities. Hopi stories, for example, tell of Muingwu, the kachina spirit, who grew corn from his body, along with watermelon and squash; Kiché Maya recount that the maize god, Hun Hunahpu, mixed corn and water together to create the first humans; Penobscot stories explain that corn is a gift from the body of First Mother.⁴⁴

One of the largest of these corn-supported cities was Teotihuacán in current-day central Mexico, northeast of Mexico City. This community, which had a population of at least 25,000 people and likely more, was made up of neighborhoods populated by ethnically distinct groups of people who came from across Mesoamerica. One of the earliest influences of the sociopolitical integration of the Mesoamerican culture was the previously mentioned Olmec. The architecture in Teotihuacán included large pyramids, especially the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. Later Nahuatl-speaking peoples in Mexico, including the Aztecs and Toltecs, considered Teotihuacan the birthplace of the gods. After the long and slow fall of Teotihuacán, the Toltec rose to power, acquiring many skills from its descendants, including woven textiles, architecture, and astronomy. Buildings, sculptures, markets, libraries, and universities populated the Toltec cities. The Toltec continued a highly centralized, theocratic government, but the palace held more power than the temple. The extensive and rapid development of Toltec cities was made possible by a rather stable government based on the control of water.⁴⁵

In the Southwest, about 2,500 years ago, ancestors of current-day Pueblo people, sometimes called Hohokam (or Huhugam), invented sophisticated irrigation systems to raise crops in the desert near current-day Phoenix, Arizona. The canals they built with clay and digging sticks routed river water into their gardens, irrigating cotton fields as well as the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash. The canal system was more than eight hundred miles of trunk lines, with hundreds of miles of branches. The longest known canal measured twenty miles.⁴⁶

From 2,900 to 1,500 years ago, in the area now known as the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia, ancestors of Stó:lō–Coast Salish peoples lived on salmon, elk, and shellfish, as well as whales, seals, and sea otters that they hunted with hooks and harpoons from large canoes of red cedar. Indeed, many people of the Pacific Northwest built elaborate plank houses out of the region’s abundant cedar trees. The five-hundred-foot-long Suquamish Oleman House (or Old Man House), for instance, rested on the banks of Puget Sound.⁴⁷ Giant cedar trees were also carved and painted in the shape of animals or other figures to tell stories and express identities. These poles (later called totem poles by anthropologists) became the most recognizable art form of the Pacific Northwest, but people also carved masks and other wooden items, such as hand drums and rattles, out of the region’s great trees.

Indigenous communities across North America were connected by kin, politics, and culture, and sustained by long-distance trading routes. The Mississippi River, for example, served as an important trade artery, but all of the continent’s waterways were vital to transportation and communication. The community at Poverty Point (in what is currently Louisiana) had access to copper from present-day Canada and flint from modern-day Indiana. Sheets of mica found at the sacred Serpent Mound site near the Ohio River came from the Allegheny Mountains in the northeast, and obsidian from nearby earthworks originated from the Yellowstone River area near present-day Montana. Turquoise from the Greater Southwest could be found further south at Teotihuacan.

In the Southwest, ancestral Puebloan people, the Anasazi (sometimes referred to as Basketmakers), adapted to a wetter climate by growing corn and using the regional grasses to create beautifully woven baskets, mats, and sandals. They lived in the desert lowlands, largely in homes made of wood and adobe. Sophisticated irrigation practices, agriculture, extensive trading networks, and the domestication of animals like dogs and turkeys supported an expanding population. Earlier, Puebloan communities lived on the lowlands and built their homes on wooden posts.

As the climate warmed, however, more people began moving to the nearby mesas to escape the heat. As the climate dried out, many people followed the pinyon trees and animals, to find water for their crops and communities. In the highlands, communities switched from living in wooden pit houses to structures made of quarried stone embedded into cliffs, such as those at Chaco Canyon in present-day New Mexico. Some of these residential structures were massive, such as Pueblo Bonito, which housed hundreds of Puebloan people, stretched over two acres, and rose five stories high. Copper bells, turquoise decorations, and bright macaw feathers decorated its six hundred rooms.⁴⁸ Homes like those at Pueblo Bonito included a small dugout room, or kiva, which played an important role in a variety of ceremonies and served as the center for Puebloan life and culture. Additionally, Puebloan people carefully charted the stars and designed their homes in line with the path of the sun and moon.⁴⁹ Between 900 and 1300 CE, as many as 15,000 Pueblo people lived in the Chaco Canyon complex.⁵⁰ These individuals constructed intricate road systems spanning hundreds of miles that would connect communities and trade routes across the region.

Chaco Canyon inhabitants appear to have faced several ecological challenges, including a severe drought in 1130 CE that ultimately caused them to disperse into smaller settlements. However, Chaco remains a site of spiritual and cultural importance.

Similarly, in the Pacific Northwest, a persistent drought provoked change, and not just in terms of increased risk of forest fire. Less rain meant that salmon yields would be less predictable. These changes nudged networks away from rivers and toward overland trail systems.⁵¹ Root crops, especially camas bulbs, became particularly important in Salish communities as winter food. Camas prairies were tended and harvested with care followed by ceremony in the springtime. The prairies themselves were host to important medicine and edible plants. Frequent fires increased the availability of wildlife, berries, and other wild foods and medicines.

The same arid climate system affected the Mississippian peoples of the American Midwest and Southeast. Roughly one thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just east of modern-day St. Louis, peaked at a population of perhaps as many as 30,000 people. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. No city north of modern Mexico, in fact, would match Cahokia’s peak population levels until after the American Revolution. The city itself spanned 2,000 acres. The center was marked by what is known today as Monks Mound, a large earthen hill that rose ten stories high. Its base was larger than that of the pyramids in Egypt. Scholars believe that, as with many of the peoples who lived in the Eastern Woodlands, life and death in Cahokia was linked to the movement of the stars, sun, and moon, and their ceremonial earthwork structures reflected these important structuring forces. They were also places of important economic exchange and political intrigue.

Cahokia became a key trading center partly because of its position near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeologists have identified materials such as seashells that traveled over a thousand miles to reach the center of this civilization. Cahokia hummed with the sounds of thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, traders, warriors, and settlers. Corn was one of the factors that enabled such a large community to exist, even though its cultivation often depended on people who had been subjugated in warfare.⁵²

The size of Cahokia and extent of its influence suggests that the city relied on a hierarchical system of chiefdoms and tributaries, enabled by sustained social stratification and frequent warfare. War captives were seized, forming an important part of the economy in the North American Southeast. Unlike the later transatlantic slave trade, Native American slavery was not based on holding people as property, nor was it always a permanent condition. Instead, Native Americans understood the enslaved as people who lacked kinship networks. Very often, a formerly enslaved person could become a fully integrated member of the community. Therefore, adoption or marriage could enable an enslaved person to enter a kinship network and join the community. Indeed, slavery and captive trading became an important way that many Native communities grew and gained or maintained power in many areas of the continent.⁵³

Around 1050 CE, Cahokia’s population expanded exponentially by almost 500 percent in one generation.⁵⁴ Moreover, new groups of incoming peoples were absorbed into the city and its supporting communities. But by 1300 CE, the once-powerful city collapsed. Scholars previously pointed to ecological disaster or slow depopulation through emigration, but new research into the causes of the city’s decline instead emphasize mounting warfare, indicated by defensive stockades, or perhaps internal political tensions made worse by environmental changes.⁵⁵ After its decline, the successor states to Cahokia restructured as small tribal republics.⁵⁶

People influenced by Cahokia are often called Mississippian, and their ways of living profoundly shaped Southeastern societies.⁵⁷ Historians suggest that Cahokian evangelists and emissaries spread news of their new religious beliefs and practices, including the specialization of labor and architectural styles. The people along the Black Warrior River, for example, renovated their city, including elements of Mississippian architecture such as pyramids and a large central plaza. Labor and agricultural practices, in particular, aided communities struggling to feed and house their inhabitants. Later, smaller communities sent their young people to learn from villagers on the Black Warrior River. In this way, the culture of Cahokia would endure. For example, the Lady of Cofitachequi ruled over a Mississippian community in the lands between the future Carolinas and the lower Mississippi River, where Spanish settlers encountered her in 1540.⁵⁸

Politically and socially, Mississippians were organized into chiefdoms. Chiefs, usually male, inherited their authority through maternal bloodlines. Traditionally matrilineal, Mississippian women were empowered by their control over agricultural food production. Historian Christina Snyder suggests that the Lady of Cofitachequi may have risen to power due to a lack of a legitimate male heir after deaths from a recent widespread disease. The Lady’s power stemmed from her authority over access to the kingdom’s food, trade, and weapons, and the support of her people, which allowed her to make decisions and alliances for the kingdom.⁵⁹

Some of the largest and most concentrated populations in North America two thousand years ago were the Puebloan groups (centered in the current-day US Southwest and northwestern Mexico), the Mississippian groups living along the Great River and its tributaries, and the Mesoamerican groups of the areas now known as Central America, central Mexico, and the Yucatán.

In present-day northern Guatemala and the Mexican state of Tabasco, the Maya built the city-states of Chichen Itza, Mayapan, and Uxmal, which housed massive temples and sustained large populations. There, a combined priesthood and nobility governed the rest of the population. In the further reaches of Maya territory, ordinary villages retained clan structures where they worked the nobles’ fields, paid rent for land use, and contributed labor and taxes for the construction of roads, nobles’ houses, and other structures.⁶⁰ Ultimately, the Maya constructed a complex and long-lasting civilization with written language, advanced mathematics, and stunningly accurate calendars.⁶¹

VI. Continuities

By the turn of the first millennium, one thousand years ago, most Native North American people in what is now the United States lived in small communities tied by kinship networks. The Cherokee, for example, emerged after the Mississippian mound-building period, reflecting a shift in political economy and social organization away from the more seemingly urban and hierarchical mode illustrated by Cahokia.⁶² The Cherokee and many other communities understood four-legged and two-legged creatures as their relatives, and some communities adopted clan or band systems as ways of organizing families across space, time, and species and dividing social roles and responsibilities.

Archaeological evidence suggests that ancestors living at Poverty Point in what is now Louisiana likely possessed a highly organized political society, despite the fact that they did not practice agriculture. This hypothesis about political authority is based upon the required planning and construction needed to create the expansive amphitheater found there. Its construction employed very sophisticated mathematics and skilled labor. Poverty Point challenges interpretations that suggest Native societies were organized in only two ways: advanced, complex hierarchical civilizations made possible by highly productive farming or less complex ones with chiefs and a council, as seen in hunter/foraging people.⁶³

Some communities traced their ancestry through their mothers or were matrilineal, including the Gitksan and Cherokee. In these cases, biological fathers often joined the mothers’ extended families; sometimes a mother’s brothers (the child’s uncles) took on more direct roles in child raising than biological fathers. Mothers often wielded enormous influence at local levels, and men’s identities and influence often depended on their relationships to women. Indigenous societies, meanwhile, generally afforded greater sexual and marital freedom than European cultures. Women, for instance, often chose their husbands, and divorce was often a relatively straightforward process.⁶⁴

Many Indigenous groups across the continent used shifting cultivation, in which farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth, and then planted seeds in the nutrient-rich ashes. When crop yields began to decline, farmers moved to another field and allowed the land to recover and the forest to regrow before again cutting the forest, burning the undergrowth, and restarting the cycle. In Eastern Woodland areas, from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, Indigenous communities managed their forest resources by burning underbrush to create vast, parklike hunting grounds. Fire management was especially important to clear the ground for planting the Three Sisters crops of corn, beans, and squash. These three crops together supplied most of the energy, fiber, vitamins, and minerals that humans need. When planted in small, raised hills, corn provides support for bean vines to grow upward. The bean plants provide nitrogen in the soil for corn, while squash gathers water with its broad leaves and provides shade to keep the soil protected. In this region, the rich soil and use of specialized tools enabled effective and sustainable farming practices, producing high yields without overburdening the soil.⁶⁵

Assuring food security in this region was a gender- and age-specific responsibility. Women held power in many ways, including reproduction and also their authority over the earth’s fertility through agriculture.⁶⁶ Gender work roles were more flexible and equitable than those practiced by Europeans. One Hidatsa woman described how her father helped her mother in caring for the children. Similarly, Luther Standing Bear recalled that if a man was home from hunting for a few days, he “busied himself in many ways, lightening the work of the woman.” Indigenous men and women were partners who cared for one another and worked together for the good of the family.⁶⁷ Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock explains, “Nothing in the structure of egalitarian band societies necessitated special deference to men. There were no economic and social liabilities that bound women to be more sensitive to men’s needs and feelings than vice versa.”⁶⁸

Women engaged in permanent, intensive agriculture using hand tools like hoes, adzes, and diggers. Children and the elderly also had roles in collecting wild foods and medicines from the land. And while adult men usually hunted and fished, big game hunting—such as for bison or caribou—was a social and ritualistic event that relied on the talents of most of the community working together, and respected the death of the hunted. Women took part by cleaning and curing hides, which became their property.

Generally, spiritual practices, understandings of property, and political arrangements differed markedly from European ways. Spiritual power permeated their worlds in tangible and accessible ways. Some Indigenous people believed that all living things contained a spirit.⁶⁹ In many cases, this power could be appealed to and harnessed through ceremony, song, or dance. Indigenous religions were often also inclusivist, that is, they allowed individuals to incorporate new religious beliefs or practices to understand the changing world.⁷⁰

Native governments were and continue to be complex. Before colonization, Eastern Woodland societies were more democratic than their European counterparts. Traditionally, any adult, male or female, was able to speak at council meetings. In most instances, the government included a chief and a tribal council that worked together to govern and guide their communities. Chiefs were respected people chosen by their communities based on their demonstrated leadership and wisdom. They offered guidance and helped resolve disputes, but even the most powerful rulers of the Eastern Woodlands did not operate like kings.

Councils continue to include elected members of the tribe who advocate for their people and pass laws to govern their nation. Indigenous communities usually valued group autonomy over individual interests. The system of decision-making was based on consensus instead of majority rule. However, when an agreement could not be reached, the dissenters would leave the community, forming one of their own nearby.⁷¹

Other communities, like that at Cahokia or in Tenochtitlán, had more hierarchical and less democratic governments. Coastal foraging societies in the Northwest were also less democratic, resembling feudal Europe with ruling nobles and a hereditary ranking system. Commoners provided labor in these “courtly societies.”⁷²

Alternatively, the Muskogees (Creeks) and Seminoles had three branches of government, each led by the communities’ elite clans: the military, civil administration, and the branch that handled sacred rituals. Typically, women were not involved in leadership affairs within these communities. However, women of the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee held more political authority. Among the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, certain women would choose their male council representatives for the clan.⁷³ Clan mothers among the Haudenosaunee would select chiefs, determine farming rights, adjudicate legal disputes, and wield other forms of power in the community.⁷⁴

Various land systems existed in Indigenous communities. However, generally, Native Americans saw land as a resource individuals had the right to use, not as a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold. As leadership varied in Native communities, they were typically judged by how well they could provide for their people. Generosity was valued in leadership, and extreme starvation was mostly avoided. For example, Powhatan, an Indigenous ruler in what is now Virginia, was known for his generosity and would redistribute 90 percent of his collected resources, paying specific attention to the neediest among his people.⁷⁵

Knowledge in Native communities was communicated in many ways. For example, Ojibwes used birch-bark scrolls to record medical treatments, recipes, songs, stories, and more. Other Eastern Woodland peoples wove plant fibers, embroidered skins with porcupine quills, and modeled the earth to make sites of complex ceremonial meaning. On the Plains, artisans wove buffalo hair and painted on buffalo skins; in the Pacific Northwest, artisans carved great cedar poles and decorated large wooden houses. Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua ancestors in Mesoamerica painted their histories on plant-derived textiles or hides and carved them into stone. Khipu technology was developed between 600 CE and 1000 CE in central Peru. It was a knotted string device recording various histories and constructed in binary code that remains unbroken to this day.⁷⁶ Only 600 khipu pieces remain today, as most were destroyed by Spanish colonists.

According to their histories, the ancestors of the Nahua people moved into the Valley of Mexico from their homeland of Aztlán in the North around 1100 CE. Soon, other Nahua ancestral groups founded small city-states known as altepetl. The related Mexica group founded their altepetl, Tenochtitlán, on an island in the middle of the lake in current-day Mexico City in 1325. Almost one hundred years later, in 1427, Tenochtitlán—with the three altepetl Texcoco, Tlacopan, and Huexotzinco—went to war and conquered its former ally, the Tepaneca altepetl of Azcapotzalco. The victors consolidated their power into the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, also known as the Aztec Empire.

The Aztec state depended on irrigated agriculture, with corn as its main focus along with beans, pumpkins, cacao, tomatoes, tobacco, cotton, and other crops, for their dense population. They constructed dams, canals, and fortress structures made of stone. Tenochtitlán had elaborate markets and received raw goods from all areas of the Americas. Turquoise from the Pueblos in the US Southwest was used as a means of exchange for valuable commodities.⁷⁷

This arrangement of related peoples went on to dominate first the Valley of Mexico, exacting tribute from enemy and vassal populations alike. The Triple Alliance ruled through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute—including everything from corn and other foodstuffs to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold—and provided troops and captives for the empire. Triple Alliance forces would spread to the Gulf Coast and as far south as current-day Honduras, exacting tribute and erecting Mexica-style governments, architecture, and other cultural monuments along the way. In Tenochtitlán, a massive pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the city center (its ruins can still be found in the center of Mexico City today), a testament to Mexica power.

This was also a time of severe drought and famine. The ruler of Texcoco altepetl, Nezahualcoyotl (1402–1472) helped solve the problem of drought and famine by building a massive aqueduct and irrigation system for Texcoco and allied Tenochtitlán, then ruled by Moctezuma I (ca. 1398–1469). Much of the city of Tenochtitlán was fed by crops grown on large artificial islands called chinampas, constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to form plots of land. Additionally, massive marketplaces facilitated the movement of local and faraway goods. By the time Moctezuma II Xocoyotzin (ca. 1466–1520) came to lead the Triple Alliance in 1502, Tenochtitlán’s Mexica—also known as the “Aztecs”—were the dominant military and economic power in the region.

In the Eastern Woodlands to the north, many Native American societies lived in smaller, dispersed communities to take advantage of rich soils and abundant rivers and streams. Along the St. Lawrence River, Iroquoian-speaking Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples lived near Anishinaabeg and Innu communities, and their kinship and trade ties stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and on to the Mississippi River.

Lenape people farmed the bottomlands throughout the Hudson and Delaware River watersheds in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. During planting and harvesting seasons, they gathered in larger groups to coordinate their labor and take advantage of local abundance. As proficient fishers, they organized seasonal fish camps and wove nets, baskets, mats, and a variety of household materials from the rushes found along the streams, rivers, and coasts.

Dispersed and relatively independent, hundreds of Lenape settlements were nonetheless bound together by oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensus-based political organization, kinship networks, and a shared clan system. Marriage occurred between clans, and matrilineal lines organized the society. For example, a married man would join the clan of his wife. Additionally, Lenape women wielded authority over marriages, households, agricultural production and the selection of leaders, called sachems.⁷⁸ Sachems governed Lenape communities by the consent of their people, and acquired their authority by demonstrating wisdom and experience. Large gatherings occurred for ceremonial purposes or to make important decisions, and the sachems spoke for their people in councils that included men, women, and elders.

Between 600 to 1,000 years ago, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy—from the region now called New York and Ontario—developed the political system they still hold today. It was created out of the necessity to end war and broker peace. With droughts, competing tributary systems, and other challenges, many Indigenous people of the Northeast and Great Lakes found themselves at war both within their own and against other groups.⁷⁹ During this time, a man later called “The Peacemaker,” who had been born north of Lake Ontario and raised by his mother and grandmother, crossed the lands to spread his message of peace and his system for ending wars. The first person who supported Peacemaker was a woman from the Erie Nation called Jigonhasse. She gave Peacemaker lodging and food and pledged to help him spread peace. Another person, a man from the Onondaga nation called Hiawatha, became Peacemaker’s spokesperson.

Eventually, Peacemaker gathered leaders from all five Haudenosaunee families—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—and invited them to join the Great League of Peace. At that time, the nations were divided into small hereditary sachemdoms, but the Great League would be represented centrally by fifty sachems chosen by the traditional Clan Mothers.⁸⁰ But one tyrannical leader from Onondaga, Tadadaho, initially refused, but with the help of Jigonhasse and Hiawatha, Tadadaho agreed to join the League. Peacemaker promised that he would henceforth preside over the Council, and that the ceremonial fire would always be kept at Onondaga. Then, Peacemaker uprooted a white pine tree and called on everyone to bury their weapons beneath its roots. The white pine’s branches came to symbolize the branches of peace, which would shelter any nation that joined the League. Later, the founders of the US government would be inspired by the Haudenosaunee League and its federal system when they built their own nation. In the nineteenth century, the League would expand to include the Tuscaroras.

VII. Conclusion

The Americas have been filled with a diverse and dynamic array of communities for millennia. The arrival of Europeans five centuries ago dramatically altered the political economy of North America. The resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what some scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange—disrupted longstanding structures of power and belonging, inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed biological terror, and revolutionized the history of the world. However, these actions began the second—not the first—chapter in the long American yawp.

VIII. Primary Sources

1. Cherokee origin story

This Cherokee creation story is among thousands of accounts for the origins of the world. This story exhibits the common Native American tendency to locate spiritual power in the natural world. 

2. Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) origin story

The Iroquois origin story recalls the first formation of Turtle Island. This story teaches the importance of balance, gratitude for nature, and cooperation among all living things.

3. Cherokee storytellers on the origins of disease and medicine

Cherokee storytellers explain that disease resulted from the broken relationship between humans and nature. Animals created disease to punish humans for being carelessly violent. Plants came to the rescue by creating medicine. The story teaches the importance of reciprocity and warns of the dangers of abusing nature.

4. The legend of Moshup

The Wampanoag legend of Moshup describes an ancient giant who lived on Martha’s Vineyard Island and offered stories about the history of the region. The story speaks to the dangers nature can present and offers an origin for fog in the region. 

5. Archaeological research on interactions between Native Americans and manatees before colonization

Scholars who study the ancient ancestors of Native Americans sometimes use the tools of science to shed light on life before colonization. This archaeologist offers evidence to show that Native Americans rarely hunted manatees in precolonial Florida.

6. A cultural anthropologist discusses Muskogee mount-building

This anthropologist uses both archaeological research and conversations with Muskogee elders to argue that Native American mounds are living places that connect contemporary communities with their ancestors. The anthropologist also notes how Indigenous narratives challenge understandings of time and even history itself.

7. Paleontologists explore the diet of Native American ancestors

The chemical remains of ancient humans allow paleontologists to reconstruct the diets of some of the earliest people in the Americas. The findings of these scholars show that some communities hunted mammoths for food. 

8. A Seneca artist paints Sky Woman

Ernest Smith was a Seneca artist. In this piece, he painted the story of Sky Woman falling to earth, where she would land on a great turtle. On the back of this turtle, and with the help of birds and animals, she would create Turtle Island. 

9. Kwantlen elders perform the First Salmon Ceremony

The First Salmon Ceremony is a sacred, ancient sacrament practiced by Indigenous communities across the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, and the Columbia River basin. Held every spring, it welcomes the return of the salmon runs, expresses gratitude to the Creator and the Salmon People, and reinforces the delicate balance of ecological stewardship. 

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Christen Mucher, with content contributions by L. D. Burnett, Michelle Cassidy, D. Andrew Johnson, Khalil Anthony Johnson Jr., Brenda Lakhani, Joseph Locke, Dawn Marsh, Christen Mucher, Rachel Pasierowska, Cameron Shriver, Ben Wright, Caroline Wright, and Garrett Wright.

Recommended Reading

• Alt, Susan, ed. Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America. University of Utah Press, 2010.

• Arista, Noelani. The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

• Barnett, James F. Jr. Mississippi’s American Indians. University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

• Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native People and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Yale University Press, 2023.

• Bruhns, Karen Olsen. Ancient South America. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

• Claasen, Cheryl, and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds. Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

• Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Praeger, 2003.

• Dewar, Elaine. Bones. Vintage Canada, 2001.

• Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.

• Dye, David. War Paths, Peace Paths: An Archaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America. AltaMira Press, 2009.

• Fenn, Elizabeth A. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. Hill and Wang, 2014.

• Jablonski, Nina G. The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World. University of California Press, 2002.

• Kehoe, Alice Beck. America Before the European Invasions. Routledge, 2002.

• Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Vintage Books, 2006.

• Meltzer, David J. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. University of California Press, 2010.

• Mt. Pleasant, Jane. “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America.” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 374–412.

• Mucher, Christen. Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America. University of Arizona Press, 2021.

• Oswalt, Wendell H. This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native North Americans. Oxford University Press, 2009.

• Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. Penguin, 2010.

• Pringle, Heather. In Search of Ancient North America: An Archaeological Journey to Forgotten Cultures. Wiley, 1996.

• Scarry, C. Margaret. Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands. University Press of Florida, 1993.

• Schwartz, Stuart B. Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2000.

• Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

• Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. Random House, 1988.

Notes

1. Alan E. Strauss, “Insights into the Woodland Period in Coastal New England as Seen from a Large Block Island Shell Midden,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 46 (2018): 167–90; James R. Ringer, “The Atherley Narrows Fish Weir Complex: A Submerged Archaic-to-Historic-Period Fishing Site in Ontario, Canada,” Revista de Arqueología Americana, no. 26 (2008): 131–51.[↩]
2. Victor Butler-Thomas, John Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés-Conde, The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 1, The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005).[↩]
3. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, trans. A. P. Maudslay (Da Capo, 1996), 190–91.[↩]
4. Noelani Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 15–16.[↩]
5. Carole A. Dana, Margo Lukens, and Conor M. Quinn, “Still They Remember Me”: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Volume 1 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), xv–xvii.[↩]
6. Adapted from Christopher R. Teuton, Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xi–xiv.[↩]
7. James F. Barnett Jr., Mississippi’s American Indians (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 90.[↩]
8. Edward Benton Banai, The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).[↩]
9. The Chickasaw Nation, “Migration Story,” accessed August 16, 2025, https://​www​.chickasaw​.net/​Our​-Nation/​History/​Migration​-Story​.aspx.[↩]
10. John W. Ives, “‘My Uncle Was Resting His Country’: Dene Kinship and Insights into the More Distant Past,” in Natural Science and Indigenous Knowledge: The Americas Experience, ed. Edward A. Johnson and Susan M. Arlidge (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 32–106.[↩]
11. Paulette Steeves, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (University of Nebraska Press, 2021); Christen Mucher, “Born of the Soil: Demography, Genetic Narratives, and American Origins,” in Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America, ed. Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher (University of Arizona Press, 2021).[↩]
12. Tom D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (Basic Books, 2000); E. James Dixon, Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (University of New Mexico Press, 1993).[↩]
13. David G. Anderson and Thaddeus G. Bissett, “The Initial Colonization of North America: Sea Level Change, Shoreline Movement, and Great Migrations,” in Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas, ed. Michael David Frachetti and Robert N. Spengler III (Springer, 2015), 59–88.[↩]
14. Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, Kathleen B. Springer, Thomas M. Urban, Vance T. Holliday, et al., “Evidence of Humans in North America During the Last Glacial Maximum,” Science 373 (2021): 1528–31, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1126/​science​.abg7586.[↩]
15. John F. Hoffecker, Scott A. Elias, G. Richard Scott, Dennis H. O’Rourke, Leslea J. Hlusko, Olga Potapova, et al., “Beringia and the Peopling of the Western Hemisphere,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 11, no. 290 (January 2023): 29020222246, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1098/​rspb​.2022​.2246.[↩]
16. Dylan Gaffney, “Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility within the Homo Genus,” Journal of Archaeology Research 29 (2021): 255–326, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10814​-020​-09149​-7.[↩]
17. Vance T. Holliday, Jason D. Windingstad, Jordon Bright, Bruce G. Phillips, Joel B. Butler, Ryan Breslawski, et al., “Paleolake Geochronology Supports Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) Age for Human Tracks at White Sands, New Mexico,” Science Advances 11, no. 25 (2025), https://​doi​.org/​10​.1126/​sciadv​.adv4951.[↩]
18. Lorena Becerra-Valdivia and Thomas Higham, “The Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America,” Nature 584 (August 2020): 93–97, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1038/​s41586​-020​-2491​-6.[↩]
19. Jon M. Erlandson, Michael H. Graham, Bruce J. Bourque, Debra Corbett, James A. Estes, and Robert S. Steneck, “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 2, no. 2 (2007): 161–74, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​15564890701628612.[↩]
20. Daryl Fedje, Quentin Mackie, Duncan McLaren, Becky Wigen, and John Southon, “Karst Caves in Haida Gwaii: Archaeology and Paleontology at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition,” Quaternary Science Reviews 272 (2021): 107221, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.quascirev​.2021​.107221.[↩]
21. David G. Anderson, Thaddeus G. Bissett, and Stephen J. Yerka, “The Late Pleistocene Human Settlement of Interior North America: The Role of Physiography and Sea-Level Change,” in Paleoamerican Odyssey, ed. Kelly E. Graf, Caroline V. Ketron and Michael R. Waters (Texas A & M University Press, 2013), 183–203.[↩]
22. Dennis Stanford, Darrin Lowery, Margaret Jodry, Bruce A. Bradley, Marvin Kay, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., et al., “New Evidence for a Possible Paleolithic Occupation of the Eastern North American Continental Shelf at the Last Glacial Maximum,” in Prehistoric Archaeology on the Continental Shelf, ed. Amanda M. Evans, Joseph C. Flatman, and Nicholas C. Flemming (Springer Science, 2014), 73–93.[↩]
23. Juliet E. Morrow, “Early Paleoindian Mobility and Watercraft: An Assessment from the Mississippi River Valley,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 39 (2014): 103–29, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1179/​2327427113Y​.0000000001; Jessi Halligan, “Reconstructing the Pleistocene Environment of the Greater Southeast,” in In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition, ed. Joseph A. M. Gingerich (University of Utah Press, 2013), 58–72; M. Scott Harris, Leslie Reynolds Sautter, Kacey L. Johnson, Katherine E. Luciano, George R. Sedberry, Eric E. Wright et al., “Continental Shelf Landscapes of the Southeastern United States Since the Last Interglacial,” Geomorphology 203 (2013): 6–24, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geomorph​.2013​.02​.014; C. Andrew Hemmings and J. M. Adovasio, “Inundated Landscapes and the Colonization of the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico,” in Pre-Clovis in the Americas: International Science Conference Proceedings Led at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, ed. Dennis J. Stanford and Alison T. Stenger (Smithsonian Institution, 2014), 16–31.[↩]
24. J. Matthew Shumway, “How Migration, Cultural Clashes and Place Combine to Create Group Identities: How the Diné Became the Navajo,” in Geography of Time, Place, Movement and Networks, Volume 5, Mapping Women and Family Journeys, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Springer, 2024), 213–28.[↩]
25. Rohina Rubicz, Theodore G. Schurr, and Michael H. Crawford, “Mitochondrial DNA Variation and the Origins of the Aleuts,” Human Biology 75, no. 6 (2003): 809–35, https://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1353/​hub​.2004​.0009.[↩]
26. J. Tyler Faith, “Late Pleistocene Climate Change, Nutrient Cycling, and the Megafaunal Extinctions in North America,” Quaternary Science Reviews 30, no. 13–14 (2011): 1675–80, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.quascirev​.2011​.03​.011.[↩]
27. Jack W. Brink, “Inukshuk: Caribou Drive Lanes on Southern Victoria Island, Nunavut, Canada,” Arctic Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2005): 1–28, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​arc​.2011​.0084.[↩]
28. Donald K. Grayson and David J. Meltzer, “Revisiting Paleoindian Exploitation of Extinct North American Mammals,” Journal of Archaeological Science 56 (2015): 177–93, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.jas​.2015​.02​.009.[↩]
29. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon, 2014), 17.[↩]
30. David S. Leigh, “Terminal Pleistocene Braided to Meandering Transition in Rivers of the Southeastern USA,” Catena 66, no. 1–2 (2006): 155–60, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.catena​.2005​.11​.008.[↩]
31. R. Douglas Hunt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Purdue University Press, 2002), 4–35.[↩]
32. Gayle J. Fritz, Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland (University of Alabama Press, 2019), 11.[↩]
33. Amy Olson, “Archaeologists Find Intensive Indigenous Farming in Michigan,” Dartmouth News (June 5, 2025).[↩]
34. D. R. Piperno, A.J. Ranere, I. Holst, J. Iriarte, and R. Dickau, “Starch Grain and Phytolith Evidence for Early Ninth Millennium B.P. Maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 13 (2009): 5019–24, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1073/​pnas​.0812525106; Esperanza Torres-Rodríguez, Miguel Vallebueno-Estrada, Javier Martínez González, Angel García Cook, Rafael Montiel, and Jean-Philippe Vielle-Calzada, “AMS Dates of New Maize Specimens Found in Rock Shelters of the Tehuacan Valley,” Radiocarbon 60 (2018): 975–87, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​RDC​.2018​.29.[↩]
35. Robert C. Hunt, “Irrigation, Food Surplus, and Complexity: A Case from Hohokam, a Prehistoric Neolithic Culture in the American Southwest,” in Irrigation in Early States: New Directions, ed. Stephanie Rost (University of Chicago, 2022). 175–82.[↩]
36. Joe W. Saunders, Rolfe D. Mandel, C. Garth Sampson, Charles M. Allen, E. Thurman Allen, Daniel A. Bush, et al., “Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana,” American Antiquity 70, no. 4 (2005): 631–68, https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​40035868.[↩]
37. Gayle J. Fritz, Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland (University of Alabama Press, 2019).[↩]
38. Erna Gunther, “An Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony,” American Anthropologist 28, no. 4 (October–December 1926): 605–17.[↩]
39. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 6 (University of Nebraska Press, 1983).[↩]
40. Richard A. Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (Thames and Hudson, 2004), 25.[↩]
41. Christopher Pool, Olmec Archeology and Early Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2–10.[↩]
42. Kenneth D. Tollefson, “Potlatching and Political Organization among the Northwest Coast Indians,” Ethnology 34, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 53–73, https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​3773863.[↩]
43. J. Ramos-Madrigal, Gayle J. Fritz, Bryon Schroeder, Bruce Smith, Fátima Sánchez-Barreiro, Christian Carøe, et al., “The Genomic Origin of Early Maize in Eastern North America,” Cell 188, no. 1 (January 9, 2025): 33–43, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.cell​.2024​.11​.003.[↩]
44. Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (Pantheon Books, 1984).[↩]
45. Nigel Davies, The Toltecs Until the Fall of Tula (University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 122–25, 285–95.[↩]
46. Jerry B. Howard, “Hohokam Legacy: Desert Canals,” Pueblo Grand Museum Profiles (2003).[↩]
47. Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (University of Washington Press, 2007), 126.[↩]
48. H. Wolcott Toll, “Making and Breaking Pots in the Chaco World,” American Antiquity 66, no. 1 (January 2001): 65, https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​2694318.[↩]
49. Anna Sofaer, “The Primary Architecture of the Chacoan Culture: A Cosmological Expression,” in Anasazi Architecture and American Design, ed. Baker H. Morrow and V. B. Price (University of New Mexico Press, 1997).[↩]
50. Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 217.[↩]
51. D. Lepofsky, K. Lertzman, D. Hallett, and R. Mathewes, “Climate Change and Culture Change on the Southern Coast of British Columbia 2400–1200 Cal. B.P.: An Hypothesis,” American Antiquity. 70, no. 2 (2005): 267–93, https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​40035704/.[↩]
52. Amber M. Vanderwarker, Dana N. Bardolph, and C. Margaret Scarry, “Maize and Mississippian Beginnings,” in Mississippian Beginnings, ed. Gregory D. Wilson (University Press of Florida, 2017), 29–70.[↩]
53. James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).[↩]
54. Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, eds., Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 31.[↩]
55. Thomas E. Emerson, “An Introduction to Cahokia 2002: Diversity, Complexity, and History,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 137–39, http://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​20708175.[↩]
56. David Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 452–65.[↩]
57. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), 31–34.[↩]
58. Christina Snyder, “The Lady of Cofitachequi: Gender and Political Power Among Native Southerners,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 1, ed. Marjorie Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson (University of Georgia Press, 2009), 11–25.[↩]
59. Snyder, “The Lady of Cofitachequi,” 13–14.[↩]
60. Markus Eberl, Community and Difference: Change in Late Classic Maya Villages of the Petexbatun Region (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 452.[↩]
61. Bruce H. Dahlin, “Climate Change and the End of the Classic Period in Yucatan,” Ancient Mesoamerica 13 (2002): 327–40, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S0956536102132135.[↩]
62. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), 54–61.[↩]
63. David Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 141–63.[↩]
64. Traci Ardren, “Studies of Gender in the Prehispanic Americas,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16, no. 1 (March 2008): 1–35, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10814​-007​-9016​-9.[↩]
65. Jane Mt. Pleasant, “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America,” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 374–412, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​eam​.2015​.0016.[↩]
66. Patrick Bottiger, “Fertile Grounds: Knowledge, Ceremony, and the Intensification of Maize,” Agricultural History 97, no. 4 (2023): 513–46, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1215/​00021482​-10795855.[↩]
67. David Smits, “The “Squaw Drudge: A Prime Index of Savagism,” Ethnohistory 29, no. 4 (1982): 296, https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​481102.[↩]
68. Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman, Women and Power in Native North America (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).[↩]
69. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (Oxford University Press, 1984).[↩]
70. Robert Cummings Neville, “Religious Diversity and Cultural Inclusion in America,” Religion & Education 22, no. 2 (1995): 28–39, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​15507394​.1995​.11000805.[↩]
71. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 38.[↩]
72. David Wengrow and David Graeber, “‘Many Seasons Ago’: Slavery and Its Rejection Among Foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America,” American Anthropologist 120, no. 2 (2018): 237–49, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​aman​.12969.[↩]
73. Douglas M. George-Kanentso, Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation (Bloomsbury, 2006), 20–21.[↩]
74. Blackhawk, Rediscovery, 78–79.[↩]
75. Martin Gallivan, “Native History in the Chesapeake: The Powhatan Chiefdom and Beyond,” in The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, ed. Timothy R. Pauketat (Oxford University Press, 2012), 310.[↩]
76. Margot Beyersdoff, “Writing Without Words/Words Without Writing: The Culture of the Khipu,” Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3 (2005): 294–311, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1353/​lar​.2005​.0037.[↩]
77. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 31.[↩]
78. Amy Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7–30.[↩]
79. Adapted from a 2015 version told by Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, “The Peacemaker & the Tadadaho,” https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​9iVziGHPhVw.[↩]
80. Gary Warrick, “The Precontact Iroquoian Occupation of Southern Ontario,” Journal of World Prehistory 14, no. 4 (2000): 415–66.[↩]