Page 10 - The Native American Experience

Chapter One

Early Life in America

American schoolchildren have long been taught about a pe-
riod called the age of discovery. This era from the fi fteenth
through eighteenth centuries was a time when the English,
French, Spanish, and other European explorers sailed to North
America and built settlements. Some old history books make it
sound as if the explorers had discovered a vacant land. In 1987
a widely used high school textbook called American History: A
Survey reinforced this idea: “For thousands of centuries . . . in
which human races were evolving, forming communities, and
building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia,
and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood
empty of mankind and its works.” The book goes on to state
that Europeans created “a civilization where none existed.” 4
Despite the notion that North America was an untouched
wilderness, anthropologists estimate that before the fi fteenth
century around 10 million indigenous people lived in what is
now the United States. They spoke over three hundred lan-
guages, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. While
early European colonists called the land the New World, it was
an ancient expanse of earth that had been shaped by Na-
tive Americans for more than ten thousand years. Around two
thousand years ago, the Hohokam people of Arizona built a
series of dams and more than 500 miles (805 km) of canals
to provide water to approximately fi fty thousand people. On
the West Coast the Mono, Karuk, and Yurok people burned
the underbrush that surrounded ancient sequoia and redwood
trees to attract game animals and prevent large, destructive
wildfi res. And almost everywhere freshwater fl owed, Native

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