A People Living in God 1

A People Living in God: Early North American Cultures
Randall H. McGuire Cobblestone Magazine April 1993

There were no Indians in North America when Christopher Columbus landed in
the Bahamas five hundred years ago, but more than ten million people lived in what is
now the United States. Among them were Din, OOdham, Lakota, Qwidicca-atx,
Wampanoag, Ganienghaka, and a host of other nations. They spoke hundreds of
different languages. In most of these languages, the name they called themselves
means the people in English. These people became Indians when Columbus called
them una gente en dios, a people living in God. In Spanish, their name became
Indios, or Indians.

The Indians world was not a new world. According to archaeologists, the first
Indians came to North America more than twenty thousand years before Columbus.
During the last Ice Age, the great glacial ice sheets took up so much water that the
oceans shrank. The Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, dried up. A broad land
bridge connected Asia and North America. Asian hunters followed game over the
bridge into North America. Many modern Indian people do not accept this theory of
migration. They believe that the people were created with the land. The stories they tell
explain who they are, where they came from, what the borders of their world are, and
how they should live as humans. Each nation has its own creation story. The Zuni story
elsewhere in this issue is one example.

Archaeologists call the first people in North America Paleo-Indians. Paleo is a
Greek word meaning early. These early Indians found a colder climate than the one
we know today. Great ice sheets covered much of Canada. The northern United States
had an arctic climate. The deserts of the western United States were lush grasslands
dappled with large lakes. Paleo-Indian hunters used finely made stone projectile points
to hunt large animals such as mammoths (extinct elephants) and bison. By nine
thousand years ago, the climate was becoming warmer. The ice sheets melted, and
the lakes in the West dried up, leaving the modern deserts.

The lives of Indian peoples changed. Archaeologists call this new way of life the
Archaic Phase. Archaic peoples adapted their way of life to the specific environment in
which they lived. People hunted smaller game, such as deer and rabbits. They
gathered wild grass seeds and ground them into flour. They collected shellfish along
the rivers of the eastern United States and along the coasts. They threw the shells in
large piles. In the far western United States and in most of Canada, the Archaic Phase
lasted until the eighteenth century A.D.

In the eastern and southwestern United States, a new way of life, the Formative
Phase, replaced the Archaic. These people lived year-round in one settlement, made
pottery, and grew crops. They built great mounds and stone buildings that still dot the
landscape.
Archaeologists divide the Formative Phase of the East into the Adena, Hopewell,
Late Woodland, and Mississippian periods. Adena people (500-100 B.C.) brought wild
sunflowers, amaranth (pigweed), and squash into their gardens. They bred the wild
plants to produce larger, domestic varieties. They buried their dead in large mounds of
earth. They built one mound in present-day Ohio to look like a snake eating an egg.
During the Hopewell Period, people continued to build mounds, and they began a trade
network that covered most of the eastern United States. This trade network fell apart in
about A.D. 400, which marks the start of the Late Woodland Period.

By 800, people based their agriculture on corn, beans, and squash. These crops
came from Mexico, where Indian people had grown them for thousands of years. The
Late Woodland Period continued in much of the East until the Europeans arrived, but
in the South, it changed into the Mississippian Period (700-1540). Mississippian
societies divided people into nobles, priests, and commoners. The nobles and priests
lived on high, flat mounds in great towns of up to twenty thousand people. The modern
Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw Indians are the descendants of
the Mississippian people.

Corn arrived in the Southwest before 1000 B.C., and by A.D. 100, three Formative
cultures existed. The Anasazi culture began in the Four Corners region, where the
states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. The Anasazis built large
apartment buildings called pueblos and made white pottery with black designs. At the
end of the thirteenth century, the Anasazis moved to the Rio Grande, where their
descendants live today.

The Mogollon people lived in the mountains and made brown pottery with red
designs. Around A.D. 1450, they moved north to become the Hopi and Zuni Indians. In
the deserts of southern Arizona, the Hohokam built large canals to water their fields
and made buff pottery with red designs. Their descendants, the Pimas, still farm
among the ruins of their ancestors.

In 1492, most of the Indian people of North America were farmers who lived in villages.
European diseases and war destroyed the Mississippian culture and greatly reduced
the farmers of the Southwest. Today almost two million Indian people live in the United
States. Several hundred Indian nations survive, and more than two hundred native
languages are spoken.

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A People Living in God: Early North American Cultures

Randall H. McGuire Cobblestone Magazine April 1993

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