Andrew Fisher: Native American History & Diversity | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 [Music] hi everyone i’m tony williams with the bill of rights institute and we are here with another scholar talks for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it’s our great privilege to have one of the authors of an earlier essay from the textbook native people by andrew fisher now andrew fisher is an associate professor of history and the director of the environmental science and policy program at the college of william mary which is right down the road for me and he received his phd from arizona state in 2003 and focuses on native american history environmental history and the american west his first book was shadow tribe the making of columbia river indian identity his current project is a biography of yakima actor and activist nippo strongheart andrew uh welcome very much uh and thank you for joining us thank you tony it’s a pleasure to be here brian thank you for your contribution to the project we’ve had over 100 scholars and and you made some great contributions so we really appreciate it yeah i’m i was happy to see it in praying it looks beautiful not in print but online right right right and and it is for available free online just a great resource especially uh with with a lot of schools and students going online i think it’ll be a fabulous resource now and into the future but uh

1:32 if you’re ready to dive in i am uh and so why don’t we get started uh so i was wondering if you could provide us with maybe a general overview of life in north america for native americans uh before the europeans arrived in 1492. sure i’ll try it’s difficult to generalize about native life in north america before european colonization began because indigenous cultures continually evolved over time as all cultures do and they vary widely even within particular culture areas the ancestors of native americans arrived in what is now the united states at least 12 000 years ago and new evidence and techniques like ancient dna testing strongly suggests that people came much earlier than previously thought and probably by multiple routes other than the so-called bearing land bridge and that theory has it’s not been completely blown out of the water but it has been complicated by competing theories about where native peoples came from and when there have even been radiocarbon dates produced at sites like monteverde in chile which is way down the tip of south america that range from 14 and a half thousand years ago to more than 30 000 years ago and although those older dates

3:03 especially are contested within the archaeological community they really beg the question even 14 and a half thousand years ago really begs the question of how people got there since ice-cream corridors didn’t open up in northern north america until much later regardless of which route they took the paleo indians as they’re often called stone age indians who were the first arrivals migrated to the americas thousands and thousands of years before europeans and they had a lot of time to disperse and diversify and so really the new world was was a very old world by the time columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and by the time columbus showed up native north americans spoke about 500 distinct languages and dialects which gives you a rough a very rough idea of how many different types or nations there were that diversity and dynamism are probably the most important things to remember about pre-columbian native america thanks especially to western movies and television we have this false impression that all american indians were tp dwelling buffalo hunting feathered headdress wearing plains warriors you know the tonka for

4:36 uh you dances of wolves fans but not all native americans were or are like that and even plains indians weren’t really like that until europeans reintroduced horses to north america the cultures that europeans first encountered didn’t exist in some sort of timeless unchanging and uniform world they were peoples who had been evolving over thousands of years another point to remember is that these cultures were interconnected uh they they communicated and and traded with each other through vast networks that linked different culture areas and parts of the continent at places like the dalles on the mid-columbia river which is uh within the homeland of the yakimas and a number of other tribes people and goods from many different places mingled in a great marketplace that we can see vestiges of in the archaeological record there are sites there that were flooded by the construction of dams in the mid 20th century and before the waters rose uh archaeologists dug into things like the middens the basically the trash heaps that native people had had left um and in the lowest layers they were there were archaeological remains uh things like fish bones and so on

6:07 that were more than ten thousand years old and then the upper layers were trade goods that had been brought by european and american sea captains visiting the coast um and then by lewis and clark in the early 19th century so it just gives you a sense of the depth of human the length of human occupation in that region and you find things in these middens that aren’t indigenous or native to the northwest and that tells you that you know there are these trade networks that are stretching all the way across the continent uh local foodstuffs like salmon and camus roots could be exchanged at the dalles for more exotic things like buffalo robes and other products from the plains or dentalia shells which are only found on the northwest coast off vancouver island and they were very prized for decoration and they even became a kind of currency like wampum did in the east different groups also came there to exchange information captives and marriage partners in order to solidify economic and diplomatic alliances with each other and and again you see goods from all over the continent uh in the archaeological mix so it’s not necessarily that people came all the way from the plains but the goods changed hands multiple times and then made their way oftentimes thousands of miles from the interior to the coast or the other way around from the coast to

7:38 the interior so the point is that the pre-columbian pre-columbian native people weren’t isolated from each other or stagnant culturally before europeans arrived they weren’t simply sitting around waiting for whites to show up so that history could begin finally i think it’s really important to remember that native peoples were actively using and even modifying the landscape contrary to the virgin land myth that europeans and later americans used to justify conquering and colonizing indigenous territories centuries before whites arrived maize-based agriculture had spread north from mexico and taken hold in places as diverse as the next new mexican pueblos uh the upper river upper missouri river villages of the mandans and the many places in the eastern woodlands where uh english columnists first arrived like a jamestown just down the road from here where they traded for corn and then when the indians wouldn’t trade for corn the english took it because they needed it survived so um maize-based agriculture and other crops like beans and squash the so-called three sisters they sustained life in the eastern women’s and many other parts of of north america and the first european explorers who came to places like virginia were amazed

9:08 by the bounty of indian fields and also by the fact that indian women often did most of the farming and controlled the crops so they had different sort of gender norms and different gender roles which to europeans look kind of backwards another point is that even where american indians hadn’t developed agriculture they actively shape the landscape especially through the use of fire to drive game to remove undergrowth for hunting and to create grazing areas that were attractive to deer and elk they also use fire to encourage the growth of useful plants to clear forest for farming or to propitiate you know propagate berries and roots that they use to survive so although we sometimes use the term nomads to describe groups that lived by hunting fishing and gathering they didn’t wander aimlessly across the landscape hoping to find enough food to survive which is a great recipe for starvation they moved in predictable patterns across territories that they knew extremely well because they had lived there for centuries or even millennia and so while it may not be accurate to call them ecologists because their knowledge of nature wasn’t constituted in the way western science has done they had a very deep knowledge a very

10:39 deep working knowledge of how particular environments worked well thank i know you’re just scratching the surface on that but i know a really rich tapestry of uh just sort of generalizations and and and and some really fascinating things and and that’s what you do in your essay i think you break down the the native people by regions and and paint that that picture of a rich and and very diverse in a different cultures economic systems adaptations to the environment shaping the environment all all fascinating and so maybe just talk about some of those particular indian tribes or nations um that you talked about in your essay specifically why don’t we start with the uh the coastal living and fishing uh lifestyles so that helped shape the lives and culture of the northwest cult coast native peoples yeah i’m happy to start there because that’s my uh that’s my homeland so to speak i’m from portland i miss the northwest dearly which is part of why i chose it as a as a research field uh so i’m happy to start there i often tell students you know uh that the northwest is the region i know best and it’s also the best region so um the really interesting thing about

12:11 northwest coast peoples from oregon up through what is now washington state and into british columbia all the way up to southeastern alaska is that they lived in such a rich environment in terms of resources uh from marine mammals to salmon to deer and elk to many different varieties of roots and berries that they were able to develop semi-sedentary you know stationary societies with social stratification or classes without developing agriculture which anthropologically is the way social stratification is usually explained you know that you have uh people who grow enough food that there are other people in the society who don’t have to devote themselves to procuring food and you have the development of different professions and um you also have the ability to amass wealth uh and sometimes even control the labor of and lives of others through slavery by and large you know at the time of european contact you didn’t have a lot of societies like this in north america most of them were hunting fishing and gathering or they were horticulture horticultural societies and in the northwest you have socially stratified societies particularly north of the columbia river and especially up into what is now canada uh groups like the

13:45 quakutal or kwakwaka and various coast salish groups they had developed a system where you had no what we might call noble families you had commoners below them and then you had uh people who were held as slaves uh generally captives taken in war from other groups and this is not it’s important to say a racialized or chattel system of slavery like developed in the caribbean or the american south after european colonization um these systems of unfree bondage were they they varied across cultures sometimes people were able to um you know become free and and even marry into the group but um you had a hierarchical society in the absence of agriculture uh and also uh people who could live quite well without having to grow food so on the northwest coast you have um as as a way of demonstrating wealth this ceremony called the potlatch which is still done in in places like british columbia where wealthy noble families would host elaborate feasts and they would often work very hard for months or even years to accumulate the property

15:16 that would then be lavishly given away and the food that would be served at these potlatches and this was a way uh not only of redistributing wealth within the group particularly during the winter months when food was often scarce uh it was a way of incurring obligations um you know debts that then people would have to pay back it was even a way of shaming enemies so sometimes you would invite your enemies to your potlatch basically to show them up and say hey if you can’t put on a better party than this then we’re better than you aren’t we i often explain to students as you know the reason why your parents will invite people they actually don’t like to your wedding it’s just to show them you know how wealthy you are and what a good party you can put on so um potlatch is were one expression of this class system that existed in the northwest as well as as well as slavery over the mountains in eastern oregon and washington east of the cascades on the columbia plateau which is where i really have focused my research you have more egalitarian societies that are based on hunting fishing and gathering but as elsewhere they’re moving regularly through uh territory that they consider themselves to belong to even more than it belongs to them they believe they belong to these landscapes and um through hunting and fishing and gathering they are able to

16:46 you know live uh order very predictable lives um in in their homelands right uh yeah really fascinating um so uh moving uh geographical regions uh the geography of california is extremely varied and seems to have led to a a vibrant diversity of peoples and cultures as well i was wondering if you can describe them sure there are too many to really go into great detail about but california was like it is today one of the most densely populated and diverse parts of north america estimates vary and estimating population is a tricky business given the records we have but at the time of first contact with the spanish in 1542 there were probably about 300 000 native people in california just west of the sierras and that was the most densely populated park because it’s the most resource rich so on in the coastal areas and river valleys west of the sierras you had probably about 300 000 uh people and they spoke as many as 100 different languages culturally they were all similar in the sense that they were hunting fishing and gathering peoples they weren’t agricultural cultures but um

18:18 even so you know they they were able to make a good living from the landscape especially california’s oak woodlands provided a very rich source of food in the form of acorns i think i mentioned in the essay that perhaps 600 000 tons of acorns were harvested annually in northern california uh up towards the what is now the oregon border groups like the carrocks and the rocks and the hoopas also fished for salmon in rivers like the klamath they foraged for plants and hunted game in the vast forests along the coast as well so they had some similarities with people to the north along the northwest coast in the sierras and east of the mountains uh people had to be more creative in terms of procuring food because there weren’t as many resources particularly in the the dry eastern part of california and so they developed um strategies and knowledge of nature that are really quite impressive by present standards for example california indians in the sierras would prune mountain plants and thereby influence the size and composition of forests they also use fire to do this in valleys like yosemite um the aonichi people

19:49 would cut the ends off the branches of oak trees to enhance acorn production the following year because they they knew that if you did that you’d get a more bountiful crop mono indian women on the eastern side of the sierras would also cut specific elderberry bushes down to ground level which seems kind of counterintuitive but they knew that it would actually make them grow faster and increase the production of berries and they sometimes even transplanted productive plants nearer to trails for easier access because they don’t want to have to walk as far into the mountains either to get these foods so they were intelligent users and even manipulators of the landscape finally one more example in southern california near what is now los angeles and san diego the chumash people harvested resources both from land and sea with great efficiency and with um some pretty impressive technology uh the closer village was to the ocean generally speaking the greater its reliance on maritime or you know ocean resources and with advanced canoe designs very seaworthy and sturdy canoes coastal and island peoples could catch fish quite far out in the pacific even huge swordfish i am not a fisherman uh despite my name fisher that was some

21:21 way way back in my family tree but um if you know anything about sports fishing swords swordfish are among the most prized trophy fish and they are fighters they are big fish they are not easy to land even with modern rods and you know plastic monofilament lines um true match people could bring these swordfish in um using you know harpoons and um fishing line that they made there’s the dog knocking something over um so um they they lived quite well off the bounty of the sea including things like seals uh and sea otters which they would then trade with interior groups for products that they couldn’t procure in their own homeland and this is common throughout north america that what you can’t produce yourself in your own territory you can often get through trade with other groups right wow well uh switching climates probably uh to the great basin in the west which was it was a lot harsher than what you just described in california how did that necessitate several new innovations for survival well the great basin uh places like utah and nevada and much of idaho are very dry they have very few uh rivers um the the lakes that are there are often saline like the great salt lake so

22:54 to survive in the great basin requires a lot of ingenuity and also a lot of mobility there are some areas like pyramid lake in western nevada where you had abundant populations of fish which uh called cuiwi by the pyramid lake paiutes also at utah lake uh south of modern-day salt lake city near provo you had enough fish and reliable sources of fresh water and other foods that enabled people to remain more sedentary and live in larger communities the same is true of ute territory in western colorado so people don’t have to move around quite so much necessarily to survive but in much of the great basin you had to be mobile and population sizes were smaller people tended to travel in family groups or maybe extended family groups a few households rather than what we think of as as big tribes and they would move regularly between food caches and water sources um they knew when particular things like um nut crops or roots would be ripe and so they knew where to go

24:24 when so again you know they’re not just wandering aimlessly around the desert but they’re moving purposefully from place to place within what they understand to be their territory even in the great basin though there are people who learn to manipulate the environment to make it more productive for example paiute southern piets in the owens valley on the eastern side of the sierra would dig irrigation ditches to encourage the growth of edible bulbs like locusts and in ute territory um people also uh learned how to do some of the things i’ve talked about with california indians like uh pruning um pruning trees and bushes in order to encourage their growth for most groups though in the great basin as i’ve said survival required mobility and so the genius really is knowing how to plan your movements across a very hostile landscape so that you always have access to water and food right okay good um and many viewers are probably familiar with the plains indians or or or at least uh with our stereotypes of them uh and so what was their what was their relationship to the land and especially

25:54 these great buffalo herds uh before the europeans arrived and and maybe if you can just briefly give us some sense of maybe how that changed later yeah yeah of course we plains indians are native americans you know par excellence in the european and american imagination in large part because of the powerful equestria equestrian tribes the horse cultures that flourish there from the late 18th through the late 19th century these are groups like the lakotas the cheyennes and on the southern plains the comanches who were real powers to be reckoned with and caused the united states and earlier european traders and spanish missionaries and other earlier european groups in the region caused them a lot of trouble but uh it’s important to remember they didn’t have horses uh until the europeans reintroduced them there were we know from the fossil record little horses that uh had died out about 10 000 years ago around the end of the last ice age and we can see them in the fossil record but the big horses that you can ride were reintroduced by the spanish and other european powers and then by the end of the 17th century native peoples in the southwest and then on the planes were acquiring them through capture or

27:24 trade with each other and then some peoples actually became accomplished horse breeders in their own right so horses will dramatically revolutionize not only buffalo hunting but but life on the plains generally and a lot of planes or world traditions like there’s a story among the cheyennes about majo basically that the creator telling them i can give you horses and horses will in many ways make your life easier you will be able to travel farther you’ll be able to travel faster you’ll be able to carry heavier loads but know also that it will change your life in in negative ways you know you will always have to be moving to find adequate pasture your enemies will come to steal your horses and um you know you make a choice about what you want to do um so horses revolutionize native life on the planes in the same way the car revolutionizes american life in the early 20th century or um you know a smartphone you know we we can’t imagine i’m sure students in high school can’t imagine living without these things now the same is true of the horse by the late 19th century a lot of native world traditions spoke of the horse as if they had always had it because they couldn’t conceive of life without it but for centuries before horses were introduced native people hunted buffalo on foot

28:56 sometimes by you know disguising themselves with with skins as uh other animals so they could creep close enough um to shoot them with arrows or by stampeding them over buffalo jumps like head smashed in which is i think the picture is featured in the textbook uh a cliff in um alberta where you using sometimes fire or you know large groups of people to corral the animals they would stampede them over the cliff and they would fall and smash their heads in and then you could butcher them at the bottom of the cliff they also built stone pounds or surrounds where you would again you know through coordinated movement and using sometimes dogs which was the only domestic animal native people had um you would get them to run into a pound where they couldn’t escape and then you could slaughter them there so it took quite a bit of ingenuity and planning to hunt buffalo before horses arrived uh one quick story that i think is kind of funny although it comes from the columbia plateau rather than the plains is the story of how horses in in the yakima language uh acquired the name that used to belong to dogs a lot of native people in north america had dogs and on the plains they would use them before they had horses to uh carry loads and to pull uh trevoy you know these you put a couple tp poles together and

30:27 you tie them at one end and you could pile stuff in there and the dogs would would pull them horses of course can carry much heavier loads and move a lot faster than dogs so in the yakima language dogs actually got demoted the word for dog used to be kusi uh k-u-s-i kusi and when horses came along and the yakima people adopted them they uh applied the word kusi to the horse and so what had been dog became horse and dogs became cousy which is a diminutive form which basically means little horse so just again shows you how horses revolutionize native society in many places and become integral to their culture uh they become the primary form of wealth that people have and also the primary for plains men they become the primary path to manhood through hunting and war and raiding um one one other thing that i’ll mention about the planes is that there are agricultural people or horticultural societies on the plains some tribes such as the mandans on the upper missouri and the pawnees um along the plat in what’s now nebraska had adopted maize and other crops and they grew enough food that way to enable them to be more sedentary

31:57 they lived in stable you know more or less permanent earth lodge villages and not migratory teepee camps and although they also hunted buffalo they oftentimes traded their crops for bison meat and robes that were procured by more nomadic groups and uh significantly in these semi-agrarian societies women like was true east of the mississippi tended the fields and controlled the produce which gave them economic and social power that european women at the time generally did not have in their households right well i i think my dogs are are happy they get to sleep all day rest it’s like clothes all over the planes yeah i don’t have to drag don’t have to drag loads around for us anymore right right good okay uh and then the the southwest region they uh witnessed the the thriving uh pueblo uh cultures until uh some prolonged droughts as you right uh invited some long-term competition from other tribes uh and can you describe that process and and and i think maybe you want to talk a little bit about some of the some of the ancient peoples and yes i didn’t talk very much about them in the essay because i didn’t have the space but in the southwest

33:28 centuries before europeans arrived in the region you had flourishing civilizations like the hohokam along the salt and gila rivers in central and southern arizona and to the north in what is now the four corners region of arizona new mexico colorado and utah you have the ancestral puebloans or they used to be called the anasazi which is actually in a navajo or the word that uh modern pueblos don’t like because it’s it means ancient enemy but the ancestral puebloans built at places like choco canyon in northern new mexico impressive urban complexes like pueblo bonito which the spanish named you know beautiful town and they they um they practiced agriculture um using both the limited rainfall and irrigation in order to support larger populations than this desert environment could normally sustain and the same was true of the hohokam they built canals that actually phoenix the phoenix water system still uses the original beds to move water around the city so these people were skilled engineers um we know that they studied the stars they practiced the kind of astronomy that was especially important

34:59 for agricultural people to know you know when when the rains would come and so forth they uh in the case of the ancestral puebloans they built what have often described as the first modern apartment complexes in north america in places like chaco canyon they built multi-story stone buildings that housed thousands of people they built roads and remember they don’t have domestic animals they don’t have uh cattle or horses they don’t have wheeled transport but they built perfectly straight roads radiating out from choco canyon and connecting that connecting that place to smaller towns and villages around them and archaeologists today aren’t even sure exactly why you know when they trade routes where they pilgrimage routes were they were they both um you know pueblo benito may have been a religious center uh so they they built these roads and they even um you know cut steps into cliff faces so they wouldn’t have to go around them and they built causeways and these are roads that are still visible from the air uh in much of the southwest and they’re not as extensive or as grand as the roads the romans built but presumably they had similar kind of function which just symbolized the power

36:30 of the anasazi of the ancestral puebloan elites but then as you said it was undone by drought the southwest is uh an arid or semi-arid region um and when drought strikes and we’re currently in a very severe drought it’s been going on almost 20 years their crops withered and that appears to have brought on increased unrest and war among peoples in the region and uh they begin building their settlements into things like cliff faces like at monovarity where you know they’re obviously trying to protect themselves um you know if you go to monteverdi you can see that um it’s built high on a cliff and you can only access uh many of the rooms with ladders so people don’t build homes like that unless they’re worried about something someone coming and taking their stuff and and maybe killing them um so it shows you that you know native north america was was not an eden as it’s often described a place of complete peace and harmony but the advanced civilization of the ancestral puebloans shows you that uh it also wasn’t the world of of utter darkness and savagery and primitivism

38:01 uh that europeans often described when they when they arrived but this civilization had fallen apart by the time the europeans actually laid eyes on it and one of the things that’s kind of amusing is that they were at a loss to explain it because they they assumed that the local natives that they met couldn’t have been responsible for it so they oftentimes came up with outlandish theories about um where these things had come from maybe the aztecs had come north and and built these or maybe um you know roman galley got blown off blown off course and some the romans wandered out here um but the the so-called mystery of the anasazi uh has has pretty much been solved by archaeologists and the answer is is not that they disappeared but rather that they they migrated they migrated um south and east and became the hopies the zunis and the various pueblos of northern new mexico that europeans encountered and in many ways they they reconstituted the society that the society that existed in places like pueblo benito but they did it on a smaller more sustainable scale by practicing agriculture in irrigated fields and developing elaborate kachina dances that uh propitiate the spirits the kachinas that bring rain

39:32 from the mountains yeah um and and i know that you’re gonna by necessity uh paint some broad strokes here uh but the the native americans east of the mississippi now they built some complex political systems and diplomatic alliances cultures uh and how did those rivalries uh shape the course of history uh in that region uh before the europeans came but then obviously shaped how they interacted with the europeans when when they did come so maybe you can speak a little bit about that right yeah east of the mississippi you also see in the pre-contact or pre-columbian period great civilizations like the adina hopewell cultural complex which flourished in ohio and indiana and left behind elaborate mounds like the great serpent mound near chillicothe which is quite a sight to say i haven’t seen it yet but if you view it from the air it looks like a snake eating an egg and it’s quite large and so the mystery of it is how did people who didn’t have access to you know airplanes or satellites or drones you know how did they plan this thing out and actually build it uh and in a lot of these mounds archaeologists have discovered evidence of a vast wealth so these were also socially stratified hierarchical societies um that were connected to each other

41:04 into other places uh through vast trade networks that brought um things like precious metals that could then be made into works of art that were buried with the important people like like the egyptians did for example um even more impressive in terms of its size uh was the mississippian culture complex which produced one of the great urban centers in north america which is called cahokia it’s across the river from modern-day st louis and although the pyramids there have been worn down by erosion and some of them were destroyed by development archaeologists who’ve studied that place have concluded that at its base the the great central pyramid in cahokia which was a palisaded city with walls around it uh was larger than the great pyramid at giza so these are enormous structures that towered over a city that at its peak about a thousand years ago scholars estimate you know may have housed as many as 250 000 people which would make it as large as london at the time which was the largest city in medieval europe so it’s a big urban center and we also know that these people like the ancestral puebloans

42:34 practiced astronomy they studied the movement of the heavens they were also an agricultural society that produced large surpluses of food that could sustain you know the upper classes and also provide trade and then although the reasons are still a little bit murky it seems that climate change associated with the little ice age caused drought uh and or floods or things that undermined the economic base of the society and it disintegrated and the people spread out and some of them became other mound building societies that the spanish encountered when they came into the southeast but again the the civilization that they left behind uh was so uh inexplicable to europeans that they grasped at straws to explain how it had come about because they they assumed that the native people were incapable of building on that kind of scale to get to get back to your question you know by the time europeans arrived on the eastern seaboard some powerful confederacies had formed in places like virginia the powhatan confederacy

44:04 confronted john smith and the english um powhatans had uh through trade and diplomacy but all through also through conquest uh cobbled together a network of different tribes that stretched all the way from you know the peninsula here in southeastern virginia up to around modern day washington dc and as far west as the blue ridge uh even more powerful was the iroquois confederacy or the haudenosaunee people of upstate new york the so-called five nations ultimately became six nations after the tuscaroras joined them in the colonial era but the mohawks the senecas the ondagas the cayugas and the tuscaroras and the united um set aside their internal differences and there’s a great oral tradition associated with this uh the work of hiawatha and dagonawida helped to put aside their differences and form a unified confederacy it has been argued although it’s very contentious to be that the iroquois confederacy provided the blueprint for the united states that people like benjamin franklin admired the work that they had done in ford informing a a federal system in effect you know you have

45:35 uh five or six different nations that are independent but then they also like states but then you know in terms of dealing with foreign threats or you know what we might call international diplomacy they tried to act as one so they are very powerful force in the northeast at the time and through the covenant chain which was a a metaphor they extended the uh chain of peace and friendship that united the their own confederacy to other groups and in fact that was often done through conquest but groups like the delawares and the shawnees sometimes join the covenant chain and then later the dutch and the english take hold of this chain and this native metaphor this native way of conducting diplomacy uh becomes very important in the eastern woodlands for europeans if they want to get anything done if they want to trade if they want alliances in particular you have to appease or mollify uh the iroquois okay um so uh again uh more broad strokes but uh just as as the final question here as we wrap things up um how did the the course of history for these native peoples change with the arrival uh and settlement

47:06 of the europeans in 1492 and and then you know 1607 at jamestown yeah well um should be clear by now that as i said at the beginning that the so-called new world that europeans described wasn’t really new because it had been settled by native americans for perhaps 20 000 years before columbus showed up in the caribbean but the arrival of europeans greatly accelerated the pace of change and so north america quickly became what uh historian james merrill has called a new world for all uh it becomes new for for native peoples often in ways that uh they later regret uh the most rapid and consequential change that overtook native americans resulted from the introduction of old world diseases to which they had no previous exposure and therefore no immunity living in the age of coven 19 which is why we’re doing this on zoom we all now have a good idea of what can happen to a society when it is struck by a novel virus or bacteria that is poorly understood and can be quite deadly many of the imported diseases that infected american indians were even bigger killers much bigger killers than covent 19 especially smallpox and influenza

48:37 in some places these diseases raced inland far ahead of actual european exploration and settlement through the trade networks that i’ve described and although estimates very um there’s good evidence that in some places they killed a third or more of the people they infected in what must have been terrifying epidemics they’re sometimes called virgin soil epidemics because when a pathogen finds a population with no immunity it runs wild and so in some places like coastal massachusetts by the time puritans showed up there were whole villages that were empty and full of bones and being the religious providentially minded people they were puritans concluded that you know providence or god had cleared a path for his chosen people but it was really disease smallpox is really what enabled cortes to topple the aztec empire with only a small army and it’s what allowed the puritans to establish a beachhead in new england so as historian francis jennings has said north america wasn’t a virgin land when europeans arrived but much of it became widowed due to european pathogens another aspect of what alfred crosby has called the colombian exchange this biological encounter between old and new worlds was the importation of plants and

50:08 animals which also transformed the lives of native americans in in dramatic ways um we’ve already talked about the reintroduction of horses and how that revolutionizes life on the great plains and gives rise to the great horse cultures that americans later confronted in their expansion across the continent similarly uh after the navajos or the danae in the southwest um acquired sheep and goats from the spanish they so thoroughly integrated them into their culture not only as a source of mutton and milk but also wool which they then wove using techniques they learned from the hopies and the pueblos they became so thorough thoroughly integrated into dynamic culture that like horses with other groups their oral traditions describe them as sacred gifts from the holy people not not something that they acquired from the spanish there are there are negative consequences to the introduction ecologically at least though um when you talk about horses and sheep they heavily affected the natural environments of the plains in the southwest the navajo country denetah is very dry with very little rainfall thin soils and not a lot of grass cover and goats and sheep can can have a significant impact on that environment the same is true of planes grasslands where horses larger and larger horse herds increasingly competed

51:39 with native game including bison for forage in colonial new england the pigs that the english brought became a source of trouble because they would let their pigs wander and native people didn’t fence their fields and the pigs would go into the native people’s fields and eat their crops and then the native people would often kill the pigs and all of a sudden you’ve got like an international incident on your hands so this biological encounter has unpredictable consequences europeans get a lot out of it you know they get corn they get beans and squash they get tomatoes and potatoes from south america it’s been estimated about two-thirds of the produce that we eat today has new world origins so this greatly enriches the diets of europeans but the process tends to work to the disadvantage of native people as not only invasive species like pigs but also plants like wheat and barley and oats get planted uh in what had been you know native woodlands or um native farmlands and you also have weeds you know getting in uh in the mix through things like animal feed and they begin to displace native species and in that way they changed the world that indian foragers had adapted to over many centuries and it becomes a new in some ways unrecognizable place

53:12 places like new england within a few decades so all these changes are part of what crosby calls ecological imperialism colonization involves not just people but also animals plants diseases that can you know upend uh native native ways of life right well uh i mean i could uh listen to you all day i’ve learned a lot i’m sure our teachers and students here who are watching have i’m sure they’ll learn a lot from reading your your essay and other essays in the textbook uh andrew fisher of the college of william and mary i want to thank you so much for coming on uh to hold this conversation uh and for your contributions to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness thank you it’s been a pleasure thank you and uh all the teachers and students are watching can register at bill of rights institute.org to have access to that free online textbook life liberty and the pursuit of happiness thank you for joining us thank you you