Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal

Annotations from Native Nations: A Millennium in North America Kathleen DuVal

chosen not to focus on histories of Native nations when they were subject to overwhelming European or U.S. power. History books, classes, documentaries, and feature films tend to overemphasize the periods of catastrophe, so the history of Jamestown’s defeat of Pocahontas’s people and the Cherokee Trail of Tears get told again and again, with little attention paid to Cherokees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or to twenty-first-century Pamunkeys—one

One of the goals of this book is to reinsert Native American history into world history.

People on the move, for war or hunting, might start a fire the hard way, but so did Europeans. Like everyone else, Native people stopped depending on premodern processes when other means became available. They adopted steel to use with flint in the sixteenth century, matches in the nineteenth century, and piped-in gas and electricity in the twentieth. Europeans came upon one version of Native peoples and took it as representative of their whole past and their whole future. A snapshot became eternity.[14]

By the late nineteenth century, explicit theories of white supremacy were at their height, and their proponents’ fervor to prove that people of European descent had always been superior led them on a cockeyed search for alternative human builders. Historian Thomas Maxwell, using white supremacist circular logic, told the Alabama Historical Society in 1876 that “the high grade of military engineering skill” required to build one of the earthworks in Alabama “proves beyond a doubt that a more civilized race than the Indians”

As late as 2002, O’odham elders listened as members of the Arizona Archaeological Council discussed theories about what had happened to the people who built the pyramids, cities, and vast irrigation systems. Finally, one of the elders told them to stop asking what had happened to those people: “We are still here.”

For too long, most Americans didn’t take oral history seriously, creating a mystery where there never was one. The question of who built these places and where they went are no mystery, O’odham elders and historians repeat: “We’ve always lived here.”

Today, descendants are studying and teaching this long history as one of continuity.

Many archaeologists (and historians) now work from a “premise of continuity,” a recognition that Native nations today are descended from the civilizations of the past and have not only knowledge about them but the primary stake in their interpretation.

It might be a surprise to outsiders that the Sonoran Desert was home to the largest agricultural system of twelfth-century North America. Today, Phoenix averages only seven inches of rain per year and more than ninety days of temperatures above one hundred degrees.

Yet the Gila River and its tributaries have long rippled through this desert landscape, carrying water to the Colorado River near where it empties into the Gulf of California. Before the rivers were dammed in the early twentieth century, their bright green riverbanks colorfully contrasted with the desert sands. The Salt River, a tributary of the Gila, was why Americans in the 1860s built a town they called Phoenix, in hopes that it would rise from the ashes of the ancient civilization of the Huhugam.

Two cities of northern Mexico that were contemporaneous with the Huhugam were Paquimé, in Chihuahua, several hundred miles to the southeast, and a large civilization that archaeologists call Las Trincheras (the Trenches), for its irrigation system along the Altar and Magdalena rivers in what’s now the state of Sonora. Along with the Huhugam, the people of Las Trincheras were ancestors of today’s O’odham, as we shall see in chapter

The irrigation of rice, for example, allowed China’s population to double between the eighth and twelfth centuries.

By the year 1000, the Huhugam had built the largest irrigation system in the Americas outside of Peru, with well over one thousand miles of canals, irrigating thousands of acres and feeding more than a hundred thousand people. Shell bracelets, rings, and pendants were so ubiquitous that archaeologists suspect people wore them to signal that they were Huhugam when they traveled elsewhere, perhaps even after death.

Teams and fans would come to town for ball games, which were occasions for feasting, courtship, trade, and sharing news. The Huhugam eventually had at least two hundred stadiums. Their teams may have also traveled to play in the cities of northern Mexico and in Chaco Canyon, to the northeast.[35]

But then the Huhugam dramatically centralized and urbanized. The 1006 and 1054 supernovas may have been a spark, and there was an urgent earthly reason: the Gila River. In the eleventh century, it began to expand its banks. Previously a predictable, fairly narrow channel, ideal for funneling water into irrigation canals, the Gila spread wider and dug into the floodplain on both sides, in a process that geomorphologists call downcutting. The widening river destroyed the original headgates and required new planning and new gates and canals.

the va’aki (in the O’odham language) marked a major change in public spaces. Stadiums—the center of Huhugam public life for several hundred years—were abandoned, no longer used for games or other activities but simply left to deteriorate. In their place, these new pyramids stood out against the sky. Historian Daniel K. Richter compares this kind of Native North American public architecture to cathedrals of Europe built in the same period, “soaring spaces focusing human attention on the spirit world” as “monuments to a new kind of agricultural civilization.”