Pre colonized America’s?

by amc-to-da-moon

Is there written history from the Americas pre- colonial times?

Some meme showed up on Facebook talking about how “we,” I guess meaning non indigenous Americans, don’t deserve the knowledge of Native Americans because they are kind and cared for the earth as a whole.

Most cultures, religions, ideologies talk about the same thing. Caring for one another, help the poor .... but doesn’t always turn out like that.

I am sure there is a lot of pre colonized American history that was not so pretty.

Any information, books, articles on this? Most of what I found was more architectural stuff. I will be looking more into now as well.

SurpriseMe_36R

While I do not have access to pre colonized sources, looking at the interactions between Natives and colonists makes it fairly clear by contrast the differences in Native and European opinions about land use and the environment during the period of their early interaction. This answer draws heavily from Changes in the Land by William Cronon, who I would encourage as a source for early New England ecology.

For your question, in New England the Natives did treat the land differently from the Europeans, but this revolved more around private property than respect for the land as an ideal. Native societies, being more mobile, would move from place to place in order to maximize their ability to obtain food. While a colonial farm might stay inside a particular landowners area, planting the same crops year after year and exhausting the soil, the lower population density and mobility of the Natives meant that a group would spread out their farming over a larger area in a longer period of time, giving the soil the ability to recover. This also applied to animals, where Natives in the region would leave populations more intact due to their wider ranging. The Natives appear to have seen ownership as less focused on the land and more on the animal resources of the land.

Did this mean that Natives were in harmony with the land? Not really. There was active management of the area done by them in order to maximize their own benefit. Perhaps the most striking example of this was the fires that were set by them to clear underbrush and allow for easier hunting. Further, the case of the beaver indicates that in some areas it was more lack of reward that stopped Natives from over hunting particular species than a more ideological reason. Once Europeans made hunting beaver worth a hunter's time by trade goods, there does not seem to be an ideological barrier that stopped them from happily hunting the species for access to this new market. When the beaver was nearly driven extinct by over hunting, the efforts by Natives to preserve the species appear based more around sustaining their livelihoods than an innate love for the animals.

As for interpersonal relations, the Natives were notably concerned about status. While in New England there were not European style monarchs, there were goods that were valued because their scarcity meant owning them was a sign of wealth. Wampum is an example of this, initially scare due to limited production in one area and gradually being less valuable as more was made to trade.