NATIVE AMERICAN

also called American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, or Indian, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of the Eskimo, or Inuit, and Aleuts. The aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere usually are recognized as constituting two broad groupings. The first and larger group, called Native Americans, is further divided geographically into North American, Middle American, and South American Indian peoples. The second group consists of a number of Arctic peoples, most of whom are variously called Eskimo or Inuit but also including such other groups as Aleuts. Although all these peoples had their origins in Asia and have retained some physical affinities with modern Asiatic peoples, they were isolated long enough to have developed into a distinct group, generally called the American Indian geographic race. The distinction between Asiatics and Americans has remained somewhat blurred, however, in extreme northeastern Siberia and northwestern Alaska, where the indigenous peoples of that region have exhibited greater affinities with each other than with their respective geographic races. The date of the arrival of humans in North America has not been accurately established, but it is known to have occurred during the Pleistocene Epoch (1,600,000 to 10,000 years ago). For some time the earliest human occupation of America was thought to date to the last (Wisconsin) glacial period, or about 35,000 to 20,000 years ago. More recently, however, some authorities have asserted that the first arrivals were much earlier, even up to 60,000 years ago. The site of entry into North America is widely assumed to have been a land bridgeformed as glaciers advanced and sea levels fellwhere the Bering Strait now divides Asia and America. The waves of newcomers to the Americas possessed a series of traits that were relatively ancient and were shared by most peoples of Africa and Eurasia. These included the use of fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear thrower, harpoon, and simple bow; cordage, netting, and basketry; and various rites and healing beliefs and practices. By the time Europeans began arriving in significant numbers at the beginning of the 16th century AD, the descendants of these and later waves of migrants had spread over the Americas and had developed a variety of cultures adjusted to various ecological conditions. The peoples of the New World developed markedly different cultures from those of the Old World during their many millennia of isolation. Some Old World practices, such as the use of the wheel and the plow and the fashioning of iron implements, did not emerge; others, such as pottery making and urbanization, reached high levels of sophistication in the Americas. Many New World cultures depended on hunting and gathering, although agriculture came to be the economic base of more advanced civilizations. The focus in the New World was on corn (maize), beans, squash, and tubers as the staple crops, as contrasted to the Old World reliance on such cereal grains as wheat, barley, and rice. The scope of this article is a survey of the Native American peoples and cultures of North, Middle, and South America, with an emphasis on traditional ways of life and the changes wrought by contact with European civilization. The traditional culture of the North American Arctic peoples is treated in the article Arctic. Additional cultural and historical information on indigenous American peoples can be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations and Stone Age. The art forms of Native American and North American Arctic peoples are discussed in the article Native American arts. The North American continent into which the Asian migrants descended is divided roughly into three major physiographic landforms: the high Cordilleras in the west, the relatively lower Appalachian Highlands and Piedmont in the east, and, between them, the Great Plains, which spearhead from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico in a great triangle. The Western Cordilleras are a series of parallel northsouth ranges cutting from Alaska to Central America; in the area of Canada and the United States they enclose, from north to south, a large plateau of grasslands and forests, an even broader, arid plateau known as the Great Basin, and a desert plain and range area of Arizona and New Mexico (as well as northwestern Mexico). The Cordilleras along the Pacific Coast separate a plethora of basins and plateaus from the coastlands. The central Great Plains, in the extreme north, consists of subarctic land that is swampy and coniferous and similar to the taiga and tundra of Siberia; to the south, the great Mississippi drainage system divides the relatively drier high plains to the west from the low, well-watered prairies and rolling hills to the east. The Appalachian Highlands and Piedmont contain, to the north, the great eastern woodlands and, to the south, a series of highlands and foothills descending to lowlands on the coast of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of European contact there were perhaps as many as 240 different tribal entities in North America. Groups of these tribes, however, have been classified by anthropologists into a more convenient limited number of culture areas, determined very much by physiographic or environmental differences: the subarctic, the Northwest Coast, California, the western Plateau, the western Great Basin, the Southwest, the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Southeast. Additional reading Books in the Civilization of the American Indian Series cover North, Central, and South American peoples and issues; several volumes are included below. Brian M. Fagan, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America (1987), investigates various theories. Prehistoric America is covered in Jesse D. Jennings (ed.), Ancient North Americans (1983); and in M. Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (1986). The question of how many people lived in the Americas when the Europeans arrived is addressed by William M. Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. (1992). Descriptions for the general reader of the major tribes in eastern and southwestern North America through Mexico to Andean South America may be found in Jamake Highwater, Native Land: Sagas of the Indian Americas (1986). Indigenous religions of both continents are explored in ke Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians (1979); and Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody, Native American Religions: An Introduction (1993), both covering North, Central, and South America. An encyclopaedic summary of knowledge, literature, and research on 11 principal cultural regions north of Mexico is provided by William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (1978 ). Other reference works include Carl Waldman and Molly Braun, Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes (1988), alphabetical entries on tribes, cultures, civilizations, and languages in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and Atlas of the North American Indian (1985), including ancient Meso-American peoples; on Canada and the United States, Barbara A. Leitch (Barbara Leitch LePoer), A Concise Dictionary of Indian Tribes of North America, ed. by Kendall T. LePoer (1979), for the general reader; Barry T. Klein (ed.), Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian, 6th ed. (1993); and Duane Champagne (ed.), The Native North American Almanac (1994), a combination of handbook, encyclopaedia, and directory; and, on the United States only, Francis Paul Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs (1990); and Arlene Hirschfelder and Martha Kreipe de Montao, The Native American Almanac: A Portrait of Native America Today (1993). An extensive listing of books and articles on particular Indian groups is given in George Peter Murdock and Timothy J. O'Leary, Ethnographic Bibliography of North America, 4th ed., 5 vol. (1975); and in a companion work, M. Marlene Martin and Timothy J. O'Leary, Ethnographic Bibliography of North America, Supplement, 19731987, 3 vol. (1990). Ongoing research is published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal (quarterly); and American Indian Quarterly.Useful introductory works on archaeology and prehistory are Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck (eds.), Prehistoric Man in the New World (1964, reissued 1974); Jesse D. Jennings, Prehistory of North America, 2nd ed. (1974); Dean Snow, The Archaeology of North America (1976), from the Ice Age to the 17th century; and David L. Browman (ed.), Early Native Americans: Prehistoric Demography, Economy, and Technology (1980).Some of the more notable general surveys of the native peoples of North America, both past and present, are Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, 20 vol. (190730, reissued 1978); A.L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (1939, reprinted 1976); John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (1952, reprinted 1984); Fred Eggan (ed.), Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, 2nd enlarged ed. (1955, reissued 1970); Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States, rev. ed. edited by Lucy Wales Kluckhohn (1966, reissued 1989); Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America, 2nd ed., rev. (1969), including Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (1970, reissued 1989), including Alaska; Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie (eds.), North American Indians in Historical Perspective (1971, reprinted 1988); Robert F. Spencer et al., The Native Americans, 2nd ed. (1977); Jon Manchip White, Everyday Life of the North American Indian (1979, reprinted 1993), coverage for the most part up to European contact; Joseph G. Jorgensen, Western Indians: Comparative Environments, Languages, and Cultures of 172 Western American Indian Tribes (1980), on Northwest Coast, Californian, North American Plateau, Great Basin, and Southwest peoples; Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables (eds.), American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History (1980); Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore (eds.), A Cultural Geography of North American Indians (1987); Paul Stuart, Nations Within a Nation: Historical Statistics of American Indians (1987), with extensive tables and bibliography; Herman J. Viola, After Columbus: The Smithsonian Chronicle of the North American Indians (1990); Norman Bancroft-Hunt, North American Indians (1991), well illustrated; John Gattuso (ed.), Native America (1991), a description of people, places, history, and culture written and illustrated by Native Americans; Alice Beck Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 2nd ed. (1992); and William T. Hagan, American Indians, 3rd ed. (1993).Studies of Canadian peoples in particular are Harold Cardinal, The Rebirth of Canada's Indians (1977), a study of government relations; Diamond Jenness, The Indians of Canada, 7th ed. (1977), a new edition of a classic work; Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown (eds.), The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Mtis in North America (1985); Bruce Alden Cox (ed.), Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit, and Mtis (1987), a study of economics with a bibliographic essay on Canadian native studies; J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, rev. ed. (1991); Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (1992); and James S. Frideres and Lilianne Ernestine Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Native Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts, 4th ed. (1993).Population histories include A.J. Jaffee, The First Immigrants from Asia (1992); Henry F. Dobyns and William R. Swagerty, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (1983); and Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987), the latter two covering the period 1492 to the present. C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (1989), based on information from the 1980 census, discusses such topics as housing, family structure, education, and mortality and makes comparisons with white and black Americans.Government policy, ethnic identity and status, and land claims are set forth in Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (1971), on developments prior to 1934; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo's Gone: A Study of Today's American Indians (1982), on land claims and on self-determination and sovereignty; Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983), on the Choctaw in the 18th century, the Pawnee in the 19th, and the Navajo in the 20th; Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (1984); Sandra L. Cadwalader and Vine Deloria, Jr. (eds.), The Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s (1984); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vol. (1984), and The Indians in American Society: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (1985); Vine Deloria, Jr. (ed.), American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (1985); Sharon O'Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (1989), on both historical and present-day governments; and Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 18871934 (1991).Religious beliefs and ceremonies are described in two reference works, Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette Molin, The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions (1992); and Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan, Dictionary of Native American Mythology (1992); and in such other studies as Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (1981); ke Hultkrantz, Belief and Worship in Native North America, ed. by Christopher Vecsey (1981), and The Study of American Indian Religions, ed. by Christopher Vecsey (1983); Sam D. Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction (1982); Connie Burland, North American Indian Mythology, new rev. ed. revised by Marion Wood (1985); Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (1987); and Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult, 5th ed., enlarged (1989). The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica