chapter 1
The Native Americans
W
ho were the Native Americans? The Spanish, French,
and English explorers were perplexed by that question.
Their first assumption that the natives were Chinese was soon abandoned;
the natives obviously were not European and did not seem to be African
either. The explorers could not think of any other possibilities. William
Strachey spoke for them in 1612 in his Historie of Travell into Virginia
Britania:“It were not perhappes too curyous a thing to demaund, how
these people might come first, and from whome, and whence, having no
entercourse with Africa, Asianor Europe, and considering the whole
world, so many years, by all knowledg receaved, was supposed to be only
conteyned and circumscrybed in the discovered and travelled Bowndes of
those three.”
The Indian societies he saw, Strachey would have been astonished to
learn, were formed by thousands of years of migration, splitting apart,
rejoining, exchanging mates, settling, and adapting—essentially the same
process that shaped European lives and culture. Just as Europeans were
products of the migrations of western Asians, so the Native Americans were
descendants of migrants from eastern Asia. And just as the Europeans’ lan-
guages give a view of their history, so American Indians’ languages illustrate
their background.
The first Indians the Spaniards encountered in what they named La
Florida spoke dialects of a language known as Muskhogean. It was one of
583 languages that have so far been identified as spoken by natives in North
and South America. Linguists trace it back to a tongue they call Amerind.
Linguistic evidence points toward northeastern Asia as their “origin.” What
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