As the previous article emphasized, factual revision is sometimes necessary when new evidence is discovered. Therefore, not all historical revisionism should be discouraged. However, some scholars and amateurs are more eager than others to revise history. Revisions made primarily because of ideological concerns should be carefully examined, as many see history as simply a tool for advancing their agendas.

A good example of history being revised to fit one’s ideology would be the negation of the Jewish Holocaust, as referenced previously. There is solid evidence supporting the reality of this historic event.  Nazi Germany systematically exterminated some six million Jewish people, along with millions of other victims. However, some do not find this fact amenable to their political or religious views. The Islamic worldview has led some to rewrite and revise history to fit their narrative.

The article below discusses the need to revise myths and misconceptions in history. In fact, the author argues that correcting previously promoted ideas is one of history’s most important tasks. As you read this article focused specifically on the American Indian, consider the broader question of who determines which facts are myths or misconceptions. While the effort to correct errors is laudable, it is not as easy to separate facts from opinions, values, and interpretations as it may at first seem.

The First Americans (Source)

Correcting Myths and Misconceptions

Most of the history that we acquire comes not from history textbooks or classroom lectures but from images that we receive from movies, television, childhood stories, and folklore. Together, these images exert a powerful influence upon the way we think about the past. Some of these images are true; others are false. But much of what we think we know about the past consists of unexamined mythic images.

No aspect of our past has been more thoroughly shaped by popular mythology than the history of Native Americans. Quite unconsciously, Americans have picked up a complex set of mythic images. For example, many assume that pre-Columbian North America was a sparsely populated virgin land; in fact, the area north of Mexico probably had seven to twelve million inhabitants. Also, when many Americans think of early Indians, they conceive of hunters on horseback. This image is misleading in two important respects: first, many Native Americans were farmers; and second, horses had been extinct in the New World for 10,000 years before Europeans arrived.

One of history’s most important tasks is to identify myths and misconceptions and correct them. This is especially important in the study of the Indian peoples of North America. Many textbooks still begin their treatment of American history with the European “discovery” of the New World–largely ignoring the first Americans, who crossed into the New World from Asia and established rich and diverse cultures in America centuries before Columbus’s arrival. Although few textbooks today use the word “primitive” to describe pre-contact Native Americans, many still convey the impression that North American Indians consisted simply of small migratory bands that subsisted through hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. As we shall see, this view is incorrect; in fact, Native American societies were rich, diverse, and sophisticated.

Throughout their history, Native Americans have been dynamic agents of change. Food discovered and domesticated by Native Americans would transform the diet of Europe and Asia. Native Americans also made many crucial–though often neglected–contributions to modern medicine, art, architecture, and ecology.

During the thousands of years preceding European contact, the Native American people developed inventive and creative cultures. They cultivated plants for food, dyes, medicines, and textiles; domesticated animals; established extensive patterns of trade; built cities; produced monumental architecture; developed intricate systems of religious beliefs; and constructed a wide variety of systems of social and political organization ranging from kin-based bands and tribes to city-states and confederations. Native Americans not only adapted to diverse and demanding environments, they also reshaped the natural environments to meet their needs.

Origins

In the spring of 1926, an African-American cowboy named George McJunkin made a discovery that profoundly altered our understanding of the first Americans in North America. While hunting for lost cattle along the edge of a gully near Folsom, New Mexico, he spotted some bleached bones. Those bones, it turned out, were the ribs of a species of bison that had been extinct for 10,000 years. Mixed in with the bones were human-made stone spearheads. The spearheads offered the first unambiguous proof that ancestors of today’s Indians lived in the New World thousands of years earlier than most early 20th century authorities believed–before the end of the last ice age.

Although the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas in the late 15th century called it the “New World,” it was a land that had been inhabited for more than 20,000 years. An enormous diversity of societies flourished, each with its own distinctive language, cultural patterns, and history. There are no written records that document these histories. To reconstruct this story, it is necessary to turn to fragile archaeological artifacts that record past human behavior. From snippets of baskets, fragments of pottery, food remains, discarded tools, and oral traditions, anthropologists, archeologists, and historians have pieced together information about these peoples’ social organization, technology, and diet, including how these have changed over time. This is a remarkable story, which underscores the ability of the first Americans to adapt to–and reshape–extraordinarily diverse environments, create their own rich and sophisticated cultures independent of outside influences, and establish elaborate trading networks and sophisticated religious systems.

When and how the ancestors of today’s Indians arrived in the New World remains one of the most controversial issues in archaeology. Many 16th century Europeans believed that the Indians were descendants of the Biblical “Lost Tribes of Israel” or the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. In 1590, a Spanish Jesuit missionary, Jose de Acosta, came closer to the truth when he suggested that small groups of “hunters driven from their homelands by starvation or some other hardships” had traveled to America from Asia.

Most scholars believe that America’s first pioneers crossed into North America in the general area of the Bering Strait–which now separates Siberia and Alaska. Although the dates when the ancestors of today’s Native Americans migrated remain disputed, existing evidence suggests that the first migrants arrived between 25,000 and 70,000 years ago. The earth’s climate at that time was very different from today’s climate. The earliest Americans entered the New World during one of the earth’s periodic ice ages, when vast amounts of water froze into glaciers. As a result, the depth of the oceans dropped, exposing a “land bridge” between Siberia and Alaska. Twice, such a land bridge appeared–between 28,000 and about 26,000 years ago, and between 20,000 and 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In fact, the term “land bridge” is a misnomer; a vast expanse of marsh-filled land, a thousand miles wide, stretched between Siberia and Alaska. This land mass, now known as Beringia, allowed hunters from northeastern Asia to follow the migratory paths of animals that were their source of food into the more southerly parts of Alaska.

Supporting the notion that the first Americans came from Northeast Asia is the evidence of physical anthropology. Native Americans and northeast Asian people share certain common physical traits: straight black hair; dark brown eyes; wide cheekbones; and “shovel incisors” (concave inner surfaces of the upper front teeth).

Physical and linguistic evidence suggests that the migration into the Americas did not take place all at once. Many scholars believe that it took place in three distinct waves, with the Inuit (Eskimos) and the natives of the Aleutian Islands arriving more recently than the people who would inhabit the Pacific Northwest coast or other portions of North and South America.

The original settlers of North America were a remarkably adaptable people, capable of surviving in subfreezing temperatures in the tundra. In a climate much harsher than today’s, they were able to build fires, construct heavily insulated housing, and make warm clothes out of hides and furs.

Despite a lack of wheeled vehicles and riding animals, the first Americans spread quickly across North and South America. This momentous movement of people was propelled by population pressure, since hunters and gatherers required a great deal of territory to support themselves. Archaeological findings suggest that these people moved along three routes: eastward, across Canada’s northern coast; southward, along the Pacific Coast, as well as across the eastern Rocky Mountains, with some groups peeling off toward the eastern seaboard, the Ohio Valley, and the Mississippi Valley.

Prehistoric Patterns of Change

Near Kit Carson, Colorado, archaeologists made an astonishing discovery. There, they found stone spearheads alongside the bones of extinct long-horned bison–evidence of a huge bison hunt around 8200 B.C. During this hunt, Native Americans drove some 200 bison into a gully before killing the animals. To butcher and carry away the 60,000 pounds of meat must have required at least 150 Indians working closely together.

At Bat Cave in southwestern New Mexico archaeologists made another important find. There, they found evidence that around 3000 B.C. Indians had learned to domesticate corn, the first grown north of Mexico. It was a primitive form of corn, with stalks barely an inch long and no husk to protect the kernels. Still, it was a sign that these people were no longer wholly dependent on wild food sources; they were now able to supplement their diet by cultivating crops.

It is from discoveries like these that archaeologists reconstruct the prehistory of North America’s Indians. They have found that the earliest New World pioneers hunted large mammals–bison, caribou, oxen, and mammoths–with stone tipped spears and spear and dart throwers, known as atlatls. Between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, however, many large animal species became extinct. Archaeologists do not agree why these animals died out. Some argue that it was the result of overkilling; others attribute it to climatic changes: rising temperatures, the drying up of many lakes, and the loss of many early forms of vegetation. As a result, the ancestors of today’s Indians had to dramatically alter their way of life.

As the larger mammals died out and the Indian population grew, many Indian peoples turned to foraging, gathering plant foods, fishing, and hunting smaller animals. To hunt small game, these people developed new kinds of weapons, including spears with barbed points, the bow and arrow, and nets and hooks for fishing. This era, known as the Archaic period, offers many examples of these peoples’ increasing technological sophistication, evident in the proliferation of such objects as awls, axes, boats, cloth, darts, millstones, and woven baskets.

Following the Archaic period comes the Formative period, when some foragers began to domesticate wild seeds. By 3000 B.C., some groups of Southwestern Indians had already begun to grow corn. The rise of agriculture allowed these people to form permanent settlements.