Native America's rich history

 

 

    By Reginald Johnson

 

  Lucianne Lavin, the author of  “Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples,” was reading the paper one day when she was taken aback.

  A story covered a lecture she gave on her book and Connecticut Indians and one reader had left the following comment: “Why would anyone want to read a book on Native Americans?  They’ve contributed nothing to our society.”

Lavin said, “I was enraged about this. I really wanted to write something, but I didn’t. I went to bed and thought about it.”

 “I decided to come up with a list of all the things that Native Americans have contributed to the building of America.”

 It was substantial.

 “First of all, 90 percent of our food culture, was actually contributed by Native people,” she said. The list includes corn, which came from the teosinte plant is northern Mexico and was cultivated by Indians more than 8,000 years ago, but also beans and squash.

  “And tomatoes, tomatoes are actually Native American coming out of South America, well before the Italians got it,” Lavin said. Also developed first by Indians were potatoes, which also originated in South America and the Southwest US and then brought to Europe by the Spanish.

 “And chocolate,” Lavin said, “all kinds of things you wouldn’t think were Native American, were Native American”

 Indians also provided the basis for America’s transportation system, said Lavin, who has taught archaeology and anthropology at Connecticut College and other universities.

 “Our American highways system is based on Native American pathways that crisscross the continent,” Lavin said.

 Good examples of that are some of the first “federal roads,” like Routes 1 and 7.

 “Route 7 was part of the old Berkshire path that originally started in the coastal area of Stratford and went up through Western Connecticut going through Schaghticoke and up into Massachusetts, connecting coastal Connecticut communities with major Indian communities and Western Massachusetts," she said. “For example Stockbridge, which was a major Indian town --- it was actually called Indiantown before it was called Stockbridge.”

 Indian pathways were also the basis for much of the United States railroad network.

 Native Americans also had a major impact on the development of American democracy, with the Founders like Thomas Jefferson taking political ideas from Indian tribes.

 “Jefferson and (Benjamin) Franklin actually visited the Iroquois to learn more about their Confederation, which was a democracy. In fact, all of the Native political systems in North America were democracies. They ruled by consensus. Everybody had to agree. That’s why it took so long for Native people to make decisions,” Dr. Lavin said.

  “Our Bill of Rights as well as the Constitution was based on Native American democracies,” she said.

  Other areas where Indians have had a major impact are music, art, sports and medicine.

 “A lot of our herbal doctors are utilizing Native plants and using Native prescriptions on how to use them,” she said.

Finally, Lavin noted Indians have participated in large numbers in the nation’s military. She said that as a percentage of their population Native Americans have the highest participation rate in US military of any ethnic group.

 So the contributions by Native Americans to America have been many and varied.

“What it also shows is not only that Native American communities contributed to the building of America, but that Native history is very much intertwined with American history,” Lavin said.  “I mean Native histories are part of American history --- you can’t separate them. Before the Europeans came, American history was Native history because there were no Europeans here.”

 Dr. Lavin, the director of research and collections emeritus at the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT, made her comments in a presentation at the Bridgeport Public Library in November and then in a later interview. The talk in Bridgeport coincided with Native American Heritage Month and was entitled “Connecticut’s Indigenous Communities: An Introduction to their Histories and Cultures.”

 Lavin related that indigenous people have been on the North American continent a very long time, predating the arrival of Columbus and other Europeans in the 15^th and 16^th centuries by thousands of years.

 Archaeological discoveries show signs of human habitation in the southwestern United States going back 36,000 years.

In Connecticut, an archaeological discovery in Avon revealed the presence of a habitation site 12,000 years old.

          

The Pequonnock River Valley in Trumbull. Archaeologists found evidence in the valley of human habitation dating to 7,000 years ago. (Photo by Reginald Johnson)

 While Europeans arrived thinking that they were going to “tame a wild wilderness” only inhabited by “savages,” quite the opposite was true.

  Indigenous people lived in well-organized societies, with a “complicated and sophisticated culture,” Lavin said. People had adequate food and shelter and  health problems were minimal. Tribes were run democratically, and everyone, including women, had a voice in the conduct of tribal affairs.

  “Native women had it so much better than English women,” Lavin noted. “Native women could vote and they could hold office. A number of sachems (chiefs) were squaw sachems in certain Native communities.”

 Indians lived harmoniously with the environment, practicing “land stewardship” ----- long before present-day environmental agencies did.

  “A lot of this had a basis where obviously they knew that if they didn’t practice stewardship, there wouldn’t be any food, and people would die,” she said, adding, “ but there was also spiritual basis behind his stewardship. ‘The Creator’ gave the tribe their homeland and therefore it was their duty to oversee and protect everything on those homelands.”

Lavin estimated that indigenous people in Connecticut lived in a “Golden Age” of culture somewhere between 1000 and 1600.

 But the arrival of Europeans brought disaster for the Native community in New England.

 European traders, as well as the earliest English and Dutch settlers, brought with them diseases that had already hit Europe, such as the plague and smallpox. Indians had not been exposed to these diseases and had no immunity.

   Disease swept through Native communities in the early 17^th century, decimating their population. In some cases, tribes became extinct.

“They say anywhere from 70% to 90% of the Native Americans in New England were killed off by 1650,” Lavin said.

 Travelers found that “when they came upon an Indian town, everyone was ill. So many people were ill, they couldn’t help anybody and they just died. It was devastating.”

 Lavin went on, “This is the problem. After the Pequot War in 1637 the English began settling along the coast and the Indians couldn’t stop them because they were a crippled society. You know it’s not just the population, but it’s the leaders in those populations that are killed off.”

 “Think if Covid had killed 77% or 90% of our population?” Lavin asked. “During the pandemic, I think that people who died from Covid, the CDC came out with figures, it’s one third of 1% of our population died from Covid. Think if you had 77% of them dying?”

 Natives also began losing their land, as settlers made continual encroachments to expand farms and steal wood. In many cases Indian land was illegally sold off to other whites.

 Natives also lost land due to cultural differences. Indians had no concept of the word “selling” as it was done in Europe. In Native culture if one person from one tribe approached another Indian in another tribe and asked to use their land the first person would give it to them as a gift or as a temporary loan. The person using the land would later give it back.

 So when Indians were first approached by white settlers about selling their land they thought they were simply giving up their land temporarily. But that was not the case.

  Natives also suffered a disadvantage since they didn’t know English and didn’t know how to read contracts. Sale documents were in English and they were meaningless to them.

 In many cases Natives had their land taken through outright fraud and when they complained to local or state authorities the complaints went unanswered.

  Another factor that hurt Natives economically was the fur trade that developed after the Europeans arrived. While Natives acquired other valuables in return for the trade the number of animals that they needed for food drastically diminished.

  “The whites totally destroyed the Native American economy,” said Lavin. “By 1800, you know, the largest animal in Connecticut were woodchucks.”

  By the 19th century, indigenous people in Connecticut were vastly reduced in number, poor and suffered discrimination at all levels.

     

Native dancers. (Photo Wikimedia Commons)

  According to Lavin, Native leaders realized they had to begin adapting to the new world thrust upon them in order for their people to live.

  They came up with strategies to survive.  First, learn English. They began doing that, in part by joining Christian churches, where missionaries were teaching the Bible in English and helped Natives learn the language.

  Being a Christian also give the Indians some protection from discrimination, Natives believed.

 Another path followed was to join the Anglo-American market economy, Lavin said. Indians took jobs as laborers, farm hands, colliers (charcoal makers), silversmiths, basket weavers, dockworkers and sailors.

Another means of assimilating into society was to join the military. And Natives did that in large numbers, as noted above.

 Today, the number of tribes in Connecticut, officially recognized by the state, is 6. They are the Mohegans, Mashuntucket Pequots and Eastern Pequots in the southeast, the Golden Hill Paugussetts in the southwest and west; and the Schaghticokes (now in two branches) in the northwest.

  But Lavin says there are many more Natives living in Connecticut who are from other tribes, inexplicably not recognized by the state. Among those tribes are the Quinnipiacs in the New Haven-Branford area; the Nipmucks in the east and the Niantics in the southeast.

  In spite of ignorance by many non-Natives about Native-Americans and their history and contributions, as well as ongoing discrimination, inconsistent help from the government and in some cases poverty, indigenous people carry on, maintaining their culture and upholding their traditions.

  In the chapter entitled “A.D. 1633 into the Twenty-First Century” in her book, Dr. Lavin said: “Despite the efforts of archaeologists and social historians, the public tends to believe in inaccurate portrayals of Native histories. Few people have any conception of the continuity of local Native communities, Native preservation of cultural traditions and group identities and the longtime resistance of Native people to the intensive continuous discrimination and detribalization efforts of local and federal governments and non-Native individuals. This book aims to change all that. As Cree-Salish-Kootenai author D'Arcy McNickle wrote: “Only the Indians seemed unwilling to accept oblivion as an appropriate final act in the New World drama… They lost, but were never defeated.”