World Religions - Chapter 2, Black Elk Speaks — Native American Timeline Page 1 of 8 Native American Timeline v.4.3 Around 40-16,000 B.C.E. • First Americans - hunter gatherers cross the Bering land bridge from Asia. Archeological evidence from the Old Crow Flats in Canada indicates human habitation at this site from about 30,000 years ago to 11,000 years ago. Some archeologists claim to have discovered human-worked mammoth bone at Bluefish Caves in Canada that dates to 24,000 years ago. 11,500 B.C.E. • The Clovis people (the Llano culture) appear in western North America. Known for their use of the Clovis point, a specifically shaped spearhead, Clovis sites are found throughout North and Central America, and even in Venezuela in northern South America, and they may have been the ancestors of most, if not all, Native peoples in the Americas. 5000 B.C.E. • First experiments at cultivation in North America in Mexico – about the same time as the Sumerians begin experimenting with intensive agriculture, and not long after cultivation first begins in the Middle East, China, India, and Africa 200 C.E. • Potatoes are cultivated in the Peruvian Andes. 200-400 • Hopewell tradition from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico built burial mounds including a young man and woman buried side by side. She wore “thousands of pearl beads” and copper bracelets, and both “wore copper earspools, copper breastplates, and necklaces of grizzly canines.” (Fiedel, Prehistory in the Americas , 238) 650-1400 • Cahokia Mounds people in southern Illinois live in a city larger than London in 1250 C.E. and has a population larger than any other North American city until Philadelphia reaches th 20,000 people in the 18 century. The largest mound, at 21,690,000 cubic feet, has a base that is 250,000 square feet larger than the largest Egyptian pyramid and remained the largest human construction in North America until the 20 century. They traded with folks from the th Great Lakes to Oklahoma and from the Carolinas to Wyoming, an area larger than most of modern Europe. 1400's • Tobacco and chocolate (cocoa) are cultivated by the Aztecs in Mexico, • North American Indian population in excess of ten million, total for the Americas probably about 20 million 1492 • Columbus comes to the "New World," annihilates the Arawak Indians. Finding no gold, but needing to turn a profit, Columbus began enslaving Indians, keeping some on Caribbean plantations and shipping thousands back to Seville in Europe. Jack Weatherford writes in Native Roots that Columbus “financed his explorations by trading in the flesh of captured Indian slaves” (136). Miguel de Cuneo writes that on one trip in 1495 they returned to Europe with 550 slaves, 200 of which died while the fleet was at sea. 1497 • John Cabot seizes the first North American Indian slaves 123 years before the first successful British colony. European fishing fleets and whalers enslaved Native peoples from their earliest journeys to the Western Atlantic. 1500's • Iroquois League holds all land in common , hunts cooperatively, and divides the catch among all in each village; women are quite important and named the men who would govern. Jack Weatherford suggests that the Iroquois and Algonquin peoples influenced Thomas Paine th and other colonial thinkers, and in the early 19 century Alexis de Tocqueville would write of the Indian love independence in his Democracy in America. 1519 • Having enslaved all of the Indians available in the local islands, Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son, writes to King Charles V of Spain asking permission to import African slaves to replace the Indians. 1520 • Portuguese explorer Gaspar Côrte-Real sails up the North American coast where he captures several score Nakapi natives and takes them home to sell as slaves in Lisbon, giving the land the name “Terra del Laboratore” or “the land of the workers,” or perhaps “slave coast,” known today as Labrador in Eastern Canada.
World Religions - Chapter 2, Black Elk Speaks — Native American Timeline Page 2 of 8 1520 • Cortez destroys Aztec civilization of Mexico after Cortez co-opts Malinche to interpret for him and after Montezuma mistakes Cortez for Queztalcoatal , the Aztec high god. 1524 • Giovanni Verrazano explores North America and captures Indian slaves. 1526 • First African slaves imported into South Carolina by Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón. They escaped to live with the local Indians when the Spanish colony failed. 1534 • Frenchman Jaques Cartier captures native slaves, including the Huron woman Agaya who reversed scurvy amongst his sailors with a medicine made from evergreen trees. 1576 • Englishman Martin Frobisher enslaves native Inuit men to guide his ships exploring the Arctic. 1530's • In the Carolinas Spanish conquistador Hernando DeSoto enslaves the Lady of Cutifachiqui and her people, and steals 25,000 pounds of pearls. 1539 • Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, descendant of Incan emperors and historian of the empire, was born. His mother’s cousin, Tupac Amaru, was the last of the Incan emperors to reign before he was beheaded by the Spanish in Cuzco (the navel of the universe to the Incas). 1596 • Queen Elizabeth exiles all dark-skinned peoples, Indians and blackamores, from her realm. British colonials, therefore, sold their Indian slaves in Bermuda and other British colonies, and even in Africa. There are reports of Indian slaves sold in Algiers, Morocco, along the west coast and in the islands west of Africa. 1607 • Jamestown (Va.) settled in April. In 1609 - "Starving Time" - 500 Virginia colonists reduced to 60. 1612 • John Rolfe plants Caribbean tobacco (the native Virginia crop being too strong for him), which would pay off the colonists’ debts and make Virginia a financial powerhouse in the New World. Virginians enslaved Indians to work the fields, but eventually settled on African slaves using the sugar cane plantation model of the Caribbean. 1619 • First Africans, 20 Angolans, were imported into Virginia aboard the White Lion, a British pirate under Dutch flag. Half of all early white settlers were indentured servants, and the colonists decided to treat Africans the same way. The first legally recognized slave would be John Casor who in 1654 was owned by another black man, Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who had earned his freedom. By 1860 the slave population would number 4 million. 1620 • The Pilgrims land at Plymouth in what is now called Massachusetts. Not used to living wild, they likely would have starved without the help of Squanto, a Wampanoag Indian who spoke English because he had been enslaved in 1614 by Thomas Hunt, an Englishman from whom he escaped. The Wampanoag natives taught the Pilgrims how to take a living from the forest by hunting, from the shore by fishing, and from the earth by planting Indian corn, pumpkins, beans, and squash. Thousands of natives in the area would die over the next several years from disease and warfare with the Europeans who would then settle the Indian land and take over the Indian crops. 1626 • Peter Minuit buys an island from the Manhattan Indians for 60 guilders (about $24). We still call the island Manhattan... or New York City. 1629 • Massachusetts colony founded; John Winthrop declares the area a legal "vacuum" without inhabitants even though it was inhabited by Indians (natural vs. civil rights to property). 1633 • Pizarro destroys the Inca empire of Peru. 1636 • The Pilgrims attack and destroy the last of the local natives in Massachusetts and Connecticut, divide up their property, and ship the prisoners out as slaves. 1640 • Colonial population 27,950 1670s • The English colonists launched major attacks against the Indians, executing older male prisoners and selling younger males and females as slaves in Spain and in the Caribbean. Owners in the colonies would brand their slaves on the forehead with a symbol of ownership. • Harvesting whole villages and selling the inhabitants into slavery helped to finance the next phase of colonial expansion. Boston becomes the center of Indian slave trade until the growth of Charleston from selling Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw slaves eclipses Boston.
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