Native American Technology Before European Colonization

Introduction: Challenging the European Origins Myth

It is still commonly believed that technology in America began with, or was introduced by, Europeans after Christopher Columbus's discovery of the continent. Between 1000 and 1003 AD — roughly five centuries before Columbus reached the Americas in October 1492 — Scandinavian explorers landed on the continent but failed to establish a permanent settlement (Kishlansky et al. 2007). These explorers' primary intent was long-distance sea trade, and the European contact that followed dealt a catastrophic blow to the vulnerable empires and tribes of a continent that had been isolated for more than 25,000 years from the rest of the world.

When European explorers reported back about the wealth they encountered, Spain dispatched further expeditions of conquistadores and claimed possession of the continent. As Spanish settlers migrated and introduced their culture to the region, it came to appear as though Native Americans had learned technology from their colonizers — an impression that distorted the historical record for centuries (Kishlansky et al. 2007).

How Colonization Disrupted Native American Societies

The prevailing misconception grew out of the prejudice that civilized, colonizing Europeans brought their developed culture into the continent and fundamentally transformed primitive Native Americans. The Europeans' permanent presence and continued conquest were profoundly disruptive to indigenous peoples who had, until that point, thrived in isolation for thousands of years within their own civilizations (Kishlansky et al. 2007). Those civilizations and their indigenous technologies were considered far less advanced than those of their conquerors. Furthermore, internal conflicts and divisions among tribes and empires were weaknesses that conquerors readily exploited.

Native peoples were subjected to unprecedented cultural and religious shock by the sudden arrival and powerful impositions of the more organized and better-equipped Spanish forces. Most devastatingly, the Spanish brought with them diseases to which these populations had no immunity. Whole societies perished or were drastically reduced by epidemics of typhus, influenza, and smallpox. Deaths from disease, combined with deaths from forced labor, cruelty, and outright slaughter, produced the massive depopulation recorded in the historical record (Kishlansky et al. 2007).

Native American societies were thus gravely diminished, massively depopulated, and forced to accept European culture, migrants, plants, animals, political authority, and economic interests (Kishlansky et al. 2007). The "white men," or European colonizers, brought sweeping change to Native Indian peoples (Fixico 2003). Records indicate that only approximately 225,000 Indians — about 2% of the original Native population — and fewer than a thousand buffalo remained at the turn of the twentieth century, the result of new and deadly diseases and more than a thousand wars. The colonizers' search for gold and silver in the early 1500s motivated them to impose European values on the Natives. Their missionaries introduced and propagated Christianity, and European metal was pressed into use in producing weapons such as guns, rifles, and the plow (Fixico 2003).

Treaties, Manifest Destiny, and the Loss of Indigenous Land

Part of the common belief was that primitive Native Americans developed their own tools and means of transportation only after Europeans had settled. The U.S. government initiated treaties with Indian tribes between the 1850s and 1871 with the ultimate purpose of seizing Indian homelands (Fixico 2003). Some of these treaties created Indian reservations throughout the West. The government entered into 389 treaties with Native nations, the majority of which it violated in pursuit of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny — the belief that European-Americans possessed both the right and the duty to expand across the North American continent. The pursuit of gold, silver, and railroad rights of way was grounded in this doctrine. The idea was entirely foreign to Native Indians, who understood themselves as stewards of the Earth — a relationship fundamentally incompatible with the concept of land ownership (Fixico 2003).