Native Americans

By Ken Kalb

Tecumseh’s Curse: There was a deep mystical tradition among the Shawnee Indians of the Ohio valley, embodied in the teachings and practices of a sage called "the Prophet," emboldened by his brother, the great Chief Tecumseh. Tecumseh felt that all Indians were one people, and insisted that only with the consent of all — could land rightly be ceded by or purchased from an individual tribe. For several years, he successfully journeyed from tribe to tribe, working with Indians of all sections to secure their cooperation in this great work of unification. Tecumseh was a daring visionary -- a powerful orator, remarkable military chief, successful negotiator, and enthusiastic leader. Indeed, the flame of hatred for the white man burned in his heart, and he swore eternal vengeance against the white race for decimating his proud nation.

When the United States refused to recognize Tecumseh’s unification principle, he bound together the Native Americans of the Old Northwest, the South, and the Eastern Mississippi Valley as a military force to defend Native American rights to the land. His plan failed with the defeat of his brother, the Shawnee Prophet, at the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Although history reports the battle of Tippecanoe a draw, it nevertheless broke the power of the Shawnee, and became known historically as marking the collapse of the Native American military movement. Legend transmits that after the historic battle of Tippecanoe, Tecumseh released prisoners with a prophetic message for General William Henry Harrison -- a prophecy that has come to be known as -- "Tecumseh's Curse." "'Harrison will win next year to be the Great Chief….... He will die in his office….. I who caused the Sun to darken and Red Men to give up firewater tell you Harrison will die. And after him, every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people." Indeed, in 1841, President William Henry Harrison died of Pneumonia, and for 140 years every President elected every 20 years died in office ...

Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the southwestern United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests. Throughout the region, dogs have been found buried with jewelry, alongside adults and children, carefully stacked in groups, or in positions that relate to important structures, said Dody Fugate, an assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fugate has conducted an ongoing survey of known dog burials in the area, and the findings suggest that the animals figured more prominently in their owners' lives thansimply as pets, she said.

"I'm suggesting that the dogs in the New World in the Southwest were used to escort people into the next world, and sometimes they were used in certain rituals in place of people," Fugate said. To conduct her research, Fugate collected data on known dog burials and urged her archaeologist colleagues to note when canine remains were found during excavations. "I have a database now of almost 700 dog burials, and a large number of them are either buried in groups in places of ritual or they're buried with individual human beings," she said. Many of the burials are concentrated in northwestern New Mexico and along the Arizona-New Mexico border, she said (see map). "All of that area wasfull of doggy people," she said. She reported her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada, last month. 1,900 Years of Burials Fugate's database indicates that dog burials were most common between 400 B.C. and A.D. 1100. "The earlier the [human] burial, the more likely you are to have dog in it," Fugate said. By the 1400s and 1500s the practice of burying people with dogs had stopped. Indeed, she noted, today's Pueblo and Navajo Indians believe it is improper to bury dogs. What the ancient dogs looked like is an open question, she said, but their remains suggest that they were far more diverse than was previously believed. Fugate has seen remains of ancient canines withfloppy. ...

A consensus is emerging in the highly contentious debate over the colonization of the Americas, according to a study that says the bulk of the region wasn"t settled until as late as 15,000 years ago. Researchers analyzed both archaeological and genetic evidence from several dozen sites throughout the Americas and eastern Asia for the paper. "In the past archaeologists haven"t paid too much attention to molecular genetic evidence," said lead author Ted Goebel, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "We have brought together twodifferent fields of science, and it looks like they are coming up with the same set of answers." The article, which is published in tomorrow"s issue of the journal Science, shows that the first Americans came from a single Siberian population and ventured across the Bering land bridge connecting Asia and North America about 22,000 years ago.

The group got stuck in Alaska because of glacial ice, however, so humans probably didn"t migrate down into the rest of the Americas until after 16,500 years ago, when an ice-free corridor in Canada opened up. Scientists have long agreed that the first Americans came from northeast Asia, according to Goebel. But the newarticle—which analyzed genetic and archaeological evidence from 43 sites, including a dozen sites in Asia—better pins down the makeup of the first Americans. Genetic evidence, for instance, points to a founding population of less than 5,000 individuals. Some geneticists had also previously suggested that the migration across the land bridge could have occurred as early as 30,000 years ago.

View: Full Article | Source: National Geographic

Using computer simulations to synthesize both new and earlier research, a team of scientists led by a Washington State University anthropology professor has given new perspective to the long-standing question of what happened more than 700 years ago to cause the ancestral Pueblo people known as the Anasazi to abruptly end their 700-year-long occupation of the now-famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and other nearby communities in southwestern Colorado.In anarticle to be published in the upcoming issue of "American Scientist," WSU Regents Professor Tim Kohler and three colleagues describe how computer simulation techniques were used to integrate nearly a century's worth of archaeological research with new climatic, ecological and demographic data to analyze two major cycles in population growth and decline among the ancient Anasazi.Ultimately their data suggests that the final population collapse within the region resulted from a complex set of environmental changes and societal pressures-including climate change, population growth, increasing competition for resources and escalating conflict and violence among local societies. Preserved in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt as Mesa Verde National Park, the ancestral Pueblo homeland also encompasses what is known today as the FourCorners Region of the American Southwest, an area marked by the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. While the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are easily the best known of these settlements, the region is dotted with some 4,000 known archaeological sites, including communities which supported as many as several hundred families. Archaeological evidence has shown that the Anasazi inhabited the region and prospered there from about A.D.

600 until sometime in the late 1200s, when they abandoned their communities abruptly - often within the span of a single generation - and migrated southward. Since the discovery of the Mesa Verde sites in the late 19th century, archaeologists have frequently invoked single factors-such as climate change or conflict - as explanations for the depopulation of more than 600 cliffdwellings......