Earlier this summer, my partner and I took a week-long vacation in northwestern Montana. A big part of the trip was the beauty of Glacier National Park. Learning about the park involved learning about the Native Americans who were there before white people moved in and took over, particular at Two Medicine Lake. The park also butts up against the reservation of the Blackfoot tribe to the east of the park. This reminded me of a book I had queued up to read called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. I started reading it the night before we left.
Since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by the history of the Americas before they were invaded and plundered by Europeans. What was here before my ancestors came? How did they live? What could we learn from them? The consensus at that time was that there wasn’t much to learn. They were just small bands of tribes sprinkled throughout the Western Hemisphere living with and respecting the land. The premise and research of this book show something else entirely.
There are two main takeaways for me. The first is that the Americas may not have been quite so sparsely populated as scholars previously thought. In fact, there may have been more Indians in the Americas than in all of Europe. So where were they when the colonists of the Americas started showing up? It is likely that many, if not most, were dead from disease. Smallpox was brought by the first explorers. With no natural immunity to such diseases, as much as 90% of the population may have been killed. By the time colonists arrived, the populations were sparse and no longer able to maintain their previous ways of living.
And that is the second takeaway. The previous understanding of the natives of the Americas is that they were nomads who lived with the land, never changing it, farming very little if at all. New discoveries have changed this thinking. One mind-blowing idea shared is that the Amazon River basin (referred to as Amazonia in the book), was cultivated! No, it wasn’t one big native garden. But rather than simply accepting nature for what it was, they nurtured it to their betterment and the environment’s. Indians often used fire to manage their surroundings. In Amazonia, they burned only to charcoal (not ash) which made the soil more fertile, planting orchards that today we think of as fruitful jungle.
This book is filled with new ways of understanding and thinking about the experience of Native Americans before the Europeans arrived. And this brings a whole new perspective to what happened after the arrival of the first Europeans. We still have much to learn from those who lived here before our ancestors arrived. Hopefully one of those lessons will involve a greater respect for the native people where we live.
My rating: 4/5
