Infinity of Nations

The right within a culture to don a headdress such as those shown here depends first on the acquisition of cultural knowledge and second on the ability to use that knowledge for the benefit of the people. These headdresses represent the right of Native peoples to govern and instruct themselves according to their own laws, customs, and prophecies.

Inspired by ancient stories that recall the creation of their homelands, the Mapuche of southern Chile and Argentina resisted subjugation by the Inka Empire and the Spanish Crown. Living on their ancestral lands, they forged a strong way of life—admapu—that has guided their response to outside forces. Today, more than one million Mapuche continue to live in Chile and Argentina, many in cities, maintaining traditions that connect them to their region of origin.

Successive cultures—including Calima and Muisca in Colombia; Valdivia and Manteño in Ecuador; Tiwanaku in Bolivia; and Cupisnique, Paracas, Moche, and Nazca in Peru—created objects that honored their deities and rulers and celebrated their way of life. Today, as many as 12 million people still speak Aymara and Quechua, the languages of Tiwanaku and the Inka Empire. Millions more live in their ancestral villages, maintain aspects of Andean culture, and take pride in their Native heritage.

Many ecologists attribute the forest’s survival to the knowledge of the hundreds of Native peoples who have lived along the river and its tributaries for millennia. The survival of the peoples of the Amazon has also depended on their ability to withstand incursions from the outside world. That struggle continues today, as Amazonian Native nations organize to protect their rain forest homelands against intrusion and deforestation.

Mesoamerica gave rise to several of history’s great civilizations and contemporary Native peoples, among them the Olmec (1500–400 BC) of the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico; the great central Mexican city Teotihuacán (200 BC–ca. AD 600); the Classic Veracruz cultures (AD 100–1000) along the Gulf of Mexico; the Maya, whose history reaches back 4,000 years and whose 21st-century population numbers 7 million; and the Triple Alliance (or Aztec Empire), which fell to Cortés in 1521.

Indians of the Southwest—Pueblo-speaking peoples, Diné, Apache, O´odham, Yuman, and Pais—maintained spheres of interaction within and beyond the region. Eventually these nations incorporated non-Native peoples and markets into their economic and political life. European wares appeared at Indian fairs in Taos, Pecos, and elsewhere, where southwestern textiles, pottery, turquoise, and maize had long been traded for Plains hides and dried meat.

Yet the museum’s collections from the same time and place also include a beautifully beaded cradleboard, a deer-hide dress decorated with cowrie shells, and the fashionable Victorian wedding ensemble worn by Inshata–Theumba (Susette La Flesche), an activist who campaigned for Indian citizenship and land rights. As these objects and their histories illustrate, clearly there were many ways of being Indian in the 19th-century American West, and they involved great creativity and resilience.   

Spanish missionaries saw in Native California a wealth of souls to convert. During the Gold Rush, miners, loggers, and settlers formed vigilante groups and local militias to hunt Indians living outside the mission communities—a genocide largely ignored by American history. The Native population, estimated at 150,000 in 1845, was by 1870 less than 30,000. In the Great Basin—the arid lands east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the Rocky Mountains—the Native population was never large.

From Yakutat Bay in Alaska to the Columbia River in Washington state, Native fishermen and sea hunters traveled north and south by water and east into the interior over mountain passes to trade commodities such as oolichan oil, dentalium shells, copper, and mountain goat wool. In a region of great natural resources, this economy enabled Northwest Coast peoples to develop comfortable and sophisticated societies marked by social ranking, elaborate ceremonial life, and spectacular art.

In the Subarctic—from Labrador to interior Alaska—Innu, Cree, Athapaskan, and other Native peoples’ hunted caribou and other game, fished, and preserved meat and hides. These proved to be marketable skills with French and English traders and trading companies. In the 1800s, people of mixed French and Native ancestry established distinct Métis communities in the region and created an exquisite new style of floral beadwork.