America

Title

America

Description

Beautiful depiction of different american natives

ca. 1750

Artist

Jernati

Historical Description

Indians of North America is the common collective term for the indigenous peoples of the North American continent. They are a large number of culturally different ethnic groups, whose diversity is evidenced by the sheer number of hundreds of indigenous American languages. Today, the Indians of Canada are called First Nations and those of the United States are called Native Americans or American Indians. This does not include the Native Hawaiians, Eskimos and Aleuts, who are still distinguished from North American Indians on the basis of ethnological theory. Mixed ethnic groups such as the Canadian Métis or the Genízaros in the south of the USA are also not counted as Indians. According to current knowledge, the colonization of North America took place in three, possibly four waves of immigration. The first wave arrived at the end of the last ice age around 12,000-11,000 BC from Asia via what is now the Bering Strait along the coast. The ancestors of the Na-Dené Indians arrived with the second wave and those of the Eskimos with the third. Some finds, such as that of the Kennewick Man, suggest that other groups may have found their way to America from Europe or Oceania. The history of the Indians in North America is divided into epochs or periods and these into individual cultures. In the south-east and east of North America there was the Woodland period, which was replaced by the Mississippi culture, with its core area in what are now Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky. The Oneota culture, on the other hand, developed around the Great Lakes. All cultures existed until the arrival of the first Europeans and the beginning of historical time. The cultural change brought about by the invading Europeans, the population collapse caused by introduced diseases and the systematic displacement of the indigenous peoples to the west created the Indian peoples that the whites encountered during their advance into the interior of the continent and who still characterize the image of the Indians today. After Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America in 1492, more and more Europeans immigrated to America. Between 1620 and 1770 alone, just before American independence, the white population in the United States rose from 2,000 to over 2.2 million. This led to land disputes between whites and Indians and to a major transformation of Native American cultures.