Indigenous Culture

Indigenous culture is a continuum from Alaska/Canada to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina and Chile. And we are still here.

Tolima gold pendant (1 BC – 700 AD). Museo del Oro. Bogotá, Colombia.

This pendant, the most iconic piece of Indigenous Colombian gold, shows the shaman squatting to put his first chakra close to the earth.

Chakras are basically places on our body through which we breathe different energies. The first chakra is at the end of your spine between your sex part and your anus. We are a people of the earth and the first chakra “grounds” us in the basic needs of survival and security. Interestingly, the first chakra color is red which in western culture we associate with the heart and love.

This squat is also recognizable as a gesture in some African dance. It is the original meaning of “getting down” and one of the reasons that we lower our center of gravity to dance Argentine Tango (Tango was originally an African dance in Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina.)

This gesture is also the plie of ballet, the Italian and French court dance. Ironically, in plie the body goes down, but the energy goes up. Notice how the squat makes the figure taller. The shaman is doing a plie to enter a moment of transcendence.

In each of these examples, we are getting down, closer to the earth and the Great Spirit.

We are the first Americans. We have been here for about 14,000 years. Europeans only arrived about 500 years ago.

Columbus called us “Indians.” He was almost right. We came from Asia (Siberia) and the Pacific Islands. He just didn’t realize that we walked or sailed halfway around the world.

A U.S. education teaches a little about “American Indians” as if the Indigenous people of the United States are unique. Actually there is a continuum of Indigenous peoples from Canada’s Northwest Territories to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina and Chile.

A U.S. education teaches that we are primitive. We are just not European. After climate change runs its course, humanity may have no choice but to return to our ways of living in a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship with the land. We are people of the land.

A U.S. education teaches that we are extinct, but basically we have always been here. We are the first Americans.

We are Taíno and Garifuna (Caribbean), Aztec and Mayan (Mexico), Inca (Peru), Quechua (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina), and Mapuche (Chile). These are just a few of our major indigenous cultures.The United States recognizes 562 indigenous tribes. Mexico has 89 different living indigenous languages. Colombia recognizes 102 indigenous groups.

There are estimated to be about 70 million of us.

In the United States, November is National Native American Heritage Month (nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov).

The first New Yorkers were the Lenape people. We are Algonquian speakers.

The most beautiful spot in Manhattan is the site of our old village in Inwood Hill Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. There are “Indian Caves” up the hill.  Today they are used by the homeless.

The start of Broadway at the southern tip of Manhattan was originally a Lenape trading post.

Broadway was the Lenape trail from the trading post to the Lenape village and on up the Hudson to what is now Albany. That is why Broadway meanders diagonally across the rectangular Manhattan street grid.

The Red Hawk Arts Native American Arts Council (redhawkcouncil.org) carries on Indigenous American traditions in New York. Interestingly, part of their mission is to promote understanding of the great variety of Indigenous traditions.

We have the same problem across the Latin world. People think we are all the same. Yet each country, and even each region in each country, has a different mix of Indigenous + European + African traditions.

During the glacial period until about 14,000 years ago, the first Americans crossed from Northeast Asia over the land bridge on the Bering Strait. They came from what is now Siberia.

Growing up in Los Angeles with Mexican – American kids and in Bangkok, Thailand with Thai and Chinese kids, I noticed as a boy that old Mexican women and old Chinese women look a lot alike. If you open your eyes, it is obvious how interconnected we all are.

Within a 100 years of the arrival of the Spaniards, European diseases depopulated large sections of what is now the eastern United States. We had no resistance to foreign diseases.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock took over mostly abandoned fields because much of the local population had already been wiped out.

Some of this was accidental, but some of it was intentional biological warfare with smallpox as the weapon. Our founding fathers practiced biological warfare. Even George Washington and his British opponents used biological warfare against each other during our Revolutionary War. It was standard practice at the time.

One of the surprising Indigenous contributions to our U.S. American culture is our democratic form of government. Democracy, the idea that common people should have a say in their own governance, comes from the Greeks. But the U.S. Constitution, our country’s foundational law, was modeled in part on the relations of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Six Nations were roughly equivalent to states. One of the things our constitutional framers noticed was that the Six Nations at times undercut each other by making their own deals with foreign powers. To avoid this, the framers gave responsibility for foreign dealings to the central government.

In 1988, the 100th U.S. Congress acknowledged the contributions of Native Americans in H. Con. Res. 331.

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