20 Myths About The First Americans History Got Wrong

Matoaka, whom we now know as Pocahontas, was about 10 or 12 when she first encountered an Englishman named John Smith, an adventurer who had come to Jamestown, Virginia. He later claimed that she saved him from being killed, but he did not tell that tale until many years later, after her death, and scholars consider his version either fabricated or an over-interpretation of a Native American ceremony that represented an adoption. She did marry, but not Smith. She was captured by the English and, after converting to Christianity, married an English tobacco farmer named John Rolfe instead.

In 1614, Thomas Hunt, an English sea captain, captured Tisquantum, a Patuxet of the Wampanoag confederation, along with 20 other Patuxet men. He took them back to Spain in hopes of selling them into slavery. Tisquantum escaped and went to London, where he lived for several years learning English before returning to his homeland in 1619. By then, his village had been wiped out by disease. Tisquantum met the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1621 and became their chief interpreter. His English skills were no accident. They were the result of being taken hostage.

Horses are actually native to North America. Horse genera arose here millions of years ago. Some wild horses made their way over the Bering land bridge to Asia, but all died out on this continent between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago as part of a mass extinction event at the end of the last ice age. When the Spanish conquistadors brought domesticated horses with them beginning in 1519, they weren’t importing horses. They were simply returning one to its birthplace after a 10,000-year absence.

In times of severe drought and political upheaval, several large lowland Maya cities, including Tikal, collapsed. Between 750 and 900 AD, inhabitants abandoned many of these cities. While it’s tempting to conflate the collapse of a city with the end of a culture, the Maya did not die out or simply disappear. Millions live today in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, speaking their ancestral languages and practicing their culture.

Teosinte, a scraggly wild grass native to Mesoamerica, barely resembles modern-day corn. Over a period of thousands of years beginning roughly 9,000 years ago, Indigenous people living there selectively bred it into the high-yielding crop we know as maize. Farmers throughout the Americas also domesticated crops like potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, cocoa, peanuts, and many different kinds of beans and squashes. In fact, the foods originally domesticated by Indigenous peoples make up an estimated 60% of the food on our plates today.

Hollywood westerns and 19th-century Wild West shows turned the trailing eagle-feather war bonnet associated with the Lakota, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne into a sort of generic headdress for any Native person in authority. In reality, the war bonnet was a very sacred piece of regalia and was only worn on the plains. An eagle feather was awarded for one brave feat of battle, like counting coup, and had to be granted individually by a council of elders.

The tipi, the portable hide tent of nomadic plains hunters like the Lakota and the Cheyenne, became the default Hollywood image of Native housing across the land. But the tipi only makes sense in a culture that is following migrating bison herds. The Eastern Woodland nations built wooden longhouses and wigwams. The Southwest nations built multi-story stone and adobe pueblos. The Pacific Northwest nations built massive cedar plank houses large enough to hold several families. There is no house style that works in all climates.

The practice of scalping is old, going back millennia, and it’s not unique to the Americas. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of scalping among the Scythians, nomadic inhabitants of the vast Eurasian steppe. Scalping in warfare existed among some Native American tribes prior to European contact, but it became a widespread phenomenon only after European colonial governments in the 17th and 18th centuries offered monetary bounties for Native scalps.

Carving a totem pole took months of work for Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian carvers in the Pacific Northwest. 19th-century Christian missionaries often destroyed the poles because they believed them to be objects to which indigenous people prayed. They weren’t. They were a kind of heraldic emblem representing family crests, borders, important events, or dead chiefs.

Between 300 and 1250 AD, Olmec, Maya, and Veracruz potters in Mesoamerica built tiny figurines of carts with working wheels and axles. They were little toys, not working wagons. But the Americas had no large domesticated animals suitable for pulling heavy wagons, such as oxen or horses, and most of the terrain was too mountainous to support them anyway. People carrying goods on their backs and paddling canoes did the job quite well. So the wheel was known, but it simply wasn’t very useful.

The Colorado museum director Jesse Figgins found a stone spear point wedged in the ribcage of an ancient Ice Age bison as he dug near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1926. Many archaeologists then held the Clovis First view that the first people in America came from Asia by crossing the Bering land bridge around 13,000 years ago as big-game hunters. But Figgins’s bison showed that humans hunted in the Americas during the last Ice Age. Later discoveries have pushed back the date of their arrival.

As early as 4000 BC, Native Americans in the Archaic era living around the Lake Superior area, modern-day Upper Michigan and Wisconsin, were using cold hammering and heat-treating techniques to shape native copper from the surface into useful objects. Tools such as knives, axes, spearpoints, and chisels were forged from this metal long before the first Europeans ever set foot on this continent. This is real, actual metalwork, not mining or smelting.

In the 19th century, many Americans believed that the massive earth mounds dotting the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys were built by a lost race, perhaps a group of Israelites, Greeks, or Celts who had somehow crossed the Atlantic. The theory was used to justify pushing Native nations off their land, by framing them as later arrivals who had destroyed that earlier civilization. The Smithsonian hired ethnologist Cyrus Thomas to study the mounds and their builders. In a 730-page report published in 1894, Thomas concluded that the mounds were created by the direct ancestors of today’s Native Americans.

The Maya produced written documents in hieroglyphics with full grammar. These documents were stored in codices made of folded bark paper, dating as far back as 300 BC. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois, created wampum belts using quahog shells as written records. These were used to document diplomatic relations, treaties, and history, and the documents were considered legally binding. Ojibwe priests maintained their spiritual and historical documents in the form of scrolls, called wiigwaasabak, carved into birch bark. This is formal record-keeping, and three separate systems were invented independently.

To justify taking their lands, colonial officials relied on a doctrine known as vacuum domicilium, Latin for “empty land.” According to this legal fiction, Native Americans had no idea what ownership meant, and their lands were therefore open for the taking. It wasn’t true. Nations didn’t hold land by deed. They held it communally, but clan families farmed particular fields, and entire nations laid claim to certain hunting territories. Treaties between tribes delineated boundaries, which were enforced through negotiations and sometimes wars.

European Romantics conjured up the Noble Savage, a vision of native people living in endless harmony and solidarity. The truth, however, lies buried in the dirt. Archaeologists have found that Cahokia, a major metropolis of native peoples, and other Iroquoian settlements built massive wooden walls to protect their communities. Alliances were shifting, boundaries were in dispute, and it was necessary to be ready for war. Politics again, as always.

Another myth has persisted for decades: that Native American languages were merely dialects of a single primitive language. Before Europeans arrived on the continent, the people of North and South America spoke more than 50 distinct language groups, including Algic, Na-Dene, Uto-Aztecan, and Iroquoian, all containing hundreds of unrelated, mutually unintelligible languages with distinct grammar.

Around 100-400 AD, the Hopewell of Ohio built raised, straight earthen roads connecting major ceremonial centers. These roads were intentionally constructed, not created by accident. Beyond Ohio, a grand artery called the Natchez Trace joined the river valleys of the continent. The Natchez Trace helped move obsidian, copper, and marine shell over large areas, as part of long-distance exchange networks that spanned the continent. This was a constructed highway, not an animal path.

When Europeans first began settling North America, they called it a vast wilderness untouched by man. Prior to 1492, however, First Americans had for millennia been “tending” it: intentionally burning brush to enhance soils, reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fires, and attract grazing animals. They created farming terraces, constructed irrigation systems, and cultivated fruit and nut trees. The landscape was manufactured, not pristine.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) was a self-governing confederacy ruled by a constitution known as the Great Law of Peace (circa 1142 to 1450 AD). According to the constitution, there was a bicameral legislature, and Clan Mothers had the power to veto decisions. Whether it had any direct influence on the US Constitution is up for debate, but you can see participatory democracy with checks and balances well before European arrival.

This content was created with the help of AI.