Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [209]
The mythologies of the Native Americans were as rich and diverse as the people themselves. Full of nature deities, mischievous animal tricksters, heroic braves, and dueling twins, they all included a great, world-encompassing Creation story. This thinking led to a deep reverence for nature and the concept of a benign Earth Mother. As Native American historian Vine Deloria puts it in his provocative book God Is Red, “For many Indian tribal religions the whole of creation was good, and because the creation event did not include a ‘fall,’ the meaning of the creation was that all parts of it functioned together to sustain it.”
Presiding over most of these traditions—which were all preliterate except for the Mayas and Aztecs—was the shaman. This powerful figure supervised group chanting, healing, spirit communication, sweat lodges, and the pipe rituals aimed at connecting with the “Great Mystery.” In the Mesoamerican civilizations, shamans formed a priestly class—like the Celtic Druids—that presided over blood rituals and human sacrifices. Not intended for squeamish audiences, these sacrifices included tearing or cutting out the still-beating heart from a victim’s chest to appease the gods. This grotesque cruelty was sometimes performed on infants while their mothers looked on.
One of the great scientific and academic debates simmering today has to do with who the Native Americans were, how they got to the Americas in the first place, and how long they have been here. Usually, when you hear the expression “Early American,” it refers to colonial-era antiques and life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But those “early Americans” were Johnny-come-latelies compared with the true “early Americans,” who lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier. What you probably learned about their history in school goes something like this:
Near the end of the last great Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers crossed the 1,000-mile-wide land bridge connecting Siberia to what is now Alaska and Canada. This crossing took place before the great North American ice sheets melted and raised sea levels by some 300 feet, inundating the grassy steppe that allowed people and animals to move between Asia and North America. Probably pursuing large game such as mastodons, these really-early Americans spread out over the two continents and gradually diversified into the tens of millions of people who were present when the Spanish arrived in 1492.
But an array of new research from the worlds of archaeology, biology, and linguistics has shaken that notion to its permafrost foundation. It is now more widely accepted that the real “Pilgrims” may have come to the Americas 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, probably in successive waves of migrations carried out over a long time span, from Siberia, Mongolia, and other parts of Central Asia. Kennewick man, for instance, has been related—based on DNA evidence—to the Ainu, the prehistoric people who first inhabited Japan. Instead of strolling across the land bridge now covered by the Bering Straits, in one great prehistoric walkathon, perhaps Kennewick man and some of the other first Americans came in small, skin-covered boats, hugging the Pacific coastline down to the southernmost parts of South America. Gradually, these ancient people spread out across both continents, a process that continued for a long time.
The likelihood of many waves of immigrants would help explain the tremendous diversity of tribes, languages, myths, and civilizations the Europeans encountered when they arrived in the 1500s. Well before the beginning of the Common Era, tribes had spread out across North America, and impressive civilizations had begun to emerge