american-holocaust

NATIVE PEOPLESFor 40,000 years, hundreds of millions of the Americas' native peopleshave built their homes and their societies on a land mass equalto one-fourth of the earth's ground surface. Consistent with the greatdiversity of their natural environments, some of these original inhabitantsof the Western Hemisphere lived in relatively small communitiesthat touched only lightly on the land, while others residedin cities that were among the largest and most sophisticated to befound anywhere in the world. So numerous, varied, ancient, andfar-flung were these peoples that at one time they spoke as many astwo thousand distinct and mutually unintelligible languages.Only a few of the societies that once existed in the New Worldare illustrated on the following pages. Thousands of others filledNorth and South and Central America's 16,000,000 square milesof land, most of them as distinctive and different from one anotheras were the peoples represented here. By the end of the nineteenthcentury, photographers had become interested in preserving imagesof what they erroneously thought were the soon-to-be-extinct nativepeoples of North America. The photographs reproduced at the endof this section are from that era.The drawings of Maya cities were done by Tatiana Proskouriakoffin collaboration with archaeologists who excavated the sites.They are reprinted here with the permission of the Peabody Museumof Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Theodorde Bry's engravings of Florida's and Virginia's native peoples,based on first-hand paintings by Jacques LeMoyne and John White,appeared in de Bry's multi-volume Great and Small Voyages (1590-1634), from which the illustrations and quoted portions of captionsprinted here are taken. The photographs following the de Bry illustrationsare all from the Smithsonian Institution, with the exceptionof the last one, which is from the Library of Congress.