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AMERICAN INDIANS When Christoph Kolumbus saw the first natives on the island Hispaniola in fourteen-ninety-two, he could not believe , that these strange-looking natures were humans. Only Pope Julius II. declared the Indians of the new world twenty years later for descendants of Adam and Eva. But thus, for the Europeans a problem had developed: how did these humans come into the new world, if they originate as descendants of the first pair of people from the old world? Different proposals for solution were made: they could be people, who had taken part in the building of the tower of Babel or they were Israelis, Egyptians, Trojans, Greek, Chinese - or simply sailors, who had gotten far off their course. In the nineteenth Century, the famous natural scientist Charles Darwin came to the south point of Argentina, and reacted with almost the same prepossession as once Kolumbus: In his opinion, the Indians knew a human language only imperfectly , and each religion was strange to them. The Italian paleontologist Florentino Amaghino even meant , the native Americas were created independently of the humans of the old world.
Other researchers assumed, that the Indians could be survivors of the sunk continent of Atlantis. In our century, scientists developed methods, which permit a more realistic view on the history of the Indians. When Kolumbus arrived in America in fourteen-ninety-two, roughly twelve-million humans lived in north and South America, perhaps even more. They talked about two-thousand-two-hundred different languages, however in North America more than five-hundred. The natives lived in just as many tribes. The most usual theory for some decades is: The ancestors of the Indians immigrated about twelve-thousand to fifteen-thousand years ago from Asia to the area, which is now Alaska.
This was possible, because at that time giant glaciers covered large parts of Canada and the northern United States. Because there was so much ice on the country, the sea level was, compared with today, about hundred meters more deeply. Animals and their hunters moved from Asia to the east and came to a new continent. There was much place in a deserted country. Later, the immigrants gradually moved up to South America. The Bering Strait, became mainland.
The first Americans also had remarkable things in common with humans from Asia. For example long legs, small arms, small feet, a broad mouth, and finally the so-called "Mongol mark" - a temporary accumulation of pigment, which is seen on the back of young Mongols, Japanese and also many Indians. Nearly all Indians have the group of bloods zero and A; the group of B hardly occurs with them. That is, why it is believed, that the native Americas originated from a relative closely circumscribed area of Asia. THE CLOVIS CULTURE The confirmation for this scenario was a discovery nearby the town of Clovis in the State New Mexico in nineteen-thirty-two. Archaeologists found several tips of spear at an old fire place.
In the following years they found such tips again and again, in many different areas of North America. With the help of a new method of age determination they found out, that the first humans of this \"Clovis culture\" lived about eleven-thousand years ago. They were hunters who pursued , long horn buffalos and American horses. - archaeologists found also tips of spear between the ribs of hunted animals. About nine-thousand years ago, the game became extinct, and the Clovis culture perished. That's the most usual theory.
LANGUAGE The exact number of Indian languages is not known. In North America today about two-hundred different languages are spoken. In Central America about 350 languages are known. The languages of South America aren't known so well. Today, four-hundred-fifty languages are spoken in North America, there are about one-hundred-twenty languages which became extinct, and one-thousand-five-hundred to two-thousand languages are mentioned in documents. Today only about two-hundred-thousand Indians are speaking an Indian language in North America, about six million in Central America and about eleven to twelve million in South America.
Today the furthest common Indian languages of North America are Navajo (with about eighty-thousand speakers), Ojibwa (with about forty-thousand) and Inuktitut (with about sixty-thousand speakers); This language is also official language in Greenland. In Central America more that one million humans speak Náhuatl (Aztekisch), about two million speak the different Maya languages. The majority of the Indian languages is spoken of only a few hundreds to a few thousand humans, some even only from fifty to one-hundred persons. The term \"Native American\" includes over five-hundred different groups and reflects great diversity of geographic location, language, socioeconomic conditions, school experience, and of traditional spiritual and cultural practices. INDIANS TODAY In ninety-twenty-four, the Indians were given the nationality of the United States. The "Indian Reorganization act" of nineteen-thirty-four planned a self-government of the Indians.
At the beginning of the seventies the Indians achieved a larger politically autonomy. Many Indian tribes tried to get their countries and territories back, which they lost: with the "Alaska native country Claims Settlement act" of nineteen-seventy-one, the "Inuit" and "Aleeuten" in Alaska got nine-hundred-sixty-two million US dollar and a territory of sixteen million hectare. In the twentieth century, the population of Indian in the United States increased continuously. In nineteen-ninety, the total Indian population was about two million, that is about 0.8 per cent to the total US population. According to the American authority for population statistics, the Indian population increased by twenty per cent from nineteen-eighty to nineteen-ninety.
About one third of these humans lives in reservations, about one half lives in cities. There are two-hundred-seventy-eight reservations covered about twenty-three million hectare in thirty-five States. Only in the year two-thousand the USA apologized formally to the Indians for pursuit, driving out and abusing. In eighteen-twenty-four, the "Bureau Of Indian Affairs (BIA) was created, first it was responsible for Resettling the Indians, today it administrates the reservations. At last, I want to tell you something about famous Indian tribes: . Navajo (Dineh, Navaho) The Navajo tribe is the largest in the United States, with some 200,000 people occupying the largest and area reserved for Native Americans - 17 million acres in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The word Navajo derives from the Spanish word for \'people with big fields.
\' At the time of the arrival of the white man they had developed agriculture, though on a smaller scale than the nearby Hopi and Pueblo peoples. The Navajo were less sedentary than the Hopi and Pueblo tribes, but more so than the Apache of the same region. . Apache The Apache (meaning \"enemy\") are a North American Indian people of the Southwest. Their name for themselves is Inde, or Nde (\"the people\"). The major nomadic tribe in the American Southwest, the Apache, was also the last major tribe to surrender to government control in the 1880s. . Blackfoot (Siksika) The Blackfoot are one of the several numanic-speaking tribes, and were historically allied with the nomadic Atsina.
Ther were the archetypal Plains Indians, for whom the buffalo provided nearly all their needs, from food to clothing to leather for their tipis. . Mohawk (Iroquois) The Iroquois League, or Five Nations of the Iroquois, was the most powerful Indian military alliance in the eastern part of North America and probably the most successful alliance of any kind between so many important tribes. There were three principal clans - deer, turtle and wolf - existing within the five nations, and this was probably an important unifying factor in the league. The league was formed in the late sixteenth century at which time the five nations had a combined population of 7000.
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