Native Americans-Indians have long been portrayed as being primitive populations who have no real understanding of civilization. Even today, they are associated with a gigantic number of stereotypes that are far away from what reality really is. These assumptions are with no doubt made by us, westerners who think within a delimited box, and who see from a single angle. What is true in fact, is that the earth had been populated by various civilizations, nations and tribes that had their own way of living, and that in order to have a clear understanding of these ways, we have to interact closely with them. In other words, you can’t understand where the water in the river comes from if you don’t track it up to its source. In this case, how can we track back the history of Indians knowing that they were primarily an oral society?
To answer this question, we have first to try to understand what’s true from what is not. One of the methods to do that is to use common sense and logic as a first filter. Indian stories contain a non-negligible number of legends. For example, Chiefly elites were believed to be descendants of the sun. Common sense and science state that the sun is planet that lightens its own solar system. Therefore, it can’t give birth to human beings, nor can it get any close to them. Another example is the Lucky Hunter and the Corn Woman who were believed to be the first human beings. Lucky Hunter was believed to luckily kill abundant prey without him putting much effort on that. Deer was simply jumping and crushing down because of Lucky Hunter. The Corn Woman was also believed to be an abundant source of corn. Common sense states that no human being can have such superpowers. In fact, legends are simply exaggerated stories of a true real simple and logical one.
One way to study Indian History is through their own oral stories. They are passed from generation to generation, but as I stated previously, a lot of these stories are exaggerated and became legends. Therefore, common sense must be used in order to isolate legends from real stories. Another way to study Indians history is to study written stories. Two major issues pup up while using this method. The first one is that Indian written stories were not written by Indians themselves because they were oral societies. They were in fact written by westerners who interacted with them after Christopher Columbus discovered America, the New World. The issue with this method is that Westerners wrote most of the stories using the stereotypes they had towards the natives. Also, they did not have the same understanding of the natural world, Indian traditions and the way natives view the universe as the Indians themselves. The second problem is that these written stories are very recent in the scale if Indian history scale. Indians populated the Americas for thousands of years, while westerners started settling in the New World only five hundred years ago. Therefore, westerners’ written stories cover only a tiny part of Indian history, and this same tiny part isn’t that accurate. Archeology and environmental sciences are two other methods of investigating in Indian history, but again, it is much less significant than when they are used to study other civilizations’ history like the Roman Empire for example. This last one has much more remains than the Indians who were mainly nomads, with a much simpler way of life. Indians belief system is much more complex than we think. It has a hierarchy toped by Religious Specialists, the priests and medicine men. Timucuan is good example to that. He was believed to be a prophet/ priest. Though, the highlight of the Indian belief system was their understanding and interpretation of the universe. They basically believed that this world is part of the tri-pyramid of the universe. The upper world, this world and the under world. The upper world was believed to be the world of deities. The
