Native Americans didn’t just all arrive in North America one day. Do the ones whose ancestors arrived X hundred years before ones whose ancestors arrived later hold a sense of superiority over the late arrivals? Do they consider themselves more authentically ‘native,’ like ‘we got here first’? Or do they not care?
Am I even making sense?
Since the various waves of migration from Siberia happened many thousands of years ago in prehistoric (ie, before historical) times, how would this even happen?
If I understand your question, then, no, not that I’ve observed. There are certainly tribes that have political or territorial disputes with other tribes. Sometimes, at least here in Washington state, some tribes believe they have the more “legitimate” entity of a certain group of Native Americans, so they battle over federal recognition.
But I’ve never seen arguments based on “my ancestors came to North America a thousand years before yours.”
But note that lots of Indian tribes HAVE migrated around America, often at literal gunpoint, in recent historical times. There are lots of Indians in what is now Oklahoma for instance whose ancestors lived in the deep south until the Trail of Tears.
The creation stories of most Indian nations don’t say that they came to the Americas from Asia or whatever. They say that the nation or tribe was created there, in America. So, while, as was stated, there are territorial disputes or whatever, there’s not a long tradition of “my ancestors got here before yours”.
Is it a safe assumption to make that the further South you go, the longer that person’s ancestors have been in the Americas? Or was there really just one wave, of which some migrated further?
You might just as well assume the opposite, even if there were multiple waves of migration: each wave may have continued travelling only as far as was necessary, bypassing the settlements of the earlier waves, to reach uninhabited land.
The archaeological history of North America has mostly been understood based on the progression of stone tool cultures. It’s only very recently that DNA has enabled some correlation between prehistoric stone tool cultures with current groups of people, but it’s still very sketchy. Like Captain Amazing mentioned, the oral traditions generally say “we’ve been here forever” and in most cases there’s not a whole lot of archaeological evidence to clarify matters. It doesn’t help that the arrival of horses, European diseases, and guns let to a big reshuffling of the territory and composition of many Native groups in the century or two before actual contact.
Some (but not all!) Native American groups have taken issue with the evolving understanding of the peopling of the Americas. It used to be fairly well established that the Clovis culture were the first people in North America and were the ancestors of at least most Native Americans, but there has been a lot of evidence that’s emerged that makes the story not quite as simple. There’s been some pre-Clovis archaeological sites, but also some human remains from around the same time or slightly after the Clovis culture that don’t appear to be related to modern Native Americans which is a contention some Native American groups are vehemently opposed to. That was the root of much of the controversy over Kennewick Man, with the local tribe claiming they’d been there forever and therefore the skeleton was one of their ancestors, even though the actual archaeological evidence strongly suggested otherwise. It also didn’t help that the skeleton was originally reported to be a Caucasian, which was obviously pretty controversial.
Generally speaking, the OPs of the America have no idea how they got here.
No written history. No science. No nothing except traditional verbal stories.
So how in the world would they actually be able to argue fine points around origins?
Even modern investigators have not yet doped it all out.
From what I’ve read in the past about such ancient migrations, probably not. Successive migrations generally followed the same path of least geographical resistance, over and over again.
…often at literal arrow-point also. I think many choose to forget that tribes weren’t all that nice to each other before the white man and his better technology came and took over.
I’m not sure I follow you; how is your statement incompatible with mine?
Genetic evidence shows that all surviving Native American groups share a common ancestry, probably in Beringia (the now submerged lands around the Bering Strait) or in western Alaska.
Anthropologists have long recognized three major groups within Native Americans, the Eskimo/Inuit/Aleuts, who appear to have spread in North America most recently; the Na-Dene, which includes groups mostly in northwestern North America but also the Navajo and Apache; and all other Native American groups in North, Central, and South America. I believe it is still controversial when the Na-Dene may have arrived. I don’t believe that the arrival times of most other Native Americans in their current locations is known.
Even if it were, as has been said Native Americans don’t rely on scientific data as a source of information on their history. (In fact, some may reject it outright.) While some groups may feel themselves superior to others (like almost all human groups), it’s not due to perceived differences in the time of arrival in the Americas.
PFF, Native American Indians and their new ways…I remember when my people had to walk up the mountains both ways to hunt mammoths.
In New Mexico I’ve met a lot of Pueblo Indians and I’ve never been asked how long our people have lived in Alaska. And Alaskans have never asked how long they have lived down South.
Pretty much what Chief Pedant says. Even though my People totally knew about this place since, like, Pangea.
The most common (but not universal) belief among native groups is that they have lived on their chunk of land “forever”. Generally meaning since their creation time period.
When two groups get into a dispute over land, it comes down to arguing more strenuously that one group’s origin story is more believable than the others.
One example of a US group that doesn’t believe they have lived in the same spot “forever” are the Hopi. Their creation tale includes a long saga of their travels before arriving at their current home. But that doesn’t stop them from getting into big disputes with the Navajo.
Trying to explain to native groups the Science of DNA, land bridges, language diffusion, etc. makes people very unhappy. They have their view of the truth. Everybody else can shut up and go away.
I just want to chime into say that the Lenape (Delaware) Indians were regarded as a Grandfather tribe by other Algonquian-speaking tribes due probably to those other tribes having split off from the Lenape in the not-too-distant past. The Lenape were accorded measures of respect (and arbitration/peace-making roles) by these other tribes.
On a trip up the West Coast a couple of years ago, I was interested to discover that the Yurok and Wiyot tribes of NW California speak a variant of an Algonquian language. Look at the Wikipedia entry on Algic languages to see a map of Algonquian distribution in North America.
Do not the Navajo believe that the Anasazi lived in what are now Navajo lands before they themselves arrived there (long before Europeans did)? Certainly there are very obvious Anasazi ruins and other remains in the Navajo lands, and the Navajo are well aware of them and do not claim that they were built by their own ancestors, but, rather, by their ancient enemies. Apparently the word Anasazi, as used by archeologists, derives from a Navajo word meaning “Ancient Ones” or “Ancient Enemy”.
IIRC, the Anasazi high culture, that was responsible for these relics, is now believed to have died out even before the ancestors of the Navajo arrived in the area, but the modern Puebloan peoples (Hopi, Zuñi, etc.) are believed to be, at least in part, descendants of the Anasazi.
Keep in mind though that “fundamentalist” (for lack of a better word) Native Americans are a very small minority, albeit one that is sometimes overly vocal in tribal governments. The vast majority of Native Americans are perfectly fine with and often quite interested in scientific study of Paleoamericans.