I don’t know that I’m postulating much of anything. Do whelk shells make it definitive that the inland people who made them had an understanding of the ocean the shells came from? It’s hard for me to see how any inland people would have contact with people, even indirectly, who lived on the Atlantic and the Pacific, but maybe that was a part of some mythologies? If so, why do we think so? If not, where do inland people start being aware of the Pacific?
How could they have gotten ocean shells without at least indirect contact with people who live on the shores?
There is quite a bit of “noble savage” myth involving Native Americans. Living off the land in perfect harmony with nature before the bad, bad, white men came. That is far from reality.
Sacagawea, who was instrumental in the success of the Corps of Discovery, also known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was herself stolen from her tribe in Idaho at a young age and sold into slavery. And slavery among tribes was a common practice. She was then sold to a French trader Charbonneau who took her as a wife. She was later reintroduced to her brother as the corps crossed the Rocky Mountains, he was now a chief in the Nez Perce nation and the corps were able to acquire much needed horses.
Tisquantum otherwise known as Squanto of Mayflower Pilgrim fame was taken to Spain and England before the pilgrims even got to America and learned some English that helped him become somewhat of a go between to the pilgrims and the natives they encountered.
There was a lot of what we would now call interstate commerce going on between the tribes. Slavery one only one aspect. The myth of isolated tribes in the Americas is just that, a myth. There was a lot of trade and cultural exchange going on, and there had been for a long time.
I’ll read into this. Thank you for the suggestion. My assumption is that someone in 1491 who lived in, say, what is now North Dakota or some place in the middle of the Amazon would likely be less educated than someone who lived in Tenochtitlan or Cusco, especially about a topic like the ocean. I admit I could very could very well be wrong about that.
Nit: It had understood that Cahokia specifically was abandoned in the 1300s, long before DeSoto. (Not that that city was the be all and end all of mississippian civilization, nor does it affect your point at all).
Yes. I was on my phone and didn’t want to go into it. That’s just a large Mississippian city we have a good population estimate for. I mean, most haven’t been excavated, or weren’t, before they were turned into parking lots. Cahokia may well have been the largest, but it wasn’t the last. One of the ways we really mangle the story, IMO, is that even when they have a token section on Mississippian culture in some American history textbook, it’s treated like an exotic anomaly, that sprang up out of no where and collapsed as mysteriously as it came.
To be fair, a large part of my point is that the simple peasants of Europe were also vastly less sophisticated than we picture them: they were also living in crude huts with a hole in the roof to let smoke out. There might have been a castle up on the hill in which you could find exotic goods from far away–but they had that in the Mississippian culture, too. Our mental image of “late medieval peasant” is from like, Oliver Twist.
One thing that the accounts of the Desoto expedition all mention is that there were roads. A king could and did send messages regularly to all these other kingdoms. It was as interconnected as anywhere else.
I’d say the opposite. They were more sophisticated than most people picture them… however…
If your mental image of medieval peasants is from, like, Oliver Twist, perhaps you should be more careful about what you’re smoking!
You’re postulating that a culture can become widespread over a large area without the individual groups who partake in that culture interacting in any meaningful way -something directly contradicted by us having physical evidence of widespread trade networks and shared religious beliefs.
I really don’t wish to be argumentative here, but I don’t see where I’m postulating that at all. I might be asking for evidence that they interacted quite as much as you maintain, which you have partially supplied, or how isolated it’s possible for one group to remain, but I don’t think I’m claiming anything like you suggest, if only because that’s marginal to my concerns here, Obviously they were separate groups–that’s why they’re “tribes”–speaking their own languages, with their own individual cultures, belief systems, values, and beyond trade (and warfare) they interacted differently with each neighboring culture. You seem to be arguing that they all constituted one big culture, rather than several smaller ones, which is, it seems to me, partly a semantic argument. I’m asking how much of a role “the ocean” necessarily plays in the culture of a tribe located 1000 miles away, and you appear to be saying “They made beads from ocean shells, therefore the ocean was as central to their cuture as it was in a shore-dwelling society” which I don’t see at all.
Nobody’s saying that. Obviously the ocean was more central to a coastal society than to an inland society. You seem to be setting up a false dilemma, where the ocean must be either completely central to a society, or completely irrelevant.
No, he is saying “They had vast trade networks and were connected by roads to communities on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico”. There very likely would have been people living in most communities that had seen some sort of ocean.
I think the word “tribe” is throwing you off. Read about the Mississippian Culture. Wikipedia is a decent start. It wasn’t just a bunch of isolated tribes passing shells to each other: it was a network of small kingdoms with well defined trade networks, large scale building projects, and a complex, stratified society. It was very, very different than what the wave of settlers in the 1600 and 1700s found: by then, there had been a century of disease wiping out whole communities over and over and over again. But we have the accounts from the Desoto expedition and we have a firm archeology record (though much remains unexcavated and even more was destroyed) to corroborate those accounts.
Until you read up on Mississippian Culture, you are not going to understand anything. You vision of what it generally meant to be an “Indian tribe” is wrong.
No, YOU are setting up that false dilemma. I am maintaining the opposite: that there are most likely subtle variations in the centrality or even knowledge of the two oceans to various inland tribes, and I’m seeking knowledge, if there is any available, to demarcate which tribes had which awarenesses, and as specifically as possible which awarenesses each inland tribe had.
Did they not speak different languages? Have different beliefs? Are you seriously arguing that all Indian “tribes” were all part of one big tribe with inconsequential distinctions between them?
No. That’s a strawman. But in/around 1492, the culture that dominated from the Great Lakes to the Gulf to the Atlantic Coast was highly interconnected. There may have been isolated, less connected groups. If so, they were wiped out of existence before anything about them could be recorded. The culture we do know about was deeply interconnected. The had well-maintained road networks. They had complex diplomatic relationships with each other. We know many people moved around a great deal.
Europe wasn’t linguistically unified. Does that make French and English interaction seem unlikely?
Certainly very difficult for an average Englishman to converse with an average Frenchman ca. 1492, although we’re talking about vastly different land areas (all of France, which contained several zones of language, some incomprehensible to other Frenchmen). What I’m asking (among other things) is for evidence of your absolutely rock-solid knowledge that
HOW do we “know” this? Can you quantify “many” people? More than twelve indivduals? More than a million? Big difference there, too. What constitutes “moving around”? What is “a great deal”? And mainly again HOW do you “know” these things? it’s really not sufficient to keep asserting generalities like this. Please point me to the best (and preferably clearest) argument instead of merely telling me to educate myself. Tell me how to educate myself, please. Is there an article or book that you consider authoritative and reliable?
We don’t know with rock certainty. The society was almost entirely destroyed in the century between the DeSoto expedition and the next European contact. But we can draw strong inferences from the sophistication of their road system, the vast quantities of trade goods found, and the fact that diplomatic relationships existed. All of those point to strong trade relationships, not just village A trading with B and B with C and so on. Movement appears to have been routine, not exotic. There is an account of DeSoto demanding “shiney metal” from the queen of Yupaha and she was able to send runners on a three days journey to return with mica. That sort of responsiveness suggests well established trade networks were in place.
The rapid devastation of the various epidemics is also strong evidence: by the time DeSoto got to Arkansas, he was running into accounts of plagues attacking kingdoms in the Ohio Valley. We infer that these plagues were the result of other coastal contact with Europeans. Diseases don’t spread themselves: the fact that the continent suffered multiple waves of various diseases is evidence of quite a bit of travel.
Actually it was. Even the smallest, most isolated and illiterate hamlet usually had a “universal translator” in their local clergy that could read, write and speak scriptural languages like Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. The lack of a written language understood universally by a widely dispersed class of scribes is what makes the situation in pre-Columbian North America different than that in Europe at the time. Could the same level of general understanding of the outer world be disseminated using sign language or a succession of intertribal translators? Perhaps, but I don’t know how you could prove it.
Did they? You goet complaints about illiterate priests with poor Latin throughout history. Charlemagne started a whole school system to try to deal with it.
We have a ton of evidence that the Mississippian culture shared similar features across the whole middle of the country and engaged in widespread trade. There’s no reason to think they didn’t have bilinguals and other ways to cope with the issue, just like everyone else.
I’m not “arguing” it, because it’s beyond argument. They were one culture. Regionally variable, what culture isn’t, but one culture nonetheless.
I’m saying no such thing, and that’s your strawman.
I’m saying the answer to your original question was given. If you’re now asking a different question, make that clear.