There have been reports in the very recent past about indigenous tribes in the Amazon rain forest who had been living in total isolation and have never had any contact with the outside world:
Now obviously, this is totally different from the situation in North America, geography being only one reason among many. But I was wondering when and where did the last Native Americans in North America (that is, for the purpose of this discussion, the territory of what is today Canada and the United States) get into contact with Europeans or Americans of European descent?
Were there, let’s say, in the 18th century (or maybe even later) Native Americans in North America who had not even heard stories about the vast number of foreigners who were making inroads?
Your question brings to mind the case of Ishi, the last Yahi indian, who came into Oroville, California in 1911. It wasn’;t that he didn’t know about white people – his tribe had essentially been wiped out by them. But he had lived outside the encroaching European culture with no interaction with them (aside from the one-sided raids). He was called things like “the last wild indian” or “the last of his tribe”, or “the last stone-age man” (which was the title of the first piece I read about him – inaccurate and somewhat insulting).
“Ishi” wasn’t his name (it means “man” in the Yah lanuguage. It’s what anthropologist Alfrede Kroeber* called him They hired and studied him after he came out of the wild for the remainder of his life, and Kroeber wrote a popular book about him. There were a number of books, plays, and movies about him, including a cable TV movie in the 90s.
*Science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin’s father. The “K” is for “Kroeber”. Now you know why she wrote so much anthropological SF.
Ishi is interesting. But I don’t think that is what I think the OP is asking for. Ishi met white people, at the latest, when they slaughtered his village in 1865. And he told the stories of several other encounters throughout his life. His appearance in 1911 wasn’t a first contact.
It can be hard to isolate a first contact. Mexico has the Lacandon, who were perhaps first contacted in the 1920s. But from what I have read, they had adopted a lifestyle designed to avoid European contact. So they were already affected by their European neighbors, and were “interacting” with them on some level. Even if that interaction can best be described as avoidance.
I believe I have read about Ishi before. He indeed appears to have been one of the very last Native Americans who lived for many years outside of “civilization”, but he was certainly aware of the world around him and had (extremely violent) encounters with it.
Coming back to my original question, the point in time when the last Native American at least had heard about Europeans must have been rather early, maybe around the beginning of the 17th century when the English colonization of North America started?. Or did the Native Americans in the American heartland remain isolated from the French, the Spanish and the British longer than that?
Although they might not be in direct contact with the outside world, they are certainly aware that it exists. And although isolated from western culture, they are almost certainly in contact with other Indians who are in frequent contact with outsiders.
That might have been the case in the interior of Alaska or the Yukon in the late 1700s. Europeans (at first Russians, then Spanish) didn’t really begin to explore even the coastal regions until the mid-1700s, and didn’t penetrate inland much until much later.
I just read Philbrick’s The Last Stand and it talked about Lakota who as of 1876 had never seen a “white man”. Undoubtedly they had heard of them though.
At least in the contiguous US/southern Canada, I doubt there were any peoples without some form of indirect contact much past 1700. Even groups that didn’t take to horses and guns were profoundly affected by their spread in the 1600s. Many of the groups that were contacted relatively late in the game (such as some of the Northern Rockies bands first contacted by Lewis and Clark) were contacted so late precisely because they had been driven into more out-of-the-way areas during the previous centuries by groups that had embraced horses and guns.
There were still holdouts who resisting being settled on the reservation at the end of the Apache wars at least as late as 1924 (the date of the last raid) and probably later, but they lived a lifestyle more similar to modern guerrillas than their traditional one. They also freely traded and lived with non-natives in Mexico.
