Native americans, Indigenous peoples of the Americas
native americans culture
Many of us have a fixed mental image of the American Indians, including their appearance and clothes, and also their primitive way of life. Although the information that the American Indian tribes are the original inhabitants of the United States of America before Christopher Columbus discovered them, the real history of the American Indians and the reason for calling them this name, may be a secret that many do not know, and this is what we will talk about.
The secret behind calling the American Indians this name
At the outset we have to point out that the term (Native American) is considered offensive to the indigenous people of the United States, and this is a major point of contention between the federal government and the tribes who call themselves (the indigenous people, but it is the most common name and therefore it is used more widely, but to distinguish between Indigenous peoples and immigrants.
The true story of this name goes back to what the traveler (Christopher Columbus) the discoverer of the United States mistakenly called them, as Columbus thought that when he reached the Americas that he was in India after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and because of the color of the skin of the original inhabitants of the red color due to the sun, he called them (American Indians). hence, they were given this name.
Where do the Native Americans live?
The American Indians still live in some American provinces and make up 1.5 percent of the population of the United States, and despite the fact that America was discovered in the fifteenth century AD, the American Indian tribes still deal with the matter as a European occupation of their land, and they do not mix Not at all with American society.
To this day, the American Indians still resort to the laws that the tribe knew, as the American Constitution stipulates the right of the American Indian tribes to self-governance for themselves and their sovereignty over their lands and communities.
Native American tribes live within reserves isolated from the Americans, and in 2010 the number of these reserves reached 334 reserves across America, and within the American Indian tribes, a distinction is made between tribes whose lineage was mixed (married to Europeans) and pure tribes who still preserve their race without mixing.
Native American tradition
Even today, the Native Americans still maintain their own identity, as they still wear bird feathers and animal skins on their bodies, and dye their faces like their ancestors, and also depend on agriculture and hunting, and some of them still worship the idols that were worshiped by their ancestors.
It is mentioned that the Native Americans were the first to grow tobacco and make smoke from it, and they were the first to know the cocoa drink.
Marriage at the Native Americans
One of the most important conditions for marriage among the Native American tribes is that the young man continues to give precious gifts until it is approved by the wife’s family. With him without an official marriage even if he has another wife.
In other tribes, widowhood is the fate of the husband or wife in the event of the death of the other, and there are also strange customs related to pregnancy and childbirth in these tribes, as when women give birth in the American Indian tribes, they do not lie in bed for comfort, but the husband lies instead with the aim of deceiving Evil spirits haunt women after childbirth and the husband becomes infected instead of his wife.
Indians have been slaughtered for centuries
Christopher Columbus set his feet on the American continent in 1492 AD, and since then wars have taken place between the European occupiers and the indigenous people of the country, and the bloodshed has not stopped until the beginning of the twentieth century, so bodies piled up and rivers of blood ran.
Although there is no accurate statistics about the numbers of the indigenous people who were present on the lands of North America at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans, some studies indicate that the numbers of the indigenous people of the Americas ranged from 10 million to 100 million in the year 1500 AD, and many specialists believe that they were About 50 million, of whom about 15 million are from the American Indian tribes and clans in North America alone.
From the moment of the arrival of the Europeans, the numbers of the American Indians began to decrease at an imaginary speed due to wars, mass massacres, famine and epidemics, until it reached less than 238,000 Red Indians only with the end of the American-Indian war in the nineteenth century, which means that European forces massacred more than At least 95% of the indigenous population of what is known as the United States of America today, although some researchers believe that the total real death toll in the Americas may reach 300 million.
This great extermination of the American Indians, from 10 million people to 200,000 people, was not random or purely a coincidence, but was a deliberate process planned by the colonialists, as Klaus Connor, a professor at Princeton University, sees that the English “are the most practicing European colonial power For genocides, their goal in the new world, such as Australia, New Zealand and many of the areas they invade, is to empty the land of its people and own it and seize its wealth” .
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