What Was Life Really Like In America Before Columbus? | 1491 | Chronicle

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the Americas before 1491 were home to thousands of societies each with its own distinct social cultural and political structure throughout the two continents indigenous people formed Clans confederacies alliances and even Empires indigenous people interacted between these communities through a complex network of trade that connected every region of the Americas the hauden nashoni Confederacy was formed nearly 900 years ago making it one of the oldest representative democracies in the world before the five founding Iroquoian nations came together in peace they were locked in an endless cycle of Retribution and inter-tribal War you had five warring Nations and the descriptions in the oral histories is uh very very explicit in talking about how there was a fratricide there was cannibalism basically human relations had totally broken down in that part of the world amongst their own people has all to do with this cycle of Revenge every Iroquoian chief engaged in retaliation but it was taradaho the serpent Chief who was known throughout the territory for his ruthlessness yeah live and writhing snakes is a very powerful spiritual person whose mind was twisted so the imagery they have in the stories is his fingers are all twisted and his body's all gnarled and so forth and he was able to control the wind and the waters and he was causing a lot of harm as internal Wars continued to tear the five nations apart an outsider known as The Peacemaker arrived in a stone canoe and began to share his vision of a society based on Harmony and peace he traveled to every corner of Iroquoian territory promoting the Great Law of Peace and the fondant Confederacy really is the story of The Peacemaker a person from a related Nation who came into our territory and connected with a leader in our nation Hiawatha once part of his nation's Warrior Society ayanwatha had changed his way of thinking and started to promote his own vision of peace as a betrayal and Had Each of ironwatha's daughters killed one by one the pain of his loss led ironwatha to leave his community and isolate himself in the forest ayawata story is not just haywata it's the story of him and his daughters and how the loss of his daughters affected him and what drove him to do what he did was the loss of his daughters your daughters are your posterity because when you just follows a female why after they met The Peacemaker convinced ironwatha that they should become allies in seeking peace among the Nations even though he was overcome with grief ayanwatha chose to work with The Peacemaker to promote his idea of an inter-tribal alliance between the five warring Nations because of the revered role of women in Iroquoian Nations ayanwatha and The Peacemaker traveled to the fire of jigan SASE to seek her advice on how to bring the Great Law of Peace to the Iroquoian people Congo from Canada in the Iroquois way of thinking women were on par with men in terms of the authority they wield in the political realm history hit his like Netflix just for history fans with exclusive history documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you with familiar faces such as Dan Jones and Dr Eleanor yanega we've got hundreds of documentaries covering the greatest figures and events of medieval history we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle that's foreign [Music] foreign foreign Nations supported the peacemaker's vision of the Great Law of Peace foreign it's important to consider the objective the objective wasn't to enhance the power of these nations uh or to increase the territory or the wealth it was to create peaceful honest coexistence continued to resist joining the alliance is he gonna agree with his peace because he'll lose all power foreign foreign happened based on astronomical records a solar eclipse covered the Northeast region of North America for four minutes on the afternoon of August 31st 11 42. [Music] after this historic event tadaho agreed to join the Confederacy foreign [Music] [Music] became the keepers of the central fire a role that they hold to this day 11 42 would be the founding of the great peace and so yeah taradahu then is named the main chief of the Confederacy he's actually taken as the symbol of the meaning of this message which is that even the worst person even the most powerful evil force can be turned around and made into good if you think back into terms of what was the first message that was brought by The Peacemaker to our people is that you should treat each other kindly and you should think of each other as one family that's the central power of this teaching is that you should be treating everyone like your brother and sister the power of it is extremely long-lasting it's shown it's been how many years now how many generations of people have been bound together by that this ancient indigenous government continues to be part of Iroquoian Society nearly 900 years after its founding [Music] the development of large Urban centers evolved from small farming Villages as mass production of food supported the growth of populations and cities foreign [Music] for centuries the marowitic kingdom thrived as it was too distant for foreign Nations to conquer it this Nubian kingdom was surrounded by fertile land and supported a large Urban population [Music] for two centuries the Assyrian Empire was a formidable Society rulers displayed their power by constructing impressive palaces and temples before the empire fell they had extended their influence over most of the Middle East and Egypt [Music] the Inca Empire was the largest civilization in the Americas in the early 16th century in its short existence the Sapa Incas ruled a society of millions of people from Ecuador to Chile over the past five thousand years large city-states with Dynamic political and religious rulers emerged and held power in every part of the world the ancestors of the ambitious Inca rulers had humble beginnings as farmers in the Andean Highlands about 900 years ago the descendants of those Farmers founded the largest indigenous Society in the Americas 600 years ago and like other great civilizations the Inca Empire began with a vision the Incas are going to claim that after the creation of the world in Titicaca some of them took this passage this tunil from the lake and they are going to emerge in pakaritamo the the the the place of their origin according to oral histories the first Inca family left their birthplace in pekari Tambo in search of the perfect location to establish a Homeland they were carrying a golden staff and they were basically testing the soils and the idea was that they were going to find a place where that Bolton Road was going to be able to be uh sunken into the ground and that happened in Cusco in one specific Sport and that's going to be the ushna and the usno is the center where all the viral force of the universe radiates when the Inca arrived in Cusco it had been the home of the kilke people for hundreds of years the land is already inhabited by those people who have always been there and they have to come with an idea of this process the local inhabitants and then they becoming the masters of the place in the first of many conquests the early income rulers either ousted or absorbed the kilke people maintaining Cusco as the logistical political and spiritual heart of their new Society 600 years ago the Inca Empire extended over much of what is today Peru Bolivia Chile Colombia Ecuador and Argentina and was home to 20 million people you are going to have four primary lines which are going to be the roads of the tawantin studio Cusco was organized into four quadrants and leaders from cities and Villages throughout the empire were required to build a house and live in Cusco part of the year in the quadrant that corresponded to their region and then based on that you are going to have all these close to 80 provinces in an area that basically went all the way from northern Chile to Ecuador all along the Andes you had these systems at the Inca built upon their empire extended in lengths some 2000 miles from north to south this grew in tandem with conquest and population growth to control such a massive territory and diverse population the Empire's leaders convinced Regional Chiefs to join the society with Promises of material riches and special status but mandatory Allegiance had a cost most of the leaders of these small Nations accepted the new government peacefully but for those who resisted the Inca's well-trained Army forced compliance the Sapa Inca was the emperor a position passed down from father to son the Sapa Inca's wife known as the Koya was typically his sister we can think about the Incas as a oligarchy of of 10 royal families those are the ones who are intermarine among themselves just remember that according to their own Traditions they have to maintain this dynastic line pure so they are allowed to marry with their first cousins and of course the sisters and brothers in addition to the importance of blood Purity the Incan Royals also believe their Emperors were blessed with immortality the emperor Never Dies your body continues to have vital powers that are used for political purposes because the people who are going to be in charge of of keeping their bodies of the Incas the mummified bodies of the Incas are called the panicas they are going to operate as a small Congress that are going to they're going to put checks and balance on the Inca so they are going to be able to decide and and advise and sometimes direct the ideas of the encato or specific purposes only because the mummy of the this is Emperor at least some of the relatives can talk with that Mommy and then it's like your grandfather says that you are doing wrong that you should better think do this the Inca hierarchy place the royal family at the top followed by the nobility including the priests Governors and tax collectors rounding out this social structure were the farmers herders servants and slaves much of the population consists of a peasantry agricultural Rural and then you have the cities and the cities kind of wield all power and they extract tax in labor from each of those communities in the case of the Incas they want to be in labor but they want you to go and work in the land of the Incas produce the crops and then an ink officer is going to show up and say like guys it's time for us to put all these in the storehouses because we are going to live out of this food if it doesn't rain next year so often tributaries would pay into the Inca State and the Incas would then through their Mita tax system with basically Warehouse Foods typically potatoes Maize and other crops and they had an incredible abundance of different crops that would be stored but these allowed armies to be maintained and fed while on campaign but also for the communities that work these areas to be able to maintain themselves during periods of drought for instance so it was a system that was a give and take but virtually everything in the income Empire belonged to the Inca himself Maya Society was made up of city-states that dotted the landscape in mesoamerica moving goods and services to a population in the millions was done through a highly evolved system of trade and commerce they were bringing in Shell from the Gulf Coast they were bringing in Shell from the West Coast they were bringing unique and prized Green obsidians from the Pachuca sources in Highland Mexico a Basalt Ceramics even turquoise coming out of the American southwest this was traveling over some of the most circuitous and mountainous regions and even Gulf lowland regions all the way to the Maya area these are people that they didn't have draft animals they did not have horses they did not have cattle oxen they didn't have any of these things so everything had to be ported on foot on the backs of human burden bearers in turn what the Maya we're giving back was access to the matagua river Jade source true Jade occurs only in a few places on the planet and the Maya had access to it so Jade was being moved throughout mesoamerica and of course Elites who identified with Jade as related to the Earth and to the ancestors wanted to be a part of that they began using ritual objects and belief to draw on the interests of Outsiders who begin to trade or to pilgrimage to these sites so you get some of the earliest pilgrimage centers in these regions Maya trade went well beyond the valuable Jade Market various other Commodities were transported in their raw or manufactured state from the Maya region on foot and by boat when the Spanish first arrived they had encounters with Maya boats or ships if you will and these were multiple canoes lashed together into platforms and they were essentially sailing ships that were traveling up the coast with large quantities of Ceramics as well as rubber kopal chocolate vanilla and virtually all of those other things that we as westerners so much enjoy which all originated in ancient mesoamerica one of the most important trade items in Maya Society was maze this crop was at the center of the Maya diet and culture and was in high demand in the urban centers eventually Maize moved into North and South America through trade with other indigenous communities considering the importance of corn for people's diet and all that went with corn it was a valuable food to trade [Music] societies throughout the world have traded Bartered and sold food for thousands of years this exchange fostered important business and social relationships and contributed to the development of Cuisines that were unique to Regions and Nations salt was an essential mineral for African diets and an important trade item with other nations salt cakes were transported by camel Caravans and traded for gold Ivory and cola nuts across the continent [Music] thank you foreign spices have been a major trade item for thousands of years cinnamon Ginger and turmeric were exchanged between Africa Europe the Middle East and Asia making spices one of the most important economic and cultural Enterprises in the world [Music] societies throughout the world have been producing wine for thousands of years as both a religious and social beverage the earliest wine production was in Armenia 7 000 years ago [Music] after 1492 fruits and vegetables cultivated in North and South America were exported to Europe Asia and Africa some of the world's most widely used ingredients had their Origins among indigenous Societies in the Americas around the same time that the Maya were the dominant trading center in mesoamerica indigenous people in North America were transporting materials by boat and foot along a trade Network known as the Hopewell Exchange we had a great deal of trade and we think a lot of it follows river valleys in my area in the southeast people were trading with one another so there was a lot of contact between different groups and trade was people were trading as far up as the Great Lakes down down the Mississippi River into the you know Louisiana area it wasn't a bunch of tiny little groups just living alone and not knowing what someone else is doing just down the street so to speak the people who traveled from distant territories into the Ohio River Valley area were bringing valuable raw materials from their region to trade with residents who were turning them into finished products we had these networks already and it was a familiar way of interacting with another group in the Hopewell interaction sphere we have this huge Trade Network and we can see where materials are coming from we know that at least by 700 A.D there are groups that were bringing obsidian from Wyoming they were bringing iron ore from Oklahoma up they were bringing shelves from the Gulf Coast they were bringing Mica sheets from North Carolina and it was all coming up to basically the Ohio River Valley catalanite which is the Pipestone a red Pipestone that people really prized and that was traded all over the place sometimes as nodules but sometimes those finished products you know somebody might carve a nice pipe and then trade that that gets into the trade route the Hopewell exchange region was populated by agriculture-based communities the artisans in these communities created intricate art pieces Pottery items pipes and tools and it's surprising that many of them are coming from a thousand miles away it was there we recognized that people were interacting on a continental scale the reason for the decline of the Hopewell trading system around 1500 years ago is a mystery but what is known is that this highway system of rivers and lakes connected the peoples and cultures of the northern continent for over 500 years and was one of the most extensive trade networks in the world a thousand years ago indigenous people built the largest urban center North of Mexico near what is now the city of St Louis over several hundred years Cahokia became one of the most influential trading centers in North America there were a whole series of cultures on the Mississippi and the Apex of that was of course Cahokia at the Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers so this was a major hub for all people traveling north and south in North America when people got up on those Mounds that would be the thing that they saw was the the river in the distance and another River coming in from the West Maize was introduced into North America from Mexico about two thousand years ago and eventually moved into the Eastern regions of the continent about a thousand years ago archaeological research has currently shown that the development of agriculture in that region occurred a lot earlier than previously believed and so this further developed over time where we see the development of large towns and even cities like places like Cahokia and many others all across the region and only now we are coming to understand those complex sites in more detail indigenous people in Central and Eastern North America have constructed Mounds for burials and ceremonial use for thousands of years the city of Cahokia has one of the greatest concentrations of Mounds in North America we can follow the Evolution if you will of of Mound construction from 300 A.D on up we get small Mounds we a little bit larger we get Mortuary Mounds we get Mounds that have houses on top a lot of these large Mound structures seem to be places where a large grouping of people came together because of its central location along traditional trade routes Cahokia approved the ideal place to exchange resources excavations of Cahokia have revealed a range of treasures mother of pearl from the Gulf of Mexico silver from Ontario and copper from Lake Superior at its peak kahugia reached a population of at least 20 000 people with many more thousands of people living in the Farmland nearby the centerpiece of the city was a massive 30 meter high dirt pyramid with a base covering five and a half hectares found beneath this and many other Mounds in Cahokia are objects made from materials that originated hundreds and even thousands of miles away there's such a wide variety of materials that we know it's of importance we don't know what started it we don't know what the importance is but and it wasn't just an economic thing very important people the people with status were using it to identify the fact that you know I'm not having to to use just local stone for my projectile points I have material that comes all the way from a thousand miles away or 20 days travel however they use to measure it so it was both a status symbol it was an economic relationship and it did become ceremonial it became a point in time where there were materials that are of such beauty that they are not really being used for hunting they're being used to demonstrate that I don't need to use this for hunting it's it's so ceremonially important that I don't have to waste it Cahokia itself is sort of seen as one of the mother locations if you will of a large number of groups during the the little ice age in 12 1300s people started realizing that they could no longer exist within one large area that they had to pull apart again and then for the end of the 12 13 14th century these people start pulling apart and they become separate groups the the Choctaw the Chickasaw and the the Okmulgee or the creek peoples the origin of the people of Cahokia remains a mystery like the Hopewell exchange before it this once bustling city was an essential hub for trade connecting every corner of North America [Music] [Music] since ancient times people have traded food tools and raw materials that could not be found in their own territories this was the earliest form of Commerce and led the way to the development of trade routes that still exist today as the Greek civilization began to expand into new territories food raw materials and manufactured goods spread the Greek culture throughout the Nations bordering the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas [Music] the Vikings were a seafaring people who traded Timber Furs and food with societies throughout Europe and the Middle East they established a bullion economy trading silver in the form of coins ingots and jewelry for goods [Music] the Maya established extensive trade routes with other societies in mesoamerica maze Jade Fabric and raw materials were some of the items that form the basis of the Maya economy over several thousand years ancient trade networks were more than a means of exchanging goods they were Central to cultural interaction and the sharing of ideas and Technologies between nations the Aztec Empire was founded 600 years ago in mesoamerica and soon became one of the largest Societies in the Americas the Aztec had complex spiritual beliefs that played a role in every part of their culture and day-to-day life the Aztecs in their own words they are not from us America in their own words they came from somewhere in the north the founders of the Aztec empire arrived in a region already settled by Major societies to survive they had to master the art of Conquest the Aztecs were people having come into the valley of Mexico and establishing themselves in the 13th century very quickly found themselves under the auspices of a brutal warlord by the name of Tesla samok eventually the Aztecs formed a Triple Alliance with the cities of tacopan and teshkoko and Tenochtitlan and that that formation in the 1440s basically allowed the Aztecs to go up against this Kingdom at ascapo salko and they literally annihilated it having done that they then stood up against some 40 other major kingdoms and they've wiped them out as as part of that Juggernaut of development and expansion resolved to maintain its status as mesoamerica's dominant Force the Aztec rulers demanded commitments of Military Support and resources from each City in its domain you would be assigned the equivalent of an emissary and that Emissary would be assigned to that site and there would be a companion Emissary in the capital to receive the tribute and as long as you paid tribute you were allowed the autonomy necessary what the Aztecs are actually promoting in their empire is what we can call an imperial facts or Olympia peace which means that while that tribute is moving is moving through safe roads whoever dares to steal the tribute is going to be punished and what it allowed was for a mobilization of resources across vast areas while allowing indigenous autonomy in every community so long as you paid tribute to the cabasera or the head in this case Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs you could maintain your system of deities Gods your system of agriculture your polity your kings Etc so now I can walk not only to the next town but I can book hundreds of kilometers inside the Aztec empire with whatever thing I want to sail and trade the debut that is reinforceed by the assets is also being returned to the miss American economy and is going to create growth the capital of the Aztec empire Teno chitlan was a sprawling city of Canal's pyramids markets residential neighborhoods and artificial Islands on what is now the present-day site of Mexico City the Isaac have the they believe that uh nothing comes out of nothing in order to create life something needs to die and the most precious life they could give was the life of humans the energy of the individuals is in the blood in the fluids this sacred liquid let's put it this way they created a religious economy in which basically uh lives have to be given to the divinities so where the Aztecs violent yes but it's organized violence violence without purpose the Aztec rulers built a society that in many ways was unparalleled in the world in the Pacific Northwest region of North America indigenous people developed a complex society that was governed by the ownership and passing down of songs dances titles and names these laws and privileges were embedded in a ceremony known as the potlatch during the Potlatch people from neighboring Villages were invited to witness a ceremony and Gifts were distributed as a sign of wealth and power by the host Chief and his family Gatherings of families and communities often took place during the winter months [Music] during the winter time is when we held our most important ceremonies when we would invite other villages to come to our communities and we would host them and and feed feed them the whole time that they were there so they might be there for two weeks or or a month are people were very giving of of everything that we had and that's how you connected with your other Villages that's how alliances loyalties and Trust was created through those connections and that didn't just happen amongst the quack quack we were very interactive and that's a misconception too that the haidas the chimpsions the trinkets the sailors the West Coast people were separate no one people one family of course we spoke different languages but we shared the same Customs we shared the same blood when I think about Latin I think of marriage which is a sacred Union between two people between two houses what's really important is the Dowry what the female brings to her husband's family validated through potlatching marriage leads to the birth of children naming our children honoring the children when they come of age lifting them up into adulthood with dignity with the teachings of their responsibilities those sort of things were are entrenched into the Potlatch system and that's again that connectedness with the other Villages and how we interacted on the coast alliances were formed for trade which was her survival depended on it you had to get along and governance systems protocols these things have to come into play in order to have Harmony [Music] throughout the ancient world ceremonies were created to honor birth marriage death and other important social and human transitions [Music] the Tea Ceremony emerged in Japan as a way to honor different types of teas and to acknowledge the beauty of the items used in their preparation thank you [Music] incense was a common trade item in Egypt and Mesopotamia Stone Alters were used to hold these aromatic resins as they burned in household and Temple rituals [Music] thank you [Music] tobacco and pipes are sacred to the Nations living in the central plains of North America sharing a pipe was often used to initiate peace talks between warring Nations [Music] ceremonies are part of every society and many of these rituals still take place in traditional cultures today from societies as large as the Inca Empire in South America to the smallest hunting communities on the Great Plains of North America rituals were created to heal and protect the people to bring the reins and to resolve conflicts for thousands of years the people of the central plains in North America smoked tobacco Connecticut and other leaves in ceremonial pipes this was their link between the Earth and the sky a sacred ritual for connecting the physical and spiritual worlds we generally think of Blackford people as uh bison Hunters hunting and Gathering cultures and that's definitely true but they did take one plant under cultivation and that was tobacco and they learned a very very intricate rituals and ceremonies around tobacco before tobacco came into Blackfoot culture they used to have local plants that they would smoke they would take the leaves of the bearberry and mix them with the inner bark of red ozier dogwood that when tobacco came along They just added tobacco to the blend people were smoking before they got tobacco the earliest pipes we find on the Northern Plains actually come from the era around 5 000 years ago so smoking and tobacco were not synonymous tobacco moved out the Missouri River probably beginning about the 8th Century A.D and it probably got into the Blackfoot Culture by about 900 A.D and we know that at that period uh there was a warm spell in global climates and this warm spell that lasted for about uh five or six hundred years and that probably created the conditions where it was easier to uh plant the crops and and to harvest them when they're ready to plant their tobacco crops they would leave it there after they prepared their Gardens and put the seeds in they would leave there and in their mythology they said there were these little people who lived in the woods they lived in little caves so they were the ones who looked after the tobacco plants while Blackfoot people were out buffalo hunting and they had to go off and do their uh berry picking or their collecting of other Foods so they can't come back and forth the tobacco Society of the Blackfoot was a Horticultural Society and what they curated was the traditional knowledge for how to plant tobacco and how to bring in a crop they said the little people were very shy and that they could cause you harm if you saw them and then in the fall time when they were getting ready to harvest the crops then they'd go by there they always sent a couple of people ahead to make lots of noise and to let the little people know that they were coming coming back and then it gives them time to get away they would leave Gifts of like food and little clothing all these things they would treat them well the tobacco smoke is is also considered very sacred because it's it's a visual manifestation of your breath foreign people wanted to make an oath they usually capped it by taking a puff of smoke or also you wanted to solidify a trade deal you smoke the pipe if you wanted to end war between your peoples you smoke the pipe so there's this very close connection between the spirit of breath and tobacco [Music] Blackfoot quackawak Aztec Inca and Maya are just a few of the thousands of indigenous Nations that develop sophisticated political systems and vast trade networks throughout the Americas before 1491. [Music] these nations were not only formidable societies of their time in many ways their laws rituals and beliefs continue to influence our world today [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign Americas were home to groundbreaking achievements in science and technology long before 1491. in mesoamerica indigenous people developed a complex writing system calendars and books in South America a precise accounting machine was created more than 5 000 years ago throughout the Western Hemisphere sophisticated knowledge and the use of plants as medicine has been practiced for thousands of years some achievements like the earliest use of the number zero and brain surgery were among the most advanced in the world for their time indigenous men and women gathered studied and administered thousands of species of plants for healing purposes skilled as no botanists adapted plans for use as sedatives painkillers and other types of medicines native peoples had a very ancient and traditional practice but there were multiple Dimensions to it some of that was as essential as herbs and ethnopharmacology as we call it in other words a Botanical repertoire of things that are medical the reality is much of the medical tradition we have here in the western tradition is born precisely of those herbs and their alkaloids and the way in which we've extracted them indigenous medicine was not simply a process of preparing plants and offering them to a sick person healers had a deep knowledge of plant chemistry and how different plants interacted as medicines in the western tradition there's a tendency to engage in a primitivist rhetoric about Native American Medicine the idea that oh well it's about Superstition and it's about evil spirits and it's about herbs because some of the people could literally walk through a forest and identify plants and their Curative properties simply from visual inspection alone such that the chemovars which are the active ingredients that allow for the healing or the relieving of symptoms could be relieved and they knew which plants those were one of the more common plants that was used is a plant known as yarrow and the arrow is a very good example of Curative plant because this is one that was put on wounds and cuts because if you take a yarrow plant and then just chew it up you masticate it you release all the alkaloids that are in there and you put it onto an open wound it actually has properties that will cause the blood to clot faster but other plants such as sweet grass these are plants that are used more in ceremonial uses you know for if you're starting a ceremony and you put sweet grass on there call and the smoke from the sweet grass has the properties that you're looking for for those who don't buy the idea that herbs can cure us the reality is much of the medical tradition we have here in the western tradition is born precisely of those herbs and their alkaloids and the way in which we've extracted them today many modern Pharmaceuticals Trace their Origins to medicines developed by indigenous people aspirin you know uh acetacilic acid which comes from Willow or Aspen the bark this was a very common one that was used from ancient times and the active ingredient was isolated and was then used to become aspirin in modern times and many of those plants and many of these people were being used by the medical industry to find those very substances many of those have been introduced into our medical tradition but in the forms of capsules and pills and and injections and thereby the American Indian is taken out of the equation though they are the discoverers and innovators of these medicines one of the the ancient manuscripts that came down to us had an entire listing of plants used by the Aztecs and there was a an incredible period in which after having examined that book and its Curative Properties or the properties of the plants identified one of them spoke of a disease that basically engaged the withering of the human body and ultimately the death of the individual and it was supposed to be a means by which to relieve the symptoms and or cure the disease and those that were studying this document came to the conclusion that it was a plant that had Curative properties to defeat cancer there's a range of treatments for cancer and other diseases in use today that are based on medicines originally developed by indigenous people but let the plants are common plants that was used in a pharmacopoe of traditional healers was the yew tree and that Barker view tree has also been used in breast cancer treatment because that's where the active ingredient of taxol is taken from that plant through a holistic approach to Healing indigenous medicine men and women of the Americas combined herbology with spiritual care when people used them traditionally they would be used in a complex with prayers and ceremony and you know you can't underestimate the power of the ceremony foreign surgery was being practiced throughout the ancient world as far back as 7 000 years ago in both North and South America thousands of skulls with evidence of surgical treatment have been found which demonstrates that this specialized Medical Practice was widely used to treat injuries and sickness the Precision of these operations and their High success rate is evidence of advanced surgical skills by indigenous people the archaeological evidence makes clear from mummy bundles in Peru to excavated burials in mesoamerica that cranial trefenin or the surgical removal of bone plates from the skull for the purposes of brain surgery or the surgical removal of tumors and the relief of blunt force trauma was a reality it was very common is you find skulls and archaeological sites here on the coast and they've obviously done trepidation and the person survived because there's been healing around the scars of the bone in a survey of over ten thousand uh crania with evidence of trepening it is clear from the surgical practices that were conducted that over 70 percent of the individuals who had suffered blunt force trauma and then had the blunt force trauma relieved by virtue of cranial trepening survived you might say well yes you have 70 percent of some 10 000 crania showing healing osteitis as we call it but what does that mean if you look at it from the perspective of forensics and osteology it was a practice engaged in when you were dealing with the potential death of a casualty of blunt force trauma or other illnesses the Inca Emperor would have the equivalent of six Physicians carry his litter these Physicians were known as yaoyo and the yaoyo were all trained in skull surgery we can no longer contend that this practice does not have a medical correlation it wasn't witchcraft it was medical Innovation that came into play thousands of years ago head trauma wasn't the only Serious injury treated surgically by indigenous Medical Specialists the Aztecs engaged in something that involved compound fractures for example to the armor leg individuals on the battlefields were often subjected to this a treatment individuals who had compound fractures were likely to lose the limb unless something could be done immediately and so surgeries were conducted in which for example the sutures would be made of hair Buren was used to wash the wounds and they would open up the arm or the leg and the long bones that were broken would actually be reattached by virtue of an intramedular nail this is basically an equivalent of a spur of bone or wood that would be inserted into the bone itself and they would be reconnected thereby allowing for the long bone to be healed and eventually individual to fully recover that's a system that was only reintroduced in the 20th century these are Traditions that appear all over South America mesoamerica and North America and I would contend the fact that they exist and they exist so broadly and through such remote Antiquity would contend that ancient Native Americans had an incredible grasp on science technology and Medicine well into the remote past every part of the world tradition medicines have been the primary means of treating illnesses for thousands of years the medicines and treatments used by practitioners are based on deep knowledge of plants and healing skills that have been passed down from generation to generation herbal medicines have been part of Chinese traditional healing practices for several Millennia in addition to using plants the use of acupuncture massage and Tai Chi are used to enhance well-being and prevent health problems [Music] a traditional practice called Muti has been one of the primary means of health care for people in southern Africa for thousands of years the medicines made from trees and plants have therapeutic properties that are used in maternal care and to treat diseases foreign peoples in every part of the Americas use plants trees and other natural materials as part of their traditional healing practices an essential part of this practice was the interrelationship between physical mental emotional and spiritual well-being millions of people rely on traditional medicine for their health care needs many medicines developed by indigenous peoples are still used in alternative medicine the oral histories of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas include references to the sun moon stars and planets solar and lunar eclipses often coincided with political and cultural events that continue to be commemorated hundreds of years later in mesoamerica the planet Venus was Central to the development of the world's most sophisticated ancient calendar systems while in Central North America the Blackfoot and other Plains Nations relied on the stars and planets to time their hunting and harvesting seasons and to interpret the forces of nature ancient people had a lot of knowledge about stars and the movement of stars and the night sky if it's clear skies you go out and you look at the stars and people were able to make sense out of all of this and one of the things that I've seen over and over again is how people used lunar calendars devised lunar calendars traditional calendars always had 13 moons that they recognized and that would be equivalent to months for us we also have to calibrate your lunar calendar with the solar year and people recognize that there is a certain number of moons within a solar year so how do we know when we've left winter the winter part of the calendar into the summer while they use the the Pleiades because there's only one season where the waxing crescent moon and the Pleiades will share the same part of the sky And when they see this they know that that's the start of this first moon of Summer so that this would be a way of calibrating their their lunar calendars these lunar calendars were vital for predicting the shifting of the seasons the migrations of herd animals and the emergence of berries and plants that indigenous peoples harvested or if you know that a certain constellation is only visible in the winter time you can then make plans about the windows constellation disappears we're moving into a new season by knowing the relative position of the Stars the seven siblings in relation to the North Star they can determine you know things such as traveling navigation or using them for collendrix so knowing these types of movements of the Stars they're able to develop star lore about it and in this way they can make plans they can avoid traveling at certain times or maybe using certain seasons lunar calendars are so common you know everywhere you go in the world you'll find Lunar calendars that's the most common form of calendar that people devise because if you have a if you have devised lunar calendar then you can start making plans several moons in advance the Blackfoot weren't the only indigenous people to depend on the night sky for guidance [Music] in the far North during the darkness of Winter the Stars provided Clues to the passage of time any of the people who have to deal with the fact that parts of the Season there is no sun how do you know morning from night or afternoon from morning if you have no sun in the sky well they recognize that certain Stars parallel the Sun so even if the Sun is not in the sky they can distinguish whether they're in the AM hours or in the afternoon hours by being able to make the association between a certain star and where the position of the sun is the most advanced calendar systems developed in ancient times had their origins in mesoamerica believed to have been developed first by the Olmec it was later refined by the Maya and Aztecs with subtle Village Life you have a demand for produce agriculture all of these things have to be set on a calendar the Maya did that to a level of accuracy that's almost unheard of they were able to calculate the solar year to 365.252 days they were able to do this by virtue of the so-called metonic calendar calendario metonico this system was used by very few World civilizations and those who did did were able to calibrate the solar year by using the lunar cycle in order to record time the Maya went one step further they had a venusian calendar or a venus-based calendar they had a lunar calendar they had the tonal powali which is essentially the agricultural or sacred Almanac and then they had the solar year each of these was being a calibrated and in looking at these different systems what they were able to do was they took a fixed point in time and having set that point in time August 13th of 3114 BC they began counting forward in time every day from that point constituted the beginnings of what we might call the Long Count besides being Central to their calendar system Venus played a prominent role in the cosmology and spiritual world of the Maya culture it was often for the Maya referred to as the WASP star it was this creature and it's often identified with war and conflict and if you've ever traveled in areas like Guatemala or the Yucatan Peninsula at night the stars come out and what you see Christine the the canopy of the sky is this massive kawil Vision serpent it is literally if you look at it carefully the Milky Way looks like it has an open mo at one end and a tail at the other and that is what they saw and every so often the planet Venus as the morning and evening star as we call it will appear at one point and that goes into retrograde motion and this appeared below the Horizon and then it reappears in another place so it was deemed the Divine twin so the the twins appear in in the mythologies of virtually all Mesoamerican peoples the Maya are recognized for more than their Advanced calendar they were the first civilization in the world to use the number zero in their counting system there was an early finding back in the 1930s of a monument that dated back to about 150 A.D once the FRA the fragments were brought together and other glyphs were found they realized that they had a bar and Dot numeral system and what made it or completed it as a system that was something more than just finger counting was the concept of the zero they invented the zero and the zero allowed to create numerals that extended well beyond the billions at a time when we have to wonder why they would be counting into the billions and the trillions and even Beyond it was invented independently in the New World by the American Indian by either the Maya or other Mesoamerican peoples it extends well before the Common Era so at least three centuries prior uh so we're looking at about 2 300 years ago this system if not at that point perhaps earlier had already been invented uh the zero the bar and Dot numerals and the founding of the calendrical system the Aztec civilization developed their own dual calendar system their lunar calendar had 13 20-day months and was used for agricultural purposes the Aztec also had a sacred solar-based calendar the solar year was also charted and that solar year consisted of 18 months of 20 days and so for 360 days with five days that the Aztecs referred to as Nemo Demi the Aztec Day Count calendar and the Maya short Count calendar each had 260 day cycles the short count is is really something that developed after the lung count those are two systems that we know from contact with the Aztecs but we also know that the Maya were able to introduce a love level of precision that we don't see in the later systems by studying the sun moon stars and planets our ancestors developed Advanced calendar systems and planned their lives around the changing seasons the origins of a written language in mesoamerica can be traced to a 3 000 year old Olmec Stone tablet found in eastern Mexico hundreds of years later the Maya developed a complex writing system that used symbols to represent sounds and words found in the Maya spoken language most indigenous peoples in the Americas recorded their history by passing it down orally from one generation to the next mesoamerica had the only written language and it was recorded using 800 unique hieroglyphs the glyph system is an amazing contribution bear in mind that there were only five World civilizations that produced literate traditions and contrary to what one of my professors used to tell me in graduate school that the Maya did not write histories the Americas were a place non-literate and prehistoric the reality is the Maya completely dispensed with that whole thing and it wasn't so much that the Maya were a non-literate tradition it was that we Western Scholars were incapable of understanding this literate tradition we couldn't read it and therefore it was irrelevant Maya writing was painted on walls and pottery carved in stone and written down on bark paper in books known as codices while many of these books were destroyed by the Spanish after 1491. some murals and sculptures still exist that describe day-to-day life and important events like battles and conquests the language used to record the Maya World reveals a culturally Rich storied civilization that placed a significant value on preserving its history for future Generations we now know it to have been a fully literate tradition with over 800 characters and it was not only logographic but it was also phonetic just as we write in block letters and italics they had more fonts than you can imagine today close to 90 percent of Maya glyphs have been deciphered revealing a wealth of knowledge about this civilization [Music] the development of writing systems took place independently in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 5000 years ago other societies that had writing systems since ancient times are the Olmec and Maya in mesoamerica and the Chinese in Asia the earliest Mesopotamian writing was carried out with a blunt instrument that made wedge shape marks on clay tablets this inspired other nearby societies to use pictograms as the basis for their writing systems [Music] foreign the Rosetta Stone was created more than two thousand years ago and features the Egyptian and Greek languages written in three different Scripts the message on the stone was recorded by priests to honor the Egyptian pharaoh Maya writing evolved from A system that was developed earlier by the Olmec Society of mesoamerica using more than 800 symbols Maya scribes recorded significant political and religious events on folding books called codices the evolution of early writing systems in mesoamerica Asia Africa and the Middle East offer a window into the worlds of ancient people dating back thousands of years about 2000 years before the birth of a written language in mesoamerica a unique system of information storage was invented in South America the discovery of a nodded string device called a kipu in the 5 000 year old city of caral makes it one of the oldest record-keeping instruments in the world kipu was a coded accounting system for both small and large Societies in South America information and data was recorded using multiple strands of knotted string or rope strung together along a Main Court is a device is artifact for Tool get numbers for recording quantities and qualities of products it's like a computer because the society is so complex as Kara needs to have organization about the work that you need to build a pyramid you need to have an organization of the numbers of the people and the products that you are taking or sharing almost 4 000 years after kipu was used by the people of Kerala they were still an important record-keeping tool in Andean cultures including the Inca Empire one of the main functions of kipu was to record numbers such as population tributes and levels of crop and art production s but another kipu sample found at the caral site proved to be far older San Marcos foreign the oldest kipu from karal were made from cotton while those from the Inca period were usually made from alpaca wool information was recorded on the device through variations in the cord color length type of knot location on the string and even how the cord was twisted the kipu had a base 10 numeric system the knots were made at specific intervals to indicate groups of tens hundreds and thousands the Inca had highly trained information Keepers who recorded the data and also memorized the stories connected to it some researchers have suggested that the kipu was also used to record oral histories and genealogies but if this is true it would be challenging to decipher these stories today is the fact that kipu was in use in South America for several thousand years demonstrates the important economic and record-keeping role this device had in successive Andean societies [Music] in ancient societies the need to keep track of crops materials and populations led to the development of recording instruments that ranged from beaded counting tablets to string counting devices [Music] the Abacus is a counting device that uses sliding beads on a frame to perform math calculations it was used by many ancient societies including China Rome Greece Mesopotamia and Egypt [Music] a bone tool found in a cave in South Africa is one of the oldest examples of a record-keeping instrument ever discovered the animal bone has 29 notches cut into it and may have been used to count objects or track the cycle of the moon foreign [Music] also known as talking knots were made from colored cords that were knotted in a specific order to signify numbers they recorded important Civic information like crop yields population and tax payments record keeping is an important part of every society and some of these ancient Innovations are the models for the calculators and computers that we use today the ancestors of today's Inuit people have lived in the Arctic region for about 5 000 years to adapt to one of the world's harshest climates Northern peoples developed a wide range of Innovations for hunting shelter and clothing that ensured their survival they lived in igloos and salt Huts you know all winter long and we would travel mostly out on the sea ice hunting seals all winter because that's what we lived on seals we would travel and when we stopped we would build an igloo and we would you know spend the night and go traveling the next day or if the hunting was good we would stay for a while but mostly in the winter we lived on a sea ice foreign [Music] food source of the Inuit but caribou and other game were hunted for meat and hide in the winter we wore coats that were made of caribou skins uh we the inner coat uh we wore with the fur on the inside uh right up against our skins and on top of that if we were going to be outside for long periods we wore another coat politak which is uh coat with the fur on the outside the seal skin [Music] these coats were made um in a very special way so that you know they weren't too bulky under your arms and they gave you you know free movement and they've been designed you know a long long time ago and and they're still used that way today one of the necessities of Arctic survival was a Dependable source of transportation which included sled dogs we made all our sleds we made all our own harnesses for the dogs and even the little booties in the spring when the ice was really sharp they would you know cut the pads on their on their feet the origins of domesticated dogs in the Arctic dates back more than 4 000 years historically their primary role was to work with Hunters to track seals and other prey the earliest archaeological evidence of sleds with dog harnesses dates back about 800 years when we had regular sleds you know which are maybe 12 14 16 feet long we would have about eight nine ten dogs to pull a slide a lot of the runners of our sleds used to have care blantler that was a shape to be thin and flat and that's what we would use on our little sleds you know little sets about this big to protect their eyes from the harsh glare of the Sun and snow the Inuit devised a unique type of snow goggles they're mostly made of bone like carbo antler you know and with a little slit and the nice thing about them is that they don't fog up you know unlike regular sunglasses you know they don't fog up because they're just slits and they're they're really good for you know getting rid of the glare because in the spring where we come from you know the Sun is up all the time in the summer and uh we got glare off the ice and snow [Music] thank you [Music] foreign not a jet power email good to me hey foreign [Music] anointed [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] in the summer months when the Arctic Ice would melt dog sleds were replaced by small-skinned boats we built kayaks and the kayak was invented because we have so little wood you know where I grew up and where I come from we don't have any trees so wood was very very scarce to build a kayak you use very little wood you know the ribs are made out of wood of course usually and and I suppose in the old days you know they were built um a lot of them were built out of uh bone you know the whale bone and seal bones and Caribou bones Caribou antlers and that kind of thing I think it's absolutely amazing how people can survive you know in this very harsh land for thousands of years to live we have invented all these amazing things you know we have invented the kayak we invented sleds and we invented this incredible structure called an igloo and skin tents and all the stuff and salt huts and we survived uh because uh we learned how to get along with each other we have a great camaraderie with all the other Arctic peoples of the world because you know we were Nomads like we traveled you know to Alaska Greenland all over the North and then we have all these stories you know these incredible legends that teach us how to live with each other a lot of us really don't think of it as surviving and we think of it as living you know because even though it's really cold it's a most incredible uh part of the world [Music] in every part of the world people develop calendars to Mark the passage of days weeks months and years the Moon Sun and planets were the basis for most of these calendar systems [Music] bone found in France may be the oldest lunar calendar in existence marks on the bone appear to show the phases of the Moon [Music] calendars used during the Middle Ages in Ethiopia were based on cycles of 532 years these calendars set the date of biblical creation as the starting point [Music] the Maya developed an accurate calendar system more than 2500 years ago that used the cycles of the Moon Sun and the planet Venus to measure time since ancient times people have used calendars to plan their religious Agricultural and hunting practices tracking the passage of time is one of Mankind's greatest achievements archaeological evidence and the oral histories of indigenous peoples confirmed that the earliest inhabitants of the Americas were seafarers with extensive knowledge of ocean navigation and Marine lifestyles over the Millennia our ancestors developed different styles of boats to travel and fish the rivers lakes and coastlines of North and South America water travel offered greater access to fishing and hunting and to trade with distant Nations these are people who may have been able to travel on the open ocean without much compunction it's quite clear that plenty of people along the coast had perfectly good boat technology in fact the onion or Alia people have some of the most extraordinary tradition of boating skills in tiny incredibly fragile little craft made out of nothing but skin and Driftwood and yet they would travel hundreds of kilometers over some of the world's most dangerous and difficult water routinely going from island island just to visit family the coast off of Washington and Oregon has no Sheltering Islands so without the Inside passage they must have been traveling out on the open water yet there was nothing wrong with that likewise clinkit folks in recorded history have traveled extraordinary difference distances in open canoes indigenous people developed a range of seafaring skills to safely Journey along coastlines including Celestial navigation and the use of landmarks in the Pacific Northwest the Tlingit devised a unique system of open ocean navigation that included an understanding of waves tides and winds in fact Clinic culture has a story of kalkajguk a man who with his nephews was blown out in a terrible storm out into the open ocean and he washed up with his nephews on apparently a tropical island because klinket maintains the word for bamboo and it's in this story that it's described how there wasn't any water on the island because there was no Rivers but they figured out that rain water was caught in the broken off stems of bamboo and that's what they used to survive on while they killed seals and then filled their the the seal stomachs up with more water for their Journey so oral history even tells us that these folks not only traveled to some very remote island where bamboo grows which could be midway or further south but still quite far out in the open ocean but then made it back using traditional navigation techniques laying in the bottom of the boat to detect the Rippling patterns of the North Pacific storms bouncing off of the islands and each of these storms has its own pattern of waves that hit the shore and bounced back and by studying how those waves cross over each other you can use them to triangulate in the direction of the shore and so this was a technique that that the this the seal hunters and Whale hunters out of yakitat would would use whenever they got blown so far off off of Shore that they couldn't find their way back studying the patterns of storm waves wasn't the only navigational tool that Tlingit and other seafarers used for Ocean Travel watching the birds and we see the same story coming from the Polynesians the birds that travel out during the day and always go back to shora at night if you know what time of day it is you know what direction the shore is because of the direction that they're traveling by applying their intimate understanding of boat technology and the ocean itself these ancient Mariners mastered navigation over some of the most challenging Waters in the world from navigation to brain surgery from snow goggles to accounting systems the indigenous peoples of the Americas are responsible for countless discoveries in science and technology Innovations like the first use of the number zero and life-saving medicines are still in use today these legacies are a tribute to our ancestors Ingenuity and remind us that their accomplishments were as significant as those made by other societies in the world before 1491. foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign the creative spirit is at the heart of every indigenous culture in the Americas the artistic Genius of our ancestors was evident in every aspect of life from traditional ceremonies to the creation of everyday objects our histories were carefully passed down from generation to generation through stories songs and dances perhaps the most visible reminders of our past are the works of art that our ancestors left for us through ceramic metal wood and woven materials we've discovered the very essence of our cultures before 1491 for thousands of years indigenous people have been creating tools and art from gold silver copper and bronze the technology of Metallurgy in the Americas before 1491 was possibly the most advanced in the world The Mining and Manufacturing of metals was an established technology in Western South America around 2000 years ago evidence of simple gold beets was discovered near Lake Titicaca that dates back 4 000 years the Inca are often credited with developing the Metallurgy traditions in South America they were after all the dominant society when gold production was at its peak 600 years ago but the extraction and purification of metals and the creation of metal alloys was practiced by indigenous cultures in the Andes a thousand years or more before the Inca civilization existed gold objects where a status symbol reserved for the Sapa Inca and the elite commoners only wore gold during religious and state ceremonies they were the most advanced civilization in the processing of methodology in the American continent they live in an area where the ore was abundant and with techniques that perhaps were Superior to the European ones skilled Artisans throughout the Inca empire were conscripted to produce jewelry and ceremonial objects for the Sapa Inca and his extended family The Artisans were often required to move from their own cities to work in the Inca capital of Cusco there was a cosmology an ideology identified with the metals gold was identified with the sun and Silber was identified with the moon and the tumbagas which were mixtures or Alloys of gold and silver and copper were identified with kind of the androgynous Bean of the metals such that they represented both the male and female element the heavens and the Earth and a whole host of other things that were sacred to the people that worked in those metals Inca goldsmiths used a variety of different smelting techniques to produce Alloys there is one Element more than gold or silver there is one element that the Incas hatch in abundance Mercury why Mercury because you need Mercury to basically remove impurities in the world and obtain only pure silver and pure gold babies I've identified over 50 metallurgical Traditions from the electrochemical plating of gold onto less precious metals all the way through to gilding processes and even the production of platinum which is among the first uh uses of platinum in the world these 50 Traditions have often been identified with things like Sheffield plating and last I recall Sheffield is in England and yet we have the earlier precedence for this Innovation and technology in Peru foreign resources and people as the Inca Empire required an efficient Road system for transportation many of the products used by the ruling family such as precious stones woven material and Feathers were transported along this vast Road system the Inca Empire stretched from Colombia to the southern tip of Chile connecting the millions of people living in this region was the great Inca Road a 40 000 kilometer Highway that crisscrossed mountains deserts and forests the chasky was a long-distance relay Runner who traveled the Great Road to deliver packages to the rulers and The Artisans who created works of art for the Sapa Incas family foreign [Music] foreign [Music] s to the next runner at a tambos for resting house applicator science [Music] it's crazy [Music] the jewelry and other objects that the Inca Artisans created from gold and silver were part of a complex cultural Dynamic that connected the ruling Sapa Inca and his family to the important deities like the sun god inti although they were highly regarded in society creating the metal objects for ceremonies Artisans performed their work at the pleasure of the Sapa Inca and the Elite Class perhaps we lost many other possible parts that perhaps were better perhaps we're more efficient perhaps we're more beautiful perhaps we're even like more sustainable at the peak of the Inca civilization the goldsmiths and Artisans were masters of Metallurgy techniques and the creation of brilliant works of art foreign [Music] one of Mankind's greatest achievements was developing Technologies to extract metals from Rock this led to the invention of bronze and iron tools and weapons and the creation of gold and silver jewelry and art [Music] earliest manufactured gold in the world was discovered at an ancient cemetery on the western shores of the Black Sea more than 3 000 pieces of gold jewelry and artifacts were found at this site foreign the Egyptians were among the first civilizations to mine and use gold it was an important part of the ceremonies associated with the burials of the Pharaohs and their families [Music] foreign the first evidence of metal art in the Americas was found in the form of gold foil beads near Lake Titicaca later methods of metal extraction and processing were developed in Northern Peru and Colombia today gold continues to be as powerful a symbol of wealth and status as it was in ancient times while stories at the core of every art form oral storytelling has preserved their cultural identity of indigenous peoples for thousands of years stories are the memories of our ancestors and through them they ensure that the values rituals knowledge and ways of life are kept alive those stories are what are held as being the foundation of an understanding of where you have come where you are and where you may go in the future every indigenous culture has a story about their Origins as a people these creation stories tell us how they came to be in Northwest North America a Haida creation story tells of a raven discovering first people as they emerged from a clamshell on a beach that simchand people have a story about the origins of the killer whale a white wolf long to tell the history of the world through song he left the land and went under sea where he transformed into a killer whale today he calls out to his wolf family who still live on the land there is a journey through a storied landscape and so as as you begin to hear descriptions of this journey the people will usually say that they stopped in different places the Inuit and their ancestors have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years a rich storytelling tradition evolved over countless Generations through the sharing of Legends between elders and children [Music] we have a great camaraderie with all the other Arctic peoples of the world uh because you know we were Nomads like we traveled you know to Alaska Greenland all over the North and we all speak the same language with many different dialects so I can talk to people from Alaska and Institute I can talk to people from Greenland and we can understand each other pretty well so we had all these stories these traditional Legends and they were told right across the North as you listen to these stories you know you fall asleep to them every night and and they teach you a lesson and you dream you know about these characters and and they become Your Heroes the most famous person that you know I can think of is a man called kivio my grandmother said kibio was born so long ago that he was the very first person the beginning of the kivial stories actually talks about a little boy who's also an orphan he was being bullied by all these kids in the community and then his grandmother made him clothing out of young seal and she said I would like you to go down to the beach and when you get to the watershedge I would like you to take the steel skin and pull it over your head and jump into the water and go for a swim and come up right in front of all your mean friends who are playing on the beach and sure enough all the mean boys were playing on the beach the little boy took seal skin he pulled it over his head so that it fit nicely and he looked like a little seal and then he took a deep breath and he jumped into the water and he came up right in front of all the mean boys who were playing on the beach they thought he was a little seal they grabbed their kayaks and all their long skinny skin boats and they started paddling following the little seal the Little Seal will go down underwater and he would swim a little bit farther out and then he would come up again and then he would go down and he would swim a little bit farther come up again and when they were way out of sea when the little seal came up he would lift up his arm and his leg and he would sing foreign I want my wind people say the weather that was on the day you were born is your very own weather and this little boy was born on a very very windy day and he was calling the weather that was on the day he was born the wind hurt him and it started to come it got windier and windier and windier and before long there were huge waves in the water The Kayaks with all the mean boys were going up and down up and down in the big waves and every now and then a giant wave would come and it would trip over and before long there was only one person left that person was kidial landed his kayak over on the other side of the ocean and so he started traveling trying to find his way home and while he was trying to find his way home it seems like he traveled through every part of the north because there are stories about him everywhere he traveled across this ocean and ended up on the other side in this very strange place and he got homesick so he started traveling trying to find his way home what people say about kivio is that he was the first person but he's still alive today he is so old his body is turning to Stone and someday when his heart turns completely the stone that stops that will be the end of the universe in The Finnish language they have a word which sounds just like TVO and it means Stone man so if you go back far enough and finish history you might find stories about this very same person of all the indigenous forms of art storytelling Remains the most essential to the teaching of culture our relationship with others and our connection to the environment we have all these stories you know these incredible legends that teach us how to care for the young and to help the more disadvantaged people in our world and teach us how to live with each other because you know nobody survives if they don't have a structure like that they came to know something about themselves something about relationship and responsibility and They Carried that knowledge and that perspective to the next place that they journeyed to the story is mirror you know the deepest the longings the deepest understandings the most profound thoughts if you will of other people and their guiding thoughts their thoughts the guide through generations rock art is one of the oldest art forms in the world by carving or scraping the surface of rocks with stone or bone tools indigenous people in the Americas created visual stories called petroglyphs many of the images carry deep cultural meaning and provide us with a connection to our past there are many Petroglyph sites that tend to be concentrated at really interesting locations on the landscape why the rocker is there is of great interest to archaeologists however we cannot fully understand these sites without considering the cultural knowledge associated with them petroglyphs had many functions to Mark a trail record an important event or tell a story for me as an indigenous archaeologist I do use the science aspect of trying to find and locate sites but we can also look at our oral histories and our place names and our traditions we can come to understand Landscapes from a cultural perspective and a scientific perspective but when we layer those two together we only enhance our understanding of the past the mountains haven't changed since the days of our ancestors we see Paths of their travels prehistoric trails that they've taken and yes definitely the petroglyphs you know the symbols and designs that remind us of our traditional religious practices our ceremony our rituals all those things are evidence of their presence and their use of this landscape they're etched in the stone because they wanted them to survive those messages to survive they wanted those symbols designs to be recognized and utilized by the people these are messages or reminders to all or often people you know to continue our way of life [Music] thank you foreign [Music] petroglyphs in every part of the Western Hemisphere they offer us a glimpse into the way of life and dream worlds of our ancestors [Music] on Cave walls Cliff faces and rock overhangs throughout the Americas indigenous people painted images that represented the world around them pictographs were drawn painted or Stained on the rock's surface using organic materials like ocher and charcoal one of the oldest pictograph sites in the Americas is the cave of hands site in Argentina the ancestors of the people of Patagonia covered the ceilings and walls with hundreds of handprints artists filled Hollow bird bones with pigment then placed their hand against the wall or ceiling by blowing the pigment through the tube the paint left the outline of a hand painted over the course of several thousand years the illustrations on the walls of this site reveal the hunting practices of the people of the region pictographs are also found throughout North America with the largest concentrations in the Great Lakes region the Southwest and along the west coast like those in South America most of the pictographs of North America were painted with ocher ocher being very rich dark red really symbolizes life and power and it provides a way to spiritually connect with your ancestors and of course the landscape and the resources that surround you in Squamish culture we refer to this as Thomas and it translates as paint the images portrayed in pictographs are more than storyboards of ancient times the ocher itself offers a valuable insight into the lives of the people who used it as paint one of the ways that I've researched Thomas Bowker is by doing some non-destructive analysis called x-ray fluorescence this gives me an elemental signature of the ocher so I can then go and find natural outcrops of the ocher and Shrine match the signature from a pictograph to a geological deposit where that material was gathered and so that gives us a little more understanding on how people use their landscape and the way they Associated those paintings with what surrounds those sites one of the mysteries of rock art is its frequent similarity with Artistic Styles in different regions of the Americas many researchers have noted that the Styles and patterns of certain rock art images are the same and early on in archaeological research many people said well maybe this was a widespread tradition or maybe it was a certain group of people who moved around really this is just a reflection of what is in the local environment and of course a shared Human Nature storytelling through petroglyphs and pictographs is one of the earliest forms of creative expression collectively rock art stands as a visual library of natural and human history throughout the Americas before 1491. [Music] foreign [Music] is one of the earliest forms of Creative Expressions in human history the oldest pictographs have survived tens of thousands of years in the shelter of Rocky Landscapes where they were painted [Music] Australia is home to more rock art than any continent on Earth detailed drawings of birds wildlife and plants and pictographs found in the Northern Territories offer a glimpse of ancient flora and fauna in the region [Music] the ancient caves of Southern France are home to a remarkable collection of rock art horses bears and bison some as large as five meters Adorn the walls of these caves [Music] foreign [Music] Argentina's Cave of hands was created over a span of several thousand years the illustrations on the walls of this site reveal the hunting practices of indigenous people over ten thousand years ago the artwork at pictograph sites and the detailed depictions of vegetation animals and humans make rock paintings a visual library of natural and human history around the world [Music] foreign the art of weaving natural fibers into baskets clothing and bedding has been part of indigenous cultures in the Americas for thousands of years the techniques used to create these materials vary from Nation to Nation Iroquoian and Algonquin basket makers used pounded ash bark and braided Sweetgrass for their baskets the Cherokee made baskets out of bundled pine needles coiled sumac and Willow the anishinaabe and Dene made birch bark baskets in Northern California Maidu women develop basket weaving to a high art form their baskets were so tightly woven they could be used to carry water and cook food and many indigenous cultures skilled basket makers Blended dyes and a variety of materials to weave their baskets some things were decorated with beautiful geometric designs and you could tell that somebody took the time to make those patterns to make it beautiful in the Pacific Northwest cedar bark roots and grasses were the materials used to make a wide range of woven products there's traditional basketry that goes on all the way from Alaska all the way down the coast and there are some similarities and there's you know a lot of differences as well you know from tribe to tribe a new channel and Macau nations were among the finest basket Weavers in the Americas when the 400 year old ozet village site was discovered long buried beneath the mudslide it gave contemporary Weavers a rare look at the traditional forms of weaving of the Macaw people underneath the mud was a whole houses filled with everything a person needed in those days to survive and so you could see you know how advanced IT and the knowledge was that these folks had in the things that they made for the Macaw as with other indigenous peoples the art of weaving wasn't limited to making baskets they had mats that could be folded up and then rolled up and stored capes to keep you warm marine hats to keep the rain off baskets to store your fish and your ceremonial items and beautifully made to they were artfully created both men and women in those eras had to make their own items some of the turndowns and weeds are very complicated and you think man how did somebody you know come up with how to execute making a knob top hat and keeping it at a certain pitch Gathering all these different materials and learning how to create a week to make these things who figured it out how to pull bark from the tree and take the outer bark off and to pound it make it really really soft enough to make a diaper for a baby [Music] the materials used in basketry depended on the natural resources available in each territory for the new channels and the Macaw of the Northwest Cedar proved to be the ideal material for weaving with the cedar tree there were Cedar bows that were used for making Outlets baskets which are packed baskets in in our language they people would use them to carry heavy heavy loads such as a firewood or clams and things like that and then the cedar root was used as the tension Weavers that go around the basket and then also Cedar Barker what we call pizza just a cedar tree alone was utilized for everything basketry with its many forms Styles and distinct patterns provides insight into the resources cultures and traditions of indigenous peoples throughout the North American continent while the earliest Pottery was used for cooking over the centuries the technology evolved into an art form the distinct materials designs and colors used in Pottery provides Clues to the cultural origins of its maker the earliest Pottery in the Americas was produced in the lower Amazon basin about 7 500 years ago around 6 000 years ago Pottery emerged in other regions of South America people of North America began their own pottery Traditions about four thousand years ago foreign Southwest Pottery played a utilitarian and spiritual role Pueblo developed traditions for molding firing and decorating clay artists use brushes made from Yucca leaves to paint their pottery they also use tools to create designs on the white clay after firing the pottery smooth Stones were rubbed over the surface to create a polished finish just as stories were woven into baskets capes and blankets story was part of each piece of pottery we have representations of Buffalo of deer of turkeys of all of the different animals that are part of our landscape and you see an ecological tapestry that tapestry of interrelationship of connection to plants to animals to the Natural Forces of the world those things that sustain the people through time through generations foreign there's a whole process that that parallels the creative process in that every stage of the creation of a pot becomes a a way to meditate and to think about some of those ideas those Primal ideas that are part of our stories uh relationship to the land in terms of leaving offerings and thanking the Earth Mother for her gift of clay to uh thinking about the kinds of designs and symbols that one will place on one's Pottery represent which is another stage of thinking and learning about the story and learning through the story uh to the actual you know the creation of the pot and the polishing of the pot the firing of the pot and then finally the gifting of the pot all of which in many ways incorporate indigenous core values of of respect responsibility of relationship these are the principles these are the Essences of thought that still remain as being the thread that holds us together the community is the holder of culture and language tradition and so through time the community becomes the real vessel that you try to sustain [Music] foreign [Music] peoples in every part of the world develop Pottery Traditions the earliest pieces were bowls and pots used for storage and cooking later clay was molded into ceremonial items masks pipes and even musical instruments the first Pottery makers in Japan coiled ropes of clay to form round bowls after smoothing the surface with tools they bake the clay in fire pits to produce ceramic pots that could be used for cooking [Music] the oldest Pottery tradition in the world had its origins in southeast China their pots and bowls were made from clay mixed with ground quarts sand and feldspar [Music] foreign [Music] the earliest Potters in the Americas lived in the lower Amazon basin they made red and black clay pots often decorated with paint that were used to store and cook food while the first Pottery in the world was used for cooking over the centuries the technology evolved into an art form as well as an important expression of cultural identity masks have been a part of indigenous culture in the Americas for thousands of years some of the earliest masks were carved in Ivory by the Dorset people later Inuit of the Arctic used masks for storytelling and ceremonies the Hopi and Pueblo cultures use Kachina masks in traditional dance ceremonies in Northwest North America artists carve intricate masks from Cedar you and older using distinct form lines that can be seen on 5000 year old petroglyphs West Coast Nations created masks depicting humans animals and supernatural beings for ceremonies called potlatches the families who host potlatches bring out their masks songs and dances to record their family lineage display wealth and honor a birth marriage or death Carver started their training as young boys often learning from an uncle or grandfather when the apprenticeship was completed they would spend their lives carving masks and poles for their family and community a mask can be a very powerful thing amongst our people a mask means so much more than just an art piece for our people even today but especially before contact it means connections to our stories we don't just make it up and and carve any old mass that we want we have to have that right in order to wear that mask The Masks are created in order to retell origin stories and old stories and it's a way of of bringing those old Legends to life in our in our ceremonies in the light of a big house reflective properties are really crucial and so we like to decorate our masks and frontlets with reflective shell in order to cast light back to the viewer and for us light you know in the darkness of the of the winter months light is so important and that reflection has a has a spiritual quality to it presented together at potlatches carved masks dances and songs told stories owned by the host families and we believe that our our ancestors were able to take off their animal clothes and they were human underneath and so there was a time of transformation when they can go back and forth between being a human or animal creature we create masks in order to tell those stories while potlatches bonded families and communities through ceremony they also played a central role in establishing relationships with neighboring Nations during the winter time is when we held our most important ceremonies when we would invite other villages to come to our communities to witness our dances and listen to the songs that are owned by the host family we invite other people to witness what we have to show and share and they validate the ownership of of those rights and prerogatives by attending pot latches or winter ceremonials [Music] one of the most important things that that we create to this day are items that are used in ceremonial context reminds us of our role in the community a role that's continued through countless generations and connects us to the artists that we're creating the exact same pieces it connects us to those same people that did the exact same thing for the exact same reason when we see one of our masks being used in the big house or one of our front lips being danced it shows that connection to the past and connection to our culture and and really gives us as artists a reason for for being and it's about that connection to culture and place and our ancestors [Music] totem poles are wooden monuments created by artists in many nations in the northwest they were raised in prominent locations like the entrance to a big house or along the shoreline to a village animal crests and supernatural beings carved on the poles represented the stories that belonged to a family when we look at totem poles it's often telling those same stories as well because you look at them and you see those same animals and sometimes you'll see the human ancestor figure depicted as well so it's showing that prehistory for our people the very first histories during the time of transformation foreign it's about that connection to culture and place and our ancestors [Music] heart sculpted from stone wood clay and fiber are reminders of the artistic Genius of our ancestors but art was not the only cultural expression of indigenous peoples before 1491. ancient peoples in every part of the world used masks for rituals celebrations and storytelling the earliest evidence of masks can be found in rock paintings that date back more than thirty thousand years the oldest masks in the world were discovered in the Judean Hills near Jerusalem they were created at a time when agriculture was first developing in Mesopotamia and people were establishing permanent towns throughout the region foreign was an important center of power and trade in ancient Greece some of the earliest gold masks from this area were found in burials of people who had a high social status in the community [Music] the earliest masks in the Arctic were made of ivory by the Dorset peoples later the Inuit made and used masks for storytelling and ceremonies [Music] masks continue to be used throughout the world in traditional ceremonies that honor ancestors and preserve cultures [Music] music dance and storytelling are a part of every nation in the Americas these diverse cultural expressions bring us together through sacred ceremonies and Community celebrations in many ways art is the expression of indigenous people's relationship with the natural and spirit worlds we have come to know our ancestors on a deeper level through their artistic Traditions before 1491. passed down from generation to generation these Traditions continue in our communities to this day [Music] [Music] in 1491 indigenous people were living in every part of the Americas from the high Arctic to the southern tip of South America there were countless indigenous Nations each with its own distinct language and ways of life foreign but this didn't happen overnight it took close to 20 000 years to build this diverse World from a very small founding population in 1492 in another world across the Atlantic Ocean an Italian Navigator named Christopher Columbus set out in three Spanish ships in search of a faster trade route to Asia the ships arrived on October 12th on an island in the Bahamas inhabited by indigenous people Columbus did not know it at the time but he had reached the Western Hemisphere I fast territory inhabited by as many as 100 million people within 100 Years of the arrival of Columbus it's estimated that 90 percent of the indigenous population had died from imported diseases and in battles protecting their territory from the newcomers from the 16th through the 20th centuries colonial governments orchestrated a campaign of genocide against indigenous peoples massacres forced removal from ancestral lands residential schools land allotment and the outlawing of traditional practices further eroded the social and cultural fabric of indigenous Nations Against All Odds there are now close to 70 million indigenous people living in the Americas we are the direct descendants of those resilient ancestors who survived the first 100 Years of colonization today the legacy of our ancestors continues through the stories languages material culture and Heritage sites that they left behind [Music] throughout much of the history of research in archeology burials were dug up artifacts were taken away and placed in museums sometimes not even analyzed the way it was investigated by archaeologists was very unethical however throughout the 1960s 70s all the way up into modern day archaeologists have become more aware and much more ethical in the way they practice our discipline and it's really shifted in the last 20 years with the growth and emergence of what we now call indigenous archeology it's archeology done for with and by indigenous communities so we're moving away from just doing strictly academic research to building Partnerships and full collaborations with indigenous communities and really giving them the power of what kind of research should be done within their territories and within their sites and this will only grow the discipline of archeology and have it be much more ethical than it has been in the past I think indigenous archaeologists are much more Adept at thinking about the who of the past and the why of the past rather than just the what of the material culture I think that's one of the most important things about being an indigenous person involved in archeology is knowing the importance of story the importance of the individual and knowing how these all fit within who we are today my name is Albert white I am an archaeologist of helic descent and I've been here for about 10 years and I have a strong cultural background that I use whenever I conduct my own archaeological investigations and surveys or collaborate with others who um have their own projects in the territory 14 000 years ago indigenous people were fishing harvesting sea mammals and living year round on a group of islands off the west coast of Canada the discovery of the Trickett Island village site confirms that indigenous people have had a marine-based diet for thousands of years initially my involvement with the cricket Island project was to help field Direct site inventory around Calvert Island in areas north of Calvert Island archaeologists like time periods they like putting dates on things that's that keeps driving archaeologists to find earlier sites and indeed we are so this is where we keep some of the stone tools and other lithic material that we've recovered from cricket Island and here on this tray are the remnants of the stone tool cache from the lowest layer at the site and these were associated with the Hearth feature that we dated to about 14 000 years ago what we didn't know was how old it was because no real excavation project had ever been conducted there Cricket is a really unique site it's on a small Island located next to the ocean in a protected Bay Sandy Beach and has differing elevations that start from the top and then it starts getting lower and tearers and lower and as you get lower each layer level has a different age of occupation we didn't understand why it was a continuous occupational site until we understood the sea level history because we have to remember this part of the continent was covered by glaciers that were in some parts of the landscape two kilometers thick a lot of the water that is required to form all that ice would have came out of the ocean so we have this Dynamic going on a fluctuating sea levels the glaciers had Advanced over all of BC and the only exposed areas were the outer Island tricky was revealed as the 14 000 year old continuous occupational site suggesting they were living there spring summer fall and winter covery of a village site on Trickett Island supports the theory that people arrived by boat a few thousand years before the melting glaciers allowed people to walk south into the Americas from beringia the discovery and excavation of this site was done through a collaboration of the heltzip First Nation the University of Victoria and the Hawkeye Institute not only are there stone tools that date to about 14 000 years ago but there are many many other stone tools that have been recovered from the upper layers that show that this site was not only important back then but that it remained important for Millennia which is actually kind of rare on the coast there are often sites that are occupied for a thousand years or 2000 years or maybe just a couple hundred years but to have 14 000 years of continuous human occupation is pretty pretty significant one of the really incredible components of the site at Cricket island is that there are peat deposits uh here we have preserved wooden artifacts which are really really cool because typically these Decay uh pretty quickly but here uh wooden tools have been preserved for up to 7 000 years so this is an adolatal throwing board it's to extend the length of your arm and you hold it back like this and you attach your spear to that and it gives you just incredible range and precision so this would have been very likely used for sea level hunting as well when a project is being conducted from one perspective usually an outsider's perspective it has its own bias and they will take something like oral history as like a secondary source to help fill in some gaps First Nation people they feel like they should take those stories and another approach and put them together and use that collaboratively it's based on respect you know um the people who know more about the history are the people who live there in the Pacific Northwest stories often tell of the great flood of the time of creation and even of the time when the islands had ocean on one side and Glaciers on the other have a story about the first human to live in their territory at a time when the glaciers still covered the landscape this story has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years there's a chief named Hamas bot from the cocoa 8 who had a very told a very lengthier story I think he summarized it when he told it the first thing he thought was nothing about ice rock and sea and because he was all alone he went to sleep and then he woke up and then there was Forest Rivers all the landscape started to appear still alone so he went to sleep woke up and there was people seafood while everything that we have today what I've learned from my my research is that the passing on of all is knowledge from one generation to the other they were finally saying that oral history just valid as science our territory the healthcare territory was the site of the refugee it's of the last ice age and specifically it's at the oyelite people of the outside of the Helsing one of the Celtic tribes now it's extremely important that indigenous groups have the authenticity the authority and the right to present the history as they know it because the more stories we can tell about the past the easier it is for people to understand how all those stories interconnect to create a a pest because there is no single pass there are so many multiple pests but we can also look at our place names and our traditions and because we do have evidence for multiple communities across the continent that our peoples our communities did experience dramatic changes and if we see this in the archaeological the physical anthropological record bringing that those lines of evidence together only gives us a better understanding of the past everyone has to be in line and work together to make that happen I think it's not only an ethical necessity but it's also just the people that we work with have such a wealth of information and can keep connection to this landscape they are very knowledgeable about the material types the resources in this area they have deep deep knowledge of what their grandparents did and their grandparents grandparents did that can help really bring these artifacts to life and help us weave together the stories the narratives of what people were doing on this landscape for Millennia and also to better understand why people would keep going out to this very remote location why was it so important we have all these sites that occur all across North America and each one gives us information about what that extremely complex history of people moving into North America and and each one tells us just a different part of the story in the late 19th and early 20th centuries museums and universities sent archaeologists out to excavate ancient caves burial mounds Villages and cities in every part of the Americas over the past hundred years archaeologists have uncovered thousands of ancestral remains often without the permission of indigenous peoples death and burial are fundamental to The Human Condition and there is no place on Earth where people don't bury their dead you know there's no place for people you know somebody dies and they just walk away from that person they put a great deal of ritual they put a great deal of reverence into that final act that final rite of passage for people human remains in archeology have been historically a contentious issue mostly this goes back to the history of research in archeology where many of the excavations and discoveries of these remains these burials sometimes multiple individuals was done without the consent of local First Nations communities the discussion on ethics has become very prominent in research communities it's no longer the case where Native people were just considered a deep well of information that researchers could just dip into at their convenience now native people want some benefit from that research they also want to know that the research is not going to create harms and sometimes they want to be the researchers you know they want to be the ones who are collecting the data and interpreting it as the field of archeology expanded so did the need to store and study the ancestral remains and artifacts found in excavations the proliferation of museums in the 19th and 20th centuries was partly the result of countless archaeological projects and the growing practice of collecting art made by indigenous peoples around the world when museums started collecting our our Treasures that was at a time of duress when cultures were changing Christianity was really taking over and people being sent to residential school and learning English it was a big change and museums are right there to you know be scooping up whatever they could at the time collectors missionaries whoever they they probably were thinking oh we should capture a bit of that before it is all gone and there was there was quite a trade of human remains museums wanting to have a bit of everything from the whole world so there was a lot of trade human remains and that's how they ended up in museums all over the world this has changed in recent decades where many of these remains have been returned back to their ancestral homelands one of the most interesting Innovations of course that goes along with this is the study of ancient DNA and what's really compelling is that the DNA that's found in those ancient skeletons is matching very closely to the local communities in those territories in which they were found this really illustrates the Deep history that these different groups across the continents have those ties to their ancient territories and really it's it's indisputable the evidence doesn't lie the Haida were one of the first indigenous Nations to pursue the repatriation of their ancestors since the early 1990s Lucy Bell and others from her Nation have succeeded in bringing home more than 500 Haida ancestors from museums around the world I was an intern 21 years ago at the Royal BC Museum I think that's where my passion for repatriation for Museum work started when I was an intern I learned about the ancestors that are in this Museum and in museums all over the world so that's the first time I'd heard about Aboriginal ancestors being stored in museums and it just just really hurt me I just felt like I couldn't go home without doing something about it in 1992 the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian museums Association released a report that encouraged museums to return ancestors and sacred objects to indigenous communities on a case-by-case basis we went to the museums in BC that had our ancestors and then we started to go further further out so Canadian museums private institutions universities I think we were strategic in in starting in BC and then going out the Native American Graves protection and repatriation act is a federal law in the United States that was passed in 1990. nagpra provided a mechanism to repatriate ancestral remains funerary and sacred objects to indigenous communities in the states we brought home I think about 150 ancestors from the Chicago Field Museum uh around 40 to 50 from the American Museum of Natural History and then some smaller institutions throughout nagpra was a whole other world for for us as Canadians the American museums were not obligated to to repatriate to us the museum people were worried they were already feeling the pressure it was a tough time for them but we were persistent and because the law didn't affect us nobody was obligated but it really called on museums to be collaborative to be working with us in friendship and to be working with us with a mutual respect since it was enacted more than 30 000 individuals and hundreds of thousands of sacred objects have been repatriated to indigenous communities all of our our Treasures are just such an important part of who we are and who our ancestors were I think all our Treasures have that sacred aspect to them Bentwood box you might that doesn't have human remains in it but has food that you're starting to feed your family that's sacred so many times we've been called up to help other nations and we've traveled all over Canada talking about hyda repatriation and they've they took our advice and ran with it and did their own did it in their own way so just sharing our stories and holding each other up I did that for 20 years of my life and repatriated my my ancestors to the best of my ability it took over 20 years but we did it repatriations can be the most rewarding thing that I do as an archaeologist because as a Native American it's it's a sense of making things right and having a connection back to those ancestors and you know being able to say I can take care of you I can I can look after you and I can you know see that um your journey continues in the way that you wanted it to foreign s continue to repatriate their ancestors and sacred objects from museums there is a growing need to build facilities to house the materials and train community members to operate them when I first started the job we held a symposium and brought 200 Aboriginal people from BC together and asked what their Vision was for repatriation and for museums not just our Museum but museums in the world what how could we better serve the Aboriginal communities umista is an internationally known cultural center and education facility and research art and language programs a lot of people come here to research and look at these masks and from The Mask you can tell it may be just a Crest but it could tell you a whole story about a whole clan like just from one single mask if you know if you know the history and the origin stories of it one of the first successful repatriations in Canada led to the creation of two cultural centers in British Columbia to house a large collection of masks and regalia there was a time where our culture and things were starting to be less valued for sure and that was a lot to do with the Polish prohibition and a lot to do with the residential school Christianity between 1884 and 1951 the Indian Act in Canada made it illegal for indigenous people to hold traditional ceremonies such as pot latches and sundances the penalties for breaking this law included arrest jail and confiscation of regalia and masks a lot of our people were very very resistant against this prohibition that came down on our people in 1921 the government of Canada sent an Indian agent to shut down a pot latch on village island he confiscated dozens of masks being used as part of the ceremony 20 community members were jailed for dancing giving speeches and receiving gifts and some people were so severely punished like some of the people that went to Ocala they came home and some people never continued after that the masks and regalia were sent to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto a British Museum and to other institutions when the mass were repatriated in the 1970s the government of Canada provided funding to two indigenous communities to build cultural centers to house the materials the Quake youth Museum and the umista cultural center are two of the first in Canada when the artifacts all came back at the time Maria Cramer Webster it was a big driving force in that I know there's a lot of the Chiefs and Chief and elected Chief and Council here that helped move that forward and uh I think when the pieces came home what it symbolized was that there was there was hope again you know that you know our people could win battles and victories in the modern world we need more people in museums that are there to work on repatriation to there to work on making access easier museums and culture centers are important to Archive the history of a First Nation people and I would prefer to see a train qualified First Nation staff running one from their perspective in 1491 there were thousands of distinct indigenous languages today there are less than 1 000 languages still spoken in North and South America some languages like quechua and Mayan have millions of speakers other languages like taltan and Seneca are considered critically endangered with less than 100 fluent speakers each we've lost a large number of languages in a very short time just in a couple hundred years there's precipitous declines in language all across the continent less so in Central America but even there quite a quite a huge number of languages have disappeared and in fact the number of language language deaths as it's called is accelerating even now so if we're just beginning to turn things around in some communities there's been a number of things that have interrupted our languages um but residential schools and the policy around taking the Indian out of the Indian Child I think did the most damage to our languages residential schools operated in Canada from the late 1800s until 1996. during that time close to 150 000 indigenous children were taken from their families and communities and forced to attend distant boarding schools operated by Churches children were not allowed to speak their indigenous languages they'd be punished for speaking the language so you know they could come home and their parents would try to speak to them and they wouldn't want to respond because there was all this shame around speaking their language they basically took children that were speakers away from their families and separated them for a really long time and taught them that their languages were bad and they shouldn't be speaking them there are some languages that have more speakers but they're not being transmitted in the home and so I would say all Canada's languages are endangered language programs have been developed in every Province and territory in Canada to revitalize endangered languages and teach community members how to regain fluency language nests and school programs immersion camps and adult learning classes are some ways that languages are taught in indigenous communities the taltan first nation in Northern British Columbia has created a multi-generation campaign to teach their endangered language it's so awesome because the kids really um started to pick up a lot of the things that we were doing to say that earlier learning years are from zero to eight and that's why it's so important to work with them when they're young if you want to take that step where you're going to have that available to babies and their families or even Toddlers and their families it's it paves the way to language and learning awesome so that's not going to happen my role in the classroom is to teach language first of all teach the beginners level language to the students and this is based on my experience as a second language learner and all of the very first things I wanted to know as a second language learner because I didn't grow up speaking the language my belief is that our language is the language of the heart this is where you speak it from and it's a gift that's given to us from the creators to our ancestors and I believe it's something that we should cherish because it's part of our identity I feel that it's a giant step that we made when we decided to make that um create the language Authority because with that in place there's a lot of things that we can do now to revitalize our language the taltan language is a member of the Denny language family and in in North America that's like the second biggest language family there's approximately say 4 000 teletons all over but in terms of speakers we probably have the most 30 fluent speakers so right now we have young children you know toddlers babies starting to learn the language they're immersed in it with with fluent speakers so I'm thinking maybe we'll eventually move out of that endangered status because of that so I feel very hopeful pause that s uh we can hear all the sad stories about our language is becoming extinct in all of the stories of having the evening sessions and no one will show up and all of that but when you're here in the classroom it's really inspiring and I can see that the Elder fluent speakers are also really happy that this is happening they're happy when they meet into someone at the store and then they speak language to them because that hasn't happened before this is something that's really creating a new path for adult language Learners and adult language teaching because some of these students who are going to come out of this course are actually it's my hope that they're going to teach adult language as well or teach children foreign my husband cooked for me because this has come about I think in you know probably five years we'll have probably quite a few people that will be fluent in the language that was my mom's dream was young people to learn the language and she used to say the only way they're going to learn is to take them and put them in a camp some work whether it's all they have to learn is to speak the language and she's right you know she was right because it's better to just keep hearing it over and over and over again this is something that's becoming really fulfilling for me and my job is that we have speakers that are up and coming speakers of Telltale language and that's really inspiring to me I hear other nations speaking their language and it's it's very important they know who they are like we have our own government we have our own language we have our own history I think it's very important that we've Revitalize our language you know we must know who we are [Music] I think this tell 10 language revitalization is really going to bring our our people together and our youth and it's going to grow and once it grows and gets stronger we get stronger as people I think our language and our culture is what makes us unique it's what makes each Nation strong it's given us hope eh it's given us hope of who we are as a people you know when when you see we're trying to retain our language retain our culture and every day of Our Lives you know we're on the land they and then it's coming back and it's a good feeling I love it of the more than 70 indigenous languages in Canada only three are considered thriving and Ojibwe professionals will say well the other languages are you know going to be extinct and what what do we say in in response to that is that First Nations themselves will determine whether or not their language is uh are passed on to the next generation and it's not for Outsiders to determine whose language is valuable and whose language should be invested in every single language in Canada is sacred and is beautiful and needs to continue to exist in ganawage in Eastern Canada a group of parents wanted their children to learn about their Mohawk language culture and philosophy they set up their own private Mohawk immersion school I was one of the first students that came to school here so my heart and my soul is here so it's almost like my second home that's how we feel it's like a big family home my future dreams what I'd love to see is um to be you know to even have a high school you know that's uh Mohawk immersion making our language become a first language and I think you know this that's why I feel so strong and supportive of this school the school operates with parent involvement and is not funded by the government because it does not teach the history of Canada from an English or French perspective because the way we put that we're not following their criteria so we haven't been able to fit in right we don't have English programming we don't have friends programming we don't have Canadian history it's completely yeah so we have to work on that to order to keep our language alive and we need to develop in in as far as we can go we have a whole generation of people like my age yeah who don't speak the language at all and I think that they the government needs to take responsibility and to make sure that we have the means and you know the teachers and the tools to be able to get our language back [Music] I really believe in our language that it's most important and we cannot lose it our languages are really unifying and they bring us together and I think a lot of the issues that we're facing as indigenous people in our communities are related to the fact that we've lost our languages we need more opportunities to to learn that and and to fill our responsibilities as indigenous people because the languages tell us how to be on the land and how to take care of the land and take care of each other and um and our histories as well so we know who we are and where we come from and that's all really important and we deserve to know that that means the ones that uphold the laws of our ancestors the way we have always wanted to maintain and manage our resources including the Simon has been reflective of the way our ancestors have managed and that's been passed down to us from generation to generation historically we were salmon people canoe Builders people who were regular users of the ocean and its resources foreign were very tied to the lands and Waters I lived spread across a huge territory and interacted very intimately with the resources within those territories we have a generation of people growing up in our community that have an opportunity to be connected in a strong way to community and to the values that guide our relationship to place foreign over Millennia to manage all of the species we harvested that we relied on one of the important tasks that we're faced with right now is recreating those connections we have a responsibility of stewards of our land and culture and resources to be the voice of the place that we come from foreign Bella Bella is located in the Central Coast of British Columbia about Smack That Center between poor Hardy and Prince Rupert well I've known for years that we really needed to get a handle on managing our own stocks of of salmon in particular the sockeye salmon which is a very high value to the healthy people for in terms of food we have to develop a strong Mountain monitoring programs because a department of fisheries and oceans doesn't have the resources to be able to to deal with everything that we want to foreign [Applause] we are trying to figure out exactly how much salmon we have in our systems so that we know how much salmon we can take for the next season and know that we still have enough salmon making it up the river systems to continue on our harvesting Quay is one of the highly valued areas that we do fish a lot for our sockeye salmon foreign [Music] we do cultural events like singing and dancing that's a really big thing that that our kids learn listen to stories [Music] we're really excited about the opportunity for capacity building and staying focused on uh training our people to understand the the old ways foreign and we've always looked at the balance of traditional knowledge traditional ways of management and merging Sciences into decision making so one of the functions of Cox is an organization is to help create opportunities for people to be out on the landscape learning in place and building a stronger sense of place-based cultural identity that ties them to the places that are important to us as a people what we're doing is working to try to build the capacity within the community both through cucks and through the helsink integrated Resource Management Department to monitor many of the important populations of salmon that sustain food fishing opportunities for people here on the coast Cox as an organization was founded in 1999 we have three program areas youth culture and environment which we consider to be three intrinsic parts of a holistic approach to building cultural and natural stewardship capacity in the hosta community [Music] hearing the birds hearing the fish jumping around the water it made you feel less insignificant [Music] [Music] it is critical that right now we raise an emerging generation of stewards that will carry on the work that we're doing now long after we're gone we'll continue to make sure that our people can continue to live the history of culture yeah yeah yeah foreign for me I think I wanted to do this so that my daughter and her generation wouldn't have to do this this is difficult work so to me it's a freeing freeing up for the rest of the generations to come to do even more amazing things and not have to worry about that that heavy burden [Music] I hope that it inspires younger people from indigenous communities to think about archeology anthropology as a potential career because there are many things that you can do and for people like myself I'm now getting a little older I'd like to see some younger and emerging indigenous archaeologists come out of various communities not only here in British Columbia but all across Turtle Island it's gratifying to see the youth being very enthusiastic about embracing their culture so the first thing I tell them is that don't be don't don't be ashamed at your first nation strengthen Yourself by knowing that who you are your healthic identity and that we need to for you to take on this new role because I can't be an archaeologist forever but at one point I'd love for one of you to become an archaeologist or some kind of researcher with a strong identity of Who You Are we don't find the real history of stories of what our people went through in history books you won't find it there he won't find it on the internet you know but today maybe in this new age of Consciousness I think things are coming to the surface we're lucky in the sense that there were those who maintained this oral tradition maintained our history maintained our medicines and maintained our identity so uh I'm grateful myself that I have that and it's something that I can share now [Music] [Applause] the Journey of indigenous people in the Americas is preserved in the languages stories innovation technology architecture and material culture that they left behind we are discovering the story of our ancestors through oral histories and scientific research as indigenous people we are committed to preserving the languages traditions and systems of governance that our ancestors left for us in 1491. [Music] [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 4,565,146

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, history documentary bbc, history documentary 2022, history documentary playlist, middle ages food

Id: 7QwuIEH4Jq8

Length: 181min 29sec (10889 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023