The Native Americans The Indigenous People of North America

Before Columbus came to America, the population of the Native Americans - the first, aboriginal peoples – was about 5 million. By 1890, it was 250,000. During the same period the white population in the U.S. increased from 0 to 75 million. As it did so, it usurped the ancestral lands of the Indians who had inhabited the continent for centuries, and destroyed both the delicate balance of their economy and an age-old way of life. Pivotal events such as the removal, in the 1830s, of the Southeastern tribes to what was called Indian Territory, the Long March of the Navajo to imprisonment at Fort Sumner in 1864, and the tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890 marked the advance of a new culture that, by the end of the century, had savagely replaced a much older one.

THE NATIVE AMERICANS looks back at the way of life of the first Americans. Divided into nine cultural areas, it draws particular attention - through the medium of 38 superb artifact spreads - to the ways in which some of the early inhabitants adapted to living in widely varying environments, from the Arctic to the Southwest. Over 1000 tribal artifacts have been selected and described by William C. Sturtevant of the Smithsonian Institution. Drawn from the superb collections of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and the Smithsonian itself, many of these artifacts have never before been exhibited; most of them have not been seen since they were collected by anthropologists and ethnologists near the turn of the last century; none of them has been presented before in color tableaux that give such a rich insight into the material wealth and culture of so many different tribes and groups.
With the aid of over 250 archive photographs, maps, color plates and artworks, THE NATIVE AMERICANS looks at various cultural aspects, beliefs, key individuals and historical events in the lives of many tribes and groups of Indians. Photographs dating from about 1850 to 1940 have been selected from the National Anthropological Archives and other sources; the artifacts date from between 1860 and 1920. These latter illustrate perhaps more eloquently than words the persistence of particular forms of Indian material culture and lifestyle at a notable period in the history of the United States.