hi I'm John Green and this is crash course US history now stand that's not
going to work actually i mean we're talking about the 16th century today
when this was neither United north states by the way this globe reflects
the fact that i believe that Alaskan statehood is illegitimate
in fact we're going to call this whole show US history but inevitably it's
going to involve other parts of the world and also not to brag a small part
of the moon
sorry we can be a little bit self-aggrandizing sometimes here in
America
so to begin US history we're not going to talk about the United States or this
guy we're going to talk about the people who lived here before any European
showed up
North America was home to a great variety of people so it's difficult to
generalize but here's what we can say one when the Europeans arrived there
were no classical style civilizations with monumental architecture and empires
like the Aztec or the incus and two native North Americans had no metal work
no gunpowder no wheels no written languages and no domesticated animals
however they did have farming complex social and political structures and
widespread trade networks mr. green mr. green
so they were pretty backwards . well I mean or at least primitive primitive is
a funny word me from the past because it implies a romanticization these simple
people who never used more than they needed and had no use for guns and it
also implies an infantile ization it's like you believe that just because you
have a beeper and they didn't they were somehow less evolved humans
so you can't see the human story is one that goes from primitive to civilize
that's not just Eurocentric that's contemporary centric the idea that we're
moving forward as a species implies a linear progression that just does not
reflect the reality of life on this planet
I get that you like to imagine yourself as the result of millennia of
advancement of the very pinnacle of humaneness but from where I'm sitting
that worldview is a lot more backwards then with him without the wheels so no
one knows exactly how many people lived in north america before the Europeans
got you some estimates are as high as 75 million but in the present US borders
the guesses are between two and ten million and like other Native Americans
their populations were decimated by diseases such as smallpox and influences
actually it was much worse the decimation as many of you have pointed
out decimation means one in ten this was much worse than that it was closer maybe
28 in 10 which would be an octave summation so there had been
civilizations in north america but they picked before the Europeans arrived the
Zuni and Hopi civilization roundabout here peaked about 1,200 Cee they had
large multiple family dwellings and canyons which they probably left because
of drought crash course world history fans will remember that environmental
degradation often causes the decline of civilizations i'm looking at you
indus valley and also you entire future Earth but complex civilizations weren't
the rule in north america and now we're about to begin generalizing a bad habit
historians have partly because there's a limited historical record but also
because Eurocentric historians have a bad habit of primitive izing and
simplifying others so I want to underscore that there was huge diversity
in the pre columbus oh man
can experience and the talking about someone who lived here in 1000 BCE and
talking about someone who lived here two thousand years later is just inherently
problematic that said let's go to the thought bubble
most native groups in most places organized as tribes and their lives were
dominated by the natural resources available where they lived so West Coast
Indians primarily led by fishing gathering and hunting sea mammals Great
Plains Indians were often buffalo hunters these tribal fans often united
in Toulouse Confederacy's or weeks the best known of which was probably the
Iroquois Confederacy also called the great League of peace
this was kind of like an upstate New York version of NATO but without nuclear
weapons are the incessant international meddling or Latvians ok it was nothing
like NATO actually religion usually involve the vibrant spiritual world with
ceremonies geared toward the tribes lifestyle hunting tribes focused on
animals agricultural tribes on good harvests and most Indian groups believed
in a single Creator God who stood above all the other day at ease but they
weren't monotheistic in the way that Christians who came to the new world
were American Indians also saw property very differently from Europeans to first
peoples land was a common resource that village leaders could assign families to
use but not to own and most land was seen as common to everyone as Black Hawk
a leader of the sock tribe said the Great Spirit gave it to his children to
live upon and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence and so
long as they occupy and cultivate it
they have a right to the soil thanks thought bubble so many of us tend to
romanticize American Indians as being immune from greed in class but in fact
there were class distinctions in Indian tribes rulers tend to come from the same
families for instance that said wealth was much more evenly distributed than it
was in Europe and while most tribal leaders were many tribes were
matrilineal meaning that children became members of their mother's family also
women were often important religious leaders women also often don't dwell ins
and tools although not land because again that idea did not exist
also in many tribes women engaging in premarital scooping wasn't taboo in
general they were just much less obsessed with female chastity than
Europeans were i mean i will remind you the first English settlement in America
was called Virginia the idea that Native Americans were noble savages somehow
purer than Europeans and untouched by their vices is not in
new one like some of the earliest European saw the Indians as Paragons of
physical beauty and innocent of Europeans worst characteristics but for
most Europeans there was little noble about what they saw as pure indian
savagery I mean Indians didn't have writing they suffered from the terrible
character flaw of being able to have sex without feeling ashamed and most
importantly they weren't Christians the Spanish were the first Europeans to
explore this part of the world juan ponce de leon arrived in what is now
Florida in 1513 looking for gold and the fabled fountain of youth in 1521 he
encountered a collusive Braves poison-tipped arrow and died before
discovering that the Fountain of Youth is of course delicious diet dr. pepper
mmm oh I can taste all 23 flavors there were many more spanish explorers in the
first half of the 16th century including one Alvar nuñez Cabeza de Vaca who
wandered through the American Southwest looking for gold which I mentioned
entirely because i think that guy's last name means cow head of course none of
these people found any gold but they did make later European colonization easier
by bringing over the microbes that wiped out most native population so the
Spanish wanted to colonize for to set up military bases to thwart the Pirates who
preyed on silver Laden Spanish galleons coming out of Mexico but Spanish
missionaries also came over hoping to convert local native populations this of
course worked out magnificently just getting it went terribly and many of the
missions were destroyed by an uprising of Gaul Indians in 1597 and i will
remind you miss pronouncing things is my thing in general colonizing 42 sucked
because it was hot and mosquito we spain was much more successful at colonizing
the American Southwest in 1610 Spain established its first permanent
settlement in the southwest at santa fe new mexico and you can really say that
flourished in Santa's population never got much about 3,000 but it had a great
small-town feel and New Mexico is really important because it's the site of the
first large-scale uprising by Native Americans against European I mean the
native people who the Spanish called Puebloans had seen their fortunes
declined significantly since the arrival of Europeans how much decline well
between sixteen hundred and sixteen eighty their population went from about
60 thousand to about 17,000 also the Franciscan friars who came to convert
the indigenous people became increasingly militant about stamping out
all native religion the Spanish Inquisition just wasn't very keen on the
kind of cultural blending that made early conversion efforts successful so
all the spanish so all the pueblos as one people they also
do they were tribal differences that made it difficult for the Indians to
unite and rise up against the Spanish but nothing unites like a common enemy
and in 1680 a religious leader named Pope a organized an uprising to drive
the Spaniard out to pay organized about two thousand warriors who killed four
hundred spanish colonists and force the rest to leave San effect so the spanish
colony in New Mexico was effectively destroyed the pueblos tore down all the
Christian churches and replace them with Kiva's their places of worship but like
most awesome uprisings it didn't last but after the revolt the Spanish were
much more tolerant of indigenous religion and they also abandoned the
forced labor practice called in comiendo it's time for the new crash course
feature the mystery document how mysterious
the rules here are simple i read an attempt to identify the mystery document
if I am right
I do not get shocked by this shock pen and if i am wrong I do
okay what do we have here the Indians were totally deprived of their freedom
and were put in the harshest fiercest most horrible servitude in captivity
which no one who has not seen it can understand even beasts enjoy more
freedom when they are allowed to graze in the fields but our Spaniards gave no
such opportunity to Indians and truly considered them perpetual slaves
I sometimes came upon dead bodies on my way and upon others who were grasping
and moaning in their death agony repeating hungry hungry and this was the
freedom the good treatment and the Christianity the Indians received
well that's nice ok so the mystery document is always a primary source and
since the writer refers to our Spaniards i'm going to guess that he or she
probably he is European and a Spaniard sympathetic to the Indians which narrows
the list of suspects considerably so it probably wasn't a supporter for instance
who argued that the Indians might not even be human ok and I'm actually pretty
confident here
I believe it is from a short account of the destruction of the Indies by
bartolomé de las casas
dog dang it Oh Stan just told me I have the author right but the book wrong it's
a history of the Andes hate shocks both literal and metaphorical yeah
so we focused a lot on the brutality of the Spanish toward the Indians but at
least one Spaniard de las casas recognize that his countrymen were
terrible
this realization is a good thing obviously but it leads us to one of the
big problems when it comes to studying this time in place the black legend is
the tale that the Spanish unleashed an unspeakable cruelty on the Indians now
that tale is true but that idea was used by later settlers especially the English
to justify their own settlements like part of the reason they needed to expand
their empire was to save the Indians from the awful Spanish but were the
English so much better
yeah probably not as we mentioned at the beginning of today's episode American
Indians didn't have writing so we don't have records of their perspective now
some Europeans like de las casas were critical of the Spaniards but most
considered the Indians heathens and implied or even outright said that they
deserved whatever horrible things but fell them so at the beginning of our
series i want to point out something that we need to remember throughout one
of the great things about American history is that we have a lot of written
sources this is the advantage of the u.s. coming onto the scene so late in
the game historically speaking but every story we here comes from a certain point
of view and we always need to remember who is speaking
why they are speaking and especially which voices go unheard
and why thanks for watching I'll see you next week
crash course is produced and directed by Stan Muller our script supervisor is
Meredith Danko the Associate Producer is Danica Johnson the show is written by my
high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself and our graphics team is
thought bubble
if you have questions about today's video you should ask them in comments
everybody who works on crash course as well as a team of historians will be
there to answer them thanks for watching please make sure you subscribe to crash
course and as we say in my hometown don't forget to be awesome
yeah