There is a lot of very good information about native peoples of America and their languages
out there on the Internet. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of garbage. Some of it poses
as scholarship.
We have strived to include links to as much useful information as possible on our website.
However, we are trying to present a correct resource here. Though we have linked to websites
which take different positions on legitimate disagreements of theory or history (Was
Michigamean a Siouan language? Did Pocahontas really save John Smith's life?), we have not
linked to anything we know is substantially incorrect, nor to claims which are unsupported by
any fact.
Instead, we would like to correct some of the myths, mistakes, and just plain made-up
stories of the Internet on this page.
Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages
Q: Aren't all Amerindian languages related? A: No. They are usually discussed together for convenience's sake. There are
more than twenty Amerindian language families. There is no *Proto-Amerindian language,
any more than there is a *Proto-Eurasian language. Cherokee and Navajo are no more
closely related than English and Chinese.
Q: These 'languages' are really dialects, right? A: No. Dialects are mutually comprehensible. A Cherokee speaker cannot understand
even one word of Navajo, or vice versa. There are some languages which are very closely
related, such as Choctaw and Chickasaw--or Spanish and Italian--where a speaker of one
language can understand some words from the other. Then there are some languages that are so
closely related that linguists disagree whether they are dialects or distinct languages.
In these cases, we have made a special note of the situation. However, such cases are few
and far between. If there is no such note on the page of a language, there is no disagreement
about it. It is a 'real' language, and it is no more a dialect of other Amerindian languages
than English is a dialect of Dutch.
Q: Are Amerindian languages related to Mongolian? A: No. Many people think American Indians are descended from Mongolian people. This
may be true, but if it is, they left Asia more than 20,000 years ago, which is much too long
a time period for linguistic preservation to occur. None of the Amerindian languages bear any
linguistic resemblance to Asian languages.
Q: Are Amerindian languages descended from Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, or Scandinavian languages? A: No. The people who claim this are trying to prove that American Indians arrived
in the Americas very recently (see Setting the Record Straight About Native People, below.)
I have seen many websites claiming to "prove" that Amerindian languages are descended
from Semitic or Germanic languages. 90% of these websites are deliberately lying, making
up nonexistant "Algonquian" words that resemble words from Semitic languages. A quick glance
at a dictionary of the Amerindian language will reveal these websites for what they are.
The other 10% are using linguistically unsound methods--searching two languages for any two
vocabulary words that begin with the same letter, essentially, and presenting them as evidence.
Using this method, English can be "proved" to descend from Japanese--English "mistake" sounds a little
like Japanese "machigai". In fact, if you randomly generate some vocabulary with a computer program,
you will be able to find a few words with surface resemblance to any language you want. Real
linguistic analysis requires dozens of vocabulary relationships which are regular and
predictable, as well as similarities in phonology and syntax, to show that one language is
related to another. No linguist has ever shown a relationship between any Amerindian language
family and a Semitic or Germanic language.
Q: But I don't know enough about linguistics to look at the phonology and syntax for
myself. Can't I tell anything from vocabulary? A: Yes, but you need to examine at least three languages to make a valid comparison,
and you need to use vocabulary items that have not been hand-selected as the one word in
the language that bears some vague resemblance to the other. The numbers one through five are
a good place to start. If four of the five look similar, or you notice a pattern in the
way they are different from each other, the languages are probably related. Let's look at some
Germanic, Semitic, and Algonquian languages (spelled more or less phonetically):
German
eins
zwei
drei
fier
funf
Dutch
een
twee
dree
feer
feef
English
one
two
three
four
five
Hebrew
echad
shtayim
shalosh
arba
chamesh
Arabic
wachid
ithnan
thalatha
arba'a
chamsa
Maltese
wechet
tnayn
tleta
erba
hamsa
Ojibwe
bezhig
nizh
nswee
niwin
nanan
Algonkin
pejig
nij
niswi
new
nanan
Cree
peyak
niso
nisto
newo
niyanan
As you can probably see even from this small amount of data, English is related to Dutch
and German; Hebrew is related to Arabic and Maltese; and Ojibwe is related to Algonkin and
Cree. On the other hand, if I had taken only the English word "seven" and the Hebrew word
"sheva," maybe I could have convinced you English was related to Hebrew. And if I had shown
you only Hebrew "shalosh" and Arabic "thalatha," you might not have noticed they were
related. (With the larger data set here, you can see that the "TH" sound from Arabic does
not exist in Hebrew or Maltese--it becomes a "sh" in Hebrew all three times, and a "t" in
Maltese all three times.)
Never believe anyone who tries to prove linguistic relationships based on one or two words that sound similar.
Q: Are Micmac, Cree, or Mayan hieroglyphics descended from Egyptian
hieroglyphics? A: No. They are all non-alphabetic writing systems, but otherwise have nothing
in common at all. Egyptian hieroglyphics
are sort of like a rebus. Some hieroglyphs represent sounds (consonants only, just like modern
Semitic writing systems), others represent words or concepts. Many hieroglyphs are strung
together top to bottom to make a word. Mayan
hieroglyphics, on the other hand, are modular. One glyph contains several elements, including
an element for gender and some for sound (both vowels and consonants). They resemble Chinese
characters more than Egyptian hieroglyphics (though they're not descended from Chinese either).
Micmac hieroglyphs are
primarily pictographs, not representing sounds at all--in fact, many symbols are mnemonics for an
entire phrase or sentence. And
Cree hieroglyphs are a syllabary.
Each symbol regularly represents a syllable with a consonant (indicated by a shape) and
a vowel (indicated by a position). "Hieroglyph" is not a linguistic term. It just means "arcane
writing." Micmac and Cree are not even the same basic type of writing system as Egyptian, and
Mayan, though the same basic type, is a completely different realization of it. It would be
more likely that a completely illiterate person would come up with one of these Amerindian
writing systems than that someone already familiar with Egyptian would.
Q: Were Micmac, Cree, or other Amerindian writing systems invented by European missionaries? A: No. Many people believe this, primarily because they have the concept of Indians as
illiterate. Most were, but some have traditions of literacy which they claim predate Columbus.
This could theoretically be untrue--but isn't it strange that in the many native tribes with
no such traditions, the missionaries sensibly provided alphabets based on their own, while
for the natives with literary traditions they inexplicably provided weird pictographs and
rotating syllabaries unlike anything they'd ever seen before? Isn't it more likely that the
Indians are telling the truth and they had these scripts to start with?
Q: What about Cherokee? Scholars and most Cherokee believe the Tsalagi syllabary was invented by a Cherokee
man named Sequoyah after he noticed Europeans communicating by writing. Some Indians think
this syllabary predated European arrival, which is also possible, but the Cherokee do not
have a strong tradition claiming so and their neighbors never remarked on this skill before
that, so the likeliest thing is that the story of Sequoyah is true. Either way, the Cherokee
syllabary was certainly not invented by missionaries.
Q: Why is the word "squaw" so offensive? Does it mean woman, prostitute, or vagina? A: None of the above. "Squaw" is not an Indian word. It was probably invented by European colonists who could
not pronounce a longer Indian word. In the Algonquian languages (such as Cree), the words for woman, prostitute, and vagina
are all related (like English "woman," "womb," and "woman of the evening," I guess) and all include a "skw" sound. So were the
Europeans originally trying to use their pidgin word "squaw" to refer to women, prostitutes, or vaginas? No one will ever know
for sure.
However, since then the word has been used in a very racist and
sexually abusive way, so it definitely has those implications now.
Like "nigger," the word "squaw" should be retired from public use. It
is also not an Indian word and no Indians ever use it among themselves.
Q: Are Amerindian languages simpler and more primitive than European languages? A: No. Actually, no human language is 'simpler' than another--linguistic analysis
consistently shows identical semantic content being carried by the same amount of
morphosyntactic structure cross-linguistically. Besides, if one Amerindian language has
a feature which someone claims is 'simpler' than English, you can bet the farm that one
of the other 800 has the same feature more 'complex' than English. I saw one site claiming
that Algonquian languages have 'childlike' noun syntax. (Algonquian languages do tend to
be verb-based.) Whoever has taken this as evidence of English superiority over the
Algonquins had better be prepared to submit humbly to the Inuit, though, since Inuktitut
has about four times the noun phrase complexity of English.
Q: I was reading about an extinct Indian language and you said it was undergoing
"language revival." I thought it was impossible to revive a language once it was dead. A: It's not impossible. Hebrew didn't have any native speakers when they revived it as
the national language of Israel. But, it is certainly very rare and difficult. Most Indians
who are trying to revive their native language are not aiming for a success such as Israel's--
they want their children to be able to understand their traditional songs and literature, and
to speak the old language as a second language. This is definitely possible. Many kids learn
Latin this way, though Latin is also "dead."
Q: If American Indian kids are raised with their traditional languages, will it
disadvantage them by making them speak English more poorly? A: No. This is a common misperception because immigrants often have so much difficulty adapting
to English. However, young children who are raised in an English-speaking society but are taught a traditional
language at home or in classes develop the same English skills as monolingual kids. The only difference is that
bilingual children are better at learning additional languages later in life. Exposing children to another
language cannot hurt them, it can only help them.
Q: Is it true that Amerindian languages have no word for time, love, honesty, etcetera? A: No. I do not know of any Amerindian language lacking words for time, love, or honesty.
This statement is usually made by people who are trying to dehumanize Indians as savages
incapable of abstraction, or of love and honesty. Sometimes the statement is rendered
technically true by playing with phrasing. The word 'time' is a verb in Mi'kmaq, for
example, so there isn't an exact translation for English 'time', even though a Mi'kmaq
can clearly express the same concept of time passing that an English speaker can.
Q: But don't Indians conceptualize time differently than Westerners? A: Well, yes and no. Cherokee have a different time concept from Mayans, and Germans
from Greeks. But we all have words for time and its passage.
Q: Do Amerindian languages come from outer space, the spirit world, or the lost island
of Atlantis? A: No. The people I have seen making these claims usually do not present any linguistic
or historical evidence, instead citing a dream they had or something an alien told them. This
is because there is no linguistic or historical evidence. Amerindian languages, like other
languages, came from our human ancestors. As for the evidence of dreams and spirituality,
it is hypocritical to promote white spirituality as superior to scientific evidence, but
scientific evidence as superior to Indian spirituality. If you are more interested in
religious beliefs than scientific knowledge, then you should listen to Indian religious
beliefs about their own origins. There is no Indian spiritual tradition supporting the idea
that Amerindian languages came from aliens or mermen.
Q: Is it true that all Amerindian languages [insert verb phrase here]? A: No. Unless you were going to end your sentence "are spoken in the Western
Hemisphere." There is no distinguishing linguistic trait shared by all Amerindian languages.
They are not all related to each other.
Setting the Record Straight About Native Peoples
Q: How did Indians get to the Americas? A: Well, Native American tradition is that Indians were always here. Most of the
scientific evidence is that Indian ancestors came from Asia in prehistoric times, when
mammoths and other ancient animals did. This would have had to happen more than 20,000 years
ago, when there was still a land bridge there. No human culture has good records of what it
was doing 20,000 years ago, so perhaps we're both right.
For a supplement about why the Bering Strait theory makes Indians so mad, click here.
Q: Is it possible Indians migrated to America much more recently than that, like
700 or 1000 years ago? A: No. There are archaeological sites between five and ten thousand years old, and
Native American oral histories, like oral histories in other parts of the world, go back
thousands of years. Also, by the time of European contact 500 years ago, there were some
forty million natives dispersed throughout the entire Western Hemisphere. It would have
been impossible for a single group of migrants to accomplish that in 200 or 500 years.
Q: If Native Americans migrated from Asia, then they're not really 'Native' at all,
right? A: Even if Native Americans migrated from Asia, they have been here 20-30,000 years
longer than Europeans. Whether or not you call that 'native' is up to you. But the Americas
have been inhabited longer than England (12-15,000 years) or northern Europe (10,000 years).
Q: Are Native Americans a lost tribe of Israel, Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, or
any other people mentioned in the Bible? A: No. These Biblical events happened only a few thousand years ago. Native Americans
were already here. Also, Middle Easterners are Caucasians. American Indians are Mongoloid.
(Indians have epicanthic eye folds, like the Chinese do.) Amerindian languages do NOT show any
relation to Semitic languages, this data was faked.
Q: Did a lost tribe of Israel sail to America and join the Indians, maybe? A: It's doubtful. It would have been a long trip, and there's no evidence to
suggest it. No Israelite ruins have been found, no oral histories of native peoples
mention it, no Semitic art or technology infusions happened in the Americas, and there
aren't any Israelite records of such a journey.
Q: But aren't there special similarities between Aztec/Mayan culture and ancient Middle Eastern
cultures, such as hieroglyphs, pyramids, symbology, traditional religions, and ethical laws like the Ten
Commandments? A: Well, no. First of all, there is no special similarity
between Mesoamerican and Ancient Egyptian writing systems. "Hieroglyph"
just means "arcane writing". You could as easily call Klingon writing
"hieroglyphs" if you wanted to. None of the
languages or writing systems of native America are related in any way
to Semitic, Norse, or Celtic ones, and the websites
we have seen claiming this have been deliberately lying by providing
made-up Indian words to "prove" the similarity. A quick glance
at an Indian dictionary is enough to prove that the writers of these
websites are inventing their "evidence" from thin air--not
behavior that lends much credence to their claims. See here for some further information about how to really determine linguistic relationships.
As for the rest, there is no more similarity between Native American
and Ancient Egyptian civilizations than between any
two ancient cultures. Traditional religions are particularly different.
Most Native American traditional religions were animistic,
unlike Middle Eastern religions. Some Central American cultures had
pantheons of gods, as Egyptians (and Chinese, and Africans, and many
other cultures) did, but these pantheons bore so little resemblance to
the familiar Egyptian or Greek gods that it took European
anthropologists centuries to even figure them out. Mayan and Egyptian
pyramids were constructed so
differently that modern anthropologists don't even class them as the
same style of architecture, and the use of five- and six-sided
stars in Mesoamerican decoration does not show a connection to
Christianity and Judaism any more than the use of swastikas in
ancient North American decoration shows a connection to Nazism. Stars
and swastikas are common patterns that even children
will doodle without being taught to. The best argument would be the one
about ethical laws, for it is true that traditional Native American
morality shares similarities to the Ten Commandments (not stealing, not
murdering, and not committing adultery). However, it would be hard to
envision an ancient society in which stealing, murdering, and adultery
were encouraged. It is
rather culturally imperialistic to say that such basic morality must
have been learned from Egyptians, Israelites, or Christians.
Perhaps it would be better, religiously, to say that the Creator made
all human beings capable of understanding good and evil,
no matter where they live. It certainly is more accurate
anthropologically to observe that all human cultures developed such
laws, and that one might as well say that the Chinese and Celts were
lost tribes of Cherokee on this basis as that the American Indians were
lost tribes of Israel.
Q: Did Viking explorers settle in the Americas? A: Yes. There are archaeological remains of their settlements in Newfoundland
(L'Anse Aux Meadows). Also, Norse sagas describe the settlements, and Mi'kmaq oral history makes mention of them.
Q: Then did Native Americans descend from them? A: No. Viking explorers arrived only five hundred years before Columbus. That would not have been
enough time for a settlement of Vikings to populate the Americas, much less develop new languages, black hair,
and epicanthic eye folds. Besides, the Norse sagas describe meeting the natives (who they called "Skraelings")
when they arrived here, and there is clear archaeological evidence that people have lived in the Americas for at
least 20,000 years--longer than Vikings have lived in Norway. Amerindian languages
are not related to Norse languages at all.
Q: Could the Viking settlers have interbred with the Indians? Is interbreeding with
Vikings or lost Israelites why some tribes are lighter-skinned than others? A: There could have been interbreeding, sure. It's unlikely this had anything to do
with skin color, though. There weren't enough Norse explorers to change the color of a whole
tribe. Besides, there is just as much variation in skin tone on the west coast and in Mexico,
where there were never any Norse explorers. Like Europeans, Asians, or Africans, Native
Americans just have a variety of colorations.
Q: Did Native Americans come from outer space? A: No. But I wish we did, because we could have zapped the colonists with our phasers.
Q: Did aliens build various Native American monuments? If not, then how did Indians
build things that relied on advanced astronomical knowledge, why did they build things that
made patterns visible from the sky, and why did the natives of Mexico and Guatemala build
monuments that were so much more impressive than things in North or South America? A: No, aliens did not build those monuments. They were built with human tools by the
same people who built the humbler structures nearby. (Nobody ever asks whether aliens built
the out-house.) Indians built things that were astronomically sophisticated because they knew
a lot about astronomy. Ancient peoples watched the sky a lot. Artifacts of ancient Greeks,
Egyptians, and Celts also make use of astronomy. So do ancient Polynesian maps. Mayan
calendars and drawings reveal their knowledge of astronomy, just as their monuments do. As
for making patterns visible from the sky, anyone who's ever climbed a hill knows that
basic principle, and many Indian tribes believed their gods lived in the sky, so those are
more likely to be religious monuments than attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials.
And finally, the civilizations of Central America were the most advanced in the region, so
they built more monuments. Why are there more ancient monuments in Greece than in Poland?
That's where the cities were. The empires of Central America were advanced in more ways than
just impressive monuments. Did aliens also teach them the secrets of irrigation, writing,
and mathematics? (On second thought, don't answer that.)
Q: Why do people believe these things? A: Some of them are trying to prove that the world was only created a few thousand years
ago, so for their religious purposes, they want everyone to have started out in Israel and
fanned out very recently. Others have been championing the idea that the Indians got here
only shortly before the European colonists since the 1600's. The subtext there is "they're
not really FROM here, so it's ok to take their land." The stuff about aliens mostly persists
because people like to believe in the supernatural, as they have since ancient times, and
stays linked to Indians and Indian artifacts because people have a harder time believing
"savage" Indians could have known what a solstice was than Greeks or Celts. For whatever
reason people promote them, they are factually dead wrong, and should not be given any
credence.
Q: Who invented scalping? My history book says it was the Indians but
the tribe who lives near me says the colonists used to scalp them. A: They're both right. Scalping--cutting off the scalp of a dead enemy as proof of his demise--
was common practice throughout North America before colonists got here. It is described in Indian
oral histories, and preserved scalps were found at archaeological sites. Europeans learned to scalp
enemies from the Indians. (The European custom was to cut off people's heads for proof/trophies, originally,
but scalps are easier to transport and preserve, so the colonists quickly switched to the Indian method.)
Once they picked up the technique, the English did a tremendous amount of scalping, both of natives
and of rival Frenchmen. Here's a
bounty
notice from 1755 offering varying rewards for the scalps of Indian men, women, and children.
(These scalps, incidentally, were commonly referred to as "redskins," one reason why that is considered
such a rude racial slur by many Native Americans today.) American and Canadian frontiersmen
kept up the tradition of scalping until the turn of the 20th century, though in some places, like California, they
reverted back to severed heads. There was actually still
a law on the books in Canada as of the year 2000 promising bounties in exchange for Indian scalps, though
the embarrassed Canadian government was hurrying to repeal it
(here's an article on that).
In other words, the scalping technique came from the American Indians, the idea of taking a piece of
a dead enemy's body as a war prize was well known to Indians and Europeans alike, and the idea of paying
bounties for dead body parts came from the Europeans.
Q: Were Native Americans cannibals? A: Not for the most part, no, but there were some groups who were. The Aztecs were notorious for ritual
cannibalism (warriors would eat a strip of flesh from enemies they had slain in combat). Some people dispute
this, but the Aztecs' own written and oral histories seem to support it as the truth. There were a few Amazonian
tribes who practiced funerary cannibalism (family and friends would eat part of a dead tribal member's body as a
religious ceremony at the funeral). Finally, the Carib people of South America were said to kill and eat prisoners
of war, though it's been pointed out that the Spaniards who made this claim were lining their own pockets by
doing so (Queen Isabella had forbidden her subjects from selling Africans, or Indians, as slaves unless they were
cannibals).
None of the other 1200 Native American cultures engaged in culturally sanctioned cannibalism at the time of
European contact. That doesn't mean cannibalism never happened--there were certainly stories in the American
Indian oral history about cannibalistic incidents (a hunting party trapped in a snowstorm who fell to
eating each other, a war chief who taunted captives by striking them in the face with their leader's heart and then
taking a bite out of it.) Such incidents also occurred in American and European history under similar
starving-in-the-wilderness and war-atrocity circumstances (a company of Crusaders, for example, bragged of
having grilled and eaten a Saracen; a Jamestown settler was executed for cannibalizing his wife during a famine).
Cannibalism should not be considered part of American Indian culture on this account any more than it would
be considered part of European or American culture--it was culturally unacceptable behavior. The Sioux
considered cannibalism a sin, the Cree considered it a mental illness, the Algonquin and Ojibwe considered it a
sign of possession by an evil spirit. In almost all cases, American Indian cannibals--just like European or
American cannibals--were put to death as soon as they were discovered.
Q: But weren't they cannibals before that--in ancient times, before European contact? A: Most of them definitely were not. It's been suggested that the pre-Iroquois Mohawk and the
ancient Anasazi may have practiced group cannibalism. This is possible, though it has not been proven. The
Mohawk were called "man-eaters" by their Algonquian enemies on account of this belief about their lurid past.
Some Mohawks think it was probably true, others that you shouldn't give too much credence to slurs people's
enemies cast at their ancestors. The claim about the ancient Anasazi came more recently, when anthropologists
found a burial site with skeletons whose flesh had apparently been hacked off the bones after their death.
Personally, I'm not too impressed by that evidence. Even if those bodies were cut up for cannibalistic purposes,
we're talking about one anomalous site with only seven bodies in it. Of the hundreds of ancient Indian burial sites
exhumed by archaeologists--including dozens of Anasazi ones--this was the only one with this strange
appearance. For all we know it was the work of some Anasazi psychopath. We can't assume ancient Anasazi
culture included cannibalism from this one unusual case any more than we could say American culture includes
cannibalism because of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.
Q: Hey! You called Battle X a massacre or Massacre Y a battle! Are you a politically
correct panderer/a Nazi? A: No. Please stop and consider whether you are emotionally capable of handling the idea that someone
from your ethnic group may have murdered some innocents and/or been beaten in battle fair and square. If not,
whether you are Indian or white, history is not for you. I recommend golf.
If you can handle that much, however, then our definitions are these: if most of the dead were civilians
it was a massacre, if most of the dead were warriors it was a battle, and if most of the dead were warriors but had
already surrendered or something it was a war crime. Little Bighorn was a battle. All the dead were armed soldiers.
Wounded Knee was a massacre. Most of the dead were civilian noncombatants. There's really nothing subjective
about it.
Q: Isn't it true that before Europeans got here Native Americans never polluted, wasted
anything, killed women or children, and they never invented child abuse, rape, or slavery? A: Yes, and I've got some great farmland to sell you in Oklahoma.
No, seriously, there has never been a human society in which no one ever abused, murdered, or raped anyone
else. American Indian societies were no exception. I've been a little surprised to hear this idea coming from
some Indians now as well as white New Agers. Some people need to go back and listen to the old stories a little
more. Why do the villains in our legends and oral histories rape, murder, abuse and enslave people if we never
knew what that was? This is really the other side of the same "savage Indians didn't understand honesty, love,
or loyalty" coin, and it's just as dehumanizing. Of course we knew what pollution, rape, massacres, and
wife-beating were, and we knew they were wrong. We had laws against these things, we punished
people we caught doing them, and we told stories with morals to teach the children they were unacceptable
and would lead to no good end. A dog never does anything evil and never does anything about evil,
because a dog doesn't understand evil. Civilized people are capable of evil and work together to protect
their society from falling prey to it. Native Americans, contrary to some reports, were and are civilized people.
Q: By the way, is it "Native Americans," "American Indians," or what? A: The languages are properly referred to as 'Amerindian'. As for the people, opinion
is divided on that count. Most native people in the Unites States use 'Indian' or 'American
Indian'. In Canada, 'First Nations' and 'aboriginal' are getting more popular. In Central
America, many people use 'indigeno' or 'indigenous'. The truth is that any of these--or
'Native Americans', or 'native peoples', or anything else polite--is fine. It's a generic term,
after all, like 'European'. Each of our nations has its own name and identity. So to the best
of my experience, we don't have too much tied up in what we get called as a collective term,
any more than a Frenchman and an Englishman would argue over the word 'Europe'. On this
website, we have used 'American Indian', 'Native American', and 'native peoples' more or less
interchangeably. I've been a little worried that 'American Indians' may sound like we're
referring only to Indians in the US, which is not our intent. We are just trying to use
general terms which everyone will understand.
Native American culture index
