Documents from Reading the American Past

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Documents

For millennia, ancient Americans and other human beings have explained who they were and how they came to be with stories, shaped and reshaped in countless tellings. The narratives of human origins that were eventually written down and still survive differed greatly, but they all express a sense of the meaning and mystery of human existence. Native Americans shared some of their origin stories with European settlers who came to the New World in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Professional anthropologists and their Native American informants recorded many others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those stories, polished and modified over the centuries, are as close as we will ever get to understanding what ancient Americans believed about their origins. The Europeans who encountered ancient Americans had their own notions of human origins created by ancient peoples in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Christians believed the creation stories in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, there was always debate and contention - among Christians themselves, and between Christians and followers of Judaism, Islam, and other ancient beliefs, including those of ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. The following excerpts from Native American origin narratives as well as from the Bible and Aristotle reveal more than contrasting views of the prehistoric origins of the world. They also disclose a great deal about the distinctive worldviews of the people whose encounters in the New World after 1492 did so much to shape American history.