Origins & Settlement Patterns INFORMATION

Creation Stories

More than one thousand nations lived in North America when the first Europeans arrived.  Each had it's own culture with particular rituals, ceremonies and beliefs that tied them to the the land the people called home.  Creation stories explain how the world and all of its parts began.  This explanation for the origin of the world can help people understand and accept things that cannot be seen or touched, including their own identity, purpose and place in the world.

An individual’s understanding of their place and purpose in the world is part of their spirituality.  The traditional spirituality of First nations and Inuit people is a way of life infused with the belief that existence includes both a physical world and a spiritual world. Creation stories describe the origin of and the reason for the rituals, ceremonies and spiritual beliefs that celebrate the renewal of creation. 

Watch this video presentation which tells one version of the aboriginal story of creation.

Examples of Creation Stories

Below you will find creation stories for different North American First Nations that you will use for your assignment on the following page. 

Read the stories by clicking on the links below:

Iroquois - Earth Diver

Blackfoot - Earth Diver

Igluik - World Parent

Huron - World Parent

Cree - World Parent

Siouian - Emergence

Haida - Conflict and Robbery

Tsimshian - Rebirth of a Corpse

Mi'kmaq - Two Creators and their Conflicts

Algonquin - Brother

Dene - Creation of Seasons

Creation Assignment

Compare and Contrast Two Creation Stories

Indigenous cultures around the world use creation stories to understand how the world and human life came to be.  Animals and nature, and their relationship to human beings, are common themes. Each group's creation story is unique, however, because it reflects the specific environment in which the group lives.

You will be marked using the following Rubric: General Rubric for Assignments File

Click here to begin your Two Creation Stories Assignment

Culture

Culture is a concept used by anthropologists to define the adaptive systems unique to humanity. Hence, how groups of humans survive and utilise their environment is that which defines them as a people. Definitions of culture are used by historians as a context for the behaviours, movements, and activities of First Nations people. Cultural identities also reflect how groups of people survive together and adapt to local environments. Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that local adaptation is a long-term process with long-term results. The long-term process includes the development of social systems, warfare and diplomacy patterns, as well as economic and trade practices. This complex set of variables creates the equilibrium necessary to survive within an environment and is the abstract of human experience. Culture is the method and measurement of these adaptations to an environment.

Click on the links below to learn more about each region's First Nations culture.

Northwest Coast Culture

Plateau Culture

Great Plains Culture

Northeastern Woodlands Culture

Canadian Shield Culture

Arctic Culture

Culture Assignment

Linguistics

Language is at the root of every First Nations culture. The identity of a people is in part created by language because language influences social lifeways and spiritual practices. Linguists have linked language diversity to length of human occupation. For example, Canada's Pacific Coast has the greatest number of languages. Because of this diversity, linguists have concluded that the Pacific Coast peoples have occupied their region longer than other First Nations groups have occupied their own regions. First Nations languages within what is now Canada are classified into twelve separate groups of approximately fifty languages. The language groupings are broken down into different languages and dialects. Historians understand how groups identify themselves and interpret their environment through language. However, the migrations of the past two hundred years - the result of European trade, disease, and resource depletion - have changed the linguistic landscape of Canada. Pre-European contact histories are developed in part by examining historic language relations and the associated cultures.

Click on the links below to learn more about some First Nation Languages

Wakashan

Salishan

Tsimshian

Tlingit

Haidian (28)

Athapaskan (Na Dene)

Kootenaian (27)

Algonquian (Algic)

Siouian

Iroquoian (7-14)

Eskaleut (Eskimo-Aleut)

Beothuk (1)

Linguistics Continued

Watch the following video that gives an example of the same story told in three languages.

Linguistics Assignment

Migration Theories

There are a number of competing theories about how the first people came to America. 

Presented here are two of the most popular theories, the Land Bridge Theory and the Coastal Route Theory. 

Land Bridge Theory

The Land Bridge Theory, also known as the Bering Strait Theory or Beringia Theory, is a popular model of migration into the New World.  This theory was first proposed in 1590 by José de Acosta and has been widely accepted since the 1930s.  The Land Bridge Theory proposes that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge that spanned the current day Bering Strait.  The first people to populate the Americas were believed to have migrated across the Bering Land Bridge while tracking large game animal herds.

The Clovis First Hypothesis:

Over the last half-century, archaeologists have largely agreed that the first Americans migrated into North America from Asia more than fourteen to twenty thousand years ago by an overland route across the frozen Land Bridge.

Althrough it is likely that there were additional migration routes into America, the importance of ancient Berinigia and its role in peopling America is undeniable.

The initial confimation for the long-held Land Bridge theory came from the discovery of spear points near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 20th century, between 1929 and 1937, that matched the kinds of artifacts found in Beringia.

Carbon dating has now placed these spear points are more than 13,500 years old.  The majority of archaeologists have traditionally seen this as direct proof of both the Bering Land Bridge theory and timeline of early migration into America.

Subsequent discoveries of Clovis style artifacts in other areas of the Southwestern United States seemed to offer further confirmation for the theory and timeline, which held undisputed sway for many decades.  Even today, the Beringia theory, is still the dominant American migration hypothesis.

This image depicts possible migration routes.

Land Bridge Theory Page 2

Archaeologists long thought the first Americans were the Clovis people, who were said to have reached the New World some 13,000 years ago from northern Asia.

But new archaeological finds prove that humans reached the Americas thousands of years before that.

These discoveries, along with insights from genetics and geology, have prompted reconsideration of where these pioneers came from, when they arrived, and what route they took into the New World.

In more than a dozen studies geneticists examined modern and ancient DNA samples from Native Americans, looking for telltale genetic mutations or markers that define major human lineages known as haplogroups.  They found that native peoples in the Americas stemmed from four major founding maternal haplogroups -- A, B, C and D -- and two major founding paternal haplogroups -- C and Q.  To find the probably source of these haplogroups, the teams then searched for human populations in the Old World whose genetic diversity included all the lineages.  Only the modern inhabitants of southern Siberia, from the Altai Mountains in the west to the Amur River in the east, matched this genetic profiles, causing them to believe that the ancestors of the first Americans came from an East Asian homeland.

Land Bridge Theory Page 3

Dressed in warm, tailored hide garments stitched together with sinew and bone needles and armed with an expert knowledge of nature, the ancestors of the Paleo-Americans entered an Arctic world without parallel today.  The ice sheets in northern Europe and North America had locked up vast quantities of water, lowering sea level by more than 100 meters and exposing the continental shelves of northeastern Asia and Alaska.  These newly revealed lands, together with adjacent regions in Sibera, Alaska and norther Canada, formed a landmass that joined the Old World seamlessly to the New.

Known today as Beringia, this landmass would have made a welcoming way station for pre-Clovis migrants.  The air masses that swept over it were so dry they brought little snowfall, preventing the growth of ice sheets.  As a result, grasses, sedges and other cold-adapted plants thrived there, as shown by plan remains found preserved under a layer of volcanic ash in northwestern Alaska and in the frozen intestines of large herbivores that once grazed in Beringia.  These plans formed an arid tundra-grassland, and there woolly mammoths weighing as much as nine tons grazed, as did giant ground sloths, steppe bison, musk ox and caribou.  Genetic studies of modern Steller's sea lion populations suggest that this sea mammal likely hauled out on the rocks along Beringia's island-studded south shore.  So the migrants may have had their pick not only of land mammals but also of water ones.

Received wisdom holds that the trailblazers hurried across Beringia to reach warmer, more hospitable lands.  Some researchers, however, think the journey could have been a more leisurely affair.  The major genetic lineages of Native Americans possess many widespread founding haplotypes -- combinations of closely linked DNA sequences on individual chromosomes that are othen inherited together -- that their closes Asian kin lack.  This suggests that the earliest Americans paused somewhere en route to the New World, evolving in isolation for thousands of years before entering the Americas.  The most likely spot for this is Beringia.  There the migrants could have been cut off from their Asian kin as the climate cooled some 22,000 years ago, forcing Siberian bands to retreat south.

Whether the migrants cooled their heels in Beringia, however, or somewhere else in northeastern Asia, people eventaully began striking off farther east and south.  A warming trend began slowly shrinking North America's ice sheets some 19,000 years ago, gradually creating two passable routes to the south and opening the possibility of multiple early migrations.  According to several studies conducted over the past decade on the geographic distribution of genetic diversity in modern indigenous Americans, the earliest of these migrants started colonizing the New World between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago. 

Coastal Route Theory

 New research and studies have prompted some anthropologists and archaelogists to present the theory that people from Southeast Asia traveled by boat along the coastline and settled in the Western portion of North America and the Northwestern portion of South America.  The theory also helps to explain how certain artifacts have been found so far from the Bering Strait region dating before and around the supposed time that humans first came into contact with the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge.

Map displaying the route that Southeast Asians and Polynesians could have taken to reach the Americas.

In 1995, Deloria disputed the Beringia theory based upon his hypothesis that the ocean's water levels had to drop sixty metres in order to fully expose a land bridge. He believes that this was impossible and that the climate would have been uninhabitable for humans due to the glacial landscape. Ultimately, if Deloria is correct in his evaluation of the Beringia environment, humans must have come by a different route to the Americas. Instead, trans-oceanic migrations could have lead Asian, Australian, or Siberian peoples to any point along the coastlines of the Americas. Therefore, post-glacial migration on the Americas could have moved north and east. Although the theory of human trans-oceanic migration is disputed, archaeologist Knut Fladmark believes humans have had the skills to travel by sea for 30,000 years. He also maintains that migration continued by sea after the landmass of Beringia was flooded. Although, some anthropologists believe that humans did not have the skill or the technology for deep-sea voyages, Fladmark argues that cross-Pacific migrations are viable because of a sea current that follows a path from Japan to the North American coastline. Another possible migration route is to travel by both land and sea along the coastlines of Beringia. This is supported by the theory that the main food sources for migrating peoples came from both land and sea.

[Excerpt from "Pre-Clovis Breakthrough" by Andrew Curry]

In his lab in Copenhagen, Willerslev and a colleague had come up with stunning results. Six of the turds contained undeniably human DNA. Not only that, they bore certain genetic markers found only in Native American populations. Willerslev agreed to pay labs in Oxford and Florida to radiocarbon date each coprolite.

The results, Jenkins says, were "earth-shaking." Both labs agreed that the coprolites were left 14,300 years ago--almost 1,500 years before the earliest agreed-upon evidence for human presence in the Americas...The find's implications are tremendous. For almost a century, archaeologists believed that people arrived in North America 13,000 years ago--a conclusion based on dating sites with a distinctive stone tool type first found near Clovis, New Mexico in the 1930s. For the last two decades, the "Clovis-first" idea has been under steady assault. Call it revisionist prehistory: researchers have turned up evidence they say supports everything from a much earlier migration from Asia to a sea-borne invasion from Europe.

Just to the north, on Prince of Wales Island, E. James Dixon, curator of archaeology at Denver Museum of Natural History, and co-workers had another startling discovery at a nondescript cave in an area about to be logged.

"It's just a very unspectacular little hole in the rock," Dixon said. Then a colleague's radiocarbon date indicated an animal bone found within was more than 20,000 years ago.

"That got our attention. This cave has been calling to us, but we weren't smart enough to follow up on the call," Dixon said.

Also found there were a human jaw bone, three vertebra, two ribs, part of a pelvis and an incisor more than 1,000 years older than the Kennewick Man, representing the oldest human skeleton yet found in Alaska. That puts humans on the island at the time seas were lower and when trees moved in.

The male, who died in his early 20s, had notches in his teeth from some repetitive task, like holding fishing lines, and ate as much seafood as a sea otter, he said.

Pushing farther south, two separate archaeological crews working in southern Peru this fall published articles about prehistoric settlers practicing a seafaring lifestyle as long as 13,000 years ago. Scattered around hearths built by the early Americans were resources gathered from the ocean, including anchovy, mussels and clams, as well as seabirds such as cormorants.

"It really gives a lot more evidence to the theory that very early migration to America could have taken place along a coastal route by people who were fishers rather than big-game hunters," David Keefer, a U.S. Geological Survey archeologist who led one of the projects, told The Associated Press.

Kennewick Man: 9,500 year old skeleton found near Kennewick, Washington believed to be of Polynesian or Ainu (South Asian) descent rather than Caucasoid or European descent, which shows clear evidence of migration to the present-day Northwestern United States by peoples other than Caucasoid.

Origins & Settlement Patterns Project