For Eastern Indians and the United States both, the century from 1780 to 1880 was a period of experimentation, learning, adjusting, and ultimately, struggling for dominance over the land and its resources. During that century, Native Americans experienced steady decline in population and power. While they won important victories through warfare, politics, and judicial action, in the end they lost all but tiny remnants of their lands east of the Mississippi. Required to relocate west of the river in Indian Territory, their numbers continued to decline even as they attempted, often quite successfully, to build new lives and communities in unfamiliar country. But the combined effects of the American Civil War and the economic penetration of corporate America brought a second round of defeats so that by 1880 the nations of Indian Territory, like those scattered groups that had avoided removal and remained in the East, were surrounded and in imminent danger of dispossession and fragmentation.

The Indian policy of the United States government during its first century was not designed to exterminate Native Americans, but it was created to meet the needs and wishes, economic, political, and spiritual, of its citizens. Those needs and wishes rarely coincided with the interests of Native Americans and, when in conflict, Indians, often denigrated as culturally and racially inferior, found themselves overwhelmed by the superior power of federal and state governments. Humanitarian interests in the United States decried the suffering of Native people and struggled to alleviate it, but the methods and goals of the well-meaning required a cultural transformation so complete that most Indians rejected it.

On January 2, 1971, a fieldworker for the Doris Duke Oral History Project was collecting narratives in Tuba City, Arizona. To warm up one conversation the interviewer opened John McGregor’s Southwestern Archaeology (second edition) to page 114 and through an interpreter asked an elderly Navajo man what he thought of a map of North America with swooping arrows indicating the routes supposedly walked by Paleo-Indian peoples after they crossed over the Beringia Land Bridge to populate the continent.

When he couldn’t get a straight answer his translator begged for patience, “he’s telling it little by little,” then added, “it doesn’t sound very little to me though.” The interpreter and informant put their heads together. “He said that he would like to tell you,” the translator explained, “but … he will be punished for it … I mean the medicine, he can’t tell how it works … he said that if he told all his secrets like that he would fall to pieces. ….”

As for the migration routes from Western Alaska down into North America, “He said, ‘that maybe some other guys came over like that, but us Navajos came a different way’.” At this the old man launched into what sounded like contradictory origin stories. One was a fragmentary narrative in which cicada-like insects “won this world for us, won this land here, the reservation” after crawling up through the earth’s underlayers. The second account had white corn kernels, “actually the mother of the Navajo tribe,” and the sun, “the father,” talking together, with Navajos born from the corn kernel’s underarms.

As the seventeenth century opened, the relationship between Native peoples and Europeans in North America east of the Mississippi had an established history but uncertain future. Over the preceding century, the presence of Europeans, their goods, and their microbes had affected many Indians, particularly on the eastern seaboard and in the southeastern interior. Depopulation and migration had caused the disappearance of numerous communities, and European goods had begun to constitute a small but significant portion of many groups’ material cultures. These changes, in turn, had brought alterations in subsistence, social and political organization, exchange, and patterns of alliance and rivalry.

Yet for all the transformations they had experienced, eastern North Americans continued to understand themselves, the world they lived in, and even the newcomers, in terms that were essentially rooted in their precontact lifeways and values. Most Indian communities still occupied the familiar, well-defined territories from which they had long drawn their material needs and within which they had constructed their cultural identities and their relations with other groups. And in spite of all their efforts to establish a more substantial presence, Europeans remained outsiders everywhere (except around St. Augustine in Florida) as the sixteenth century drew to a close.

All this would change after 1600. The next two centuries witnessed the explosive and historically unprecedented spread of European societies, economies, and cultures in one form or another throughout the eastern portion of the continent. Colonization would pose serious challenges to Indians’ ability to maintain continuity in and control over their ways of life, their homelands, and their cultural identities.

This chapter examines the evidence for the arrival of human beings in the Americas and the subsequent development of American Indian and Inuit hunter-gatherer societies in North America. Coverage ends with the rise of horticultural societies where that occurred, but continues to first contact with Europeans for much of North America. The chapter also explains how archaeologists build chronologies for periods prior to written records, and how colleagues in other disciplines reconstruct the environmental contexts of ancient societies.

APPROACHES TO THE PAST

Like human beings everywhere, all American Indians descend from people who were once full-time hunter-gatherers. Even those who eventually adopted more intensive subsistence strategies often retained hunting and gathering practices as regular supplements and insurance against occasional shortages. After European contact, many North American horticulturalists reverted to full-time hunting and gathering, as firearms and the reintroduced horse made the vast bison herds of the Great Plains more easily accessible. Thus hunting and gathering pervades the history of American Indian societies, providing the context for their initial expansion and subsequent differentiation. However, to carry an understanding of those processes beyond the simplistic stereotypes of popular history, some reassessment of basic concepts and review of archaeological theory is necessary.

The greatest problem confronting scholars in researching the history of Native Americans is that the written sources for that history derive largely from the non-Native side and are subject to the distortions, misconceptions, biases, and ignorance that are generally associated with history seen from an external cultural perspective. Moreover, the nature of those biases and distortions has varied over the centuries, so that the data from which the historian must draw need to be interpreted with an understanding of those changes. In addition, Native American history shares all the problems of history in general, which, as the British historian Christopher Hill has observed, is rewritten by every generation, not because the past has changed but because each generation asks different questions about it. As a result, historical writing often reveals as much about historians and their social milieu as it does about the objects of their study.

Our knowledge of American Indian history does not depend only on written sources. Oral history, although full of pitfalls, has demonstrated that even through the veil of centuries the Native American past can sometimes be recaptured by the diligent and sensitive researcher. Archaeology is providing increasingly sophisticated evidence about indigenous societies from the earliest appearance of human beings in the New World until the beginning of written records. For more recent times it supplements in many important ways the historical record of changes in Native life as well as providing new insights into specific events, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Nevertheless, the interpretation of archaeological data has limitations and biases that are no less significant than those of written records.

Throughout much of continental North America that today is included in the eastern and southwestern United States, Native Americans developed mixed economies based on farming New World domesticates combined with important wild foods obtained by hunting and gathering. At the time of contact with Europeans, the Native peoples in these two regions were cultivating many of the same crops. Although there were no real barriers to travel between what is now the western and eastern United States, these areas are markedly different in climate and vegetation. The peoples of these two vast regions followed very different paths in their development of farming economies and in their settlement systems, subsistence strategies, political institutions, and religious beliefs. This chapter explores the similarities and differences between these areas with respect to farming and a settled way of life. Chapter 5 examines the development of ranked agricultural societies characterized by a chiefdom level of socio-political organization in the eastern United States.

In the western region, indigenous farming peoples inhabited the Southwest culture area which forms part of modern Arizona and New Mexico, extending into southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado. Aridity is the primary climatic feature uniting landscapes of topographic diversity, including rugged mountains, mesas, and broad valleys. The region encompasses the low basins stretching north from the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the higher and often wooded Colorado Plateaus, and the still higher wooded and forested mountain masses of central Arizona and New Mexico. Prior to and shortly after European contact, Native farming societies extended their settlements onto the undulating short grass plains of Oklahoma and Texas.

The long and complex history of the eastern United States prior to European contact has often been viewed as being largely peripheral to, and derivative from, cultural developments in Mesoamerica. This tendency to look south of the border has been particularly pronounced in attempts to account for the agricultural chiefdoms that emerged around A.D. 1000, and flourished across much of the eastern United States right up to the arrival of Europeans. These were the largest and most hierarchical indigenous societies to develop north of Mexico. At first glance, a proposed derivation of the principal features of these agricultural chiefdoms from Mesoamerica does not seem unreasonable. There are obvious, if only general, parallels in public architecture, iconography, socio-political organization, and economy.

The Mississippian chiefdoms of the East constructed flat-topped, rectangular mounds, sometimes of considerable size, arranged around open plazas. Such mound-plaza areas were the central focus of fortified civic-ceremonial centers that often had a sizable resident population. In addition, Mississippian societies were markedly hierarchical. Their constituent kin units or clans were ranked, with political and religious power and authority maintained, through inheritance, in the highest ranking clans. Elaborate iconographic systems developed in Mississippian chiefdoms, reflecting and supporting both their hierarchical structure and their larger worldview. Some of the elements of these iconographic systems (e.g., snakes, raptorial birds, costumed dancers, trophy heads) have vaguely Mesoamerican parallels encouraging a search for connections south of the border. The important role of two Mesoamerican crop plants – maize (Zea mays) and beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) – in the agricultural economy of Mississippian societies also suggests Mesoamerican connections, with the shift to maize-centered agriculture in eastern North America between A.D. 800 and 1000 corresponding to the initial emergence of Mississippian chiefdoms.

The early texts of Iberian America as a whole could hardly be literature of the New World; they were, rather, literature about the newly discovered and gradually occupied lands that stretched from New Spain (today’s Mexico) to the river Plate basin. To our modern eyes these chronicles of conquest, beginning with the first inventories (the letters of Columbus and of Pero Vaz de Caminha, for example) have long seemed out of place within the canon of Iberian American literature, since they lack the conventional marks of both nationality – their authors, of course, were Europeans almost to a man – and literariness; with a few exceptions, they are marginal to the sacred triad – epos, drama, and the lyric – which defines the core of literature in the aesthetic sense. Yet one should avoid anachronism. After all, until the age of Voltaire, “literature” retained a primarily cognitive rather than aesthetic meaning; that is, literature meant learning rather than a body of imaginative works. This is precisely what these early colonial writings are: accounts of acquaintance, of a learning process. Besides, these texts are by no means devoid of literary value. Literary historians used to stress the coarse and unclassical, “Gothic” character of most such chronicles. Yet some of them – in the Brazilian case, beginning with Caminha’s letter of 1500 – evince rhetorical skills worthy of the best humanist writing of the Renaissance.

The twentieth century opened in Brazil with an atmosphere of intense political and economic interest but without a corresponding intensity in a literary manifestation. In the Amazonian area, Brazil’s “last frontier,” the rubber boom which had begun around 1860 was nearing its peak, focusing both public interest and international speculation upon the “exotic rainforest.” The abolition of slavery in 1888 had resulted in large-scale appeals by the Brazilian government to certain foreign nations for the immigration of families with agricultural experience, bringing to Brazil thousands of Italian, German, and (after 1908) Japanese families. On the political scene, the advent of the Republic in 1889 had brought a decade of opportunism, austerity, factional unrest, and general disappointment to the country and, as the century turned, Brazilian intellectuals were in the throes of intense national self-examination in an attempt to discover whether Brazil was indeed in a period of progress or of decadence and whether the nation merited any kind of confidence at home or abroad. Reactions ranged from euphoric admiration (Afonso Celso, For que me ufano do meu pais, 1900) to pessimistic condemnation (Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões, 1902 [Rebellion in the Backlands]). Essayists throughout Brazil found their most fertile field of endeavor in the analysis of national strengths and weaknesses and the attempt to identify solutions to the latter. The perennial presence of national self-consciousness in Brazilian thought as the twentieth century began to run its course may be verified in the writings of essayists such as Alberto Torres (O problema nacional brasileiro [1914]), Monteiro Lobato (Idéias de Jeca Tatu [1919]), and Paulo Prado (Retrato do Brasil [1928]). Its pervasiveness in the genre of prose fiction will be observed throughout the present chapter.

Although romantic poetry continued to be cultivated during the 1870s, it was showing signs of weariness, and a new poetic discourse began to emerge in reaction to it. In 1870, Silvio Romero (1851–1914) published a series of articles – later collected in the fourth volume of the third edition of his Historia da literatura brasileira (5 vols., 1943) – in Grenqa, a Recife newspaper. In those articles, Romero attacked “the exaggerated senti-mentalism and the decrepit Indianism of the Harpejos poeticos of Santa Helena Magno, the stentorian Hugoanism of Castro Alves’ Espumas flutuantes, the subjectivist lyricism and the pretentious humor of the Falenas of Machado de Assis.” This reaction against Romanticism rapidly acquired republican and anti-monarchist overtones, visible as early as 1872 in the Névoas matutinas (Rio de Janeiro) of Lúcio de Mendonca (1854–1909).

While not the direct causes of these changes, the erotic poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the 1865 Coimbra Question (a dispute between hardened Romantics and the academic generation of Coimbra, known for its revolutionary ideas), and the secretive realist lectures given at the Lisbon Casino in 1871 all greatly stimulated the poetic metamorphosis taking place in Brazil during the 1870s.

The year 1878 was a true watershed. Inspired by what he called “philosophical conceptualism” and “scientific poetry,” Sílvio Romero published his Cantos do fim do seculo in Rio de Janeiro. The fact that Romero’s poetry did not completely match the postulates he had set forth in 1870 was duly noted by Machado de Assis (1839–1908) in “A nova geração” (published in the Revista Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, no. 2, Dec. 1, 1879), his famous study summing up the new generation.

Brazil entered the consciousness of the European world late in April of 1500. Beginning with its conquest of Ceuta in 1415, Portugal had moved beyond the narrow confines of the western shore of the Iberian peninsula, eager to discover a sea route to the rich spice lands of India and the East. The Portuguese sailed down the African coast, reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; Vasco da Gama’s small fleet entered the Indian harbor of Calicut only ten years later. The Portuguese regarded da Gama’s voyage as one of the greatest accomplishments of human history, but the rulers of Calicut were clearly less than impressed. When da Gama returned to Lisbon, it was decided to mount a much more considerable show of force. A new fleet, 13 ships and about 1,100 men under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral, set sail in early 1500. This fleet – perhaps accidentally carried off-course, perhaps keeping to a pre-arranged plan to follow up on secret reports of a land mass in the South Atlantic – landed on the Brazilian coast on April 22, 1500.

Cabral’s scribe, one Pero Vaz de Caminha, was greatly moved by the beauty of all that he saw during the ten days he spent in this new land, setting down a poetic and profoundly mythic vision of fertility and innocence. Caminha was struck, almost at first glance, by the apparently inexhaustible abundance and goodness of the land – and by the fact that all this visible and latent fertility served no useful purpose. He wrote:

Brazilian novels and short stories of the second half of the nineteenth century reflected the complex and infinitely larger fictions which served as the basis of Brazilian society as a whole during the period. The most basic of those fictions, that Brazil was a progressive and essentially European nation which happened to find itself on the other side of the Atlantic, was an article of faith among the miniscule Brazilian elite – those who could read and write, those who voted, those who controlled government, economics, and society.

It has been estimated that those actively involved in cultural and political matters at the time of Independence in 1822 numbered about 20,000, out of a population of some 4 million. By 1871, when the total population had reached 10 million, only 147,621 children were enrolled in primary schools, and only 9,389 attended secondary schools. Ten years later, in 1881, only 147,000 Brazilians-out of a total population of around 13 million – were qualified to vote. To talk of progress, of politics, of literature during the nineteenth century, therefore, is inevitably to talk about this small elite; the other Brazilians, perhaps 97 or 98 percent of the population, remained outside what the elite defined as the mainstream of national society, isolated from politics, from culture, and from meaningful progress, by poverty, illiteracy, and racial discrimination. This last factor was of particular importance, for Brazil’s population remained overwhelmingly non-white throughout most of the century.

Prose fiction is without a doubt the “sleeper” of the literary genres in Brazil during the first half of the nineteenth century. In fact, it may be said that, with the exception of Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta’s Máximas de virtude e forrnosura, ou Aventuras de Diófanes (published in the second half of the eighteenth century), Brazilian fiction was born, and experienced a rather sickly infancy, during the period 1830–1855. It remains for the second half of the nineteenth century to raise this “late bloomer” among the literary genres in Brazil to its place of glory with the works of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis. Among the reasons typically given (Salles, Primeiras manifestações da ficção na Bahia, 8) for the lethargy in the development of Brazilian fiction are the preference among writers and the public for the prestigious poetic genre, the lingering of the neoclassical influence, the popularity of ecclesiastical and oratorical rhetoric, the immediate appeal of combative prose, and a simple lack of editors disposed to experiment with publication of an unproven genre. The public attention to events surrounding Brazil’s Independence from Portugal and the pressure of immediate political and social concerns left little time for speculative writing (Paranhos, História do romantismo no Brasil, 36), though paradoxically the city of Rio de Janeiro had become a cultural center through the presence there of the Portuguese royal court, gaining a press in 1808 and publishing its first newspapers in 1813.

The practice of literary criticism in Brazil is characterized historically by the high quality and vitality of critical debate and its importance to national literary, intellectual, cultural, and political life. A progressive development of critical self-awareness is interconnected with foundations and concepts of national history and culture. Dependent on literary creation, on one hand, and archival or legal documents, on the other, critical writing forms a strong and prolific tradition, recently documented in Wilson Martins’s two-volume history of Brazilian literary criticism (A critica literdria no Brasil) and six-volume history of the Brazilian intelligentsia (História da inteligência brasileira), and further described in a wide bibliography of essays on the nature and theory of criticism in Brazil. Cosmopolitan thinkers in a South American context, exemplary founding figures of criticism from the nineteenth century established parameters of intellectual debate, from agnostic and revolutionary to orthodox and traditional, that to a great extent continue to shape the contemporary interchange of critical ideas. The continuing broad social and intellectual influence of critical debate today can be inferred from its prominence in journalistic literary supplements and its continuing relevance to national issues, as well as its growing role in universities and research.

Historical approaches to Brazilian criticism traditionally emphasize exemplary figures and fundamental texts within a chronological framework. Writings of major figures in criticism, starting in the nineteenth century from the Romantics to Silvio Romero (1851–1914) and Araripe Júnior (1848–1911), can be read both chronologically, drawing on their relationships with literary movements and periods, and thematically, following the evolution and development of their philosophical foundations.

Side by side, and often intertwined, with the work of Brazil’s best-known novelists, playwrights, and poets, popular literature has played a primary role in the nation’s cultural life over many centuries. “Popular” is used here to mean of and by the people. It refers to prose, poetry, and theatre produced and consumed primarily by persons of limited means and education, operating on a local and, sometimes, regional basis, as opposed to that created by educated individuals writing for themselves and for a literate national and international audience.

A good deal of Brazilian popular literature is primarily or exclusively oral. It includes a wealth of Medieval Portuguese and often pan-European dramatic forms, such as puppet theatre and Christmas pageants, as well as a variety of proverbs, folktales, and legends, a number of which have all but disappeared in Spain and Portugal. Not infrequently, these Iberian transplants have fused with other, equally varied, and deeply-rooted African and indigenous traditions. From time to time, one can also detect further borrowings from the various immigrant groups (German, Japanese, Syrian and Lebanese, Italian, and Jewish, among others) which have found a home over the centuries in Brazil.

In addition to this myriad of oral traditions, many of which have yet to be systematically collected and studied, there is also a large and vibrant printed literature known as the literatura de cordel. Significant both in its own right and as an ongoing source of inspiration for a variety of educated authors, the cordel has become of increasing interest over the last few decades not only to scholars but also to a more general public.

Brazilian poetry of the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by political tensions. From this period forward, the relationship between literature and social values in Brazil would become very intimate. The first political event of consequence to provoke a reaction in the literary arena was the transference of the Portuguese court to Brazil in the years between 1808 and 1820. This resulted in the development of a metropolis–colony and colony–metropolis relationship that was subject to waves of internationalism and to a strong patriotic reaction on the part of the Brazilians.

In 1822, Brazil gained its political independence. This event fed the nativist tendencies of the poets, who took advantage of the circulation of romantic ideas in order to expand their discourse.

The Portuguese upper class, with opportunistic motives in mind, allied itself politically with the aristocratic nobility, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie exporting goods from Brazil. These groups shared a conservative view of the world and showed themselves to be directly or indirectly linked to the latifundia system of exploitation.

However, the lower-middle and middle classes, in alliance with bureaucratic groups, were receptive to the ideas of liberalism, where aspirations of liberty and equality favored the strengthening of the individual’s conscience. Nevertheless, this attitude soon experienced moments of disenchantment that would be expressed in the phase of the romantic “spleen.” The lack of initiative on the part of the bourgeoisie initially lent itself to a diffuse sense of religion, in which devout Catholicism and a belief in Divine Providence prevailed. All of this combined with a certain sentimental Humanism.

Contributing to the encounter of multiple cultural and literary sources in the Brazilian short story, reflecting its Latin American identity, is an ahistorical, oral tradition of tales and legends from Amerindian, African, and European origins that came to be reflected in popular literature and folklore. While encompassing this folkloric background, a historical account of the modern Brazilian short story can be divided profitably into three chronological stages of development. The first extends from its nineteenth-century romantic origins and realist practices, dominated by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), topre-modernist currents before 1922. Modernism, a second phase centered in the 1920s and 1930s, provided new aesthetic criteria crucial for the development of the modern story. Its national, artistic program, based on Brazilianized language and the rediscovery of national reality, continues to guide story writers. Contemporary and postmodern trends – with a sharp popular, urban, socio-political orientation filtered through complex, highly referential narrative strategies for which the short story has become a preferred form – constitute a third phase leading from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1990s. Common to the three phases of development are stylistic and thematic currents in Brazilian writing, such as Regionalismo [Regionalism], race, social and psychological analysis, dialectal and expressive differences in Brazilian language, and formal experimentation. A brief overview of each stage will serve as a frame of reference for our historical, interpretive survey.